Gentry culture and the politics of religion: Cheshire on the eve of civil war 9781526114426

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Gentry culture and the politics of religion

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Politics, culture and society in early modern Britain General Editors professor alastair bellany dr alexandra gajda professor peter lake professor anthony milton professor jason peacey

This important series publishes monographs that take a fresh and challenging look at the interactions between politics, culture and society in Britain between 1500 and the mid-eighteenth century. It counteracts the fragmentation of current historiography through encouraging a variety of approaches which attempt to redefine the political, social and cultural worlds, and to explore their interconnection in a flexible and creative fashion. All the volumes in the series question and transcend traditional interdisciplinary boundaries, such as those between political history and literary studies, social history and divinity, urban history and anthropology. They thus contribute to a broader understanding of crucial developments in early modern Britain. Recently published in the series Chaplains in early modern England: Patronage, literature and religion hugh adlington, tom lockwood and gillian wright (eds) The Cooke sisters: Education, piety and patronage in early modern England  gemma allen Black Bartholomew’s Day  david j. appleby Insular Christianity  robert armstrong and tadhg ó hannrachain (eds) Reading and politics in early modern England  geoff baker ‘No historie so meete’  jan broadway Writing the history of parliament in Tudor and early Stuart England paul cavill and alexandra gajda (eds) Republican learning  justin champion News and rumour in Jacobean England: Information, court politics and diplomacy, 1618–25 david coast

This England  patrick collinson Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653) and the patriotic monarch  cesare cuttica Doubtful and dangerous: The question of succession in late Elizabethan England susan doran and paulina kewes (eds) Brave community  john gurney ‘Black Tom’  andrew hopper Reformation without end: Religion, politics and the past in post-revolutionary England robert g. ingram Connecting centre and locality: Political communication in early modern England chris r. kyle and jason peacey (eds) Revolution remembered: Seditious memories after the British Civil Wars  edward james legon Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum  jason mcelligott and david l. smith Laudian and Royalist polemic in Stuart England  anthony milton The crisis of British Protestantism: Church power in the Puritan Revolution, 1638–44 hunter powell

Lollards in the English Reformation: History, radicalism, and John Foxe  susan royal The gentlewoman’s remembrance: Patriarchy, piety, and singlehood in early Stuart England isaac stephens

Exploring Russia in the Elizabethan Commonwealth: The Muscovy Company and Giles Fletcher, the elder (1546–1611)  felicity jane stout Loyalty, memory and public opinion in England, 1658–1727  edward vallance Church polity and politics in the British Atlantic world, c. 1635–66 elliot vernon and hunter powell (eds) Full details of the series are available at www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk.

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Gentry culture and the politics of religion Cheshire on the eve of civil war RICHARD CUST AND PETER LAKE

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Richard Cust and Peter Lake 2020 The right of Richard Cust and Peter Lake to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 1440 2 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in 10/12 Scala by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

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Contents

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list of figures—vi acknowledgements—viii abbreviations—ix

Introduction

1

Part I The Cheshire gentry and their world 1 The culture of dynasticism 2 The culture of the Cheshire gentleman 3 The governance of the shire Part I conclusion

25 74 119 151

Part II The Personal Rule and its problems 4 Cheshire politics in the 1620s and 1630s 5 Puritans and ecclesiastical government Part II conclusion

163 186 224

Part III The crisis, 1641–42 6 Petitioning and the search for settlement 7 The search for the centre as partisan enterprise? 8 Cheshire and the outbreak of civil war Part III conclusion

229 272 323 351

bibliography of manuscript sources—365 index—369

v

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Figures

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  1 Wenceslaus Hollar’s engraving of Crewe Hall, rebuilt by Sir Ranulph Crewe between 1615 and 1639: G. Ormerod, The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, ed. T. Helsby, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 1882), iii.311. (Reproduced by permission of the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham) page 26   2 Part of the display of Cheshire coats of arms set up by Thomas Leigh in the Great Hall at Adlington in the 1580s. (Photo: Richard Cust) 30   3 The only known depiction of Rock Savage before its destruction in the nineteenth century: G. Ormerod, The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, ed. T. Helsby, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 1882), ii.52. (Reproduced by permission of the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham) 33   4 One of the ‘four esquires’, still set in the original balustrading installed at Doddington Hall when Sir Thomas Delves rebuilt the house in the early seventeenth century. (Photo: Richard Cust) 36   5 The monument to Sir John Savage VIII (d.1597) in the Savage chapel in St Michael’s church, Macclesfield. (Photo: Wendy Di Traglia) 42   6 The armorial board tracing twenty-four descents of the Aston family in St Peter’s church, Aston-by-Sutton. (Photo: Richard Cust) 43   7 The Mainwaring chapel at St Lawrence’s church, Over Peover, commissioned by Ellen Minshull in 1648 to commemorate her husband, Philip Mainwaring (d.1647). (Photo: Richard Cust) 44   8 Cheshire in the early seventeenth century, showing hundred divisions, principal towns, small towns and main roads. (Map drawn by Louise Buglass) 46 vi

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Figures

  9 A late sixteenth-century armorial showing the Venables coat of arms: Huntington Library Ellesmere MSS, EL 1114. (Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California) 10 The Shakerley family chapel built in the south chancel aisle in St Oswald’s church, Lower Peover in 1610. (Photo: Richard Cust) 11 The ancient parliament of Hugh Lupus, earl of Chester, reputedly meeting in the ‘parliament house’ in Chester castle: G. Ormerod, The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, ed. T. Helsby, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 1882), i.pl. 11, copied from Daniel King, The Vale Royal of England (London, 1656), pt 3, p. 130. (Reproduced by permission of the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham) 12 The triple portrait of Mary Done, c.1635–38, by William Dobson. (Reproduced by permission of the Grosvenor Museum, Chester) 13 Sir Thomas Aston at the deathbed of his wife, c.1635, by John Souch. (Reproduced by permission of Manchester Museums and Art Galleries and Bridgeman Images) 14 The distribution of a sample of recognisances signed by Sir William Brereton, Sir Edward Fitton, Hamnett Hyde and Thomas Stanley in Macclesfield hundred during the 1630s. (Map drawn by Louise Buglass) 15 The schedule of signatures to the February 1641 petition in defence of episcopacy from Rowton township in Broxton hundred: Parliamentary Archives HL/PO/JO/1/53, fo. 62 (Reproduced by permission of the Parliamentary Archives, London) 16 The distribution of Cheshire parishes and townships that are known to have signed the February 1641 petition in defence of episcopacy. (Map drawn by Louise Buglass) 17 Geoffrey Shakerley’s copy of the king’s letter of 13 March 1641 commending those who had signed the February petition in defence of episcopacy: Cheshire Archives and Local Studies DSS 1/4/36A/12. (Reproduced by permission of Chester Archives and Local Studies).

59 63

79 102 103

128

248 251

275

vii

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Acknowledgements

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This book began life forty years ago when we were researching the career and writings of Sir Richard Grosvenor on a series of memorable student trips to Chester with our friend Alan Thomas. Ever since then we have been enormously grateful for the hospitality and help given to us by the staff at Cheshire Archives and Local Studies (formerly the county and city record offices) and also at the Staffordshire Record Office. We would also like to thank the Universities of Birmingham and Vanderbilt for providing us with the research funding to carry out this project. In writing this book we have relied heavily on the work of others and benefited enormously from their help and insights. We are particularly indebted to Tom Cogswell, Ken Fincham, Ann Hughes and John Walter, who all read sections of this book and advised us on particular topics. Howard Barlow, Steven Hindle, James Mawdesley, Philip Morgan and David Scott have been particularly generous in sharing their knowledge of all things Cheshire and saving us from errors. Charles Goode and Julia White have assisted with work on Thomas Mainwaring’s diary; Louise Buglass has drawn the maps; Wendy Di Traglia kindly allowed us to use her work on Cheshire funeral monuments; and Rosemary Keep has shared her work on gentry portraiture. We would like to thank all of them. We would also like to acknowledge the influence of the work of Conrad Russell in shaping this and all our work on early Stuart politics. Finally, we would like to thank, and acknowledge the influence of, four outstanding historians whose own early work on county studies has done so much to influence our understanding of the local history of the civil-war period: Anthony Fletcher, Clive Holmes, Ann Hughes and John Morrill. Richard Cust and Peter Lake July 2019 viii

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Abbreviations

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APC Beinecke BL Bodleian Brereton

Acts of the Privy Council of England Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT British Library Bodleian Library, Oxford The Letter Books of Sir William Brereton, ed. R. N. Dore, 2 vols (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 123, 128, 1984–90) CALS Cheshire Archives and Local Studies Civil War Tracts J. A. Atkinson (ed.), Tracts Relating to the Civil War in Cheshire 1641–1659 (Chetham Society, series 2, 65, 1909) CJ Journals of the House of Commons CLM Chetham’s Library, Manchester CSPD Calendar of State Papers Domestic D’Ewes 1 The Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, ed. W. Notestein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1923) D’Ewes 2 The Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, ed. W. H. Coates (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942) Earwaker J. P. Earwaker, East Cheshire Past and Present, 2 vols (London, 1877) ESTC BL English Short Title Catalogue Grosvenor papers The Papers of Sir Richard Grosvenor, 1st Bart (1585–1645), ed. R. P. Cust (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 134, 1996) HL Huntington Library, San Marino, CA HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission JP justice of the peace JRL John Rylands Library, Manchester ix

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Abbreviations

LH Life of Bruen

LJ MP ODNB Ormerod PA PJ

REED Cheshire Rushworth SHL SRO TNA UCNW Vale Royal

VCH

Longleat House, Wiltshire William Hinde, A faithfull remonstrance of the Holy Life and Happy Death of John Bruen of Stapleford in the county of Cheshire esquire (London, 1641) Lords Journals Member of Parliament Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) G. Ormerod, The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, ed. T. Helsby, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 1882) Parliamentary Archives, London The Private Journals of the Long Parliament, 5 January–17 September 1642, eds W. H. Coates, V. F. Snow and A. S. Young, 3 vols (New Haven, CT, 1982–92) Records of Early English Drama. Cheshire including Chester, ed. E. Baldwin, L. M. Clopper and D. Mills, 2 vols (Buffalo, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2007) J. Rushworth, Historical Collections, 7 vols (London, 1659–1701) Senate House Library, University of London Staffordshire Record Office The National Archives University College of North Wales, Bangor Daniel King, The Vale Royal of England (London, 1656) (King’s book is organised in three parts, each separately paginated: part 1 contains William Smith’s history of the shire; part 2 miscellaneous historical material; and part 3 William Webb’s chorography) Victoria County History

Spellings and punctuation have been modernised.

x

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Introduction

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T

his book is an attempt to revisit the county study as a viable unit through which to analyse the politics of early modern England. After a period of something approaching dominance, for entirely explicable historiographic reasons this is a genre that has fallen out of favour since the 1990s. The rise and fall of the county study was tied to the fortunes of ‘localism’ as a key interpretative concept in the writing of early Stuart political history. The notion of localism and the connected idea of the ‘county community’ were first fully articulated in 1966, by Alan Everitt in his book The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640–60.1 ‘Localism’ became a central conceptual building block in the early revisionism of Conrad Russell and John Morrill, exemplified in their books on Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 and The Revolt of the Provinces.2 Indeed, in the mid-1970s Robert Ashton hailed the ‘emphasis on local and regional studies’ as ‘the most important single development in the historiography of the Civil War in the last quarter of a century’, and identified the publication of Morrill’s Revolt of the Provinces as ‘a sure indication of the coming of age of this approach’.3 As a term of art ‘localism’ did double duty as a description of a set of contemporary attitudes and a school of modern historical interpretation. It held that, as well as the basic governing unit of the kingdom, the county was the basic unit of the social and political lives of the gentry. Their social lives and marriage alliances were limited by the shire, just as their activities as governors and local magistrates were defined by it. The result was a social and political unit, and object of loyalty, that became known as the ‘county community’. It became axiomatic that when local gentlemen spoke of their ‘country’, they meant their county, and it was that which provided them with the prime locus of their social lives and object for their political and social loyalty. On this view the polity of early modern England was best viewed as 1

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an association of semi-autonomous county communities whose relations with the demands of the central government, and indeed the attractions of metropolitan culture, were essentially adversarial, with the gentry seeing their role as the protection of the interests of their counties or countries from the demands of the first and the corrupting influence of the second. Thus, the first thought of the gentry, confronted with the requirements of some national policy or fiscal innovation, was how to protect their own counties from the worst of its effects. The result was an inward-looking, conservative outlook, centred on the county and the patriarchal role of the gentry in protecting their native countries and social inferiors and dependents from the depredations of central authority. The consequent view of the political attitudes – the culture of the landed ruling class, as we might call it now – played a central role in two aspects of early revisionism. Firstly, it helped to explain what Conrad Russell called the ‘functional breakdown’, the fiscal and administrative atrophy that prevented the early Stuart state from adapting to the changing realities produced by the effect of price inflation on the fixed revenues of the crown and the escalating costs of war. For, confronted by demands for national taxation, the localist gentry saw it as their duty to minimise the effects thereof not merely on their own pocket books but on their counties. There was more involved here than mere financial self-interest; for, given their essentially localist interests and perspectives, the gentry, and their representatives in parliament, tended to view the financial demands of the crown with scepticism, seeing them as evidence of royal extravagance and court corruption, rather than the expression of any fundamental shortfall in the finances of the crown or need for fundamental fiscal reform. If the failure of the Great Contract of 1610 was taken as proof positive of the dominance of such attitudes coming out of Elizabeth’s reign into the opening decade of James’s, then the refusal of successive parliaments adequately to fund the wars of the 1620s, and their easy, indeed almost immediate, recourse to the language of malfeasance and corruption, of evil counsel and popery, was taken to demonstrate the persistence of such attitudes into the reign of Charles I and beyond. Secondly, localism, and the basic loyalty to the autonomy and stability of the county community that provided the gentry with their political bottom line, was taken to explain a good deal about the outbreak of the civil war. When the crown and elements in the parliament – the so-called ‘junto’ – failed to come to an accommodation based on the compromises and concessions of 1641, the provincial gentry found themselves on the receiving end of appeals for loyalty, and then allegiance, from two opposing sides. In these circumstances, their natural reaction was to fall back on the basic unit of their social and political lives, the county community, and seek to keep the intrusive forces of partisanship, and then violence, out of their own shires. Thus ‘localism’ became ‘neutralism’, and, ‘neutralism’ having failed in county after county to keep the war at bay, the initiative was handed to relatively small groups of 2

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Introduction

engagés, enthusiastic adherents of king or parliament, most of whose zeal for their particular cause was rooted in religious rather than political principle. As Ronald Hutton observed, in a somewhat gruesome image conjured up in his account of The Royalist War Effort – a text best viewed as a sort of Revolt of the Provinces for royalists – the violence and partisanship necessary for a civil war to start had to be ‘artificially inseminated’ into the provinces from somewhere outside the boundaries of the relevant county.4 The dominance of the county study thus produced had roots other than mere scholarly fashion and the rise of revisionism. After all, the county was the basic unit of government in England and the records of that government provided a coherent body of sources through which to study county administration and politics. Moreover, by the early Stuart period the archives of particular gentry families were starting to survive in considerable numbers and density. This meant that county affairs could be studied from the local sources, sources as often as not housed in increasingly accessible and wellcatalogued county record offices. Moreover, since the localist model of the county community asserted the self-sufficiency of the shire as a basic unit of administrative, political and social life, and emphasised the distance between central and local politics, there was every reason to feel that an adequate account of local affairs could be constructed out of largely local sources. There therefore seemed relatively little reason to have systematic recourse to the records of the central government, and because few dioceses were contiguous with the boundaries of any one county, and the prime object of interest was the gentry, there seemed not much more reason to concern oneself with the records of the national church or with purely ecclesiastical structures or politics. Here it is worth mentioning that in the religious history of the period the diocesan study came in the late 1960s and early 1970s to play almost as ubiquitous a part as the county study did in the political sphere. These two streams of research, animated by much the same impulse to see what the newly available local sources had to say both about the causes, course and consequences of the English reformation, and about the causes and course of the English civil war, sprang up at much the same time, but for the most part ran in parallel but largely separate tracks through the historiography.5 There were, of course, some honourable exceptions, and here Diarmaid McCulloch’s study of Tudor Suffolk and Anthony Fletcher’s of early Stuart Sussex stand out. All of which meant that the county study provided the perfect template for the PhD thesis. These limitations were compounded by the insistence on manuscript sources. Much of the force behind the dominance of the local study came from a reaction against a Marxist, or Marxisant, historiography obsessed with a social, indeed a class analysis, of allegiance in the English civil war, and dominated by the use of printed sources. Everitt-style localism was a reaction against that. In its place, the localist school constructed a vision of an organic social hierarchy overseen by a patriarchal gentry intensely aware of their 3

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responsibilities to their tenants and social inferiors; a vision which it insisted was based on the interpretation of manuscript local sources, rather than the printed ones privileged by the likes of Christopher Hill and Brian Manning.6 While they did not quite embrace Peter Laslett’s vision of early modern England as a society without class, the localists’ view of the matter was far closer to Laslett’s than to Christopher Hill’s.7 Certainly, the localist vision of politics and society, remained dominated by the gentry, and, perhaps with the exception of the Clubmen, left little room for anything like popular politics. The difference between those two visions was very often read onto that between printed and manuscript sources. The latter were often taken uniquely to reveal what really happened, as opposed to the former, which merely told you what various contemporaries thought or claimed had happened. That shift of emphasis from printed to manuscript sources was often equated with a move from the factitious to the real, and then read onto the shift from the national to the local, inherent in the rise of the county study. There was a sense that in making that move historians were accessing, if not the history of the real England, then certainly the opinions and history of the ‘silent majority’, a phrase appropriated from Richard Nixon by John Morrill in the course of asserting the essentially provincial outlook of a minor Cheshire gentleman obsessed with the collection of manuscript separates about national news.8 Certainly, in relation to the civil war, there was a sense that this was a tragedy visited upon that ‘silent majority’ by the commitments and machinations of relatively small groups of elite politicians, pointy-headed intellectuals and religious engagés, and that, in turning away from the details of a national politics in Whitehall and Westminster, and a printed polemical literature, dominated by the manoeuvres of such people, the real nature of events would be revealed. The point was almost reached where it seemed that if enough county studies were piled on top of one another what would emerge would be a new form of national history.9 On the reformation side of the revisionist equation, the resort to the local records – which, it was assumed, would tell us if not what ‘what really happened’, then certainly what ‘the people’ really thought – was deemed to have revealed the innate conservatism, indeed the innate Catholicism, of the said ‘people’. This had the somewhat paradoxical effect of putting all the emphasis back on the highest of high politics, at court, as providing the only possible explanation for what actually did happen (i.e., the English reformation/s). Remarkably, this was the opposite of what transpired among civil war revisionists, who laid a great deal of their initial emphasis on versions of local history in order to explain what, in fact, had not happened – that is to say, the avoidance of the English civil war and the cancellation of the English revolution. When they returned to the question of why what happened had indeed happened, civil war revisionists like Russell and Morrill turned to events neither in the English localities nor indeed at Westminster, but, rather, in Scotland and Ireland. Hence, the so-called British problem. 4

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Introduction

On these foundations and assumptions the traditional county study was based and it proved, if not infinitely, then certainly almost serially, replicable. So intense was the hold exercised over the genre by the localist mode of analysis and the assumed localism of the major political players in each county that each succeeding study tended to replicate the assumptions and expectations laid down by Everitt. One of the paradoxes of Everittian localism was that while the political ties and allegiances of the gentry were presented as in some sense rooted in the soil of each individual shire, despite the very considerable differences between counties, in each and every instance localism was always the same.10 This was true even when the empirical findings produced by research into the shire in question did anything but support the localist thesis. Here the prime example is Anthony Fletcher’s beautifully researched study of Sussex, A County Community in Peace and War, which revealed that at the basic level of administration the county was divided into eastern and western rapes, with the gentry from the two sides of the county only occasionally engaging with each other. Fletcher’s researches also revealed that the social contacts and marriage alliances of even the major gentry were anything but county wide. Rather, they tended to be concentrated around the immediate environs of their own residences and estates, while some of the wealthier of them, most notably Sir Thomas Pelham, spent a good deal of time and money in London. Pelham’s kinship and social network also spread far and wide outside the shire, including close contacts with families in Lincolnshire, Kent, Cheshire and Northamptonshire. And yet, on Fletcher’s account, Sussex remained a ‘county community’ of the classic sort, and his book was organised around many of the central nostrums of the localist model.11 Clearly this victory, if not of hope over experience, then certainly of dominant paradigm over evidence, could not be sustained indefinitely, and, as the localist model threatened to take over the national history of the early seventeenth century and civil war eras, it (inevitably) provoked a reaction. Ann Hughes and Clive Holmes produced detailed critiques of the county community, localist approach and then extended studies of counties – Warwickshire in Hughes’s case and Lincolnshire in Holmes’s – that did not fit the Everittian model at all. Counties which lacked Kent’s natural boundaries (provided by the sea to the south and east, and the Thames to the north), or which encompassed different sorts of terrain or farming regions, did not provide the natural framework for the social or economic lives of either the gentry or the social groups beneath them. The extent of marriage within a shire – which, according to Everitt, turned many counties into inbred networks of cousinage – varied enormously. In a county like Warwickshire marriage ties often did as much to encourage kinship and friendship with the gentry of neighbouring shires, or much further afield, as within the county itself. Everitt’s emphasis on long settlement in a shire – which he sees as encouraging moderation – has also been questioned. Hughes, Holmes and 5

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others point out that the extent of this varied enormously, often according to geographical proximity to London, or how much former monastic land had come onto the market in the mid-sixteenth century; and, anyway, some of the longest-established families, like the Barnardistons in Suffolk, were far from conservative in their political outlook. Other counties, in this just like Fletcher’s Sussex, were found to be broken up into smaller administrative units. Lincolnshire, for instance, was fragmented into as many as eight divisions. Again, whereas Everitt had compared the twice-yearly meetings of the county assizes to a ‘county parliament’, other historians started to see them as much ‘national’ as ‘local’ occasions, with assize judges coming down from Westminster to remind local justices that they were part of a national political and legal system and acting as ‘brokers’ between the privy council and local communities.12 Accordingly, people started to notice that when local gentry talked of their ‘country’, they were not referring exclusively to their county but, rather, to a range of allegiances and identities stretching from the most local household responsibilities up to their obligation to serve the commonwealth in both local and national capacities. Central here was the interaction between the local and national, with various forms of what passed as localism seen as the products of, and terms and tools to be deployed within, a series of dynamic interactions and negotiations between the centre and the locality, local and national forces and allegiances.13 Such interactions had been at the centre of Clive Holmes’s account of the Eastern Association, which in many ways reads in retrospect as a response to, indeed as, in some sense, a refutation of The Revolt of the Provinces, published some years before that latter work saw the light of day. And they were similarly central to Hughes’s account of Warwickshire in the civil war. In her Alexander Prize essay of 1981 Hughes showed radical parliamentarians using localist arguments to conduct a political struggle with both their local and national rivals in the parliamentarian cause.14 Nor were these interactions between the local and national limited to the domain of politics or administration. In a seminal article on ‘Cambridge university and the country’, Victor Morgan showed how the links between particular colleges and certain localities served to send young men into national institutions where they were exposed to unfamiliar ideological, religious and intellectual forces, not to mention people from areas of the country distinct from their own. They were then dispatched back, often to the areas whence they had come, with both their sense of belonging to a greater whole than their immediate neighbourhood or shire heightened, and their sense of local identity sharpened. Morgan’s study of the rise of the county map, and indeed of images of England as comprised of its constituent shires, served a similar purpose, demonstrating how national cultural trends, and indeed the needs of the central government, helped both to create and meet a demand for images of the nation as a unified polity comprised of distinct shires. In 6

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Morgan’s vision the national and local consciousness marched, if not in lock step, then certainly linked together in a series of dialectical interactions. Localism was emerging from studies like these not as something immemorial, rooted in the soil of the different counties of England but, rather, as a cultural and ideological construct.15 Two things were happening here. Firstly, the coherence of the county as the basic unit of analysis for local political history was being undercut. The full extent of that change can be seen in the work of David Underdown. His classic work Pride’s Purge, published in 1970 but a product of the historiographical world of the 1960s, had been suffused with Everittian localism, and his own exercise in the genre of the county study, Somerset, had displayed at least some of the characteristic features of the localist model. But fast-forward to 1986, and his Revel, Riot and Rebellion was organised around different farming regions which spread across county boundaries – boundaries which played little or no part in the analysis – and centred upon the impact of a national ideological formation – puritanism – on local social relations and politics.16 Secondly, this development was compounded by the renewed emphasis on interactions between the local and the national as being of the essence in the political history of the period, even in some of its most apparently local aspects. This prompted a move away from studies based on the administrative structures of local government and towards a more political concern with particular conjunctures, or moments of dynamic interaction between central and local interests. Ironically, this was itself a product of the revisionist emphasis on political process, narrative and contingency, which was now turned back onto the essentially static structural assumptions about localism upon which much of the early revisionist case had been based. The result was a form of histoire événementelle, organised around particular events or conjunctures. Richard Cust’s study of The Forced Loan and English Politics 1626–1628 was an early example of this approach. It featured a series of sources, issues and questions typical of conventional local history, but did not limit itself to evidence culled from one county. Rather, materials from several counties were integrated into an account of parliamentary and court politics, and national administration. The time-scale was short, limited to just under two years, but what was lost in terms of narrative sweep was gained in depth of analysis across a number of levels of activity and causation.17 The result of all this was that the county study all but evaporated. From being one of the more common genres of PhD thesis, and indeed of first book, it disappeared almost completely from the scholarly scene, with major presses declining to publish even rather innovative exercises in the genre because ‘no one was interested in local history’. Not that local history went away. Far from it. It merely became a vehicle for social rather than political history, with some of the seminal works in that mode since the late 1980s being based on studies firmly rooted in a particular time and place. One 7

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thinks here of Martin Ingram’s study of sexual regulation, which was based on an intensive use of the church court records in Wiltshire, or of Steven Hindle’s The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640, which started life as a local study of Cheshire, or of Craig Muldrew’s seminal account of The Economy of Obligation, which was based on a study of debt in King’s Lynn, than which one can scarcely think of a more local topic.18 But in political history, with the eclipse of the county study, what were required were alternative ways of studying the interaction between the local and the national, and a variety of approaches produced some outstanding results. Jackie Eales exploited the riches of the Harley papers to centre an analysis of the interaction between the national and the local on the study of a family. Tom Cogswell reinvented the county study as a way to trace the development of the local state. By focusing his account of early Stuart Leicestershire on the institution of the lieutenancy and the career of the earl of Huntingdon, and diving into the riches of the Hastings papers in the Huntington Library, he was able to tell a political and administrative story while also integrating the aristocracy back into the study of county affairs in a way which was unique among the extant county histories, remarkable for their exclusion of the peerage from their account of local politics and society.19 Other scholars, influenced in various ways by micro-history, sought to centre accounts of the inner workings of local society and their interaction with more national trends and institutions on particular events or individuals. However bizarre or unusual the event in question – a matricide in Shropshire, an infanticide in Northamptonshire, the eccentric career of a godly woman and near-hermit from the same county20 – the use of such diverse persons and events, together with an intense scrutiny of the genres and sources in which their stories were told and retold, allowed insights to be gleaned into the tenor of local politics and religion, of a depth and intensity that a more general survey of county affairs over thirty or forty years might not have allowed. A feature of such studies was a willingness to use printed sources as a crucial element in the analysis, and to follow the particular sources in question wherever they led. This was a freedom that the generic constraints and expectations of the county study did not allow. But the resulting insights were fleeting, and often as not parasitic upon more systematic studies of the same county. Here a paradigmatic example is Peter Lake and Isaac Stephens’ study of the Barker affair in Northamptonshire, which would not have been possible but for the exhaustive researches into the religious life of the diocese of Peterborough in the early Stuart period undertaken by John Fielding, whose own work on Robert Woodford represents the pre-eminent example of this sort of research.21 On the cusp between social and political history one might also cite a number of articles by John Walter on various outbreaks of local iconoclasm, together with his work on the Protestation Oath, as a way into the dynamics of both popular and elite politics in 1640–41 8

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that links high and low, national, parliamentary, local, and often popular, politics together.22 Important and consequential though this sort of research can be, there can also be no doubt that there was a gap left in the historiography by the demise of the county study. For a number of issues were left, as it were, dangling in mid-air. If the classic localist rendition of the county community was no longer tenable, it was by no means simply made up; aspects of that case remained to be integrated into a new synthesis. Early Stuart gentlemen may not have simply equated their country with their county, but the term certainly encompassed loyalty to the county, and gentry politics and, indeed, public politics around the civil war resounded with claims to be protecting the interests of the county and about the need to unite in defence of those interests. What did such claims signify? How were they related to other aspects of political life and the self-identity of the local gentry? In many instances the county community may have been as much a cultural or ideological construct as a social reality, but the notion retained a certain hold over the political imaginary of contemporaries. How did that work, exactly? In many respects, with the decline of the county study, those questions were put on hold. In others, they came to be discussed under a different set of headings or rubric. These stemmed from the rise of talk about England as a monarchical republic, which coincided almost exactly with the demise of the classic local study in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. (Collinson’s seminal essay on ‘The monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I’ first saw the light of day in 1987, the same year in which Ann Hughes’s study of Warwickshire was published.)23 At its inception, the notion of the monarchical republic was primarily concerned with contingency plans made by the Elizabethan regime to handle the event of the death of the queen with Mary Stuart still above ground. But from the outset, in an afterword about the anomalous hamlet of Swallowfield, Collinson stressed what he took to be the localist connotations or consequences of the concept, with self-governing communities, holding office under the crown, containing within themselves what Collinson described as citizens masquerading as subjects. And in a subsequent lecture he extended this approach to encompass what he called ‘gentry republics’. By this term he was describing the systems of self-government devised and put into practice by groups of active citizen-gentry within the shires whose hand had been strengthened by the numerous parliamentary statutes extending their administrative remit in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean period. This description, he argued, could be applied most readily to those counties where groups of gentry took charge of local affairs unsupervised by any local magnate, such as Elizabethan Norfolk and Suffolk. But the implication was that self-government under the crown by virtuous and godly gentlemen was a feature of counties everywhere.24 Indeed, one might see monarchical republicanism as localism raised to the level of a self-conscious ideology, composed in part by traditional English 9

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notions of mixed monarchy and in part by classically infused ideas of political virtue and service of the commonwealth. In many ways, all of this was pure gain. Instead of a set of immemorial attitudes rooted in the soil of various English shires we have an ideological construct made up of various elements, with discernible histories, and put together to meet particular circumstances. It now became possible to write the intellectual and cultural histories of the public man, the patriot or servant of the commonweal, who combined in his person the discharge of local duty, the protection of local interests at the centre and the doing of the business of the crown in the locality. As Richard Cust and Markku Peltonnen have between them shown, the image of the public man, or patriot, was a composite, made up in part of classical notions of political virtue and the commonwealth and in part of Calvinist or puritan notions of calling, zeal and the preservation of a notion of the common good, to which the protection of true religion and the rejection of popery were central.25 Questions remain, however, about the application of the notion of monarchical republicanism to the quotidian conduct of early Stuart government and politics, generally construed. Some proponents of the idea have taken it more or less literally, seeing in it a genuinely republican mode of thought and action, and even of government. Applied to county government, this might be thought to be a bridge too far. After all, the offices in and through which public men served the commonwealth – even if they conceived of themselves as the classically Ciceronian vir civilis – were in the gift of the crown. The authority being exercised stemmed from the crown, and the business being discharged was not merely that of the county, or even the commonwealth, but also the monarch’s. However much the assizes might, at times, have functioned as county parliaments, the assize judges served at the pleasure of the crown and it was the statutes of the realm, not to mention the latest emanations of royal policy, that they were executing and disseminating in the localities. Certainly, this was a system of government that enlisted the social clout, the local influence and authority of the landed class and depended upon the collaboration of a wide swathe of participants. It might thus be said to have depended ultimately on the active cooperation, in a certain sense of the word on the (implicit) consent, of a remarkably large section of those being notionally governed. But the peace being preserved was still the king’s peace, as well as that of ‘the country’, and, as James I repeatedly reminded his subjects, the defence of the commonweal depended ultimately on the exercise of royal authority, indeed, on some views of the matter, on the exercise of the royal prerogative. Thus, another way to look at the operation of county and local government was as the operation of the local state. The work of Steven Hindle and Michael Braddick has shown that one perspective from which to view the whole range of developments running through the conduct of local government during this period is that provided by the notion of state formation.26 10

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It is thus not the least of the contributions made by Tom Cogswell’s study of Leicestershire to reposition the county study in relation to such concerns, showing in the process that the conduct of what we might think of as administration and the workings of the judicial system were always in this period also intensely political processes, dependent on the balance of local as well as central forces, and the priorities and capacities of a wide cast of characters.27 In many of its aspects, then, monarchical republicanism might be thought to be the enabling ideology not so much of localist resistance to the demands of central authority as of the increasingly activist agenda of both the local and, hence, of course, the national state. Here it is worth recalling that the agenda of that state was set not merely by royal command and proclamation but also by parliamentary statute, and that many of the great initiatives of the period, like the poor law, were codifications of existing local expedients and experiments, instantiated in statute and gradually spread through the localities by the initiative and perceived self-interest of myriad local elites. As Brian Quintrell has observed, even a centralising initiative as apparently intrusive, as the Book of Orders was in fact based on existing provincial best practice.28 The result was a system of mixed government, based on myriad negotiations and trade-offs between a number of interests. As such, it was as capable of a ‘royalist’ (or even an absolutist) gloss as it was of a republican (or ‘parliamentarian’) one. Indeed, one might describe the Personal Rule as an attempt to realise the ‘absolutist’ or royalist potential of the system, enlisting, as Kevin Sharpe has shown, the rhetoric of the commonweal for purposes set by the crown and intended to serve a distinctly Caroline version of good government and civil peace.29 That that experiment ultimately failed should not lead us to downplay the extent to which it was based on actual or latent potentials within the system itself, any more than the, if anything, even more definitive failure of English republicanism to take root in the early 1650s should lead us to deny the implicitly ‘republican’ assumptions underpinning much that went before or, indeed, came after. But all that being said, to call early Stuart government simply ‘republican’ (however unacknowledged its status as such is said to have been) seems not merely a mistake but, more seriously, an anachronistic prejudgement of issues which contemporaries had to fight a civil war (only imperfectly) to resolve. Either way, that is the historiographical context into which this book seeks to insert itself. We want to return to the genre of the county study, to look again through the lens of the government and politics of one shire, at the political culture and practice, the self-image and ideology, of the early Stuart gentry as widely conceived. And we want to use the example of Cheshire c.1590–1642 to do it. Why Cheshire, in particular? The reasons for this choice are partly substantive and partly contingent. Substantively, thanks to the path-breaking researches of John Morrill, along with Everitt’s Kent, Cheshire has a claim 11

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to be the county in and through the study of which the localist model established itself. In returning to some of the central themes of that model now, it seems appropriate to return too to Cheshire. Contingently, both of the authors have a long-standing interest in the county that dates back to work we did on the political ideology of Sir Richard Grosvenor and the collection of ship money in the late 1970s. Since then, prompted by his extensive work on the Grosvenor papers, Richard Cust has worked through his abiding interest in the political culture of the early Stuart gentry, in part though the study of Cheshire materials. Peter Lake has, since the late 1970s, when he first came upon him, had a long-standing interest in the works and career of John Ley, for him an archetypical moderate puritan negotiating his way through the various crises of the 1640s and 1650s. In addition, for anyone as interested in anti-puritanism as he is, Sir Thomas Aston must retain a certain fascination. Lake has also written about the petitioning campaigns of 1641. Those campaigns hold the real key to our choice of this county, since Cheshire has a uniquely rich deposit of evidence about the techniques of mass petitioning, of pressure group politics, of public pitch making and of the processes whereby large local constituencies were mobilised around different visions of the current conjuncture, in the run-in to the civil war.30 In the course of making those pitches for wider support, notions of the county community, of the unity of the Cheshire gentry in the defence of the harmony and order of the county, were shaken almost to pieces. They became subject to very different glosses, and the interests of the county became identified with very different versions of the cause being contended for during the political crisis of 1640–42. The petitions themselves represent serial attempts to insert the local into the national, and the national into the local. As such, they present us with a speeded-up film, a suddenly accelerated rendition, of practices and manoeuvres that, over the course of the preceding decades, had started to come almost as second nature to the provincial gentry. As we shall see, in seeking to mediate between local and national concerns and authorities in his petitioning campaigns, Sir Thomas Aston was replicating the same oscillation between local concerns and his contacts at the centre that had characterised his conduct as ship money sheriff. Then he had managed to discharge his duties as sheriff to the great contentment of the privy council, while still succeeding in presenting himself before the county as the great protector of its interests in a show-down with the city of Chester.31 Again, the topics at stake during this petitioning campaign were not limited to issues of who spoke for Cheshire and how best to do so, but encompassed religious questions, narrowly construed about church government, but also, taken more broadly, about what to do about Laudianism and the question of further reformation opened up by its collapse. These quintessentially Cestrian events thus allow us to address what has become the rather vexed question of the relation between politics and religion as causes of the outbreak of the English civil war. 12

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In addition to the Aston papers in the British Library and the petitions themselves in the Parliamentary Archives, we now have in the Staffordshire Record Office the (relatively recently) available papers of Bishop Bridgeman. This is perhaps the richest single episcopal archive surviving for the period, and a wonderful source of insights into how Laudianism came into the county and how Bishop Bridgeman dealt with the resulting strains. And, finally, there is a run of remarkable printed pamphlets, chiefly the work of John Ley and Sir Thomas Aston, which represented both direct interventions into the politics of the locality and sustained attempts to link those local politics to more national events and publics. Some of these sources had not been available when the last account Cheshire in the early seventeenth century was written by John Morrill, and certainly there has never been an attempt to integrate them into a coherent account. Anyway, the centre of gravity, and major scholarly contribution, of Professor Morrill’s pioneering study lay in its account of Cheshire politics and administration during the English civil wars and revolution, not in its analysis of the preceding period or, indeed, of the outbreak of the war in Cheshire. This study is intended therefore to develop, sometimes to critique, but mainly to supplement Professor Morrill’s book. At one level, then, this book is an attempt first to flag up and then to explain the remarkable events of 1641–42, and to do so by setting them into the widest possible context. At another it is an attempt to revisit the county study, and some of the central organising concerns and claims of the localist school, and see where we are now. The quite remarkable collapse of the genre in the late 1980s and 1990s prevented this from happening at the time when those claims were first called into question. But we think that that agenda still has legs and justifies a return both to that mode of writing and research and to some of the old chestnuts of the previous debate, not to mention to Cheshire. However, the aim is not merely to repeat the research techniques and revisit the same sources that underpinned the county study in its hey-day. Certainly we want to do some of that – patterns of office holding, the conduct of local government and administration, the prosopography of the gentry all play a central role in the following analysis – but we also want to bring an expanded range of sources and questions to bear on the study of the political culture and self-image of the early Stuart gentry, and to do so through a properly realised picture of a particular place and time; a specificity of context too often beyond a certain sort of cultural history. The point here is most definitely not to ignore or eschew the sources and approaches typical of cultural history but, rather, to use such sources and methods to answer questions central to the conduct of political history. Issues of gentry identity and self-image, together with the sort of generalisations about the county, its history and its essence used to project those images, are all central to the analysis. And in addressing those questions we want to use a range of visual, 13

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architectural and material as well as textual sources. Country houses and parish churches, funeral processions and funerary monuments, armorial glass, heraldic displays and pedigree rolls were all crucial to the ways in which the Cheshire gentry constructed their sense of themselves and made their bids for place and status, and, accordingly, they are central to our analysis as well. So too are the intellectual techniques and the antiquarian texts used to construct histories of the county, the (invented) traditions and norms that (allegedly) underlay its current practices. But, if versions of history, and the construction of various legitimating lineages or narratives out of the county’s past or the pasts of particular families, had a central part to play, so too did the appropriation of classicising discourses concerned with the active political virtue of the public man, and the Calvinist sense of calling of the magistrate active in the defence of true religion and the cause of the gospel. These distinct but mutually reinforcing imperatives found expression not merely in textual forms but also in the iconography of funeral monuments and the decoration of country houses. It would be tempting to draw a contrast here between discourses seemingly based in the medieval past, centred on notions of lineage and given expression in largely heraldic form, which produced hierarchies based on birth and noble blood, and other, more ‘modern’ classicising and godly norms, which produced claims to status and authority based on active virtue, godliness and the service of the commonweal. But such hard and fast distinctions are best resisted. As we shall see, the claims to status founded on ancient lineage and asserted by heraldic means were being actively constructed throughout the period, and the resulting hierarchies were remarkably open to change in the face of the shifting fortunes of individual families. Given the emergent concern with matters heraldic and historical during this very period, there was nothing antique or backward looking about this way of asserting the importance of one’s ancestry or current position in the gentry pecking order, which was arguably just as ‘modern’ as arguments based on virtuous discharge of one’s duties as a magistrate or obligations as a public man. We might say the same about the claims of Calvinist godliness and classical virtue, which, in the hands of an active servant of his country and the commonwealth, and man on the make, like Sir Richard Grosvenor, could be combined into a relatively seamless legitimation of his own career as a public man and rise up the pecking order of the Cheshire gentry. Indeed, Grosvenor’s career is perhaps the best example that we are dealing here not with a timeless hierarchy of long-established families, each taking their turn to serve the county in a variety of roles, but with a more volatile and competitive situation, in which some individuals and families rose and others fell, for a variety of personal, financial and demographic reasons. The fortunes of some ancient families declined, other lines died out and others still forced their way to the forefront through a combination of personal ambition and the careful acquisition and exercise of all the cultural attributes and compe14

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tencies of the public man. Perhaps the most extreme example of the forces in play here was John Bruen. At one point his indebtedness forced him to shut down his domestic establishment at Bruen Stapleford and move into hired digs in Chester; but his zealous godliness enabled him to play a role in county affairs among the godly, and wannabe-godly, gentry far in excess of anything his material circumstances would otherwise have allowed.32 The first part of the book constitutes an analytic account of gentry mores, political culture and government. The second part is concerned with Cheshire during the Personal Rule and moves towards a more narrative mode. Here as well we introduce an account of the tenor of ecclesiastical affairs in the county. This entails a move away from the gentry, in order to recount the relations between the more puritan elements in the clergy and the local bishops – chiefly Morton and his successor Bridgeman – and the impact thereon of Laudianism. This shift of focus is necessary in order to introduce the context for, and the major players in, the third part, which is an account of the politics of 1640–42 and, in particular, of the petitioning campaigns that are such a marked feature of county politics during this period. The attempt here is to set events in Cheshire within the context of national, that is to say both parliamentary and court, politics with which they were continuously in dialogue and reaction; the petitions themselves constituting not merely the expression of local opinions and tensions, but also attempts to intervene, sometimes definitively, in the course of national politics. In this account attention is paid both to circulating manuscript and printed pamphlets – of the sort not merely ignored but often actively written off by conventional county studies and by revisionist historiography more ­generally as inherently unrepresentative of genuinely local opinion. The texts in question were produced by Cheshire political agents, often expressing local tensions and reflecting intensely local events (a tiff among the Chester clergy about the Sabbath, or the erection by Bishop Bridgeman of an altar in Chester cathedral). But, for all that local focus, these authors were always already concerned with topics of national ideological significance, in this case with the two big-ticket issues of ecclesiastical dispute during the 1630s: the Sabbath and the altar. In their original form as open letters, circulated locally in manuscript, such texts were intensely local and ad hominem in their focus and purpose; but, when later expanded, printed and thus inserted into wider national debates, they represented attempts to forge links between such local concerns and wider forces and arguments. We contend that without these broader contexts events in Cheshire, as reconstructed out of the local, manuscript sources, would be virtually unintelligible; or, rather, they would appear to be almost wholly a product of local interpersonal tensions and rivalries – which, of course, in part they were – rather than attempts to interpellate local divisions and claims into the wider national narrative, which they also were. Not that this represents a flight from the manuscript to the printed, or from the local to the national. Rather, 15

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the very richness of the manuscript sources produced in and around the petitioning campaigns allows us to adopt a narrative mode, usually reserved for the analysis of high politics, to recount these often most local of events. Crucial here, as throughout, is the dynamic interaction between events at the centre and events in the localities. The aim is to accord primacy to neither, but, rather, to gain a sense of the way in which they interacted, thus moving away from the almost entirely local focus of the conventional county study – exemplified in this case by John Morrill’s path-breaking book on Cheshire – and the almost entirely parliamentary focus of Russellian revisionism.33 This explains the switch-back structure of the last section of the book, which alternates between passages of political analysis and narrative – based largely on manuscript sources, derived both from the centre and the locality – and passages of analysis of the ideological context and content of these exchanges, based on a range of printed sources. This last part represents the culmination of the book, to which what precedes it has been tending and has, indeed, in some sense, been designed to explain. We do not accept that this means that we have written a teleological book. Certainly, there is no sense in which the situations, forces and tensions outlined in the first two parts of the book rendered the events recounted in the third necessary or inevitable. Those events could have led to other outcomes. Throughout, those contingencies, most notably choices made by a number of political actors, ranging from Calvin Bruen to Charles I and Sir Thomas Aston and his gentry critics in the county, played a crucial role. But it is the case that what happened between 1640 and 1642 is what makes the political history of Cheshire stand out. It is these events that make this book something more than an attempt to test out the viability of the county study and to get a handle on the ‘political culture’ of the early Stuart gentry through an in-depth study of another county. If that were the aim, then sources from more than one shire would be required. Rather, what we want to do here is to make these events properly intelligible, and that is what the first two parts of the book have been designed to do. For in that last part we see a cast of characters, and a range of attitudes and structures, introduced and analysed in the first two parts, as it were in sudden motion. They were rapidly reacting to and helping to shape, indeed at crucial moments to create, a political narrative over which none of the actors involved here had anything like control, or even intellectual command, but within which they were deeply embroiled, and out of which they were all trying to find their way, by bringing to bear on events their understandings of how the world worked, or, rather, had until recently worked, and ought to work now and in the future. In so doing they were seeking to deploy, within a range of both local and national, political and ideological arenas, whatever cultural credit and ideological understanding their previous careers had conferred on them. A variety of political actors were making bets that they understood how the world worked, that commitments to certain ways of doing things, to certain constellations of values and 16

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expectation formed over the course of the preceding decades, would continue to operate even in a time of deep crisis. This meant that men of even the most ‘conservative’ cast of mind or intent were forced to innovate even as they strove to keep things much the same as they had always been. Others had agendas for change, agendas based on their previous commitments, experience and opinions to be sure, but for change nonetheless. Still others sought to intervene in events to bend them to their own and their political allies’ and masters’ purposes. We are dealing here with men with scores to settle and careers to make, but also men with a variety of ideological commitments and agendas. The fact that those agendas were framed and canvassed in terms of the nostrums and shibboleths, the seemingly consensual common rhetorical and ideological currency of the preceding fifty years or so, did not mean that they all agreed with one another. Rather, it meant that a common language and set of assumptions were being appropriated and bent to justify and further courses of action and projected settlements of the crisis with which everyone was confronted and in which everyone was acting, but which were simply not the same. As will become clear, some of the participants in these events were more clear eyed about, and in that sense self-consciously manipulative of, what was happening than were others; but everyone had skin in essentially the same game. The existence of a county community was a given throughout these disputes. So too were the nature of Cheshireness and the centrality of the gentry in embodying its values and protecting its unity and integrity. Central too was the increasingly controversial and contested question of who got to speak for Cheshire, defend its interests, express its essence. But in the course of these events those settled points of common assumption and shared aspiration became attached to very different versions of the current conjuncture and what to do about it. We get to watch, in fact, as the common currency represented by those shared terms and aspirations got shaken pretty much to pieces by the ways in which they were appealed to and appropriated in order to go back to what rapidly became very different ideological positions, political allegiances and preferences. Not that these nostrums and sound bites were rendered meaningless or useless. Rather, they had ceased to operate as constraints upon, or blocks to the development of, very different views of the current situation, and sharply divergent opinions of how best to get out of it. Indeed, the less such symbols and battle cries worked as they had in the past, the more desperately various political actors both clung to and invoked them in order to justify their view of the matter, and the more desperately even some of the most engagé participants to these controversies strove to present themselves as ‘moderates’. What we have here is not political and ideological conflict being introjected into a hitherto peaceful and unified shire from outside, nor even the best instincts of a moderate middle being frustrated by the activities of various extremists or engagés. Rather, we have a political process in which all the 17

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participants were called upon to take sides, not in the crude sense of choosing to support either king or parliament but, rather, in that of taking up a position about what to do next, about which authority or entity – the king, the parliament, the House of Commons, the House of Lords, ‘the people’ – to appeal to in the search for one way or another out of the current conjuncture. The choice was between projected settlements, none of which, until the very end, included civil war, but all of which were inflected towards the cause of either the king or the parliament, as those causes were variously construed by their supporters. This was as much a local as it was a national process, although it really took place in and through the often very rapid interactions between those two spheres of operation and modes of political consciousness. That is to say, we are in a situation in which every attempt to protect the interests of Cheshire, however they were construed, was attached explicitly or implicitly to one sort of national settlement or another, and in which each and every projected settlement pursued at the national level had direct implications for events and the distribution of power in the locality. It is the purpose of this book to trace and explicate this process as closely as possible, since we argue that it is these events that constituted the main claim of Cheshire on the attention of historians of early modern England not interested either in Cheshire or indeed local history, tout court, but who might, instead, be concerned with the relations between the centre and the localities within which the outbreak of the civil war actually took place, and in the processes of political pitch making, positioning and side taking that constituted those interactions. Finally, it is just as well to remind the reader of what this book is not doing. This is a book about the gentry and gentry political culture. For all that, at times, it concerns processes of mass petitioning and mobilisation directed in many ways towards ‘the people’, it is not a study of popular politics. The reasons for that will, we hope, become apparent during the course of the narrative. It is also a study of the county of Cheshire. Events in Chester have at times a rather crucial role to play, as do jurisdictional rivalries between the city and the county and, indeed, do the doings of the bishop and some of the Chester clergy, but such matters are discussed episodically, as and when the narrative demands. We have not attempted anything like a systematic study of the city or its politics. This remains a subject of considerable complexity and import, but it would not have been possible to do it justice within a book with this focus or of this scale.

NOTES 1 A. M. Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1966). 2 C. S. R. Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford: Clarendon 18

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3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10

11 12

Press, 1979); J. S. Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976). R. Ashton, The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution, 1603–1649 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978), 437. R. Hutton, The Royalist War Effort (London: Longman, 1982). All of which came together in the Local Reformation Studies colloquium, founded in the 1970s, for which see the collections of essays edited by Felicity Heal and Rosemary O’Day: Continuity and Change: Personnel and Administration in the Church of England, 1500–1642 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1976); Church and Society in England, Henry VIII to James I (London: Macmillan, 1977); Princes and Paupers in the English Church, 1500–1800 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1981). Perhaps the outstanding diocesan/county study was Christopher Haigh’s Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Haigh and Morrill cut parallel, and equally self-consciously revisionist and localist, swathes through the historiography, with Morrill’s work on Cheshire prompting his more general synthetic account of The Revolt of the Provinces and Haigh’s ecclesiastical study of Lancashire followed by the collection of essays he edited in 1987, The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). While Haigh produced the promised synthetic overview of the period, in his English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), Morrill’s ‘England’s Wars of Religion’ project was never realised. Having himself moved on to things Archipelagian, ‘British’ and Irish, his collected essays on The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993) and the second edition of Revolt of the Provinces, now retitled Revolt in the Provinces: The People of England and the Tragedies of War, 1630–1648 (London: Longman, 1999), in some ways filled the gap. C. Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London: Secker and Warburg, 1964); B. Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640–1649 (London: Heinemann Educational, 1976) P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965). J. S. Morrill, ‘William Davenport and the “silent majority” of early Stuart England’, Journal of the Chester and North Wales Archaeological Society, 58 (1975), 115–29. Arguably, Morrill’s Revolt of the Provinces was an attempt to write such a book. There were, of course, honourable exceptions. A. Hassell Smith’s, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558–1603 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) placed an entirely non-localist emphasis on the intersection between the local and the national and on the consequent factional, personal and ideological divisions among the local gentry. Similarly, Brian Quintrell’s ‘The government of Essex, 1603–40’ (PhD thesis, University of London, 1965) acknowledged the importance of local–central interaction and ideological division. A. Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex 1600–1660 (London: Longman, 1975). A. L. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); A. L. Hughes, ‘Warwickshire on the eve of civil war: a county community?’, Midland History, 7 (1982), 42–72; C. Holmes, ‘The county community in Stuart historiography’, Journal of British 19

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Gentry culture and the politics of religion

13 14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

Studies, 19 (1980), 54–73; C. Holmes, Seventeenth Century Lincolnshire (Lincoln: History of Lincolnshire, vol. 7, 1980). R. P. Cust and P. G. Lake, ‘Sir Richard Grosvenor and the rhetoric of magistracy’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 54 (1981), 40–53. C. Holmes, The Eastern Association in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); A. L. Hughes, ‘Militancy and localism: Warwickshire politics and Westminster politics, 1643–1647’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 31 (1981), 51–68. V. Morgan, ‘Cambridge university and “the country” 1560–1640’, in L. Stone (ed.), The University in Society, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), i.183–245; V. Morgan, ‘The cartographic image of “the country” in early modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 29 (1979), 129–54. D. Underdown, Pride’s Purge: The Politics of the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); D. Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). R. P. Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics 1626–1628 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Cust’s work might be taken to have the same sort of relation to the previous body of localist county studies as that enjoyed by Prelate as Pastor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), Ken Fincham’s study of the Jacobean episcopate, with the work of the local reformation studies group. M. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation. The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). J. Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); T. E. Cogswell, Home Divisions: Aristocracy, the State and Provincial Conflict (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). P. G. Lake, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and a Shropshire axe murder’, Midland History, 15 (1990), 37–64; P. G. Lake and I. Stephens, Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England: A Northamptonshire Maid’s Tragedy (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2015); I. Stephens, The Gentlewoman’s Remembrancer: Patriarchy, Piety and Singlehood in Early Stuart England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). Also see Peter Marshall, Mother Leakey and the Bishop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). J. Fielding, ‘Opposition to the Personal Rule of Charles I: the diary of Robert Woodford’, Historical Journal, 31 (1988), 769–88; J. Fielding (ed.), The Diary of Robert Woodford, 1637–41 (Camden Society, 5th series, 42, 2012). J. Walter, Covenanting Citizens: The Protestation Oath and Popular Culture in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); J. Walter, ‘“Abolishing superstition with sedition”? The politics of popular iconoclasm in England, 1640–2’, Past and Present, 183 (2004), 79–123; J. Walter, ‘“Affronts and insolencies”: the voices of Radwinter and popular opposition to Laudianism’, English Historical Review, 122 (2007), 35–60. Hughes’s study might be identified as the moment when the conventional county

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Introduction

24

25

26 27

28 9 2 30

31 32

33

study ate itself. After that it was really no longer possible to go on replicating the conventional localist county study and have anything interesting or sensible to say. P. Collinson, Elizabethans (London: Hambledon Press, 2003), ch. 2, ‘The monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, pp. 31–57; ch. 1, ‘De Republica Anglorum: or history with the politics put back’, pp. 1–29. Collinson implied that this was a term coined by others, referring to ‘what we have begun to call gentry republics’ (Elizabethans, p. 21); but, as far as we are aware, he was the first to use it in this context. R. P. Cust, ‘The “public man” in late Tudor and early Stuart England’, in P. G. Lake and S. Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 116–43; M. Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Hindle, State and Social Change; M. J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Cogswell, Home Divisions; P. G. Lake, ‘The collection of ship money in Cheshire in the 1630s: a case study in relations between central and local government’, Northern History, 17 (1981), 44–71. B. Quintrell, ‘The making of Charles I’s Book of Orders’, English Historical Review, 95 (1980), 553–72. K. Sharpe, Personal Rule of Charles I (London: Yale University Press, 1992). Cust and Lake, ‘Rhetoric of magistracy’, 40–53; The Papers of Sir Richard Grosvenor, 1st Bart (1585–1645), ed. R. P. Cust (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 134, 1996) (hereafter Grosvenor papers); Lake, ‘Collection of ship money’; P. G. Lake, ‘Puritans, popularity and petitions: local politics in a national context, Cheshire 1641’, in T. E. Cogswell, R. P. Cust and P. G. Lake (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 259–89. Lake, ‘Collection of ship money’. William Hinde, A faithfull remonstrance of the Holy Life and Happy Death of John Bruen of Stapleford in the county of Cheshire esquire (London, 1641) (hereafter Life of Bruen). J. S. Morrill, Cheshire 1630–60. County Government and Society during the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); C. S. R. Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). The debt owed to the work of both these scholars should be apparent on almost every page of this last section of the book, and what follows should be seen not primarily as criticism, still less as simple rejection of their version of events, but, rather, as an extended engagement with and extension of their work.

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Part I

The Cheshire gentry and their world

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1

The culture of dynasticism

A

fter a long and eventful life, Sir Ranulph Crewe sat down to write his will at the age of eighty-six in 1645. He reflected that the greatest ‘external token … of God’s favour to me’ was that ‘it hath pleased God, of his abundant goodness to reduce the house and manor of the name to the name again’. Crewe had risen to the dizzy heights of speaker of the House of Commons and lord chief justice, only to be sacked from his office in November 1626 after leading a delegation of judges to protest against Charles I’s forced loan. But what preoccupied him at the end of his life was the way in which ‘it hath pleased God in some measure to raise the name again which for many years hath been greatly weakened and impaired’. It was the establishing – or, rather, re-establishing – of his dynasty that mattered to him above all.1 According to Ranulph, the Crewes could trace their descent back to Patreus de Crewe in Edward I’s reign. But the family manor at Crewe in Cheshire had passed into the hands of the Foulshurst family in Edward III’s reign, when Sir Robert Foulshurst had married the daughter and heiress of Thomas Crewe. Sir Ranulph belonged to a collateral branch of the family and his father had been a tanner in nearby Nantwich. Having made his fortune as a sergeant at law, he embarked on a systematic strategy to rebuild the family’s presence and inheritance in Cheshire. In 1609, at a cost of £6,000, he purchased the manor of Crewe and the adjacent Barthomley from the heirs of Lord Chancellor Hatton, who had acquired the estates in Elizabeth’s reign. On 3 April 1615 he laid the foundation stone for Crewe Hall, which was finally completed in 1639 (Figure 1). During the 1620s he reconstructed the chapel and burial vault in Barthomley church to serve as a mausoleum for future generations of Crewes. And around 1630 he commissioned a decorated family pedigree from the Cheshire herald and antiquary, Randle Holme I.2 The success of his efforts was already being acknowledged in the 25

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1  Wenceslaus Hollar’s engraving of Crewe Hall, rebuilt by Sir Ranulph Crewe between 1615 and 1639. William Webb equated the rebuilding of the house with the revival of the Crewe family, describing the ‘stately fabric of the hall of Crewe which for many years aforegoing had drooped and fallen in much decay, as it were lingering and longing for one that might raise up that name and seat’.

early 1620s by the local chronicler, William Webb. He hailed Sir Ranulph for having revived both the family and the house at Crewe, ‘which for many years aforegoing had drooped and fallen in much decay, as it were lingering and longing for one that might raise up that name and seat’.3 The impulse that gave rise to Crewe’s expressions of thankfulness is familiar to early modern scholars. Dynasticism has been recognised by historians such as Natalie Davis, Lawrence Stone, Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes as an increasingly powerful force in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as feudal constraints weakened and patriarchs enjoyed new opportunities to acquire wealth and property and build up the status of their families.4 Among the English elite this process was assisted by the principles of primogeniture and patrilineal descent, enshrined in common law and commanding increasing respect in the early modern period. According to these, the bulk of the family estate should pass to the eldest surviving son or his son. Where there was no immediate male heir – which, given the harsh demographic fact that in each generation around a quarter of landed families would fail to produce a surviving son, was not infrequently – families would generally go back to a paternal grandfather and his descendants, that is, uncles, cousins or nephews bearing the family name, before they resorted to inheritance by an heiress of the female line. The division of estates was discouraged, except where younger children could be endowed with property acquired in addition to the 26

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original family inheritance. As a consequence, the majority of estates passed intact from one generation to the next.5 At the same time as primogeniture helped to ensure extensive concentrations of property in the heads of families, developments in English land law were giving them greater control over the management of this property. During the course of the sixteenth century the effectiveness of medieval entails – which had turned the owner into a virtual trustee for the transmission of the patrimony to future generations – was steadily eroded by the Statutes of Uses and Wills, and various accompanying legal judgments. Developments in mortgages, settlements and instruments of credit were also providing new tools to manage the disposal of property. Family heads now exercised much greater freedom to alienate estates and raise ready cash in order to play the property market, endow younger sons and inflate the marriage portions of their daughters.6 This gave them increased authority over their family members, which was reinforced by post-reformation religious and political teachings on the deference and obedience that was due to patriarchs. The rule of patriarchs within the ‘little commonwealths’ of their families replicated that of magistrates and princes within the state; and order and unity in both was seen to depend on the exercise of a benevolent but strictly enforced authority. What this could mean in practice was vividly illustrated in the complaint of the social commentator Thomas Wilson, himself a younger son: Such a fever hectic hath custom brought in and inured amongst fathers, and such fond desire they have to leave a great show of the stock of their house, though the branches be withered, that they will not do it, but my elder brother forsooth must be my master. He must have all, and all the rest which the cat left on the malt heap, perhaps some small annuity during his life or what please our elder brother’s worship to bestow upon us if we please him and my mistress his wife.7

The main constraint on their actions – apart from feelings of fatherly or brotherly affection – was the expectation that younger brothers and sisters would be adequately provided for, and that if they were not this would reflect badly on the head of the family.8 Sir Ranulph Crewe’s will was a product of these circumstances as he sought to manage his family’s future from beyond the grave. The urge to do so was no doubt in part a product of his forceful and controlling personality and the rather tense relationship with his eldest son, Sir Clippesby Crewe, whom he does not appear to have trusted to secure the family inheritance in Cheshire.9 But it was also a reflection of the importance that the elite attached to maintaining their family name and titles, consolidating the connections between lineage and place and leaving ‘a great show of the stock of their house …’. In the trusts and settlements set out in his will, he made detailed provision not only for his children but also for his grandchildren, specifying the education and marriage portions appropriate for Sir Clippesby’s offspring, down to 27

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itemising the estates that he had purchased with the intention of servicing their needs. Above all, he provided for Crewe Hall itself, which was to be maintained as the focus of the family’s inheritance and identity. He allocated landholdings in Cheshire to ‘the better supportation of my house at Crewe’; he listed the ‘heirlooms’ which were to be preserved perpetually at the house as reminders of his illustrious connections with the earls of Shrewsbury and Derby, Lord Keeper Coventry and Lord Chief Justice Coke; and he delivered a specific injunction to his second son, John – who had married a local heiress and bought into his father’s Cheshire enterprise – to ‘take especial care for the safety and preservation of my household stuff … the repairing of the house and mills … and the handsome keeping of my gardens …’.10 The influence exercised by Sir Ranulph Crewe in shaping his family’s future was replicated among his Cheshire neighbours. These included a number of extremely forceful patriarchs – virtual ‘godfathers’ to their ­families – who, by dint of longevity, prestige and personality, maintained their power to shape their families’ destinies to their dying day, and often well beyond. A good example was Sir Peter Leigh of Lyme, who ruled his family with a rod of iron from the moment he succeeded his grandfather in 1589 to his own death at the age of seventy-three in 1636. As a soldier in the Elizabethan wars, and member of parliament (MP) and justice of the peace (JP) in the shire, he commanded the respect of both his peers and his family, and this translated into dominance over every aspect of his children’s lives. He was viewed with an awed deference, typified in the willingness of his third son, Thomas, to become a minister against his own inclinations, but in accordance with his father’s wishes.11 It was in his dealings with his son and heir, Piers, however, that Sir Peter most clearly demonstrated his ruthless and authoritarian personality. Piers was sent to Cambridge in 1604 at the age of sixteen, but was removed a year later at his father’s behest – presumably because of some indiscretion – and was made to submit to the humiliation of being home tutored while his brothers went to Oxford. In 1610, having at last been released from Lyme, Piers formed what his father considered to be an unsuitable attachment to a Mistress Morley. The young man agreed to give this up after a solemn undertaking by his father that he would be allowed freedom of choice in his next match, provided that the bride was of suitable family and status. Two years later Piers became engaged to Ann Savile, daughter of the leading Yorkshire knight Sir John; but Sir Peter again refused to countenance the match, insisting that the marriage portion that Sir John was offering was demeaning to his family’s status. Sir Peter’s closest family friends, including Sir John Egerton, Sir Thomas Gerard and Lady Molineux queued up to remind him of his earlier promise to his son and urge him to ‘strain … not … the power of a father … to the confusion … of a loving and dutiful son’. In spite of this, Sir Peter remained unbending and, when Piers married Ann in 1616, he carried out his threat to disinherit him. However, mindful of the future of 28

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his family, he also undertook to make any son produced by Piers and Ann his heir. When Piers died in 1624, soon after the birth of ‘little Peter’, Sir Peter mobilised his court connections in a lengthy campaign to secure the wardship of his grandson; and, having done so, promptly removed him from the custody of his mother and had him brought up at Lyme. Sir Peter died before he could arrange a marriage for his grandson, but he did persuade his second son, Francis, to take on the role of his nephew’s guardian, which he loyally discharged until ‘little Peter’s’ premature death as a result of a duel in 1642.12 As the regular reminders from his friends to act less harshly and unbendingly towards his children indicate, Sir Peter Leigh was an unusually forceful and domineering family patriarch. Most of the heads of Cheshire families exercised a far more benevolent oversight of their siblings and offspring. But his actions are another indication of just how much energy and force a leading landowner was prepared to mobilise in order to secure what he saw as the best prospects for the future of his dynasty. Dynasticism, then, was at the core of gentry belief systems and family strategies in this period. Securing the future of their lineage and building its reputation was the principal life-time project of most heads of gentry families. It was of paramount importance for them in terms of their sense of identity and self-worth within a culture which valued very highly the achievement of passing on one’s estates in an uninterrupted succession from one generation to the next. But this was not just an individualistic enterprise. These dynasties were the building blocks of gentry society. Dynastic patriarchs had a strong sense of belonging to wider collectives of gentry families among whom they socialised, transacted business, governed their households, served the commonwealth and pursued various political and religious ventures. These groupings could vary considerably, from the gentry of their immediate neighbourhood, hundred or agricultural ‘pays’, to their county or the nation as a whole, represented in parliament. But here we are concerned mainly with the county. The aim of this chapter is to explore the interactions between family dynasties and the wider society of the gentry-based county community. Firstly, it will look at how far these dynasties were rooted within their shire and the extent to which they identified with its topography and sense of place. Secondly, it will explore how kinship networks were constructed and operated, and the role they played in defining the gentry’s social horizons. Then, thirdly, it will explore the competition between these gentry for status and reputation. What forms did this take? How did these impact on the sense of the county as a collective whole?

DYNASTICISM AND PLACE One of the most striking demonstrations of the Cheshire gentry’s sense of belonging to a county community was the remarkable display of 186 coats 29

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2  Part of the display of Cheshire coats of arms set up by Thomas Leigh in the Great Hall at Adlington in the 1580s

of arms recorded in the great hall of Sir Urian Leigh’s house at Adlington in 1611 (Figure 2). This had originally been set up in 1581 when Thomas Leigh refurbished the house and decided to follow the fashion of the time by installing a massive display of coats of arms of county families. Only part of the original scheme survives, but it gives a sense of how imposing the whole array must have been. The initial ordering may have been based, in part, on the roll of arms of county families which Leigh had drawn up in a large historical scrapbook showing families in their order of precedence at this time, with the Savage, Booth, Brereton and Warburton arms at its head. Thirty years later, when an anonymous visitor recorded the display, the ordering had been changed. The Savages were still at the head, but the Cholmondeleys had now moved into second place and, gratifyingly, the Leighs of Adlington were now in the top ten, along with their cousins the Leighs of Lyme, and just outside one of the most upwardly mobile of all Cheshire families in this period, the Grosvenors of Eaton.13 The rejigging of the order of precedence was made possible by the use of wooden frames for the shields, which could be moved around and inserted in the appropriate place as notions of local ranking were revised. However, our well-informed visitor was far from satisfied. He expressed the view that the whole arrangement was flawed, since ‘divers ancient houses of good account are omitted and many others misplaced here’.14 We will return to this notion that there was a ranking and a constantly changing order of precedence among Cheshire families when we explore their competition for status. But for the moment we should focus on what 30

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this tells us about the identity of a ‘county community’. Unlike our visitor, with his well-developed sense of history and hierarchy, what would probably have struck most viewers was the visible aggregation of gentry families through the marshalling of their coats of arms together in one room. The neatly ordered rows of shields and the identically sized frames would have created the impression of a society of equals. One man’s coat armour was, after all, as honourable as another’s; and to a much greater extent than in other forms of heraldic display – on tombs or pedigree rolls, for example – this style of marshalling coat armour emphasised the essential collegiality of the gentry. Depicting county societies through displays of their collective heraldry was very fashionable in the period from the 1570s through to the 1590s. It was a concrete expression of the notion that every family which was represented shared a common sense of identity with, and belonging to, a wider gentry community. Its essential message was that it was the county that provided the main context in which their dynasties existed, and also the fabric out of which they were constructed – the landholdings and sense of place, the country houses, the local offices, the social contacts and the sense of heritage.15 The sense of belonging was stronger in Cheshire than in most shires. One of the first things that struck contemporary commentators was that it had an unusually large number of gentry who had been long settled within the shire. Daniel King, the editor of the various accounts of the shire published in 1656 under the title The Vale Royal of England, proclaimed that ‘there is no county in England more famous for a long continued succession of ancient gentry than this of Cheshire’, and this was proudly echoed by one of their number, Sir Thomas Aston: ‘we are a gentry who for antiquity shall subscribe to none’.16 An analysis of the origins of the top one hundred families in the Adlington display bears this out. Ninety of them in the early Stuart period still occupied estates that their families had held since before 1500, most since the thirteenth or fourteenth century, when records of land tenure and descent first become reliable.17 Of the families that had acquired their estates since 1500 only five (the Egertons of Ridley, the Cottons of Combermere, the Holcrofts of Vale Royal, the Hurlestons of Picton and the Glaseors of Lea) had come in from outside the shire.18 The remainder were the offspring of already established county families. This remarkably settled pattern of landownership can be explained in considerable part by Cheshire’s distance from London – normally some five days’ travel – which made it too remote to attract the attention of carpetbagging courtiers and merchants. There had been some churning in the local land market following the dissolution of the monasteries which allowed newcomers like the Cottons (from Shropshire) or the Holcrofts (from Lancashire) to establish landed dynasties within the shire. But the majority of the most upwardly mobile gentry were from existing Cheshire families: like Sir Ranulph Crewe’s colleagues among the senior judiciary, Lord Keeper 31

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Ellesmere, who established his family at Tatton and Doddington, and Sir Peter Warburton, justice of the Common Pleas, who purchased the Masseys’ estate at Tilston and built a large manor house there. Both were the illegitimate offspring of the senior branches of their families.19 A few of the leading county families, such as the Bulkeleys of Bulkeley, the Needhams of Shavington and the Egertons of Oulton, resided mainly on estates in other shires; but they were very much the exception.20 A high proportion of the long-established Cheshire families – some twentysix of the leading one hundred – took their surnames from the manors on which they still resided. The Beestons, for example, traced their line back to David de Beeston and the Davenports to Orme de Davenport.21 This was not only another indication of the longevity of these families; it also underlined the importance of an identification with place. Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes have emphasised this in their classic study of The Gentry in England and Wales 1500–1700, citing the reflections of the Isle of Wight gentleman, Sir John Oglander: The de Oglanders are as ancient as any family in the Isle of Wight. They came in with the Conqueror out of Normandy and there have not wanted worthy knights of this family … We have kept this spot of ground this five hundred years from father to son, and I pray God thou beest not the last, nor see that scattered, which so many have taken care to gain for thee.22

The mixture of pride and anxiety that fuelled Oglander’s preoccupation is also emphasised in Lawrence and Jeanne Stone’s study of the English landed classes from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. They cite Thomas Fuller’s comment in his Worthies of England, compiled in the 1640s and 1650s, that many families time out of mind have been certainly fixed in eminent seats in their respective counties where the ashes of their ancestors sleep in quiet and their names are known with honour.23

In Cheshire the association of blood line, place and honour was a very strong component of dynastic identity. Families would invest heavily in the site of their original patrimony because they recognised that this would enhance their distinctiveness and sense of self, and augment their collective honour. Crewe’s construction of a new house and family chapel on the original sites of his family’s settlement was a typical response to these imperatives. The Savages of Clifton, perhaps the wealthiest family in the shire in the early seventeenth century, acquired property stretching across Cheshire, as well as a major country house at Melford Hall in Suffolk and a substantial London house at Tower Hill. But they still focused most of their attention on their original Cheshire inheritance. During Elizabeth’s reign Sir John Savage VIII had acquired the keepership of nearby Halton castle, associated with the ancient barony, and purchased the adjacent manor of Frodsham. 32

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3  The only known depiction of Rock Savage before its destruction in the nineteenth century. This early eighteenth-century engraving shows its closeness to the royal castle at Halton and its proximity to Frodsham, another important Savage estate.

In 1565 he also built a house at Rock Savage, adjacent to Clifton, which over fifty years later was still regarded by Webb as the most ‘magnificent fabric’ in Cheshire. By the time that Webb was writing, in the early 1620s, Sir John’s grandson, Sir Thomas, was firmly established at the royal court and visited Clifton only rarely in the late summer. But he still continued to invest heavily in Rock Savage and its gardens as a showcase for his dynastic identity (Figure 3).24 Maintaining the material substance of one’s dynasty in this way was seen as providing purpose, structure and continuity for landed families faced with unprecedented social mobility and the brutal demographic reality that their name could often be continued only through inheritance by an uncle or cousin.25 It also confirmed this as the ‘lordship’ of the Savages, the neighbourhood where their authority held sway and local inhabitants looked to them for leadership and protection.26 William Webb’s survey of Cheshire in the early 1620s affirmed this association of land, house and lineage. It took as its focal points the houses of the gentry because he saw many of these as endowed with the character and identity of the families that inhabited them. The adjectives that he used to describe the built environment and the carefully constructed edifices of these 33

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dynasties were often interchangeable. An ‘ancient seat’ would be described in a way that underlined the longevity and durability of a lineage; Peover Hall was ‘that stately house’ which ‘hath been the continued seat of that great house of Mainwaring’; and the ‘beautiful seat of Dunham’ was ‘never more grand than in the now possession of Sir George Booth’.27 These houses also became showcases for the history and achievements of the dynasty. To do this they drew on the languages of history and heraldry, combining coats of arms with heirlooms and artefacts connected to the history of both the county and the nation. By the late Tudor period the study of family history and the display of coats of arms had been adopted by many county gentry as an essential means of affirming their place within established hierarchies. Following the lead of heraldic writers such as Gerard Legh and John Ferne, there was a drive to establish ‘blood and arms’ as the ‘gold standard’ for assessing gentility. This led to an emphasis on longevity of descent – over at least three generations, but preferably more – as the mark of a true gentleman. It also produced a new branch of knowledge, ‘genealogical science’, which was believed to provide the key to understanding matters of honour and status. And it generated a burgeoning interest in the display of coat armour, the ‘secret emblems and sacred sculptures’ of which, according to Ferne, ‘figured out’ the whole history of a family’s virtuous achievements, as well as its relationships and descents.28 From the 1570s onwards heralds and heraldic writers began recording and assessing these armorial bearings and descents with far greater professionalism, examining deeds, charters and evidences, taking ‘church notes’ from funeral monuments and window glasses and compiling the standardised rectilinear pedigrees. By the 1590s this was providing the tools and inspiration for the expanding study of family and local history, and Ferne’s message, that only those in possession of coats of arms and a respectable lineage were fully entitled to be called gentleman, had begun to resonate widely. It was this that turned generations of gentlemen into enthusiastic students of their ancestral heritage, poring over muniments to establish the distinguished achievements of their forbears and, if possible, trace their line back to the Norman Conquest.29 There is plenty of evidence of enthusiasm for antiquarian studies among the Cheshire gentry.30 Sir Richard Grosvenor, who claimed that his family ‘hath continued in Cheshire ever since the Conquest’, inherited a heraldic commonplace book in which he recorded the births and pedigrees of his family and kin, and copied the family deeds that were shown by his father at the heraldic visitation of 1613. In 1629 he also commissioned Randle Holme I, the deputy herald for Chester, to make an illuminated transcript of the Scrope v. Grosvenor case of 1385–89 in which witnesses testified to the military service and honorific achievements of his forbears.31 Sir Thomas Aston was another antiquarian enthusiast. Once he had taken a decision, in 1635, to spend more time in his native shire, one of his principal projects became the study and promotion of his family’s history. He amassed a large collection of 34

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medieval deeds and exchanged notes and evidences with fellow antiquarians such as William Dugdale and the Chester deputy herald Randle Holme II.32 His family was able to trace its pedigree back reliably to Henry II’s reign. But, like many of his contemporaries, he wished to push it back to the Conquest; and this appears to have been the objective of a display pedigree that he commissioned from Holme in 1639.33 The fruits of such researches provided the subject matter and material for much of the decoration in both country houses and parish churches. Cheshire was a county of relatively modest architecture by the standards of the day, containing none of the prodigy houses or courtiers’ palaces that one encounters nearer to London. Nevertheless, these Cheshire houses still displayed many of the decorative and ornamental features which were intrinsic to the culture of dynasticism and gave substance to the all important connection between land and blood. Architectural historians have argued that from the mid-sixteenth century, as country houses became more stylish and symmetrical in design, so heraldry and other types of ornamentation associated with lineage tended to disappear from the exterior and become more prominent in the interior.34 This was not always the case and there were still examples of buildings which went out their way to showcase their family pedigree on their outsides. One of the more striking Cheshire houses, in this respect, must have been the Venables’ mansion at Kinderton, which unfortunately has not survived. The chief claim to fame of the family was that, almost uniquely among the Cheshire, gentry they could trace their tenure of the Norman barony of Kinderton in a direct succession back to the Conquest. Their traditional blackand-white timbered hall was decorated round the exterior of the upper storey with a series of imaginary ‘ancestor portraits’ of former barons which traced their remarkable pedigree.35 Another house with impressive external decoration was Brereton Hall, with its striking twin-towered gatehouse decorated with sculpted panels in the centre of which were the royal arms and the arms of the Breretons.36 However, surely the most unique of these decorations were the figures of the ‘four esquires’ constructed beneath the balustraded staircase at Doddington Hall when it was rebuilt around the time that Sir Thomas Delves was created a baronet in 1612. These represented, albeit in seventeenth-century armour, John de Delves and three companions who had all achieved distinction under Sir James Audley in the vanguard of the Black Prince’s army at the battle of Poitiers (Figure 4). This was a notable example of what Philip Morgan has identified as a penchant among the Cheshire gentry for commemorating (and often embellishing) the feats of their ancestors in the Hundred Years’ War. It became particularly marked with the Elizabethan chivalric revival and the burgeoning interest in family history, as a consequence of which, Morgan points out, ‘incidents of military service were amplified into feats of martial glory or else simply fabricated …’. In Delves’s case no fabrication was required, since his ancestor’s feat of arms was well reported in Froissart’s Chronicles.37 35

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4  One of the ‘four esquires’, still set in the original balustrading installed at Doddington Hall when Sir Thomas Delves rebuilt the house in the early seventeenth century. They are dressed in Jacobean cavalry armour.

Interior decoration in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries made extensive use of heraldry. It is difficult to assess with any degree of certainty how far this represented an innovation in interior design, since prior to this much of the decoration was provided by hanging tapestries, 36

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which rarely survive. Some of these certainly featured heraldry, such as the tapestry woven for Sir William Davenport of Bramall Hall (c.1570), recording generations of the family and their marriage alliances back to the fourteenth century.38 What is clear, however, is that, with the increased use of wood panelling, the reduced cost and increased availability of domestic stained glass and the proliferation of sculpted fireplaces and plasterwork ceilings, displays of family heraldry became a conspicuous feature of house interiors.39 The significance attached to these displays depended a good deal on where in the house they were located. Although the medieval great hall was falling out of use during the early sixteenth century and being replaced by smaller, often single-storied, structures, the hall retained its place as the principal reception room for visitors and therefore an important site for showcasing a family’s sense of identity. None of the other houses in the shire for which there is surviving evidence could match the display in the Great Hall at Adlington. But there is plenty of evidence of heraldic window glasses, like the display of Cheshire families’ coats of arms in the hall at Utkinton; or the glasses commemorating his family’s alliances, mainly with other Cheshire dynasties, that William Moreton inserted into the late-medieval hall at Little Moreton Hall in the early 1560s. The most impressive of the surviving arrays of heraldic glass was the one set up by Sir William Brereton at Brereton Hall in the 1580s. He installed nine large windows, depicting two Saxon earls of Mercia and seven earls of Chester, down to his putative ancestor the seventh earl, John Scot; then, in smaller windows throughout the house he placed the coats of arms of 330 Cheshire, Lancashire and Shropshire families, based on a parchment roll prepared for him by Norroy King of Arms Robert Glover. In this marshalling of coat armour Brereton was proclaiming his membership, and indeed eminence, among not just the gentry community of Cheshire but the wider region of the North-West.40 Penny Hegbin-Barnes, the historian of medieval and post-medieval stained glass in the shire, has described these displays as so ubiquitous that their absence was probably the exception rather than the rule.41 Displays of brightly coloured heraldry are generally the most eye-catching means of celebrating lineage that one encounters in house interiors from this period; but alongside these there were often complementary displays of family heirlooms. Tara Hamling has highlighted the capacity of these to perpetuate images of virtuous achievement and serve as ‘a permanent record and reminder of ancestral and familial heritage’. The injunctions that one finds in wills, that particular objects were to be preserved ‘as heirlooms to remain from heir to heir for ever at my house’, expressed the sense that such objects were inextricably bound up with dynastic identity and the building in which this was being showcased.42 The objects that testators specified should be treated as heirlooms varied enormously, from family deeds and evidences to furniture, bedding, plate and tableware, often bearing the arms 37

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of the testator’s family or those with whom they wished to be associated. The Stanleys of Hooton Hall passed down as an heirloom the thirteenth-century hunting horn said to have been given to them by Ranulph earl of Chester in recognition of their hereditary keepership of Wirral Forest; and Sir Thomas Delves displayed a sword given to his ancestor by the Black Prince. When William Webb visited Peover Hall in the time of Sir Randle Mainwaring (d.1612) he was shown the family’s pedigree roll, together with an even more precious evidence, the charter recording the marriage of an ancestor, Ranulf de Meinilwarin, to the daughter of Hugh Keveloc, one of the original Norman earls of Chester.43 However, the item most often mentioned in Cheshire gentlemen’s wills of the period – in keeping with the shire’s pride in its military heritage – was the family armour, invariably on display in the great hall. Few of these gentlemen had ever experienced combat, but they made a point of preserving and displaying this armour as what Morgan calls ‘a uniform of ancient status’.44 During the early sixteenth century the great chamber took over from the great hall as the principal room for entertaining and dining guests, and this became the other main site for showing off a family’s heritage. Here the decorative focus was often the fireplace, which, as the source of warmth, was generally the focal point of the room. Fireplace designs were being transformed during the 1580s with the introduction of many of the design features associated with Dutch carvers that were appearing on funeral monuments at the same time. Some twenty years later patterned plasterwork ceilings were also becoming commonplace, to add to the possibilities for decoration.45 Both presented opportunities for extensive displays of brightly coloured heraldry. The most striking example from Cheshire is the display of family heraldry on the plasterwork ceiling of the great chamber at Combermere Abbey, which was rebuilt by Richard Cotton from 1563 onwards. The ceiling was probably installed considerably later by his son George Cotton, since among the family connections commemorated there is the marriage of George’s son Thomas to Elizabeth Calverley, which did not take place until the early 1620s. However, the heraldry of the ceiling complemented an ornate wood-panelled fireplace which does date back to the rebuilding of the house, and includes portraits of Richard Cotton painted in 1579 and a young man, presumed to be his son and heir George, flanking copy portraits of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth. This is a notable example of ‘founders’ portraits’, a familiar genre encountered in houses of the period, proclaiming for the benefit of visitors the status and legitimacy of those who had established the family seat.46 The final genre of dynastic artefact on display in most houses was the family portrait. There was a huge expansion in personal portraiture during this period, with paintings often incorporating the family tree and heraldic motifs which were deployed elsewhere to celebrate lineage.47 Sir Henry Wotton, in his Elements of Architecture, advised that these should be dispersed around the house in rooms appropriate to their subject matter; but they were 38

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probably displayed most often in the long galleries which became popular from the mid-sixteenth century as a site for exercising and conversing with visitors.48 At Lyme the long gallery built and panelled by Sir Peter Leigh and his grandfather in Elizabeth’s reign still houses several portraits of Sir Peter and his sons, alongside a portrait of Lord Keeper Ellesmere, cousin to his second wife. It is impossible to be certain whether they were being displayed there in the early Stuart period; but this is the most likely venue, and there they probably contributed to the same sort of eclectic mix of portraits of family, friends and kings and queens as was recorded in the inventory for the gallery of Hardwick Hall in 1601.49 The inventory for Sir George Calverley’s seat at Lea, taken in 1619, records family portraits scattered through the house, in the long gallery, the hall and various chambers; and this dispersal of portraits is the pattern elsewhere. A late seventeenth-century inventory of pictures at Utkinton Hall recorded an array of family portraits, including John Crewe’s father and mother, his brother Sir Clippesby Crewe and wife, his father and mother-in-law, Sir John and Lady Done, his cousin and namesake, John Crewe of Steane in Northamptonshire, and Thomas Viscount Savage, the county’s leading magnate, all set amid the array of window glasses of Cheshire families. This display started in the hall, progressed up the stairs and culminated in the first-floor great chamber, offering visitors a progression through the house which could have left them in little doubt about the family’s illustrious status and connections.50 Just as significant as houses in giving substance to the connection between family and place were the rites and monuments associated with death. Anthropologists have taught us that in many societies the rituals surrounding death focus on stressing the continuity from one generation to the next in order to repair the ruptures to the social fabric caused by death. The person who died was seen not so much as departing from the world of the living as experiencing a change of status, to take his place alongside his ancestors. In early modern England this process was assisted by the legal doctrine of ‘the king’s two bodies’, which stated that monarchs and rulers possessed both a natural body which died out with the demise of the individual and a social or political body which lived on in his heir and was simply transferred from one generation to the next.51 This doctrine was expressed in the rites of the heraldic funeral and the erection of funeral monuments which helped the living to manage the process of transition and integrated the deceased into the ancestral line.52 Heraldic funerals were becoming an increasingly common occurrence in late Tudor England. They had been introduced for leading members of the aristocracy in the fifteenth century; but orders given by the earl marshal in 1568 recognised that the right extended to all who were entitled to bear arms, gentlemen as well as noblemen. By the late sixteenth century an elaborate hierarchy of regulations had been introduced, specifying the numbers of mourners, size of hearse, style 39

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of banners and hatchments, types of achievements to be presented at the offertory and so on, all to ensure that the funerals replicated the proper distinctions of estate and degree. The papers of heralds like Randle Holme I, deputy to Norroy King of Arms for Cheshire, suggest that full-scale heraldic funerals took place within the county relatively frequently, with one or more during most years of James I’s reign. These were spectacular set-pieces in which the leaders of local society would come together to affirm their shared values. They often took weeks to organise and could entail lengthy processions across country to a family burial vault. They were also visually very dramatic, with long lines of mourners clad all in black processing alongside the hearse, offset only by the brightly coloured banners and escutcheons.53 At the heart of the whole rite were three themes, all of them closely connected with the promotion of dynasticism: firstly, hierarchy, reflected in the precise grading of mourners according to degree and status; secondly, continuity, shown in the transfer of power from one generation to the next in the act of offertory; and thirdly, family honour, acknowledged by the presence of the herald, which, according to William Segar, was a sign that the deceased had ‘died honourably … without spot of infamy or disworship to his name, blood and family’.54 All were evident in the funeral of Sir John Savage at Macclesfield in 1598, which Holme recorded in detail. This took place at the chapel within Macclesfield church built as a perpetual chantry by the family’s most distinguished forbear, Thomas Savage, archbishop of York (d.1507). At the head of the procession of mourners were a trumpeter and conductors with black staves, followed by eighty poor men (supposedly one for each year of Sir John’s age, although in fact he was seventy-four) each bearing a pennant with the arms of the Savages and those to whom they were related. Then followed household servants, choristers, chaplains, a Chester alderman and various ‘gentlemen of blood and alliance’ representing Cheshire families, such as the Astons, the Breretons and the Davenports. Some bore banner rolls and flags, others Sir John’s knightly accoutrements of sword, helm, gauntlets, spurs and shield. Even his great horse was ridden into the church. After this came the hearse, draped in mourning cloth and covered with armorial escutcheons, accompanied by the preacher and the herald presiding over the funeral. He was followed by the principal mourner, Sir John’s son and heir, John Savage esq., and the regulation number of four chief mourners, who had to be of the same status and sex as the deceased – in this case Sir Hugh Cholmondeley, the senior member of the Cheshire gentry after Savage, and his counterparts from south Lancashire and north Wales, Sir Richard Molyneux, Sir Robert Salisbury and Sir Richard Bulkeley. Finally there were the remaining mourners, including Savage’s wife and daughters, disbarred from the main part of the procession on account of their sex. The service that followed incorporated a rich array of imagery and allusion. The display of heraldry represented the matches of each generation of 40

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the family, many ‘with earls, barons and great dignities’, back to the beginnings of Sir John’s pedigree in the fourteenth century. Various flags and emblems recorded his honorific achievements: a great ensign was carried, ‘in regard he had served for his prince in defence of his country and … was knighted in the field’; a forked cavalry pennant indicated that he had been a deputy lieutenant and commander of the county horse; and a white stave was presented by the Chester alderman to show that he had also been mayor of the town. These achievements were also rehearsed for the benefit of posterity in his funeral sermon, which portrayed him as a model of knightly accomplishments. Finally, the offertory emphasised the power and permanence Savage’s social body, as against the transience of his natural body. The herald led his heir to the communion table, where he was invested with the armour and weapons which symbolised his father’s knightly status: the banners and escutcheons signifying his headship of the lineage, the white staves of the household officers and a lance with a banner, ‘showing he is ready to supply his father’s magnanimity and virtue’. This was the high point of the whole ceremony, the moment at which political and social power was formally transferred from one generation to the next and the persistence of the Savage line was reaffirmed. After the service much of the paraphernalia which had accompanied the hearse, including the banners, hatchments and funeral armour, was left on display in the Savage chapel. Finally, well after the event, Sir John’s grandson Sir Thomas Savage set up a monument which, with its heraldry and statues of his wife and children, and its lengthy Latin inscription recording his distinguished family alliances and service to his ‘country’, provided an enduring image of his social and political body (Figure 5).55 The venues for these funerals and displays of family achievements were crucial for substantiating the connection between blood and land. Many took place in family mausoleums, constructed for the purpose. Traditionally, many gentry families had been commemorated in monasteries or chantries that they themselves had endowed, like the Savage chantry at Macclesfield; but, as these were threatened with destruction, families began to focus their attention onto local parish churches. Chantry chapels which already existed within them were refurbished and new family chapels were built, often tacked onto existing structures in what became the most significant category of new building for many local churches.56 In Cheshire this building and repurposing took a variety of forms. When Sir Thomas Aston rebuilt the small chapel at Aston early in 1635 as part of his project for re-establishing himself in the shire he relocated the family burial vault from the parish church at Runcorn. The chapel was now given parochial status; the communion table was returned to an east-end position, with his family pews set up either side of it; and he had a large armorial board installed, tracing the twenty-five descents of his family (Figure 6). When Sir Thomas’s wife died soon after, and then his son and heir two years later, he 41

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5  The monument to Sir John Savage VIII (d.1597) in the Savage chapel in St Michael’s church, Macclesfield. Set up by his grandson, Sir Thomas Savage, c.1620, the lengthy inscription records Savage’s illustrious family connections and service to his ‘country’.

had them commemorated in two finely carved marble tablets with verses rehearsing their virtues.57 A typical example of the more modest family chapel was the one refurbished and extended by Sir Urian Brereton of Handforth in Cheadle church in 1562. This consisted of a wooden screen, decorated with the distinctive Brereton rebus of the briar and tun. By the time an unidentified chronicler visited the church c.1633 the family was also hanging its funeral armour over the fifteenth-century tombs of two unknown knights. This was doubtless intended to rebuff the proprietorial claims of the Savages, who held the manor of Cheadle Moseley and had built a chapel in the church in 1529, although by the seventeenth century the Savages’ commemorative focus was directed to Macclesfield.58 Of all the examples of family chapel and monument building in this period in Cheshire, the most striking is the chapel set up in the north aisle of Over Peover church by Ellen Mainwaring in 1648. The church already had a Mainwaring chantry in the south aisle, built in 1456 and containing the memorials of generations of Mainwarings since then. When Philip Mainwaring drew up his will in 1643 he decreed that he was to be buried there in ‘our peculiar dormitory’. But Ellen had other ideas, perhaps encouraged by her son Thomas, the later family historian. She commissioned an entirely new chapel which, unusually, made no effort to accommodate itself 42

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6  The armorial board tracing twenty-four descents of the Aston family, researched and painted by Randle Holme II and installed in St Peter’s church, Aston-by-Sutton after Sir Thomas Aston had refurbished it as a family chapel in 1635

to the existing church structure but was designed to stand out, as Nikolaus Pevsner describes it, ‘amazingly pure for that date in its classical style’. The centrepiece of the chapel was the marble monument to Philip and Ellen, with Philip encased in traditional knightly armour, his head resting on an ass, which was the family crest and a reminder of his ancestor’s rescue on crusade on the back of an ass. An inscription recorded Philip’s service to the shire as JP, deputy lieutenant and captain of the county horse, a reminder of which was provided by the 1630s cavalry armour that still hangs in the chapel. The most arresting feature of the display within the chapel, however, is the heraldry – in contemporary window glasses, the carved oak ceiling, carved and painted shields above the monument and on Mainwaring’s monument itself. This was highly selective. Dominating the display was the Mainwaring coat impaling the arms of Ellen’s family, the Minshulls, which took pride of place in the huge ceiling boss, on the end of the monument and in the windows and carved shields. Otherwise it was the historical alliances that the family was so proud of – with the daughter of Hugh Keveloc, earl of Chester, and Joan Praers, the heiress who had brought the Baddeley estate into the family 43

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7  The Mainwaring chapel at St Lawrence’s church, Over Peover, commissioned by Ellen Minshull in 1648 to commemorate her husband, Philip Mainwaring (d.1647). It shows the monument to Philip and Ellen, Philip’s cavalry armour and a display of heraldry carefully chosen to emphasise the Mainwarings’ alliances with the Minshulls and offspring of the earls of Chester.

in the fourteenth century – that mainly featured in the widow glasses, on the carvings and on Philip’s tomb. Conspicuous by their absence was any reference to the arms of Philip’s Fitton grandmother and Smith of Hough mother. Both were from distinguished local families; but it was her own connection that Ellen Minshull was most keen to emphasise (Figure 7).59 The Mainwaring chapel and monument encapsulated the narratives of dynasticism that were most prevalent in the early seventeenth century: the lengthy lineage and association with distinguished ancestors; the legends and myths which gave substance to a family’s past history; the service to one’s ‘country’ which was an indication that the present generations were continuing to display the virtue of the past; and the conjuncture of blood and tenure that was the hallmark of an honourable family.

KINSHIP AND SOCIAL HORIZONS The connections between family and shire were reinforced by the pattern of gentry marriages, which were predominantly with brides from other Cheshire families. Out of 285 marriages contracted by the offspring of the top one hundred Cheshire families in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth 44

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centuries, 170 (60 per cent) were within the shire, 59 (21 per cent) with brides from immediately adjacent shires (mainly south Lancashire, Staffordshire and Shropshire) and 56 (19 per cent) with brides from further afield (nearly all from London, the Home Counties and the Midlands).60 For a mainly landlocked shire, this was a significantly high percentage. The Kentish (82 per cent), Lancashire (71 per cent), Norfolk (71 per cent) and Suffolk (69 per cent) gentry all had higher rates of endogamy, but each of these counties had a much more substantial coastline which hemmed them in on at least one side.61 Cheshire, apart from the Wirral peninsula, was landlocked; but, in spite of sharing borders with six other shires, it was a county that looked inwards rather than outwards. The pastoral vale of Cheshire stretched across the heartland of the county from Chester in the west, to Nantwich, Northwich and Middlewich in the centre and Congleton, Macclesfield and Stockport in the east. This was basically pasture farming country, much of it on land enclosed by agreement since the middle ages, with a concentration on cattle rearing and fattening in the north and dairying and cheese production in the south. This central area had the best communications and access to markets. The river Weaver carried dairy produce and the shire’s main manufactured product, salt, from Nantwich, Northwich and Middlewich to the open water of the river Mersey for export to London and overseas. The road system, dominated by the main road from London to Chester and then on to Ireland (now the A51), stretched across the county from the south-east to the west, via Nantwich, and was linked to a network of Roman roads which connected Sandbach, Middlewich, Northwich, Frodsham and routes north to the Lancashire towns of Warrington and Manchester, and in the south linked Malpas and Nantwich to the Shropshire town of Whitchurch. Beyond this central heartland lay the two most geographically isolated parts of the shire: the flat Wirral peninsula, bounded on three sides by the sea and looking as much towards south Lancashire, across the Mersey, and north Wales, across the Dee, as to other parts of Cheshire; and the relatively remote uplands of the north-east of the shire, beyond Macclesfield and Stockport, which topographically and economically had more in common with the peak district of Derbyshire and the Pennines of Lancashire and Yorkshire (Figure 8).62 This geographical integrity was assisted by the gravitational pull of the market towns. Chester was, of course, the dominant town in the shire, economically and administratively, and, with a population of around eight thousand was more than three times the size of the next-largest towns, Macclesfield and Nantwich. But it was well to the west of the shire and its trading and social hinterland was mainly confined to parts of Broxton and Wirral hundreds and north Wales. The other market towns each provided focal points for the gentry and other local inhabitants within a five-to-ten mile radius. William Webb illustrated this in his comments on the small but rapidly developing market town of Knutsford. He put its expansion down 45

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8  Cheshire in the early seventeenth century, showing hundred divisions, principal towns, small towns and main roads 02/06/2020 07:46

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partly to the meetings of county justices there for their Easter quarter sessions, but also to the growth in local trade ‘which I have been inclined to think hath risen from this, that on every side [it was] beset and environed with gentlemen’s houses who by shortening their own journeys to other markets have encouraged the tradesmen there to be furnished with all needeful commodities’.63 Much the same could be said for Nantwich, which, as Webb again noted, had large numbers of neighbouring and resident gentry, several of whom took the lead in rebuilding the town after its disastrous fire in 1583. But, additionally, it had the assets of its long-established salt industry (in which James I took a particular interest on his progress in 1617) and a large number of well-established inns to cater for the travellers between London and Chester. The presence of some twelve small to medium-sized market towns within the shire tended to encourage its inhabitants to look inward in their marketing and economic activities rather than beyond the shire’s borders, as Ann Hughes found to be the case in Warwickshire and Anthony Fletcher in west Sussex.64 It was mainly in the North, with the economic pull of Liverpool, Warrington and Manchester just across the Lancashire border, that Cheshire men were generally drawn outside the shire. The wills of inhabitants of Stockport, in the north-east of the shire, reveal regular contacts with Manchester, as much as with the nearby Cheshire town of Macclesfield. But in the south of the shire these cross-county contacts were less obvious. The inhabitants of Wrenbury, for example, which was located midway between Nantwich and the Shropshire market town of Whitchurch, had much closer ties with Nantwich.65 These geographical and economic characteristics were one of the factors that encouraged Cheshire gentry to look within the county’s borders for their brides. Others related to their social aspirations and circumstances. Gentry marriages in this period were defined by what Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes describe as a ‘calculus of interest and emotion’ which, in the final analysis, is impossible to quantify.66 Personal affection certainly played an important part, as most parents wanted their children to enjoy a loving and companionable relationship. Sir Richard Grosvenor’s advice to his newly married son in 1628 illustrates this, with its insistence that he ‘love her heartily, use her with all respect, banish far from you all harshness … such dealing will incline that sweet disposition which I observe be in her … & be as a strong cement to fasten her affection, to perpetuate her love’.67 The assumption was generally made that a couple who were well matched in terms of wealth and breeding would in time develop a lasting affection. But concerns over the size of portions, property rights and family honour could often break an otherwise suitable match, as Sir Peter Leigh’s treatment of his eldest son demonstrated. Amid such considerations, the geographical reach of marriage alliances was generally determined by the spread of a family’s estates and kinship network, access to marriage markets – which in Cheshire meant the two leading county towns of Chester and Nantwich and, beyond the shire, the great, 47

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burgeoning marriage mart of London – and the educational opportunities that lifted young men out of their immediate environments and took them to Oxford or Cambridge, or the London Inns of Court. Unsurprisingly, the wealthier gentry tended to look farthest afield. Among the top twenty Cheshire families 36 per cent of marriages were contracted with families in London or well beyond Cheshire’s borders and only 47 per cent within Cheshire. One such family was the Booths of Dunham Massey, headed by the formidable patriarch and effective county boss for much of the early Stuart period, Sir George Booth. As one of the wealthiest of the Cheshire gentry, with an income of £6,000–£7,000 a year, he could afford to aim high, and his son and heir William was married in 1619 to Lord Chancellor Ellesmere’s grand-daughter. Following William’s unexpected death in 1636, Sir George geared himself up to arrange the marriage of his grandson and next heir, the thirteen-year-old George. The young man had little say in the matter. Instead, Booth consulted young George’s grandmother, Lady Egerton, his Nottinghamshire friend, the earl of Kingston, and the family attorney, John Bradshawe. An initial approach to Bishop Wright of Coventry and Lichfield appears to have foundered on Lady Egerton’s snobbery towards the clergy and eventually, through the good offices of Bradshawe and the Lincolnshire gentleman Sir John Monson, an alliance was negotiated with the daughter of the earl of Lincoln, Katherine Fiennes. But, although this was settled in principle by December 1638, there remained months of hard bargaining over the jointure and the marriage settlement before the couple were finally married at the end of 1639. Such decisions mattered enormously because they could shape the whole future trajectory of a family in terms of its finances, connections, titles and reputation. In this case, however, the unfortunate Katherine died soon after giving birth to her first child in 1643. It was George Booth’s second marriage the following year, to Katherine Grey, daughter of the earl of Stamford, which defined the family’s eventual fortunes.68 Another family head with considerable ambitions was Sir Thomas Aston. His family ranked outside the top twenty, but he was determined to recoup his family’s fortunes and climb the ladder of status and reputation within the shire. In search of a bride he traded on the courtly contacts forged by his kinsman, Sir Roger Aston, gentleman of the bedchamber and master huntsman to James I, and his father, John, sewer to Queen Anne. In 1627 he married Magdalene Poultney, a wealthy Leicestershire heiress among whose ancestors were included a former Lord Mayor of London, an alliance which not only repaired his impoverished estate but, to judge by the remarkable mourning portrait that he commissioned after her death (see Figure 13), led to a strong and affectionate bond between the couple.69 Lower down the social scale marriages were more likely to take place within the shire or immediately across the county border. Among the 122 marriages contracted by families ranked between fifty and one hundred 48

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on the Adlington display, 89 (73 per cent) took place within the shire and 26 (21 per cent) with brides from adjacent shires. These were often within an area close to the family’s estates. Thus, successive heads of the Lawton family of Church Lawton, whose estates were in the far south-east of the county, contracted three marriages with brides from just across the county border in Staffordshire; and the Downes family of Pott Shrigley, just north of Macclesfield, allied with three Cheshire brides all from Macclesfield hundred. The kinship ties forged by these marriages played a critical role in determining the social horizons of the Cheshire gentry, in many cases anchoring them firmly within their immediate neighbourhood. There has been considerable debate among social historians over the importance of kinship in early modern England. Some have argued that among the middling sorts and householders ‘recognised’ kin, beyond the ‘intimate’ kin of the immediate nuclear family, played only a limited role in day-to-day life and that links with neighbours tended to be of much great significance, for example when it came to borrowing money, or leaving bequests in wills. Others have suggested that if allowance is made for the need for more support from kin at particular stages in the life cycle, and the extent of geographical mobility is also factored in, then kin relationships could often be relatively dense and of considerable practical importance. Kinship was always a very elastic concept – as the notorious imprecision in the contemporary usage of terms such as ‘cousin’ and ‘kinsman’ indicates. But the more qualitative evidence provided by correspondence suggests that it could often be used to foster a sense of obligation which was drawn on when relatives needed shelter, protection, and help in their economic advancement or marriage negotiations. Moreover, most historians are agreed that among the gentry classes kinship ties were of very considerable significance. Not only did the gentry tend to be much better informed than those lower down the social scale about who their kin actually were – through the genealogical knowledge and preoccupation with ancestry which, as we have seen, was becoming more and more widespread in this period – but they also had greater access to activities which promoted kin interaction, such as travel, letter writing, the provision of hospitality and shared leisure activities. Close relations with kin were not always seen as an unqualified benefit. It was widely recognised that kinship could often lead to the bitterest disputes, particularly over the inheritance of property, and that resorting to kin to borrow money or seek support in suits for favour could create an uncomfortable sense of obligation. But, by and large, the studies that have been made of gentry families have emphasised the high levels of kin interaction and the intimacy of the relationships that developed, both with blood relatives and kin by marriage. These links were mainly focused in three areas: firstly, the ties of spiritual kinship created by godparenting; secondly, the legal and personal support involved in the willingness to act as executors and trustees in wills and settlements, and more occasional favours and service such as taking in sick relatives or using one’s influence to advance 49

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marriage negotiations; and thirdly, reciprocal hospitality, which for the gentry consisted of endless rounds of visiting, dining and hunting, often connected with family events such as marriages, baptisms and funerals.70 Each of these types of kin interaction is revealing of the texture of Cheshire gentry life. The evidence relating to spiritual kinship supports Anthony Fletcher’s conclusion, based on the Sussex gentry, that ‘god parenthood was used to reinforce kinship bonds, to strengthen links between families and as a means of enlisting patrons in local society’.71 The most informative source on godparenting is the remarkable diary of family events kept by the Wilbrahams of Nantwich from the 1580s through to the 1960s. Begun by Richard Wilbraham, it records the births, deaths and marriages of all those who mattered to the family as far as Richard and his grandson, Thomas, were concerned, and the godparents of Thomas’s eight children. In conjunction with family wills and settlements, and the diary of Richard’s second son, Sir Roger Wilbraham, the Jacobean Master of Requests, one can use this to build a picture of the ‘recognised’ and ‘intimate’ kin acknowledged by the immediate family and the quality of their connections.72 What this reveals is a remarkably tight-knit kinship network, extending beyond the immediate nuclear family to encompass the whole of the ‘house’ of Wilbraham. The births, marriages and deaths recorded most assiduously by Richard were, not surprisingly, those of children and brothers and sisters; but just as prominent in the diary were those of the Wilbrahams of Woodhey, the senior branch of the family, from whom the Nantwich family had diverged in the mid-fifteenth century. The diary then broadened out to include those families bound by marriage to himself and his children: his first wife’s family, the Maistersons of Nantwich; the Cluttons of Nantwich, into whose family his sister Margaret had married; and the Hassalls of Nantwich and the Walthalls of Wistaston, just outside Nantwich, who had married into his wife’s family. The combination of kinship and geographical proximity ensured that these were the families on whom Richard relied for support in legal matters. He nominated Sir Richard Wilbraham, who, when he made his will in 1611, had just taken over from ‘his beloved friend’ Thomas Wilbraham as head of the Woodhey branch of the family, as overseer to his will and one of the ‘feoffees for my lands’. His other principal trustees were Richard Maisterson, Richard Walthall and William Hassall. His grandson and heir, Thomas, expanded the range of family events that he documented to include the Minshull family of Nantwich, into which his elder sister Elizabeth had married, and his aunt’s family by marriage, the Mainwarings of Nantwich. He also began recording local worthies with whom he had a more distant relationship: the family of Sir Ranulph Crewe at nearby Crewe Hall, whose great grandmother was a Wilbraham; and the Churches of Nantwich, one of whom had married his aunt Elizabeth. The same range of connections was reflected in his choice of godparents for his children. Nine of these (over a third) were drawn from the immediate Wilbraham clan, led by their senior member, Sir Richard 50

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Wilbraham, who stood as godfather to his eldest son, Richard. A further six (a quarter) were close relatives by marriage, with his mother-in-law, Mary Clive, standing as godmother to his eldest son and his brother-in-law, Richard Minshull, whom he described as ‘my truest and kindest friend’, godfather to his second son. Another six of the godparents were more distant kin, often important members of the local gentry whom he felt able to address as cousin and who were in a strong position to advance the interests of their godchildren, including John Crewe, Philip Mainwaring, Peter Venables and Sir Thomas Delves. The remainder were personal friends, such as Sir Peter Wentworth, who accompanied Thomas on a tour of France in 1618. The evidence that this analysis provides of the closeness of the family’s relations with its ‘intimate kin’ is reinforced by the more qualitative testimony of family wills and Sir Roger’s diary. Richard requested in his will that Sir Roger purchase the wardship of his orphaned grandson and now heir, Thomas, and that his fourth son, Ralph, act as ‘a faithful friend to these poor orphanes’, Thomas and his brothers and sisters. The two brothers carried out their father’s bidding. Sir Roger duly purchased the wardship, then arranged for Thomas to attend his own Inn of Court, Lincoln’s Inn, and Brasenose College Oxford, before touring the continent; and Ralph and his son Roger provided moral and material support that Thomas gratefully acknowledged in the family diary. Sir Roger, perhaps because he had no male heir of his own to whom he could pass on his considerable legal fortune, was particularly committed to the advancement of the Wilbraham dynasty as a whole. He described in his diary how his father and Thomas Wilbraham of Woodhey, the two long-lived family patriarchs in the early part of James’s reign, worked together to map out the future for their grandchildren. It was his father’s ‘chief care’ in his latter years to see ‘his grandchild and heir’, Thomas, ‘married and settled to succeed him’. The two grandfathers also got together to urge him that ‘I having no sons might with my daughter give to the chief of my name a part of my acquired inheritance’. This was duly accomplished in 1612, when his second daughter and joint heiress, Elizabeth, aged ten, married Sir Richard Wilbraham’s eldest son, Thomas, aged eleven. Marriage at such a young age was becoming unusual by the seventeenth century; but, in this case, it was a measure of the reverence and loyalty that the Nantwich branch of the Wilbrahams felt towards the senior branch of the house.73 The closeness and sense of kin solidarity of the Wilbrahams was particularly pronounced, doubtless assisted by the fact that most of the principal members of the family lived within a five-mile radius of Nantwich, seated at their houses at Woodhey, Dorfold and Townend in Nantwich, and worshipping at the parish churches of Acton and Nantwich. But amid the long-settled and intermarried society of the Cheshire gentry such dynastic loyalty was far from untypical.74 The importance of legal engagements, and more miscellaneous favours and services, provided by the gentry’s kin connections can be illustrated from 51

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the network of connections by marriage forged by Sir Richard Grosvenor. Sir Richard made three marriages of his own, and together with the marriages of his sisters and children these created a kinship network stretching across much of southern and western Cheshire and into north Wales. He was very conscious of the obligations and expectations that family relationships created, and elaborated on these in two sets of advice to his son, Richard, the first on the occasion of Richard’s marriage to Sydney Mostyn, daughter of Sir Roger Mostyn of Flintshire in 1628, and the second when he felt his own death approaching in 1636. His primary concern was to ensure that his son continued to take responsibility for looking after the welfare of his sisters: ‘A house divided cannot stand … Be you a father to them as well as a brother and in my room protect them from injuries. Let them peaceably enjoy what I have bequeathed & left to them …’75 He also elaborated on Richard’s relationship with his new father and mother-in-law, with whom he took up residence after the marriage. Their great respect showed to you and yours, & the good opinion & hopes they conceive of you doth justly challenge a large portion of duty of you to them both … Go abroad with your father & when he rides from home offer yourself to attend him … Advise with him in whatever you undertake & trust his judgement before your own … His years render him able & his affections willing to be your best guide … Remember he is now in my place.76

This latter advice was probably shaped by Sir Richard’s own close relationship with his mother-in-law by his first marriage, the redoubtable Cheshire matriarch Lady Mary Cholmondeley. He married Lettice Cholmondeley in 1600 at the age of fifteen and promptly went off to Oxford in the company of Lady Mary’s two eldest sons, Robert and Hatton. Sir Richard and Lettice produced four children and, even after the latter’s death in 1612, Grosvenor remained close to Lady Cholmondeley. He acted as her adviser in legal matters and executor to her will; he followed her advice in the choice of tutors for his son; and it was at her house at Vale Royal that he was knighted by James I in August 1617. For her part, Lady Mary doted on her Grosvenor grandchildren, particularly ‘my son Dick’. Writing over Christmas 1624, she urged Sir Richard to send him to spend New Year with her, ‘to make merry with his uncles and friends that are now with me … For I look for him and am not well without him, and if you had not been nearer akin to him than I you should not have had him with you all this while.’77 Sir Richard’s second marriage, to Elizabeth Wilbraham in 1614, brought an even closer alliance. His brother-in-law, Sir Richard Wilbraham, became his family’s most trusted friend and confidant, acting as overseer to his father’s will in 1617, standing surety for Grosvenor’s debts, entertaining him at Christmas, working closely with him in local government and keeping up 52

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a weekly correspondence with him when he was incarcerated in the Fleet prison in the 1630s. However, the relationship that had most impact on Grosvenor’s life was the marriage of his sister Christian to Peter Daniell in 1601. Daniell acted as the family’s legal adviser and accompanied Sir Richard to parliament as fellow knight of the shire in 1626. However, in 1629 he defaulted on his debts and Grosvenor, as his main surety, was incarcerated in the Fleet prison and not released until Daniell had paid what he owed out of his son’s marriage settlement in 1638.78 Kinship connections did not always bring benefits to the gentry; but they did, invariably, matter. The impact of kinship on the gentry’s social horizons can best be assessed by exploring the impact of this on everyday interactions around their family, leisure, business and official activities. To investigate this we have the remarkable diary of Thomas Mainwaring of Baddiley and Over Peover, compiled between 1649 and 1659. It covers a period slightly later than the focus of this book, but the evidence it offers appears to be very much in keeping with the pre-civil war period. Mainwaring rarely set foot outside the shire. Over the first three years of the diary he did not record a single visit to London, and otherwise made only occasional trips beyond the county borders, to Wrexham and the Shropshire towns of Shrewsbury and Whitchurch. His round of visiting, and the performance of his magisterial duties, took place largely within the orbit of his two residences, at Baddeley, his main residence to the east of Nantwich, and at Over Peover immediately south of Knutsford. Otherwise he visited Chester three or four times a year, principally for the meetings of the assizes.79 The only comparable source for the pre-civil war period is the personal account book of Henry Bradshawe of Marple and Wibersley, near Stockport, which covers the period 1637–44.80 This provides an almost daily record of his personal spending, which makes it possible to track his movements in detail. Henry was the eldest son of the Henry Bradshawe of Marple (d.1654) and elder brother to John Bradshawe, the lawyer, whose main claim to fame was his presidency of the court that condemned Charles I. The family can best be described as middle-ranking gentry. Henry’s grandfather, a yeoman farmer, had purchased the estates at Marple and Wibersley in 1606, and his father built the imposing Jacobean mansion at Marple; but it was not until Henry junior, after serving as a colonel in the parliamentarian armies, became a justice and one of the most active members of the post-civil war bench that the family joined the ranks of the county’s magisterial elite. The family was too recently risen to feature in the Adlington display of the county’s leading 186 families; but by the late 1630s they were moving comfortably within upper and middling gentry circles. Henry mentions attending a ‘common table’ or ‘gentleman’s dinner’ in Stockport at the start of each month, and similar occasions at Disley and Prestbury. He was a close friend of Francis Legh, who took over the running of the estates at Lyme Park after Sir Peter’s death in 1636. He was also a regular visitor and friend of the Warrens of 53

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Poynton, the Jodrells of Yeardsley and the Wrights of Offerton, all within the geographical orbit of his estates. Henry’s day-to-day movements suggest a similarly narrow social ambit to Mainwaring’s. While his father was alive he lived at Wibersley, the family’s second house, immediately to the south of Marple, and spent most of his time moving between Stockport, Marple and Disley. He worshipped at the main parish church at Stockport, where he contributed 10s a year towards supporting ‘a preacher’ and socialised regularly with the minister, Edmund Shalcrosse; he also frequently attended services at the chapelries at Marple and Disley. He went to Stockport to buy produce and consumer items (including clothes and gloves), to have his hair cut and his watch repaired and to socialise with friends. His young son was being schooled at Marple and he regularly attended fairs and dinners at Disley. He also regularly travelled further afield into Derbyshire, where his first wife’s family had come from, making the journey over the county border to Chapel-en-le-Frith, then on to Bakewell and Buxton or else further east to Tideswell, Eyam and on to Chesterfield, or on one occasion to Sheffield. He also travelled west to Bowdon, where his recently married second wife Anne’s family was based, and then often on to Manchester, where his most regular purchase was books from the (later Presbyterian) bookseller Thomas Smith. Otherwise his most frequent journey was south, to Macclesfield and on to Congleton, where his brother John was the recorder. Every six months or so he would journey to Chester for four days at a time to settle his legal and business affairs with the assistance of the leading county attorney John Werden and to purchase consumer items; but during the period covered by the accounts he never went further afield, and certainly not to London. This pattern of a range of geographically circumscribed connections and activities taking place in the vicinity of one’s estate, with day-to-day contacts with those in one’s neighbourhood, together with contacts with elite families drawn from a wider radius with whom one had kinship, business and legal connections, appears to have been the norm in early Stuart Cheshire. Sir Richard Grosvenor offers another good example of this. As we have seen, he spent a good deal of time in the company of those to whom he was related by marriage: the Cholmondeleys, the Daniells and the Wilbrahams. But the majority of his day-to-day interactions, to judge by his correspondence and legal papers, were with lesser gentry and yeomen in the vicinity of his estates, which stretched south and west from Chester to the borders of Wales within Broxton hundred. Prominent among these were Thomas Bavand of Chester, his legal adviser, William Colley of Eccleston, his man-of-business, two relatives by marriage, Roger Hurleston of Picton and John Massey of Coddington, and neighbours such as William Glegg of Lower Kinnerton and Richard Wright of Pulford. They helped to manage his estates, acted a sureties for his debts and serviced the family trusts. In return, Grosvenor displayed the ‘downward deference’ that has been seen 54

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as characteristic of the upper gentry in this period, discussing day-to-day business with them, socialising, visiting and offering them his hospitality and patronage.81 The one member of the county elite who appears to have enjoyed a county-wide set of connections and ties was the ever-accommodating Sir Richard Wilbraham of Woodhey. Of all the leading gentry, Sir Richard was the one employed most widely and most regularly to act as an executor, overseer or feoffee in the affairs of the leading county families. His range of connections was partly a result of his own longevity as head of his family for more than thirty years, and partly due also to the unusual dispersal of his family estates. When he succeeded his father, Thomas, in 1610 he inherited nearly a hundred properties. In addition to the family patrimony at Woodhey to the west of Nantwich, he held blocks of manors around Tilston Fearnall, near Bunbury, Mottram in Longdendale in the upland north-east of the county and in the Wirral, at Landecan, Great Saughall and Shotwick, where the family were hereditary keepers of the royal park.82 As senior member of the long-established Wilbraham clan he also had a formidable range of kinship ties among the leading county families. Sir Richard himself was married to Grace, sister of Thomas Viscount Savage; his mother was Frances Cholmondeley, aunt to Robert, Viscount Cholmondeley; and his sisters married Sir Richard Grosvenor, Sir Thomas Delves and Sir John Done, who became, perhaps, his three closest friends. At his father’s funeral procession at Acton church in July 1610 the chief mourners were Delves and Done, along with William Davenport of Bramhall and John Hurleton of Pickton, who had married his half-sisters. Other mourners included an array of family friends from across the shire: Sir George Booth, Sir Richard Egerton of Ridley, Sir Peter and Sir Urian Leigh, Peter Daniell, William Leversage, George Cotton, William Brereton of Ashley and Thomas Marbury, all of whom were members of the county’s magisterial elites. In addition, as we have seen, Sir Richard enjoyed very close contacts with his cousins, the extremely well-connected offspring of Richard Wilbraham of Nantwich and his grandson Thomas, and also Ralph and Roger Wilbraham of Dorfold. Sir Richard took the responsibilities implied in all these connections extremely seriously, not only acting as executor, overseer and trustee on a regular basis but also frequently offering himself as a godparent. He was also one of the most industrious and conscientious of the county’s magistrates, acting as a deputy lieutenant throughout the 1620s and 1630s and an energetic JP. He invariably attended the July sessions at Nantwich, where he was often the senior justice, and more often than not he made the trip to Chester for the January sessions and the assizes. And he was linked to the county’s ministerial elite through the puritan connections of his father and Grosvenor.83 In his book on Cheshire John Morrill has highlighted the contrast between the ‘county gentry’ (the top sixty-five or so families), who were involved with a county-wide network of social relationships, and the ‘parochial gentry’, whose 55

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interactions were almost entirely with their neighbours.84 This is a suggestive distinction, but the evidence presented here suggests a more complex picture. It was certainly the case that the leading county did look further afield (often beyond the county’s borders) for brides who could add wealth and distinction to their lineage; but wider kinship networks did not necessarily lead to everyday contacts throughout the shire. Sir Richard Wilbraham fits the model because of the unusually wide dispersal of his estates, but he was something of an exception. More common was the pattern of recreational and business meetings of Thomas Mainwaring, who, although he belonged to a family ranked twenty-fourth in the Adlington display, still confined most of his day-to-day activity to the immediate vicinity of his two houses. The same pattern is suggested by the ‘downward deference’ and interactions with lesser gentry and yeomen in their neighbourhood that was characteristic of magisterial gentry such as Grosvenor and George Cotton.85 Gentry at this level were more likely to travel across the shire and to spend time in Chester (very evident in the cases of Viscount Savage, Sir Thomas Smith, Sir Ranulph Mainwaring, Sir William Brereton of Handforth and Grosvenor himself), where they often had town houses. They were also more likely to travel beyond the shire to London, for both business and recreation. But, in geographical terms, their regular daily interactions were likely to be defined by the neighbourhood where their patrimonial estate was located and where their family had, as often as not, laid down its roots; in other words the area where they exercised social, cultural and political ‘lordship’. This was the locale – alongside the county and the wider commonwealth – that they described as their ‘country’, with all its connotations of affinity, loyalty and duty.86

AN HONOUR COMMUNITY There was, however, an altogether more competitive aspect to dynasticism that was recognised by our anonymous observer at Adlington: this was the sense of an order of precedence, a pecking order, among the county’s gentry families. Sir Ranulph Crewe was as conscious of this as he was of the need to re-establish the material and personal base of his family when he asserted that, up until his family’s fall from grace, it had been regarded as ‘in the best rank of the families of my country’.87 It was this ranking that he was trying to restore. Many of his fellow gentry shared this desire in a society in which honour and reputation were constantly being measured in terms of relative status. Early Stuart England was beset by a heightened status-anxiety, the origins of which can be traced back to the economic turbulence created by the population increase and price rise of the late sixteenth century. The landed elite was experiencing unprecedented social mobility as many well-to-do families suffered economic decline, while those able to profit from the new opportuni56

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ties were able to rise into the ranks of the gentry. However, concern over this became particularly acute because of the chaos created by James I’s inflation of honours. His mass dubbing of knights in 1603, followed by the creation of the new order of baronets in 1611, caused a sudden free-for-all as longestablished local hierarchies were disrupted and there was a rush to dispute and litigation. Contests over precedence arose at every level, from peers jockeying for position on ceremonial occasions to parishioners challenging each other for the best church pews. The observation by Garter King of Arms, Sir William Segar, that ‘the loss of worldly wealth is less grievous to men of generous minds then the privation of place’, was borne out in the numerous quarrels of the period which arose out of seemingly trivial snubs and oversights but could sometimes lead to fatal duels. Ranking and precedence highlighted issues of respect, deference and personal dignity which were invariably close to the hearts of members of the elite.88 We do not know what criteria the Adlington observer was using to make his judgement about the proper ordering of the local gentry, but his reference to ‘ancient houses’ suggests that it was based on the heraldic principle of ‘antientcy’: the notion that peers, knights and noblemen should be ranked according to the antiquity of their titles or their descents.89 But ‘antientcy’ was far from being the only principle that determined precedence. Office, wealth, title and reputation were, as we shall see, all parts of the equation and, in the Adlington ranking, were presumably of greater significance since only four of the eight leading Cheshire families who could plausibly claim a descent back to the Norman Conquest were ranked within the top twenty.90 Those who headed the list appear to have done so largely by dint of wealth, office holding, family and personal achievement, and also their tenure of the original eight baronies created by the first earl of Chester. These relatively tangible marks of estimation, however, worked in combination with more abstract – and, for many contemporary commentators, worthier – means of pursuing status. Much of the competition between them took the form of matching themselves to the ideals of the gentry’s honour code, then seeking to advertise this through legitimating languages and symbols. At the core of this code lay an understanding of what constituted ‘true nobility’. When antiquarian scholars and writers of conduct books analysed this they generally came to the conclusion that it took the form of ‘mixed nobleness’, a complex amalgam of virtuous conduct and distinguished pedigree. Virtue was always deemed to be the more important component, but it was widely accepted that those of gentle blood had a greater inclination to act virtuously than commoners, partly because it was in their genes and partly because of the high standards set for them by their ancestors. Virtue could take many forms – wisdom, learning, godliness, service of the country, service in arms, service in office – but all were acknowledged to be worthy of esteem and therefore contributed to an individual’s standing in relation to other nobles and gentry. Virtue was also 57

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seen as something cumulative, increasing from one generation to the next as the achievements of family members, and the quality of their marriage alliances, added lustre to the dynasty. It was, in part, because of this that contemporaries set such store by ‘antientcy’: the older a family, the more deserving it was of honour.91 The preoccupation with relative status had the effect of forming the gentry of the shire into an ‘honour community’. This community had a collective identity that, as we shall see, distinguished Cheshire from other shires and endowed it with a shared personality. But it also functioned as a public stage or arena on which estimation and ranking were continually being sifted and assessed to produce the order of precedence represented in the Adlington display. One of the forms that competition took was emphasising a family’s achievements. As we have seen, there was something of a cult of virtuous service in the Hundred Years’ War that Cheshire gentry were eager to be associated with. There were also more mythical feats which were conveniently rediscovered, then advertised. Perhaps the most conspicuous example was the publicising of the legend of the medieval Thomas Venables of Golborne, who, in imitation of St George, had slain a dragon that was tyrannising the people of Moston. This fable had already been passed down through several generations of the family when, in 1560, Thomas Venables of Kinderton secured from Norroy King of Arms an official augmentation to his coat of arms in the form of a crest showing the dragon with a half-devoured child. Thenceforth this gruesome motif appeared on their official heraldry – ­including the screen of their family chapel in Middlewich church set up in 1632 – as a conspicuous reminder of the family’s claims to honour (Figure 9).92 The catalogue of family achievement was continually being added to, most notably by attaining the status of a county ‘worthy’. The notion of local worthies – outstanding figures within their shires whose lives were worthy of celebration as role models and exemplars of noble qualities and achievements – was popularised by Thomas Fuller in his Worthies of England, published in 1662.93 But Fuller was drawing on an already well-established tradition among county historians and chorographers, like William Webb. Sir Ranulph Crewe was identified by Webb as a recent worthy, as was his fellow lawyer Lord Chancellor Ellesmere; and the achievements of both promised to raise their families considerably within the county’s order of precedence. Webb also singled out the county’s leaders at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, Sir John Savage VIII (d.1597) and Sir Hugh Chomondeley (d.1601). Both were family patriarchs and dynasty builders whose exploits of chivalry in their youth were matched by service in local office in their later years, in which they had displayed the model virtues of the gentleman governor (‘wisdom, temperance, continuing liberality, hospitality’) and earned the ultimate accolade of ‘our country’s father’.94 Savage’s achievements cemented his family’s place at the head of the gentry hierarchy, while Cholmondeley’s may well 58

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9  A late sixteenth-century armorial showing the Venables coat of arms, with the recently acquired crest commemorating Thomas Venables’ slaying of the legendary dragon of Moston

have helped his family to supersede the Booths in the Adlington ranking. The acquisition of titles also played an important role in this ordering of families. There was a rush within Cheshire to purchase baronetcies when they came on to the market in May 1611. At a cost of £1,095 these represented a considerable outlay for a landed family, but they were evidently considered a good investment because, unlike a knighthood, the title was hereditary and it automatically conferred precedence in public commissions.95 First out of the blocks was Sir George Booth, whose family had recently slipped 59

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below the Cholmondeleys. His name was ninth among the first batch of baronetcies to be purchased, on 22 May 1611, closely followed by Sir John Savage IX, who was first among next batch of sales, on 29 June, no doubt mindful of the need to maintain his family’s position as the county’s premier dynasty. Also among the purchasers on 29 June was Robert Chomondeley, presumably anxious not to be left behind.96 Over the following years purchasing a baronetcy became a marker for those heads of family who were particularly ambitious to further their own and their families’ fortunes. Sir Richard Grosvenor, the first in several generations of his family to acquire a knighthood, purchased his baronetcy in February 1622, after securing the county’s supreme political accolade of being elected knight of the shire. The benefit of this was immediately apparent in his promotion from eighteenth to sixth place on the county’s commission of the peace, which, among other things, determined the order of seating at the public assemblies of quarter sessions and assizes.97 Another highly ambitious gentleman, Thomas Aston, purchased a baronetcy in 1628, before he had even acquired a knighthood but soon after his family’s economic fortunes had been repaired by his marriage to Magdalene Poultney. William Brereton of Handforth, whose ambitions matched those of Aston, had purchased his baronetcy two years earlier.98 All recognised that acquiring titles, and the precedence which went with them, was critical to furthering both their personal and their dynastic aspirations. Another area of considerable competition involved establishing a connection between one’s own family and the ancient baronies and earldoms of Chester. When Hugh Lupus, first earl of Chester was endowed with vice-regal authority by William the Conqueror he had created eight of them; and, although the titles had formally lapsed because they were not direct royal grants, they continued to enjoy enormous local prestige. Pictures of them were on display at Chester castle and in gentry houses, and, as we have seen, families went out of their way to establish connections with them where they could.99 Indeed, those who could trace their connections back to particular baronies – like the Venables of Kinderton and the Warrens of Poynton, barons of Stockport – still enjoyed their unofficial titles. In some cases these titles still held practical significance in that they enabled those who occupied the original estates to hold baronial courts, distinct from and superior to the more common manorial courts. Sir William Brereton even tried, unsuccessfully, to have the right of the baronial court of Malpas to extend its jurisdiction across Broxton hundred confirmed by act of parliament when he sat as knight of the shire in 1621.100 But of greater immediate significance to the families associated with these baronies was the social eminence that such a connection conferred on them. The senior barony was widely acknowledged to be that of Halton and Halton Castle, which had originally been associated with the constable of Chester who led the earl’s forces against the Welsh. Any association with a particular Cheshire family had largely died out in the middle ages as Halton was absorbed into the Duchy of Lancaster. But during Elizabeth’s reign Sir 60

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John Savage VIII had exercised the office of keeper of the castle and his son and grandson leased the lordship of Halton and its deer park.101 Although the Savages did not make a specific claim to the title of Barons of Halton, their association with its territorial inheritance certainly bolstered their claim to pre-eminence within the shire. The Cholmondeleys gained similar benefits from cultivating such an association. Sir Hugh Cholmondeley (d.1597) went out of his way to acquire the original landholdings connected with the barony of Nantwich and, according to his inquisition post mortem, had purchased eighteen of the twenty parts. Webb recognised that, with the original estate ‘almost all knit together again’, his grandson Sir Robert Cholmondeley was entitled to stake a claim to ‘the noble barony’; and, indeed, when Robert was granted an English peerage in 1645 – in recognition of services to the king in the civil war – the title he claimed was baron of Nantwich.102 However, the most tenacious of all the local gentry in pursuit of a traditional baronial title was the assertive antiquarian, Sir William Brereton of Brereton. The Breretons had staked a claim to the barony of Malpas in Richard II’s reign, when they had acquired by marriage two-quarters of the original landholding. However, up until Elizabeth’s reign this claim was largely obscured by the rival efforts of the Egertons and the Sutton/Dudleys.103 Sir William set about recovering his family’s stake by systematically reacquiring the remainder of the ancient baronial landholdings, in which, by the 1620s, he had largely succeeded. This claim was trumpeted when he accorded himself the title ‘Baron of Malpas’ on the monument he set up when he moved the family mausoleum to Brereton church in 1618. But, not content with this, he also made strenuous efforts to establish Malpas as the senior of the Chester baronies. In the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, on the orders of William Glaseor, who was acting as deputy to the earl of Leicester, chamberlain of Chester, Thomas Chaloner, deputy herald and arms painter, had installed a series of ancestor portraits of the eight barons over the seats that they had traditionally occupied in the palatinate’s ancient parliament chamber (see below Figure 11). Chaloner positioned Malpas fourth in the pecking order; but, under Leicester’s successor, the fourth earl of Derby, Brereton was able to get this changed, having produced evidences, validated by two of the heralds, which attested that Malpas should be in first place. This arrangement continued until 1624, when the fifth earl of Derby, again after consulting the heralds, ordered Randle Holme I to restore Glaseor’s original ordering. Brereton was livid, and promptly petitioned the Earl Marshal’s court in Westminster to try to get his ranking re-established. The outcome of the plea is uncertain; but it demonstrated the continuing prestige of these titles and the immediate social implications of what might otherwise appear to have been an arcane antiquarian spat.104 There was also considerable competition over the colonising of church interiors. Cheshire was a county of unusually large parishes in which several gentry families often vied to appropriate the highest-status spaces towards the east end of the church for their pews, monuments and family chapels. 61

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One device that helped to sort out competing claims was the local practice of painting the coats of arms of the leading parish families in ranking order on the chancel arch immediately adjacent to the royal arms. So, for example, at Prestbury church (which had thirteen chapelries and townships) an anonymous church-noter recorded the arms of Sir Urian Leigh of Adlington, Sir Edward Warren of Poynton, Sir Peter Leigh of Lyme, Sir George Calverley of Lea, William Davenport of Henbury and Jasper Worth of Tytherington next to the royal arms.105 All were substantial landowners within the parish. In the similarly crowded parish church at Bunbury, Sir Hugh Beeston took advantage of the relative decline of two once-mighty local families, the Calverleys of Lea and the Egertons of Ridley, during James’s reign, to erect an imposing monument to his father, Sir George. Standing in prime position at the east end and richly decorated with martial motifs, this commemorated his service to Henry VIII, Edward VI and, finally, Elizabeth, who knighted him after he had commanded a squadron of ships in the Armada campaign. This was all the more powerful as an assertion of dynastic prominence because it complemented the imposing alabaster monument, which dominated the nave, to Sir High Calverley (d.1394), a hero of the Hundred Years’ War, who founded the collegiate church at Bunbury to commemorate his achievements. Beeston’s efforts do not appear to have passed unchallenged. In 1621 he was locked in a dispute with another Bunbury gentleman, George Spurstow esq., over the title to a chapel in the chancel which had to be adjudicated by Sir Richard Wilbraham, Sir John Done and other local gentry. Perhaps in order to seal his privileged position Beeston left the remarkably generous bequest of £300 to the poor of Bunbury, together with 5s per annum for the parish clerk, ‘for his pains in keeping fair the monument … of my late deceased father’.106 The most fully documented of the disputes over church space in this period took place at Nether Peover, between Margaret Shakerley and the ever-litigious Lady Mary Cholmondeley. Geoffrey Shakerley of Hulme had built a family chapel in the south aisle in 1610 to provide seating for his household and a ‘burial place for him and his heirs’ (Figure 10). This passed unchallenged until the early 1620s, when Lady Cholmondeley decided to move back into the parish and take up residence at Holford Hall, the house she had inherited from her parents. Having decided to refurbish the Holford chapel built in the north aisle in Henry VIII’s reign, she discovered that her family’s traditional right of access to the chapel via the door in the south aisle was now blocked by the Shakerleys’ Hulme chapel. This meant that she and her household were no longer able to process into church at the front of the nave, but were subjected to the potential indignity of entering by the west door, with tenants and neighbours. She therefore launched a suit in the local archdeaconry court and wrote a series of indignant letters to the bishop of Chester, harping on the insult to her family, which had ‘been of equal rank with the best of the parish at all times’ and whose heraldic stained glass could still be seen in the windows of the north aisle, ‘which is more than can be 62

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10  The Shakerley family chapel built in the south chancel aisle in St Oswald’s church, Lower Peover in 1610. It obstructed Lady Cholmondeley’s access to her Holford chapel in the north aisle of the chancel and provoked a bitter row in 1625.

showed for any of the house of Hulme throughout the whole church’. Lady Mary got her way and order was given for the access to be opened up through the Shakerley chapel.107 This dispute perfectly illustrates the mixture of personal dignity, family pride and respect for status that was so often at stake in these contests over church space and, indeed, all the varied assertions of family connections and achievement.

WILLIAM WEBB’S CHESHIRE This survey of the culture of dynasticism among the early Stuart gentry has drawn again and again on the commentary provided by William Webb’s ‘Description of the City and County Palatine of Chester’. This is unsurprising. In terms of its capacity to tap into the ideals and self-representation of the county community this is one of the richest sources that we have. Compiled in the early 1620s, it belonged to the genre of ‘chorographicall’ or ‘topographical’ histories popularised first in John Leland’s ‘Itinerary’ of Henry VIII’s reign, and then more extensively in William Camden’s Britannia, first published in 1586. This was a genre that combined a limited amount of antiquarian research and documentation with extensive first-hand observation as authors travelled around their county, talking to gentry with historical interests, drawing on oral traditions and adding their own impres63

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sions of landscapes and family reputations. Their priorities were different from the classic county histories produced by the likes of William Burton for Leicestershire or William Dugdale for Warwickshire. The extent to which they drew on deed collections and the evidences of the new ‘genealogical science’ was limited, and their emphasis was on mapping the social, historical and topographical character of their shires from a contemporary perspective.108 Webb acknowledged as much, making it clear that he had done virtually no documentary research and lacked the skills of the professional genealogist. Apart from recycling some material from Camden, who had visited the shire during the 1590s, most of his content came from first-hand observation and acquaintance with local gentry.109 He had been placed as a gentleman servant in the household that Thomas Wilbraham of Woodhey formed when he retired to Tilston Fearnall in the early 1600s. Webb was full of admiration for his former master and moved in the same godly circles around William Hinde, the local minister at Bunbury and a pivotal figure among Cheshire puritans in the Jacobean period. Webb was also on terms of first-hand friendship with other members of the Cheshire elite, such as Sir Richard Lee of Lee, under whom he served as deputy sheriff 1616–17. Never a substantial landowner himself, Webb eventually settled in Chester, where he became clerk to the mayor’s court until his death in 1623. But he certainly knew the local gentry well enough to understand their sense of themselves and what mattered to them.110 The Cheshire that Webb painstakingly delineated was essentially an aggregate of gentry families. It was formed out of generations of intermarriage and association, typified by the Grosvenors, whose ‘marriages and alliances’, Webb observed, ‘have been happy for many descents and have linked many families together of great dignity and repute’.111 Each of these dynasties, on Webb’s account, had its own history and reputation, its attachment to a particular place and its sense of self. His descriptions are often repetitive and formulaic. The phrases ‘gentlemen of great antiquity’, ‘of a long continued descent’, a ‘worthy governor of his county’, ‘of worthy parts’ and so on appear again and again.112 But there is also sufficient variety and specificity to indicate that Webb was making careful choices in the ways he recorded reputations for posterity. His ‘Description’ also evoked a powerful sense of continuity, of a society of gentry families stretching backwards and forwards through the centuries in a seamless progression. Like the Adlington display and the county armorial included in King’s Vale Royal, he included families that had died out in the male line, thus emphasising their continuing place in the annals of their native shire.113 He also displayed a reluctance, characteristic of the genre in which he was writing, to admit evidence of breakdown and disruption. Instead the focus was on establishing and celebrating a sense of permanence and tradition as a way of managing and coming to terms with the change that contemporaries witnessed all around them. Webb, like his fellow chorogra64

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phers and antiquarians, was realistic enough to acknowledge that change was taking place within the ranks of the gentry, and that family lines were dying out and others rising to take their place. But the explanations that he offered for this were almost entirely structured around narratives of providence and the transience of humanity, rather than the economic and demographic facts of life. Thus, he carefully detailed the workings of God’s providence in the survival and continuity of a family line, most strikingly in the fortuitous birth of a male heir to Thomas Venables at the unlikely age of sixty, following a late second marriage. On Webb’s account the family ‘was at the point of failing, and even likely on all man’s account to be transplanted … when it pleased God in his providence to raise a successor of this same stem’.114 Where families did die out in the male line Webb conjured up images of the frailty of the human condition, describing them as ‘a great name now almost extinguished’ or ‘through want of issue to pass into another name’.115 And, in the rare instance that he acknowledged that a family faced decline because of its financial circumstances, he resorted to the imagery of the ups and downs of the wheel of fortune. Hence, he described the Tattons of Wythenshawe as ‘a race for a descent or two, through the variable consistency of all mortal happiness much eclipsed … by troubles and encumbrances whereunto the greatest estates are often subject’.116 The model that Webb constructed, then, was of established families passing property back and forth among themselves by orderly processes of marriage and inheritance; of timeless association with particular plots of land; of family traditions and dynasties striving to maintain and enhance their reputations; and of these dynasties providing the building blocks of the Cheshire community. He went on, as we shall see in the next chapter, to represent this county community as a united, organic ‘body politic’, with shared values and aspirations that helped to define the gentry’s sense of identity and self-worth, and also to shape and structure the dynastic competitiveness that was an inevitable consequence of a hierarchical, honour-based society.

NOTES 1 The National Archives (hereafter TNA) PROB 11/196/199. 2 W. R. Prest, ‘Crewe, Sir Randolph (1559–1646)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) (hereafter ODNB), xiv.173–4; G. Ormerod, The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, ed. T. Helsby, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 1882) (hereafter Ormerod), iii.310–11; Cheshire Archives and Local Studies (hereafter CALS) DCH/H/207. 3 C. R. Kyle, ‘Crewe, Ranulphe (1558–1646), Crewe, Sir Clippesby (1599–1649)’, in A. Thrush and J. P. Ferris (eds), History of Parliament. The House of Commons 1604–1629, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ii.730–6; Ormerod, iii.292–3. 4 N. Z. Davis, ‘Ghosts, kin and progeny: some features of family life in early 65

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5 6 7

8 9

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modern France’, Daedalus, 106:2 (1977), 87–98; L. Stone and J. C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 70–8; F. Heal and C. Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales 1500–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 20–30, 50–60. Stone and Stone, Open Elite, pp. 75–6, 108–10, 114–15, 118–21; R. Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450–1700 (London: Longman, 1984), pp. 229–38. L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 175–83; Heal and Holmes, Gentry, pp. 42–7. F. J. Fisher (ed.), ‘The State of England (1600), by Sir Thomas Wilson’, Camden Miscellany, Vol. XVI (Camden Society, 3rd series, 52, 1936), p. 24. See also, for example, the dictatorial control exercised by Sir Edmund and Sir Ralph Verney over their children and siblings: M. Slater, Family Life in the Seventeenth Century: The Verneys of Claydon House (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), ch. 2. L. Pollock, ‘Younger sons in Tudor and Stuart England’, History Today, 39:6 (1989), 23–9. Well into his seventies and eighties, he continued to buy and sell land to consolidate his family’s holdings in Cheshire, and he engaged in a series of ferocious lawsuits against fellow landowners and the corporation of Chester which required privy council arbitration: Acts of the Privy Council of England 1630–1 (hereafter APC), pp. 9, 16–18, 118–20, 184–5. His detailed instructions to his stewards continued to cover everything from estate management to the wainscoting and hangings at Crewe Hall: CALS DAR/D/98. For his relationship with Sir Clippesby and his significant decision to make his second son, John, and his nephew, John Crewe of Steane, Northamptonshire, the chief feoffees of the family trusts he set up in the 1620s, see ‘Crewe, Sir Clippesby (1599–1649)’, in Thrush and Ferris (eds), The House of Commons 1604–1629, ii.730–1; TNA PROB 11/196/99, 11/207/41. TNA PROB 11/196/99. P. W. Hasler (ed.), History of Parliament 1558–1603 (London: HMSO, 1981), 3 vols (1981), ii.453; Evelyn Baroness Newton, The House of Lyme from its Foundation to the End of the Eighteenth Century (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1917), pp. 95–6. Newton, House of Lyme, pp. 79, 99–112, 150–3, 164–76. G. Nares, ‘Adlington Hall, Cheshire – II’, Country Life, cxii, 2916 (5 December 1959), 1828–32; Chetham’s Library, Manchester (hereafter CLM) Mun.E.8.22, ‘The Adlington Manuscript’, fos 29–34, 39. In 1611, 186 coats of arms were recorded in the Great Hall , while the current display at the west end consists of 60. The current arrangement of shields may have been part of the original version set up in 1581. We are grateful to Tony Bostock (www.tonybostock.com) for advice on various points relating to the Adlington display. He has pointed out to us that the present display is a mixture of family arms, mostly of relevance to the Leigh family. CALS CR63/2/22, ‘Cheshire pedigrees written c.1633 by Mr Will Davenport’, unpaginated, ‘A note of the gentlemen of Cheshire according to their degrees A. D. 1611 (viz. as they are ranked at Adlington Hall) But they are not rightly placed as I think.’ The unidentified visitor may have been William Davenport himself, who resided nearby at Bramhall Hall and whose family had a strong interest in heraldry: P. Hegbin-Barnes (ed.), Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi. Great

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17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

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29 30 31 32

Britain Summary Catalogue 9. The Medieval Stained Glass of Cheshire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 35–42. There are several copies of the Adlington list, which suggests that the ranking order that it incorporated was one that was relatively familiar to the local gentry: see also, CLM MS A.6.8; CALS ZCR 63/2/34. R. P. Cust, ‘Heraldry and gentry communities in Shakespeare’s England’, in N. Ramsay (ed.), Heralds and Heraldry in Shakespeare’s England (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2014), pp. 190–203. Daniel King, The Vale Royal of England (London, 1656) (hereafter Vale Royal), ‘To the reader’; Thomas Aston, A Remonstrance against Presbytery (London, 1641), sig. B3. John Morrill gives a slightly lower figure of 85 per cent, which may be a product of the Adlington roll privileging long-established families over newcomers: Morrill, Cheshire, pp. 3–4. Figures produced on a comparable basis to Morrill’s range from around 75 per cent settled before 1500 for counties such as Kent and Sussex, to around 42 per cent and 32 per cent for Norfolk and Suffolk, to 21 per cent, 16 per cent and 10 per cent for Berkshire, Essex and Hertfordshire: C. G. Durston, ‘London and the provinces: the association between the capital and the Berkshire county gentry of the early seventeenth century’, Southern History, 3 (1981), 38– 53, at 42. Ormerod, ii.154, 158, 299–300, 386, 815; iii.289, 404–5. Ibid., i.443; ii.270, 589, 704–5; iii.502–3. Ibid., 11.220; iii.289–90; J. P. Earwaker, East Cheshire Past and Present, 2 vols (London, 1877) (hereafter Earwaker), i.171–9, 203–4. Ormerod, ii.271–2; iii.61–7. Heal and Holmes, Gentry, pp. 20–37. Stone and Stone, Open Elite, 70–2; Thomas Fuller, The Worthies of England, ed. J. Freeman (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1952), pp. ix–xiv. T. Thornton, ‘The Savage family, c.1369–1528’, ODNB, xlix.63–6; L. Bootham and Sir R. H. Parker (eds), Savage Fortune. An Aristocratic Family in the Early Seventeenth Century (Suffolk Records Society, xlix, 2006), pp. xvi–xxx, lxvi–lxxxii; Ormerod, i.408. William Webb, the Cheshire chorographer, particularly commended the recent refurbishment of the ‘gardens, walks etc’ at Rock Savage, which had played host to James I on his progress through the shire in 1617. Stone and Stone, Open Elite, pp. 75–6, table 3.7. ‘Lordship’ was still the term most regularly used by Webb to indicate the orbit of a family’s estates, where they enjoyed power and pre-eminence. Ormerod, i.409–10; iii.590. J. P. Cooper, ‘Ideas of gentility in early modern England’, in J. P. Cooper, Land, Men and Beliefs (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), pp. 43–77, at p. 58; Sir John Ferne, The Blazon of Gentrie (London, 1586), pp. 26, 74, 91, 152. R. P. Cust, Charles I and the Aristocracy, 1625–1642 (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 14–16. A. T. Thacker, ‘Cheshire’, in C. R. J. Currie and C. P. Lewis (eds), English County Histories: A Guide (Stroud: Sutton, 1994), pp. 71–84, at pp. 72–4. Grosvenor papers, p. xii. CALS DLT, B44; L. C. Lloyd and D. M. Stenton (eds), Sir Christopher Hatton’s 67

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The Cheshire gentry and their world ‘Book of Seals’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), pp. xlviii–xlix, 32, 36. 33 This conclusion is based on the Domesday references in Holme’s notes for the pedigree: British Library (hereafter BL) Harleian MS 1988, fo. 140; 2094, fo. 44. 34 N. Cooper, Houses of the Gentry 1480–1680 (London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 58–64, 320; C. Hartwell, M. Hyde, E. Hubbard and N. Pevsner, Buildings of England: Cheshire (London: Yale University Press, 2nd edn, 2011), p. 223. 35 Ormerod, iii.9, 183. ‘Ancestor portraits’ were in vogue in the late sixteenth century, which is probably when the Kinderton portraits were painted: M. Evans (ed.), Art Collecting and Lineage in the Elizabethan Age: The Lumley Inventory and Pedigree (London: The Roxburgh Club, 2010), pp. 39–41. 36 Hartwell et al., Buildings of Cheshire, pp. 181–3. 37 P. Morgan, War and Society in Medieval Cheshire, 1277–1403 (Chetham Society, 3rd series, 34, 1987), pp. 3–4. Another example of the embellishing of family feats of arms in the Hundred Years’ War was the augmentation to the Leigh of Lyme’s coat of arms in the 1570s. This showed a mailed arm grasping a standard supposedly in commemoration of Piers Leigh’s rescue of the Black Prince’s standard at Crecy. This was fictitious, as was the assertion in a wall plaque in Macclesfield church that recorded the supposed death of Piers’s son fighting at Agincourt: T. Woodcock and J. M. Robinson, The Oxford Guide to Heraldry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 70; Earwaker, ii.291–3; P. Morgan, ‘Sir Peter Leigh’s dog’, unpublished paper. We are very grateful to Philip Morgan for allowing us to cite this and for advice on the whole topic. 38 Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, pp. 24, 320; Earwaker, i.450–4. 39 Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, pp. 316–17; M. Girouard, Elizabethan Architecture, Its Rise and Fall 1540–1640 (London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 192–4, 356–60, 362–3. 40 William Camden, Britannia, or a chorographicall description of England, Scotland and Ireland, trans. P. Holland, 2 vols (London, 1610), i.609; P. de Figueiredo and J. Treuherz, Cheshire Country Houses (Chichester: Phillimore, 1988), pp. 44–7; Hegbin-Barnes, Glass of Cheshire, pp. 271–8. 41 Hegbin-Barnes, Glass of Cheshire, pp. xci–xciii, 299–302. 42 T. J. Hamling, ‘“An Arelome To This House For Ever”; monumental fixtures and furnishings in the English domestic interior, c.1560–1660’, in A. Gordon and T. Rist (eds), The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 59–83; CALS WS 1613 (William Leversage), WS 1622 (Thomas Brooke). 43 Ormerod, i.410; ii.359, 361. 44 Ormerod, ii.8, 353n, 359, 361; Bodleian Library, Oxford (hereafter Bodleian), Ashmole MS 854, p. 344; CALS WS 1620 (William Whitmore), WS 1622 (Thomas Brooke), WS 1625 (Sir John Davenport); Morgan, War and Society, pp. 3–4. 45 Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, p. 293; Girouard, Elizabethan Architecture, pp. 325–9. 46 Figueiredo and Treuherz, Cheshire Houses, 60–4; www.combermere-restora​ tion.co.uk (accessed 22 June 2015); P. A. Marshall, A Summary of the Heraldry at Combermere Abbey (Lancaster, 2006), pp. 15–18; R. Tittler, ‘Portraiture 68

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and memory amongst the middling elites in post-Reformation England’, in A. Gordon and T. Rist, Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 37–57, at pp. 43–5. For other displays of family arms in the great chamber, see the spectacular plasterwork display at Dorfold Hall, where the Wilbraham arms were mingled with those of James I, who visited the house in 1617: Hartwell et al., Buildings of Cheshire, pp. 334–5. Tittler, ‘Portraiture and memory’. The Elements of Architecture by Sir Henry Wotton, ed. F. Hard (Charlottesville, VA: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1968), pp. 98–100; Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, pp. 301–5; Girouard, Elizabethan Architecture, pp. 69–72. J. Rothwell, Lyme Park: House and Garden (London: National Trust, 1998), pp. 6–8, 27–30; L. Boynton and R. Thornton, ‘A Hardwick Hall inventory of 1601’, Furniture History, 7 (1971), 27–9. J. T. Hopkins, ‘“Such a likeness there was in the pair”: an investigation into the painting of the Cholmondeley sisters’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 141 (1991), 17–18; CALS WS 1643 (Sir Richard Wilbraham); ZCR63/2/694, no. 23; Hegbin-Barnes, Glass of Cheshire, pp. 243–4, 314, 326. We are most grateful to Rosemary Keep for sharing with us her analysis of the portraits at Utkinton. See her ‘Facing the family: group portraits and the construction of identity within early modern families’ (PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 2017), ch. 1. R. Huntington and P. Metcalf, Celebrations of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), chs 4, 6; E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 7–23. N. Llewellyn, The Art of Death (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1991), pp. 46–9, 54–72. J. P. Rylands (ed.), Cheshire and Lancashire Funeral Certificates, 1600–1678 (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, VI, 1882), pp. v–xxiii; BL Harleian MS 2129. C. Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1984), ch. 8; W. Segar, Honor, Military and Civill (London, 1602), p. 254. Rylands, Funeral Certificates, pp. vi–x; W. Di Traglia, ‘Death, commemoration and the heraldic funeral in Tudor and Stuart Lancashire and Cheshire, parts i and ii’, The Coat of Arms (3rd series, III, pts 1 and 2, 2007), pp. 110–12; F. H. Crossley, ‘The post-reformation effigies and monuments of Cheshire (1550–1800), Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 91 (1940), pp. 74–6. A similarly elaborate funeral was staged after the decease of Thomas Viscount Savage in 1635, involving a procession to Macclesfield, from London where he died, which took over a week: Bootham and Parker, Savage Fortune, pp. 69–74. H. M. Colvin, Architecture and the After-Life (London: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 263–8. CALS WS 1613 (Sir Thomas Aston); J. D. Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 137–90; Ormerod, i.720–1, 726–7. For a comparable relocation of the family burial site and turning a church into a family chapel, see Sir William 69

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58 59

60

61

62

63 64

65

66 67 68

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Brereton’s initiative at Brereton: R. P. Cust, ‘The culture of dynasticism in early modern Cheshire’, in S. Jettot and M. Lezowski (eds), The Genealogical Enterprise. Social Practices and Collective Imagination in Europe (15th–20th century) (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2016), pp. 209–33, at pp. 217–18, 222–3. Hegbin-Barnes, Glass of Cheshire, pp. 53–5; Earwaker, i.209, 218. Hegbin-Barnes, Glass of Cheshire, pp. 189–95; Ormerod, i.485; Hartwell et al., Buildings of Cheshire, p. 519; Crossley, ‘Monuments of Cheshire’, pp, 85–6; CALS WS 1647 (Philip Mainwaring). These figures are based on the pedigrees in Ormerod; Earwaker; G. J. Armytage and J. P. Rylands (eds), Pedigrees Made at the Visitation of Cheshire 1613 (Harleian Society, lix, 1909); A. Adams (ed.), Cheshire Visitation Pedigrees 1663 (Harleian Society, xciii, 1941). These figures are from Heal and Holmes, Gentry, p. 61, where they are cited with warnings about issues of comparability. The Cheshire figure is given here as 65 per cent, which reflects a greater emphasis on counting marriages from outside the county’s foremost families. C. B. Phillips and J. H. Smith, Lancashire and Cheshire from AD 1540 (Harlow: Longman, 1994), pp. 7–9, 25–30, 50–3; J. Thirsk, ‘The farming regions of England and Wales’, in J. Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 4 (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 1–112, at pp. 81–4; D. Sylvester and G. Nulty, The Historical Atlas of Cheshire (Chester: Cheshire Community Council, 1958), pp. 54–5, 60–1. Ormerod, i.409–10. A. Dyer, ‘Small market towns 1540–1700’, in P. Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 2, 1540–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 425–50; Hughes, Warwickshire, ch. 1; Fletcher, Sussex, pp. 44–8. C. B. Phillips and J. H. Smith (eds), Stockport Probate Records 1578–1619 (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 124, 1985); P. B. Pixton (ed.), Wrenbury Wills and Inventories 1542–1661 (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 144, 2009). Heal and Holmes, Gentry, pp. 60–70; Houlbrooke, The English Family, pp. 68–78, 83; Hughes, Warwickshire, pp. 38–9. Grosvenor papers, p. 27. John Rylands Library (hereafter JRL) Tatton of Wythenshawe MSS 251–6; JRL Grey family earls of Stamford, EGR1/8/3/6, 3/3/3/2, item 4; ‘Booth, Sir George, 2nd Bt. (1622–84)’, in B. D. Henning (ed.), The House of Commons 1660–1690, 3 vols (London: Secker and Warburg, 1983), i.678–9. History of Parliament Trust, London, unpublished article by D. Scott on ‘Aston, Sir Thomas (1600–1646) of Aston, Cheshire’. We are grateful to the History of Parliament for permission to cite the draft of this article and to David Scott for discussions about Aston. Sir Thomas’s grandfather had sold large tracts of land in Cheshire and Shropshire in 1605–14: M. D. G. Wanklyn, ‘Landed society and allegiance in Cheshire and Shropshire in the First Civil War’ (PhD dissertation, University of Manchester, 1976), p. 95. In 1625 the young Thomas’s estate was described as ‘greatly impaired by his father’s sale of lands’: TNA SP 16/20/40. His fortunes were also repaired by his purchase of the valuable customs on the import of French wines into Chester from Endymion Porter c.1632: BL

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The culture of dynasticism Additional MS 36918, fo. 84 (we are grateful to David Scott for this reference). 70 Among the large body of scholarship on this subject, the following are particularly informative: Houlbrooke, The English Family, pp. 39–58,130–1; K. Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), pp. 44–51; D. Cressy, ‘Kinship and kin interactions in early modern England’, Past and Present, 113 (1986), 41–66; Heal and Holmes, Gentry, pp. 91–6; R. O’Day, Family and Family Relationships 1500–1900: England, France and the United States of America (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 68–73, 80–90; Fletcher, Sussex, pp. 44–8. 71 Fletcher, Sussex, p. 52. 72 The original of the Wilbraham diary is still in the hands of the family, but a photocopy is available as CALS DDX 210/1. The other sources used in this section are J. Hall, A History of the Town and Parish of Nantwich (Didsbury: E. J. Morton, 1972), pp. 416–511; CALS DBW/P/J/6,7,8; WS 1612 (Richard Wilbraham esq.); WS 1628 (Ralph Wilbraham esq.); WS 1643 (Sir Richard Wilbraham); TNA PROB 11/128/493, will of Sir Roger Wilbraham, 1615; Ormerod, iii.137–8, 346, 379–80; ‘The journal of Sir Roger Wilbraham, solicitor general in Ireland and Master of Requests, 1593–1616’, in Camden Miscellany, X, ed. H. S. Scott (Camden Society, 3rd series, 4, 1902), pp. 110–11; Thrush and Ferris (eds), House of Commons, 1604–29, iv.281–4. 73 Houlbrooke, The English Family, pp. 63–8. 74 See, for example, the will of Francis Fitton, who in his seventies was taken in and given shelter in the ancestral home at Gawsworth. He left numerous family bequests to express his abiding loyalty to ‘the house of Gawsworth … in which I and many of my ancestors were born, lived and continued many years and many descents’: J. P. Earwaker (ed.), Lancashire and Cheshire Wills and Inventories (Chetham Society, series 2, 28, 1893), pp. 174–5. See also the record that Sir Richard Grosvenor’s father kept of the godparents of his seventeen children born between 1582 and 1601 in a book of family memoranda: Eaton Hall, Cheshire, Grosvenor MS Legal and Miscellanea 6, fos 6–7. 75 Grosvenor papers, pp. xii–xiii, 32–3, 38. 76 Ibid., p. 28. 77 Ibid., xiii; CALS DCH/L/49/2; Hopkins, ‘Cholmondeley sisters’, pp. 14–16, 37. 78 Grosvenor papers, pp. xiii, xix–xx. 79 CALS DDX 384. We are grateful to Julia White for analysing Mainwaring’s movements. 80 CALS DDX 69/9; Ormerod, iii.839–47; JRL Legh of Lyme MS S I/16; S. Kelsey, ‘Bradshaw, John, Lord Bradshaw, 1602–1659’, ODNB, vii.238–42. 81 Grosvenor papers, pp. xiii–xiv. For the notion of ‘downward deference’, see Collinson, De Republica Anglorum, pp. 22–3. 82 R. Stewart Brown (ed.), Cheshire Inquisitions Post Mortem. Stuart Period, 3 vols (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 84, 86, 91, 1934–38), i.181–90; Ormerod, ii.254, 277–8, 288, 360, 525, 547; iii.347–9, 373, 375; Earwaker, ii.139–40. 83 For these activities and connections, see below, pp. 138, 172. 84 Morrill, Cheshire, 15–16. 85 For Cotton, see below, pp. 88–9. 71

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The Cheshire gentry and their world 86 Cust and Lake, ‘Rhetoric of magistracy’, pp. 48–9. 87 Ormerod, iii.311. 88 K. Thomas, The Ends of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 147–52; D. Gelber, ‘“Hark what discord”; precedency among the early Stuart gentry’, The Coat of Arms (3rd series, III, 2007), 117–44; Segar, Honor Military and Civill, p. 207. 89 G. D. Squibb, Precedence in England and Wales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 15–17, 30. For a local articulation of this principle, see the judgment given by Sir Richard St George, Norroy King of Arms, in a precedence dispute between the wives of two Chester aldermen from gentry families, William Gamull and Roger Hurleton. This was resolved in favour of Mrs Hurleton because her husband could trace his pedigree further back than Gamull’s: Eaton Hall, Grosvenor MS, Misc. 6, fo. 107. 90 These four were the Breretons of Brereton, the Venables of Kinderton, the Duttons of Dutton and the Egertons of Egerton; the other four were the Davenports of Davenport, the Masseys of Puddington, the Vernons of Haslington and the Minshulls of Minshull. 91 R. P. Cust, ‘Catholicism, antiquarianism and gentry honour; the writings of Sir Thomas Shirley’, Midland History, 23 (1998), 40–70; R. P. Cust, ‘William Dugdale and the honour politics of Stuart Warwickshire’, in C. Dyer and C. T. Richardson (eds), William Dugdale, Historian 1605–1686: His Life, His Writings and His County (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2009), pp. 89–108. 92 Ormerod, iii.182–3, 236; Huntington Library, San Marino, CA (hereafter HL) Ellesmere MS, EL 1114. 93 Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England who for parts and learning have been eminent in several counties (London, 1662). 94 Ormerod, ii.588–90; iii.292–3, 544–5. 95 K. S. van Erde, ‘The creation of the baronetage in England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 22 (1959), 313–22; Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, p. 85. 96 A catalogue of the Baronets of this Kingdom of England (London, 1667). 97 Grosvenor papers, pp. xvi–xvii; TNA C 193/13/1. 98 J. S. Morrill, ‘Sir William Brereton, 1st bart, 1604–1661’, ODNB, vii.471–4. 99 BL Harleian MS 2079, fos 41–2. Aside from examples already mentioned, John Crewe’s house at Utkinton, inherited from the Dones, had pictures of the eight earls and eight barons on display in the 1640s and the Stanleys’ house at Hooton had a decoration of the eight earls: Ormerod, ii.415. 100 T. Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State, 1480–1560 (Royal Historical Society Studies in History, 2000), pp. 50–4; C. R. Kyle, ‘Brereton, Sir William (1550– 1631), of Brereton, Cheshire’, in A. Thrush and J. P. Ferris (eds), History of Parliament. The House of Commons 1604–1629, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), iii.301–2. For the courts attached to the baronies of Dunham Massey and Kinderton, see BL Harleian MS 2078, fos 41–3. 101 Ormerod, i.710; Bootham and Parker, Savage Fortune, p. xxi. 102 Ormerod, iii.291, 425; J. S. Morrill, ‘Cholmondeley, Robert, earl of Leinster (1584–1659)’, ODNB, xi.511–12. 103 Ormerod, ii.589–90, 599. 104 BL, Harleian. MS 2079, fos 41–2; CALS, Z/ML/6/66. 72

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The culture of dynasticism 105 CALS ZCR 63/2/35. 106 Hegbin-Barnes, Glass of Cheshire, pp. 43–5; Crossley, ‘Cheshire monuments’, 42–7; University College of North Wales, Bangor (hereafter UCNW) Mostyn MSS, 4271–4272; CALS WS 1627 (Sir Hugh Beeston). We are grateful to Howard Barlow for the Mostyn reference. 107 W. F. Irvine, ‘Disputes at Nether Peover chapel in 1625’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 107 (1955), 141–7. For another such dispute, see the feud between Thomas Stanley and Sir Edward Fitton over the chapel Stanley erected in Alderley church after his family had moved into the parish from Derbyshire. In 1598 Sir Edward, who owned the manor and the advowson, had the chapel ‘cut down’ at night, and then launched ‘great suits’ against Stanley which were not resolved until 1600: P. H. Lawson, ‘Family memoranda of the Stanleys of Alderley 1590–1601 and 1621–1627’, Journal of the Chester and North Wales Archaeological Society, new series 24 (1921–22), 81–101, at 87, 90. 108 J. Broadway, ‘No historie so meete”: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 23–40; P. Collinson, ‘This England: race, nation, patriotism’, in P. Collinson, This England: Essays on the English Nation and Commonwealth in the Sixteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 1–35. 109 For borrowings from Camden, see, for example, Ormerod, i.409; ii.359, 588. Camden appears to have visited Cheshire in the late 1590s during one of the tours he made in his vacations from his headmastership at Westminster: W. M. Herendeen, ‘William Camden, 1551–1621’, ODNB, ix.603–14. 110 Ormerod, ii.8, 9; ii.10–11; iii.290, 292–3. For Webb’s appearance as a gentleman attendant at Thomas Wilbraham’s funeral in 1610, see BL Harleian MS 2129, fo. 71; for his offices in the shire, see Fuller, Worthies, p. 74; for the inventory of his relatively modest house in Chester: CALS, WS 1623 (William Webb). His ‘Description’ circulated in manuscript, a copy of which came into the hands of Dugdale’s antiquarian friend Sir Simon Archer, who proposed that it be published, alongside the herald William Smith’s late-Elizabethan account of the shire, in King’s Vale Royal: Broadway, Gentry Culture and Local History, p. 51. 111 Ormerod, ii.588–9. 112 Ibid., i.408; ii.8; iii.546. 113 For a fuller discussion of this armorial and its implications, see J. Broadway, ‘A convenient fiction? The county community and county history in the 1650s’, in J. E. Eales and A. J. Hopper (eds), The County Community in Seventeenth Century England and Wales (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2012), pp. 39–55, at pp. 48–50. 114 Ormerod, iii.9. 115 Ibid., ii.8 (the Beestons); iii.292 (the Foulshursts). 116 Ibid., i.409. For the economic misfortunes of the Tattons, which had led to their temporary abandonment of Wythenshawe Hall, see J. Groves, The Impact of the Civil War on a Community (Sale, Cheshire: Northern Writers Advisory Service, 2002), pp. 6–11. They had, indeed, recovered by the 1630s.

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T

he Adlington display discussed in the previous chapter was one example of a nationwide phenomenon during the 1570s and 1580s. Gentry decorated their manor houses and local churches with arrays of coat armour, sometimes depicting families across the county or region, but just as commonly limiting their coverage to the local hundred or district, or those with whom they had kinship connections. As we have seen, there were displays of this sort throughout Cheshire. They can be documented at Brereton Hall, at Utkinton, at Little Moreton Hall, at Sir William Davenport’s Bramhall and so on. The Adlington display was unusual in that it arranged the gentry’s heraldry ‘according to their degrees’. Most appear to have adopted an alphabetical or chronological ordering. But all of them illustrate the Cheshire gentry’s preoccupation with heraldry and dynastic display. More intriguingly, they also offer images of how they viewed themselves collectively, and wanted to be viewed by others.1 They provide striking representations of what anthropologists and sociologists have taught us to recognise as the ‘imagined’ or ‘symbolic’ communities of early modern England. Historians have become more aware since the 1970s of how problematic it is to talk about ‘communities’ in this or any other period. Aside from the specific challenges to the notion of county community, and a wariness of the associations of the term ‘community’ – with images of natural, consensual societies, wreathed in nostalgia for a ‘world we have lost’ – there is an understanding that individual lives were worked out not so much in terms of a community as in terms of a multiplicity of complex, overlapping social networks: communities of place and associations of neighbours, occupational communities, communities of class, communities of (often religious) belief and so on.2 And individuals did not identify with one single collectivity, but more often with whole series of different, 74

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overlapping communities. The oft-quoted eulogy in the funeral sermon of the Warwickshire gentleman Sir Thomas Lucy makes this point. He was described as participating in, and feeling a sense of duty and responsibility towards, a series of outwardly expanding social arenas and spheres of activity, beginning with his family and household, then enlarging to encompass his estates, his neighbourhood, his county and, ultimately, the English nation.3 In the Cheshire context this pattern was given substance in the advice that Sir Richard Grosvenor wrote for his son in 1636, which begins with his duties to his wife and children, then works outwards to encompass his servants, tenants, neighbours and eventually ‘the country’ which he would serve as a magistrate.4 The difficulties of locating and unpicking, and giving due weight to the influence of, all these social networks and communities have encouraged historians to look more and more at the ideas and imaginings which linked individuals together and created a sense of common identity. This brings us back to a recognition that collective identity often inhered most recognisably not in social structures or networks of relationships but in shared allegiances and aspirations, ideas of togetherness, customs, rituals and a common sense of the past, accentuated by the drawing of boundaries and differentiating of ‘them’ and ‘us’.5 In early modern England this sense of distinctiveness and identity was tending to become more sharply defined in the face of an intrusive, centralising state and a metropolitan centre exerting increasing social and cultural influence. At the same time, however, the tools with which these identities were worked out and expressed were often provided by the state, or by ongoing processes of educational and cultural homogenisation. And, paradoxically, one of the features – and strengths – of these ‘communities of the mind’ was that they were often imprecisely defined, multifaceted and open ended. This allowed contemporaries to bestow their own meanings and significances and come together under an umbrella of apparent ‘uniformity’ in ways which allowed for considerable heterogeneity and diversity. ‘Imagined’ and ‘symbolic communities’ can, of course, be recognised in all shapes and sizes in early modern England, from the family and the parish up to the nation and beyond. Each of these collectivities had its own senses of identity and its own imagined and symbolic constructions. We have already explored several of these in Chapter 1, in respect of the family, kinship networks and dynastic alliances. Here the focus will be on the wider types of association acknowledged by the gentry, especially the county.

HISTORY AND CHESHIRENESS The ‘imaginings’ of Cheshire that shaped perceptions of the county elite were, to a considerable extent, influenced by the work of antiquarians, chorographers and cartographers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In this sense the construction of Cheshire’s identity is a classic example of a 75

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community becoming aware of its shared values through boundaries being more clearly demarcated and an enhanced recognition of ‘them’ and ‘us’. This process was a consequence of interventions by the late Tudor and early Stuart state, encounters with humanist and antiquarian intellectual currents and a growing sense of being part of an English nation made up of many disparate shires, each with its own competing identities and agendas. A central element in all this was the forging of a coherent, historicised sense of selfhood, which took place as part of what has been described as the ‘discovery of England’ in the late Tudor period.6 With the discrediting of the Brutus myth and the Arthurian legends, Tudor historians turned to the Roman and Anglo-Saxon past, encouraged by humanist scholars eager to forge links with their classical heritage and by Protestant reformers seeking to establish the antiquity of an independent English church. William Camden led the way in investigating the Roman connections in his formidable collaborative work, Britannia. As he toured the country during the 1580s and 1590s, collecting Roman coins and inscriptions and drawing on the knowledge of local antiquaries, he was able to compile a vast compendium of studies which basically charted the history of Britain as a Roman province. In this respect his coverage of Cheshire was typical. He traced the roots of ‘civilisation’ within the shire to the camp set up at Chester by the XXth Legion in the time of the Emperor Vespasian. This was a vision of Chester’s origins picked up by all the later county historians and it laid to rest the legend, enshrined in the work of Lucina, a twelfth-century Chester monk, that settlement was the work of mythical Britons.7 To underline this, in his 1611 county atlas, the Theatre of Great Britain, John Speed depicted the coins and inscriptions on which Camden had based his conclusions. Within these narratives the Anglo-Saxons were seen as the heirs of the Romans, but also as establishing and institutionalising English traditions of government which predated the Norman Conquest. They were credited with creating the original shires, and also inaugurating many original place names. In the case of Cheshire, first Camden, then William Smith (Rouge Dragon pursuivant and native of the shire, writing in the 1580s), John Speed and William Webb following him, traced the origins and government of the county back to the kingdom of Mercia and the beginnings of the shire system established by King Alfred in the ninth century.8 At the same time as the early county histories were being developed, advances were being made in cartography which, as Victor Morgan has demonstrated, enabled the gentry for the first time to visualise what their shires looked like.9 These developments were fed by some of the same intellectual trends in humanist and antiquarian scholarship that encouraged the growth of county history, allied to recent advances in the techniques for surveying and the central government’s need for accurate representations of the shires. The first set of these maps was drawn up by Christopher Saxton between 1574 and 1579, at the same time as the first of the county histories was being 76

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published. Within a few years they were coming to be seen as an essential adjunct to histories and chorographies. This process came of age with the publication of Speed’s atlas. The volume included brief histories and descriptions of the shires, but the emphasis was very much on the maps, which were more detailed and more sumptuous versions of those produced by Saxton. The popularity of the Theatre, which ran to three more editions by 1616, and the vulgarised versions which appeared on playing cards and tapestries, was testimony to the way in which maps in general, and county maps in particular, were becoming increasingly fashionable components of the visual culture of the elite.10 These maps of Cheshire helped the local elite to visualise their shire in ways which complemented the histories of Camden and Webb. Speed’s map – largely drawn by the local topographer William Rogers, with a plan of Chester by William Smith11 – highlighted the villages, towns and gentry deer parks, as well as the topographical features such as rivers, hills and woodland that they identified. It also divided the shire by the hundred boundaries that Webb used to organise his chorography and brought out the relative isolation of Wirral hundred, bounded on three sides by the sea, and of the north-eastern finger of Macclesfield hundred beyond Stockport, which stretched up into the Derbyshire peak district. The result was to accentuate the integrity of the geographical heartland of the shire, stretching from Chester in the west across to Nantwich, Congleton and Macclesfield in the east. In historical terms, Speed also linked the county to the earls of Chester (whose arms adorned the right-hand side of the map) and, as we have seen, to the Romans. This was the county very much as the gentry envisaged it; but it was not a county in isolation. As Morgan has emphasised, Speed’s and Saxton’s plates were generally sold as part of a larger collection showing all the shires of England and Wales; and this format sharpened the sense of distinctiveness of individual shires, but at the same time also their integration within a larger whole, which was part of this process of the ‘discovery of England’.12 Morgan’s observations – and also the chorographers’ oft-stated pride in their local gentry – point up another important aspect of these maps and histories: the drawing of comparisons between counties and a sense of competitive pride in pressing the claims of one’s own shire – what contemporaries called ‘emulation’. Thomas Habington famously remarked in the preface to his unpublished Jacobean ‘Survey of Worcestershire’ that he had undertaken the project ‘because it was objected by one that our countie contained few gentlemen of antiquity’; and he was later able to claim that through his genealogical researches ‘the face of our shire [had been] raised out of obscurities’.13 The sense that a suitably laudatory county history would enable the gentry of a shire to hold their heads up high in their dealings with the outside world was picked up by Thomas Fuller in his Worthies of England. He made it clear that their lives were worthy of celebration not only as examples to others, but also as a manifestation of the ‘particular genius’ of the shire that claimed them.14 77

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Interestingly, Fuller also linked this process of ‘noble emulation between the shires’ to the burgeoning practice of county feasts in London, which are first mentioned in a newsletter of 1621. These involved émigré gentry, living in the metropolis, gathering once a year to listen to a sermon, then retire to a dinner at which, according to Fuller, the conversation would generally turn to discussing ‘the heroes of every particular county, modelled in a body together and marching under the banner of their several eminences’. Cheshire was one of the earliest counties mentioned as holding these feasts;15 and there is plentiful evidence of the sort of competitive pride identified by Fuller, but little of the worry about inferiority that pervaded Habington’s ‘Survey’. William Webb proudly, and unabashedly, declared in the preface to his survey that ‘for the general, whether constitution of bodies or endowment of their minds, or both [his native county] hath contained an ancient and continued appellation to be Cheshire chief of men’. He hastened to add that he did not intend that ‘therein any other country-men are disparaged in any particular gift of excellency or precedency above a Cheshire man’; but nonetheless went on to expound the qualities that had earned his description.16 If we turn to the content of the work of the Cheshire chroniclers it is possible to disaggregate the component parts of this identity. All were agreed that the pivotal event in the shire’s history, around which were constructed the myths and narratives which made up the Cestrians’ sense of their distinctive selfhood, was its creation as a county palatine. This happened when William the Conqueror installed his nephew Hugh Lupus of Avranches as earl of Chester and vested him with all the authority that he himself exercised in other parts of England. From this act of creation stemmed the privileges and liberties that Cheshire’s inhabitants were still claiming in the seventeenth century. The most potent symbol of these was Hugh Lupus’s sword, the gladium principis, which William had supposedly strapped to his waist in acknowledgement of his vice-regal authority. This hung in Chester castle, and its totemic value was such that in 1649, when John Bradshawe arrived in Chester to proclaim Charles I a traitor to the commonwealth, he took the sword away with him back to London. It signified the traditional powers that the earl exercised within the palatinate: he could create his own barons, hold his own parliament and pass local legislation; he provided justice for his subjects through what became the Exchequer Court of Chester and validated local property rights that were recorded in the ‘Cheshire Domesday’; he enjoyed his own version of the royal prerogative, which, among other things, freed his Cheshire subjects from national, parliamentary taxation; and he could even issue his own version of Magna Carta for the barons of Cheshire. The reality of some of these supposed rights has been questioned by modern historians, in particular the claim that Cheshire could hold its own parliament and pass ‘Cheshire laws’. But there is every indication that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries they were seen as entirely credible. William Smith reproduced one of the classic statements 78

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11  The ancient parliament of Hugh Lupus, earl of Chester, reputedly meeting in the ‘parliament house’ in Chester castle

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of Cheshire’s distinctiveness, a petition for exemption from parliamentary taxation in 1450, which asserted unequivocally the claim that Cheshire had its own parliament and made its own laws; and when Daniel King published this in his 1656 Vale Royal he included an illustration of Hugh Lupus sitting in the parliament house at Chester castle among his secular barons and ecclesiastical lords (Figure 11).17 Many of the original privileges that Cheshire had enjoyed as county palatine, of course, disappeared when it was formally integrated into the realm of England in the statutes of 1536 and 1543. These introduced JPs on the same basis as the rest of England, granted the shire and the city representation in parliament and assimilated it into the national taxation system.18 However, the sense that local inhabitants had of being something of a race apart, with their autonomous traditions, their freedoms and their liberties, remained intact. These assertions of separateness and distinctiveness tended to emerge most emphatically in their dealings with central government over either the ‘Cheshire mise’ or the status of the Exchequer Court at Chester, which had survived as an independent entity through the Henrician reforms. The historian of early Tudor Cheshire, Tim Thornton, has pointed out that although there are few examples of a Cheshire parliament passing formal legislation there is evidence of consultation with a body representing the shire – often at a meeting of the county court – and drawing up a statement of the grievances of the shire.19 This occurred most often at the granting of the mise, a tax on the shire of 3,000 marks which was generally awarded at the accession of a new monarch or a new earl of Chester in return for confirmation of the privileges of the county palatine. The best documented of these early Tudor grants was in 1547 at the accession of Edward VI, when it was recorded that ‘all knights, esquires, gentlemen and other great freeholders’ were summoned to appear before the commissioners for the mise and had given their consent to it ‘by the mouth of Sir Thomas Holcroft’, who was to represent the shire in the parliaments of 1553. This mechanism continued to operate with the mises that were levied in the early Stuart period – in 1605 following James’s accession, and in 1612 and 1617 at the creation of Princes Henry and Charles as earl of Chester20 – and it was accompanied by a process of negotiation over the shire’s privileges and liberties. The anonymous author of ‘The Rights and Jurisdiction of the County Palatine of Chester …’ (written around 1604) outlined the procedures by which the chamberlain of Chester do cause all the gentlemen of the country to meet together and to subscribe to one petition, to be preferred to the king’s most excellent Majesty beseeching the same that the Charter of the Countie Palatine may be confirmed by his highness in consideration of the sum of money which they are to yield according to an ancient custom.21

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of a palatine parliament and the distinctiveness of the county’s privileged position. The most regular and conspicuous reminder of this was the Exchequer Court at Chester. In the early seventeenth century it was a flourishing institution. After it had won a series of jurisdictional battles over the city of Chester and the Council of Marches during Elizabeth’s reign, its volume of business had expanded apace and it moved into bigger premises in what William Smith described as ‘the goodly, fair and large shire hall [in Chester castle] newly repaired’. Symbolically, its meetings took place in the chamber known as the ‘parliament house’.22 For local inhabitants the main practical benefit of the court was that it provided relatively cheap and speedy justice, without having to travel the two hundred or so miles to London. Cestrians, of course, continued to use the Westminster courts, as the volume of Cheshire star chamber cases in James’s reign testified; and there were an increasing number of prohibitions withdrawing cases from Chester to one of the London courts. But otherwise they could settle many of their disputes, especially those relating to debt and property, on their own doorstep, often with recourse to arbitration by local gentry appointed by the court. As the author of ‘The Rights and jurisdiction’ emphasised, this style of local equity jurisdiction, based on conscience rather than the adversarial traditions of the common law, was calculated ‘to please and content the country’.23 For local inhabitants it also embodied the county’s sense of itself as an independent, self-governing entity, far from London. When the Exchequer Court was threatened by the Commonwealth regime’s allowance of prohibitions from London, the sheriff and leading justices came together to petition the Rump Parliament. The petition began with a trenchant statement of the shire’s ‘ancient customs’ embodied in the court: the people and inhabitants of this county for five hundred years and upwards have enjoyed the liberty [and] privilege to sue and be sued and impleaded within the said county, and for that purpose have had courts of justice for law and equity within the same, and by all the time aforesaid it hath ever been their privilege and right to have all pleas for land and other causes ariseing within the said county to be tried and judicially determined there and not elsewhere …24

The elite of Cheshire, then, undoubtedly had a strong sense of the distinctiveness of their shire in jurisdictional terms. But how did this translate into a culture of ‘Cheshireness’? What were the component parts out of which the ‘imagined’ community of the shire was constructed? One way into exploring this is to investigate the heroic myths which played an important role in defining and articulating the shared values and assumptions of the Cheshire ‘community’.25 Of these the county had more than its fair share, many of them harking back to the ‘golden age’ of the sixth earl, Ranulph, when the prestige and independence of the palatinate was at its height. Earl Ranulph, like Guy of Warwick, was a real historical figure who achieved mythical status through verse romances circulating in the late 81

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middle ages. The high prevalence of Ranulph – or its alternate versions Ralph or Randall – among early modern Cheshire forenames was testimony to his enduring reputation.26 He held the earldom between 1181 and 1232, accompanying King Richard on his crusade to the Holy Land, defending Cheshire against Llewellyn Prince of Wales, standing beside Richard against Prince John, then counselling the young Henry III in his struggle to free England from French incursions; and it was he who in 1215 or 1216 granted the Cheshire Magna Carta. Webb described him as ‘Ranulph the Good, a famous defender of the liberties and freedoms of his country’.27 The gentleman poet of early Stuart Cheshire, Richard Bostock of Tattenhall, depicted him as the exemplar of Cheshire virtues: the chiefest man of all that race … Bold, bountiful, religious wise Profoundly learned, liberal In all thinges dealing with advise Of haughty mind yet mild withal.28

Two of the ways in which Ranulph made his mark left enduring reminders of all that he stood for. One was through his building of Beeston castle, perhaps the most prominent landmark in Cheshire, high on its hill, in the heart of the shire. By the seventeenth century it was partially in ruins, but its revival – as a ‘fense [to] his own country’ – was prophesied in verses recorded by John Leland in the sixteenth century, then translated by Camden and Speed.29 The other reminder was the annual celebration of the Cheshire minstrels’ privileges. These had been awarded by Earl Ranulph when the minstrels had taken the lead in rescuing him from a siege of his castle at Rothelent in Flintshire by the Welsh. The lordship of the minstrels had passed down through the Dutton family and in 1622 came into the hands of Sir Robert Needham, later Viscount Killmorrey, who married Thomas Dutton’s heiress, Eleanor. Every year, in the early seventeenth century, the minstrels would attend the Midsummer Fair at Chester to pay homage to their lord, who would then proclaim their privileges, hear their petitions and hold a minstrels’ court. Dutton or Needham, with their gentleman companions, would then process to a service in St John’s church and retire to a gentlemen’s dinner at which they affirmed their shared heritage of honour and achievement.30 Rituals such as these, and the totemic role of a hero such as Earl Ranulph, played an important part in sustaining the notion of the symbolic community of Cheshire. The narratives which had grown up around this encapsulated ideals and assumptions which did much to shape the Cheshire elite’s sense of themselves. One of the main themes celebrated at the minstrels’ feast was the valour of the ‘men of Cheshire’ in defending their homeland. Such was the resilience of this particular appellation that it had passed into proverbial usage, alongside the equally resonant phrase ‘men of Kent’. This reputation 82

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carried considerable weight. Camden and Speed both picked up on it; and, as we have seen, there was a vogue for celebration of valorous (sometimes fabricated) achievements in the Hundred Years’ War. The most developed elaboration was provided by Michael Drayton in his Jacobean epic poem Polyolbion, akin to a down-your-way tour of England. For him the proverb conjured up a vision of how … in many fields since conquering William came, Her people she hath prov’n to her eternal fame. All children of her own, the leader and the led, The mightiest men of bone in her full bosom bred.31

Allied to this valour was the constancy and loyalty displayed by the ‘men of Cheshire’ to the crown. This was highlighted in William Smith’s account of the county, then picked up by John Speed, also a native of Cheshire, who insisted that ‘this shire hath never been stained with the taint of rebellion, but ever found loyal to the king and his crown’, citing in particular their loyalty to the beleaguered Richard II. Fuller acknowledged that it was not quite as clear cut as this, citing Drayton’s account of the fratricidal slaughter at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 when some had sided with Henry IV and others with Harry Hotspur: … Dutton, Dutton kills; a Done doth kill a Done, A Booth, a Booth and Leigh by Leigh is overthrown …

However, he explained the apparent lapse by pointing out that at the start of Henry’s reign it was by no means clear who had the legitimate claim to the crown.32 These ideals translated into two themes which were endlessly reiterated in the county histories and which helped to further shape Cestrians’ selfperception and image of themselves in the eyes of others: ‘antientcy’and unity. We have already seen in Chapter 1 that the antiquity and rootedness of the Cheshire gentry was exceptional and widely celebrated. A concomitant of this for Webb and his fellow chroniclers was their unity and sense of fellowship. Jan Broadway has identified an emphasis on social and ideological unity as a particular characteristic of county histories and chorographies. They tended to gloss over political, religious or personal divisions, or omit them altogether. This was a striking aspect, for example, of Thomas Habington’s ‘Survey of Worcestershire’. A devout Catholic, implicated in the gunpowder plot, he nonetheless suppressed all reference to religious divisions between the Worcestershire gentry with the presumption that gentlemanly ideals transcended any such differences.33 Diarmaid MacCulloch’s analysis of the Suffolk ‘Breviary’ of Robert Ryece makes much the same point. Ryece drew on humanist and Calvinist notions of virtuous sociability and good fellowship to construct a narrative of harmony and cooperation. He described how his fellow gentry 83

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The Cheshire gentry and their world visit one another much, meet often conversing most familiarly together which so winneth the good will of one another with all reverend regard of the meaner sort, true love and unfeigned affection of their neighbours that if differences do arise, which are very seldom, such is the great discretion ever tempered with love and kindness among them, that these divisions are soon smothered and appeased. So again what with interlacing of houses in marriage (a practice at this day much used for strengthening of families thereby) such is the religious unity wherewith in all good actions they doe concur that whatsoever offendeth one displeaseth all, and whatsoever satisfieth one contenteth all.34

These characteristics were similarly evident in the narratives of the Cheshire gentry. Webb’s chorography, for example, demonstrated a striking readiness to downplay religious differences. Webb was linked to the puritan circles around his master, Thomas Wilbraham, and William Hinde of Bunbury, and there is the occasional hint that he shared Hinde’s abhorrence of popery.35 But none of this was allowed to impinge on his account of the local gentry. He simply glossed over the religion of Sir Thomas Savage, the leading local Catholic, and presented him as a paragon of noble virtues. The same treatment was also accorded to other leading Catholics, such as Sir Hugh Beeston, Sir William Massey and William Whitmore of Leighton.36 Religious divisions were ignored in the interests of accommodating a wide range of beliefs to the shared pursuit of noble attributes and ideals. Webb was also notable for his eulogy of Cheshire’s common lawyers, who in other contexts were often see as a divisive force, fomenting litigation and stirring up division for their own, self-interested ends.37 He chose, instead, to stress their wisdom and altruism, and their contribution to harmonising and stabilising relationships within local society. As we have seen, he applauded the county’s leading lawyers, such as Lord Chancellor Ellesmere and Sir Ranulph Crewe, as ‘worthies’ and role models. But it was the lawyers’ role in settling disputes and arbitrating disagreements that he depicted most strikingly. In his portrait of the local attorney Hugh Winnington of the Hermitage, he described how he was frequently visited not as an hermitage for superstitious devotion, but as an oracle for counsel and advice, how poor clients may with most safety and ease compose suits and troubles, wherein that gentleman the owner, as well for his great experience in the practic proceedings of law courses as for his singular humanity and gentleness, was very famous.38

The appetite for settling disputes, and averting potential litigation, was also something he picked up on among the elite more generally, citing the instance of Ravensmore Common, near Nantwich, a piece of land ‘at which many men’s teeth had watered’. It had been preserved from exploitation ‘by God’s providence (raising up divers noble gentlemen to stand against the enclosing of it) [to ensure that it was] hitherto preserved for the relief of the poor neighbours to it and others’.39 84

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The most striking account of county unity and fellowship, however, was provided by Thomas Lytler in his verse eulogy of Lady Mary Cholmondeley. Lytler was Lady Mary’s legal counsel and was thus involved at first hand in the great fifty-year lawsuit between her and her uncle, Sir George Holford, over her grandfather’s property settlement. One of his principal themes was the importance of peace and charity between friends and neighbours, which Lytler depicted as a Christian duty, bolstered by classical morality. He cited Cicero, Ovid and, above all, St Matthew’s dictum, ‘beati pacifici’: Peace makers are (saith Christ) in blessed case, And so are they that blessed peace embrace.40

This imperative was expressed in the final settlement of the Cholmondeley– Holford lawsuit. It had, according to Lytler, caused increasingly bitter divisions over the years, splitting the county’s gentry between those who favoured Holford’s claims as ‘heir male’, because they were reluctant to see the family name pass away, and those who favoured Lady Mary as ‘heir general’. These differences were ratcheted up in 1616 after some of Holford’s servants had invaded Lady Cholmondeley’s property and caused a ‘riot’ which ended in litigation in Star Chamber.41 However, at this point a group of leading gentry, consisting of Sir George Booth, Sir Richard Grosvenor, Sir Richard Brooke, William Brereton of Ashley, Thomas Marbury, Peter Daniel and William Leversage, proposed an arbitration, much to Lytler’s approval: … blest be they and theirs for that good deed, Let this for ever be a precedent, For friends to make agreement with all speed    And spend not wealth and waste themselves with care    When all is done, the friends best judges are.

It was followed by a petition to the king when he stayed at Lady Mary’s house at Vale Royal on his progress in 1617. James ordered the assize judges to take the matter into their hands and a final settlement was brokered at Macclesfield over Easter 1618.42 This was greeted with lengthy celebrations which, according to Lytler, embodied the values and rituals which held Cheshire society together: … joy afresh doth all the shire surprise    And friends disjoined, this blessed peace endears. The parties show with passions counterchange What grief they had so long to be so strange. Since then what intercourse of love hath past! Twixt them & theirs! What visiting! What joy! O longe & longe O ever may it last, That time nor age may that sweet peace destroy.43

Lytler’s elegy, like so many of the accounts being discussed here, was a carefully crafted idealisation, as much fiction as fact. But, precisely because 85

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of this, it tells us much about the ideals that the Cheshire gentry aspired to, the standards they set themselves and the values that they revered and held in common. They shared an image of their county, partly anchored in historical fact, partly in myth, which emphasised their rootedness, their longevity, their distinctive self-governing traditions, their geographical, social and institutional cohesion and their inherent virtue, expressed particularly in their courage, loyalty and charitable friendship. ‘Imagined’ and ‘symbolic’ many of the components of this ‘community’ may have been, but, nonetheless, they exercised a powerful influence over their social and ideological interactions and their political encounters and decision making.

THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN While various versions of Cheshireness were being forged through county history and chorography, a complementary set of narratives was restructuring notions of what it meant to be a landed gentleman within the shire. A whole range of genres, from drama and conduct books to character sketches, godly lives and country house poems, were reshaping the habits and mentalities associated with the ownership of land, ‘good lordship’ and rural living. Because of the tendency of contemporaries to think in terms of binary opposites these narratives were often presented in terms of dichotomies – ‘court/city’ versus ‘country’, ‘urbane’ versus ‘rustic’, ‘sophistication’ versus ‘simplicity’ and so on – and as the image of the ‘polite’ and ‘civil’ man about town came to be explored and more sharply defined, so too, through a complex dialectic, did the image of the ‘honest’ and ‘plain-speaking’ ‘country gentleman’. There is a need, as Ian Warren has argued, to revisit some of the ‘localist’ and ‘country’ ideals highlighted by Everitt in his original formulation of the ‘county community’. In their eagerness to understand the homogenising influence of metropolitan civility, the expanding remit of the state and the growth of the early modern public sphere, historians have tended to overlook the question of what ‘landedness’ meant to the early Stuart gentry.44 ‘Country’ gentlemen – as opposed to the growing numbers of ‘urban’ gentry – still saw themselves primarily as landowners, whose sense of identity was tied up with their estates and their houses. When Sir Richard Grosvenor set out his advice to his son from the Fleet prison in August 1636 he did not mention the metropolitan world in which he had immersed himself since his incarceration. His advice was all about young Richard’s role as a landowner, good neighbour, protector of his tenantry and JP. This was an attitude shared by the majority of his Cheshire neighbours. It is telling that among the county’s leading landowners – as opposed to lawyers – the only one for whom we have evidence for the ownership of a London house is Viscount Savage, who had acquired the former Lumley residence at Tower Hill by dint of marriage. Even Sir Thomas Aston, the quintessential courtier, 86

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lived in lodgings when in London.45 As we have seen, these gentry continued to invest in their country houses as the principal showcases of their families’ prestige and identity. So, what were the cultural associations and meanings of ‘landedness’; and how did it serve to define the modes of lordship adopted by these country gentlemen? Just as these gentlemen privileged their associations with place in forging their dynastic connections, so it was land, rather than any other sources of income, that provided the basis for their wealth and status. Advices to sons, which were preoccupied with impressing the need to husband resources and manage wealth prudently, invariably focused on land and the steady income that it generated as the bedrock of their prosperity. Other forms of wealth creation, such as court office, property speculation, trade, mining and industry were usually hedged around with caveats and warnings of the risks involved. It was significant that in his advice Grosvenor did not even mention his risky, cut-throat ventures into coalmining in north Wales, which were providing his family with a significant new source of income. Diligent attention to surveying one’s estates, steady improvement through consolidation and enclosure and the introduction of new agricultural techniques were what these gentry aspired to.46 But this dependence on land brought with it a complex grid of duties and obligations, originally enshrined in feudal land law, which did much to define and give substance to the cultural associations of landedness and lordship. In the model of expanding spheres of responsibility to which so many of these gentry subscribed, tenants and neighbours formed the next circle beyond one’s immediate family and servants. Advices continually stressed the extent to which a gentleman’s reputation and local standing depended on maintaining good relations with neighbours and fulfilling paternalistic obligations to tenants. This would bring not only gratitude, loyalty, service, honour and reputation but also the approval of God, under whom the landowner was in effect a steward, managing his lands for the benefit of the ‘common weal’. This was an approach expounded at length in Grosvenor’s advice of 1636: Be kind and loving to your tennants and tender over them. Make not slaves of them, but use them so that they may delight to be commanded by you and be useful to you. Remember they are planted under you not to be tyrranised over but to be protected, not to be ruined but to be fostered by you. Count it your credit to own rich tenants and your glory when they live in plenty and are able with alacrity to call you in & make you drink when you pass by their doors.47

Neighbours were to be treated in similar fashion: ‘Covet & thirst after the love of your neighbours, for there is nothing more sovereign for the life of man than the affection of those near whom hee dwell.’ One should always strive to think the best of them, and be quick to reconcile their differences and slow to take offence. ‘Furious words’, threats and lawsuits should be avoided at 87

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all costs and every care taken ‘to gain and keep the love of your neighbours, without which,’ Grosvenor impressed on his son, ‘I had rather not be.’48 Such values were extolled in a variety of other genres. In his Life of John Bruen William Hinde described ‘his merciful dealing with his tenants towards whom he did ever bear a very tender and compassionate respect’ and ‘he ever … carried himself as a merciful and good landlord towards them.’ Hinde, like many another godly preacher, was making a point about the judgements that awaited those ‘cruel’ landlords who engaged in rack renting, enclosure and ‘grinding the poor’.49 It is hard to know how far this portrait of Bruen was realised in practice – although it would have diminished the force of Hinde’s message had he not enjoyed a local reputation which at least in part matched this image. However, one social arena where these ideals do appear to have accorded with some sort of social reality was on George Cotton’s estate at Combermere and Wrenbury, just south of Nantwich. In one of the earliest examples of a new genre, ‘country house poems’, Geoffrey Whiting, a native of Wrenbury, depicted the estate at Combermere as like a beehive, the model of an ordered, hierarchical ‘commonwealth’. It was presided over by a ‘lord’ who poured forth its bounty on his tenants and neighbours and in return received their loyalty and service. He addressed the Elizabethan owner of the estate, George’s father, and his patron, Richard Cotton:    … in this place your golden time you spend, Unto your praise and to your country’s good:    This is the hive, your tenants are the bees:    And in the same have places by degrees … A Commonwealth by this is right expressed: Both him that rules, and those that do obey: Or such as are the heads above the rest, Whom here the Lord in high estate doth stay; By whose support the meaner sort do live, And unto them all reverence duly give.50

During the 1620s an extra dimension was added to this model by the godly ministry of Robert Nicholls. A succession of lesser gentry and yeomen in the parish acknowledged their debt to Nicolls through bequests in their wills; and he was particularly close to the Cotton family, where George’s younger brother Andrew provided a remarkable testimony to Nicholls’ ‘painful and in itself powerful ministry’, to which he attributed his spiritual awakening.51 The renowned puritan Julines Herring continued this ministry when he settled in Wrenbury between 1635 and 1637 after being deprived of his lectureship at Shrewsbury. He and his wife were taken in by Nicolls’ widow, who was his sister-in-law, and Herring reportedly devoted himself to comforting afflicted souls in the parish.52 The evidence from quarter sessions and assizes also shows Cotton himself to have been a diligent and industrious JP in the 88

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area, settling disputes, presiding over the administration of poor relief and speaking up for the interests of his neighbours.53 And the loyalty and gratitude that George and his family commanded in the locality are evident from surviving wills in which lesser gentry and yeomen lined up to acknowledge him as their ‘master and landlord’ and request that he act as overseer of their final bequests.54 Closely integrated with this paternalistic approach to tenants and ­neighbours – and at the heart of most contemporary discussions of landed and ‘country’ identity – was hospitality. Felicity Heal has demonstrated that between the 1580s and the 1630s hospitality received more attention in social commentaries and discursive literature than at any time before or since. The theme of such discussions was almost invariably the decline of traditional, distinctively English, open-house patterns of hospitality, in comparison to a largely mythical ‘golden age’. Conduct literature, like William Vaughan’s The Golden Grove, analysed the reasons for this decay, generally in terms of personal covetousness, conspicuous consumption, especially expenditure on building, and the lure of London. Royal proclamations exhorted the gentry to return to their shires and discharge their duty to the ‘commonwealth’ by maintaining the ‘old fashion’ of hospitality.55 Country house poems like Ben Jonson’s ‘Ode to Penshurst’ extolled idealised visions of houses where the old traditions were still maintained. And another new genre, the character book, presented personifications of old-fashioned ‘country’ values, like the ‘relique of gentility’ found in Wye Saltonstall’s Picturae Loquentes, whose house was the seat of hospitality; the poor man’s court of justice, the curate’s Sunday ordinary and the only exchequer of Charity where the poor go away relieved and cry, God Bless the founder … [where] all the rooms smell of dogs and hawk and the hall bears armes though it be but a musket and two corslets … [and the master was careful not to let his wife] see London or the court for fear she should make his woods pay for it.56

Such imaginings purported to describe – but also helped to give shape to – contemporary modes of behaviour and identity. The Cheshire gentleman was renowned for the maintenance of such traditions. Drayton’s Polyolbion characterised him as … assured in work, he spent of his estate, Returning to his house, his hospitable gate, The richer and the poorer stand open to receive, They of England most to ancient customs cleave.

Fuller expressed the ‘wish that some of their hospitality were planted in the south that it might bring forth fruit therein …’.57 This sense of the importance of hospitality was also given priority in the eulogies of local gentry. Webb recalled that Sir John Savage VIII, the builder of Rock Savage, was 89

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‘inimitable in the fame of his hospitality, charity and alms, and for retinue and good housekeeping right nobleman like’. Richard Eaton, in his funeral sermon of 1616, commended Thomas Dutton for his ‘love and kindness to his poor friends and neighbours’: ‘it is well known that his house was seldom without strangers’.58 And Lytler’s account of the hospitality of Lady Mary Cholmondeley provided a demonstration not only of how a family’s ability to sustain the traditional open-house hospitality depended on its immediate economic fortunes, but also of how important this was for their local fame and reputation. He lauded Lady Mary’s husband, Sir Hugh (d.1601), for maintaining old-fashioned standards: In love of all more great & fortunate More bountiful, more prudent there was none. Housekeeper great & good unto the poor Whereof whole troops resorted to his door.

While her fortunes allowed, Lady Mary kept up these traditions at Cholmondeley Castle, spending the approved proportion of a third of her income on ‘housekeeping’. But by 1606 she was forced to retrench, and moved to St John’s Chester, where she maintained a much smaller establishment. However, once the family’s fortunes had been recouped through the marriage of her eldest son, Robert, to Lady Katherine Stanhope in 1617, the first outward sign of this was an immediate resumption of the old-fashioned traditions at Cholmondeley. It became ‘famous again for hospitality’: That stately house now ceasing for to mourn, Yields more than wonted hospitality With plenty filled, & with so great a train, As if time brought the golden world again.59

Webb, Dutton and Lytler all highlighted the traditional approach to hospitality, allowing a free-for-all in which there was little attempt to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving. By the 1630s, however, as Heal has noted, this was becoming more circumscribed and controlled, partly because of the sharper distinctions observed in the new poor laws, but also because of the growing preoccupation with observing standards of politeness.60 Grosvenor’s advice to his son reflected these changing ideals. He continued to recommend the relatively generous setting aside of a third of his wealth for hospitality. He also saw the provision of hospitality as a godly imperative. But the stress was now on providing for the ‘truly poor’: Be charitable to the truly poor. Receive strangers, clothe the naked … the care of such is a work worthy the care of the best & greatest … Christian souls are the true stones of a spiritual temple where God dwells as in his proud mansion; so to nourish and support the poor, being the precious members of Christ, is to build a goodly temple. And that you may be the better enabled to relieve such, drive from your gates those lusty rogues and sturdy beggars that are able to earn their own 90

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This was accompanied by stern injunctions to maintain moderation and sobriety: ‘Suffer not your butlery to be converted into an alehouse and tavern for men to swill and drink themselves drunken.’61 Ideas about hospitality, then, were undergoing subtle changes; but within Cheshire they continued to play a central role in the nexus of values that shaped the identity of the landed gentry and remained fundamental to their local reputations. This was also true of rural sports and pastimes. Of these much the most widely practised, and the country gentleman’s sport par excellence, was hunting. Daniel Beaver and others have demonstrated that the culture of hunting was rich in symbols, rituals and honorific associations. It combined the gentle virtues of martial valour and masculinity (in the courage, endurance and horsemanship demanded in the chase), refined skills and forms of knowledge (in the breeding of dogs and deer, and the understanding of the prey) and hospitality and sociability (in the gifting of venison and the feasting which often accompanied a successful hunt), all within a context in which, as Beaver emphasises, ‘successful performance redounded to the gentleman in the potent form of honour’.62 Cheshire, with the forests of Delamere and Macclesfield and the numerous deer parks recorded on Speed’s map, was famous for its hunting traditions. Red and fallow deer were the most sought-after prey and no setting was more renowned than Sir Peter Leigh’s park at Lyme. He entertained a string of distinguished courtly visitors during James’s reign, many of them in the hunting lodge refurbished in Elizabeth’s reign, high on the hill overlooking Lyme; and his correspondence is strewn with references to dogs, horses and deer and the occasional request for him to provide the famous Leigh mastiffs for breeding.63 This was a world fashioned around the requirements of the country gentleman, whose exclusive right to hunt deer was given statutory protection in 1603 and 1606. Moreover, it was serviced by an army of huntsmen, keepers and retainers and, in this respect, it replicated the well-defined hierarchy of landed society. All this was true of an even more characteristically Cheshire pursuit: horse racing. The most famous of the shire’s races, the Roo Dee at Chester, provided opportunities for city aldermen and country gentlemen to gather, socialise and match the skills of their horses and riders.64 But it is the less well-known race inaugurated in 1632 at Farndon which tells us most about the attitudes and mores that were seen as characterising the sport. The race was sponsored by Viscount Cholmondeley, with the objective – according to articles of agreement signed by ‘divers knights, esquires and gentlemen’ of Broxton hundred – of preserving ‘unity and peace among the gentlemen whose servants [the riders] are, and for whose sakes, and for the mutuality of friendship and kind society amongst them, this sport was first devised and is intended forever to be continued’.65 To this end, a complex set of rules were 91

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drawn up. Entry was open to the horses and riders of gentlemen – but only gentlemen – and they competed on an equal basis; the nature of the course, the weights of riders and the use of whips was regulated by a committee of three gentlemen to ensure ‘fair play’; those gentlemen in attendance, ‘whose birth and breeding declare them to be truly generous’, were enjoined to demonstrate ‘their exemplary carriage in their own persons’ by foregoing the privilege of riding onto the course in order to accommodate the large crowds; and all participants were enjoined to ‘depart as they met, lovingly and contentedly, repining at nothing but the want of their horses truth or speed’.66 Those who put up the prize money, alongside Cholmondeley, were the middling and upper gentry of the hundred. The race was run every year between 1632 and 1642 and drew in the great and the good with landholdings in the southern and western parts of the shire, including the earl of Shrewsbury, Lord Strange, Lord Gerrard, Peter Venables, Sir William Massey (the leading local Catholic) and the justices Thomas Marbury and George Spurstow. The arrangements surrounding the Farndon meetings, then, provided the template for an imagined local society which privileged unity, sociability, ‘mutuality of friendship’ and a sense of equality and ‘fair play’ within the gentry class; but at the same time they sustained clearly delineated notions of hierarchy, as ranking within the gentry was confirmed by the order of the recording of subscriptions, and the gentlemen attending were expected to maintain suitable standards of decorum as an example to the ‘great concourse of people’ there for the sport and the betting.67 Rural sports and recreations of course came under attack during this period from puritans bent on suppressing sinfulness and promoting Sabbath observance;68 so this is a good example of the way in which rusticity and landedness became more sharply defined through the contests and contrast with their supposed opposites: politeness, civility, urbanity and godliness. But, of course, for individual gentlemen these pursuits and sets of values were not an either/or. As we shall see, some of the most godly gentry in the shire were enthusiasts for horse racing and other popular pastimes. In constructing their sense of self it was open to them to pick and choose between a range of languages, narratives, role models, ideal types and other cultural resources in what has been described as a process of ‘creative bricolage’. To understand the make-up of the Cheshire gentry, then, it is also important to explore their encounters with urbane and metropolitan cultures that lay beyond the county’s borders.

METROPOLITAN ENCOUNTERS During the 1620s Sir Richard Grosvenor visited London comparatively infrequently, mainly to attend the three parliaments in which he sat as knight of the shire for Cheshire. Otherwise he was resident at Eaton Hall, consolidating his estate, raising his young family and establishing his reputation as an 92

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active and conscientious local magistrate. But between 1629 and 1639 his imprisonment in the Fleet changed all that. The regime at the prison was relatively relaxed, with a requirement to reside but no close confinement, and Grosvenor found that he could travel around London day to day and experience all the opportunities and experiences that the metropolis had to offer. He spent much of this time at inns and ‘ordinaries’, dining and visiting and socialising with new acquaintances, like his fellow inmate at the Fleet, Berkshire gentleman Sir Robert Hyde. He was also able to play the tourist, visiting the renowned Mermaid tavern and inspecting ‘the kings ship’ at Woolwich (presumably the newly built Sovereign of the Seas). He met up with and entertained Cheshire neighbours and kin down in London, and his accounts also show him making regular purchases of books and separates to add to his well-stocked library at Eaton. Sir Richard’s extended residence in the debtors’ prison was unusual, and once Peter Daniell settled his debts there is every indication that he hastened back to his estates in Cheshire and did not visit London again.69 Nonetheless, his extended sojourn in the capital was an experience shared by a number of his fellow Cheshire gentry, and it raises all sorts of interesting questions about the impact of this on the county elite. What effect did encounters with a metropolitan environment so different from their normal experience have on their attitudes and outlook? How far did they adopt the values, fashions and behaviour of London; and what differences did this make to the ways in which they presented and conducted themselves in their locality? And to what extent, and how, did these encounters with a metropolitan ‘other’ reshape local identities? Historians writing within a localist framework, such as Alan Everitt and John Morrill, have tended to stress the adversarial nature of the relationship between the country gentleman and the court and city. The likes of William Davenport of Bramhall and the Kentish gentleman Henry Oxinden found the vices and corruptions identified with London and the royal court intolerable and distanced themselves from such associations. But scholars such as Anna Bryson and James Rosenheim have followed the lead of cultural anthropologists and sociologists and posited a model of development from about the 1580s onwards in which the growing influence of London, the royal court and the universities, combined with the elite’s embrace of Italianate models of civility, set in train a process of increasing homogenisation. Localised ‘modes of lordship’ gave way to more uniform ‘modes of urbanity’. ‘Manners’ and ‘politeness’, rather than the hierarchical values traditionally associated with the world of the country house and landed estate, came increasingly to define what it meant to be a gentleman.70 Others, notably Ian Warren, have sounded a note of caution, suggesting that the transition was by no means as uniform or as coherent as this model might imply. He points out, for example, that there were a variety of different ‘Londons’ to be experienced, depending on wealth, location and social contacts; and that for many gentlemen ‘a middle course’ of restraint and moderation in embracing the new ‘polite’, 93

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consumer-based fashions was allied to a continuing acknowledgement of the traditional duties and responsibilities of the landed gentleman.71 Nonetheless, he acknowledges that the contrast between the various London societies and the rural environments that the landed gentleman normally experienced had important consequences. This was particularly sharply drawn in contemporary drama and literature, which often contrasted two distinctive social types: the plain-speaking, honest and independent, but also boorish, naïve and sartorially inept, ‘country gentleman’; and the urbane, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, but often hollow and untrustworthy, ‘man about town’. And, of course, these differences morphed into contemporary notions of ‘court/ city’ versus ‘country’. Exploring these polarities, and their comings together, then, offers another way in to analysing the Cheshire elite’s sense of self. The obvious starting point is to investigate links between the Cheshire gentry and London. Although the sources on residence in London suggest that there was a rapid increase in the numbers of gentry visiting from the North and North Midlands between the 1580s and 1630s, the county remained too remote for visiting to become a feature of the lives of the majority of local landowners.72 At its nearest extent it was 180 miles from London and the journey generally took five days, at a time when ownership of coaches was still uncommon. This precluded regular journeys and, as we have seen, middle-ranking and often elite gentlemen – like Henry Bradshawe or Thomas Mainwaring – went for years on end without visiting the metropolis. There were, however, three groups among the elite who were the notable exception to this. One of these was the young sons of gentlemen, who made their way to London and the universities in large numbers in the early seventeenth century. A sample of well-to-do gentry from four shires (not including Cheshire) has established that at least 21 per cent of gentlemen’s sons went to London in their youth, either as apprentices to merchants in one of the capital’s ‘Great Trades’ companies (12 per cent) or as students at one of the  Inns of Court (9 per cent). Those who attended the Inns were usually first or second sons aged between 16 and 20.73 Eighty-four of the offspring of the leading one hundred Cheshire families are recorded as attending one of the Inns, including some fifty-two (22 per cent) of those destined to become heads of their family between 1590 and 1650. Forty-eight (57 per cent) of these students attended Grays Inn, the largest and most prestigious of the Inns because of its connections with the royal court and its reputation as an aristocratic finishing school. Brothers and relatives would often be sent to London together, like William and Urian Brereton, who were dispatched to Grays Inn by their guardian, Sir George Booth, in 1624, aged 20 and 16. There they would be allocated chambers or lodgings in or near the Inn, would keep ‘commons’, which involved dining at the Inn and would usually be supervised by relatives or friends of the family in the metropolis.74 We have little direct information on how these young gentlemen spent 94

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their time in London. Some like John Bradshawe who entered Grays Inn in 1620 and was called to the bar in 1627, evidently took their legal studies very seriously. Most young men at this age, however, found the study of the common law difficult and intractable and they devoted little time to it, since much of the curriculum related to the more arcane and specialist areas of limited practical use in their future roles as landowners and justices. Instead, the majority treated their period of attendance as an opportunity to experience the attractions of London, further their education as gentlemen and expand their social contacts. They attended fencing and dancing schools, became enthusiastic playgoers, listened to sermons, purchased books, gossiped, courted and discharged commissions for friends or relatives back in Cheshire.75 As a student at Lincoln’s Inn in 1613 Thomas Wilbraham arranged for the purchase of silks, textiles, gloves, ruffs and collars for various Wilbraham kin, and of ‘a treble viol gambo’ for his uncle, Sir Richard. Some, no doubt, treated the experience as a period of licensed freedom and adventure, getting involved in incidents like the ruckus described by Bradshawe in 1623 when ‘some gentlemen of our house and of Lincoln’s Inn’ rescued one of their fellows from a debtors’ cell by beating up the constables and watchmen and then fighting a running battle through Holborn armed with swords and pistols.76 Many of these young gentlemen returned to Chester after two or three years in London and ventured back only occasionally. Some 62 per cent of future heads of families attending the Inns still took brides back in Cheshire or a neighbouring shire, with 38 per cent from London or counties farther afield. This suggests that, in terms of shaping their future kinship connections, this period of life in London had an impact on only a minority. Nonetheless, encounters with the metropolis must have broadened their horizons and created lasting impressions for all of them. Similar conclusions can be suggested for the young gentlemen who attended Oxford and Cambridge, usually rather younger, matriculating between the ages of 14 and 16. Eighty-six of the sons of the leading one hundred Cheshire families matriculated or graduated at one of the two universities, the majority, sixty-three (72 per cent) at Oxford, of whom fortynine (78 per cent) went to a single college, Brasenose.77 The connection with Brasenose was forged in the early sixteenth century when Sir Richard Sutton, a Cheshire gentleman from Prestbury, had refounded the college along with  William Smyth, bishop of Lincoln, a native of Lancashire. The link with the two shires was enshrined in the provision that preference be given to Lancashire and Cheshire men in admitting students and granting fellowships. The county’s connections with the college were part of a pattern, analysed by Victor Morgan, in which particular colleges at Oxford and Cambridge developed associations with particular shires through the provision of local scholarships and landed endowments, donations of plate, books and money for building and the preference for local men when granting fellowships. This helped to ensure, Morgan argues, that college life 95

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helped to develop a strong sense of association with the student’s native shire as he mixed with gentlemen’s sons and studied under tutors from his home county, then worshipped in a chapel decorated with the arms of local donors, and dined off tableware and read books similarly decorated.78 Some sense of the local associations that were fostered in this way is provided by the experience of Francis and Thomas Leigh, two of the sons of Sir Peter Leigh of Lyme. They went up to Brasenose in 1608 and had both graduated as Bachelors of Arts (BA) by 1612. During this period they would have mingled with the eldest sons of a number of local gentry, also admitted to the college, who would take their place in the county establishment during the 1630s: Roger Wilbraham, Philip Mainwaring, Henry Delves, William Marbury, Thomas Smith and Thomas Stanley. County contacts were also evident in the working of the college tutorial system. Francis and Thomas were looked after by Mr Richardson and Richard Taylor, the college viceprincipal, both Lancashire men, who accompanied their young charges on journeys back to Lyme and spent time there. In 1622, when William Gamull, the mayor of Chester, was seeking a tutor for his son William, about to go to Brasenose, he approached Thomas Leigh, who had stayed on at the college to become a fellow in 1621. Leigh arranged for him to be placed with Mr Andrewes, a Cheshire man, and also kept a close eye on the young William himself.79 The two years or so that most young gentlemen spent at Oxford or Cambridge, then, especially for the majority who attended Brasenose, must have helped to cement and reinforce the familial and social ties that were already well developed among the Cheshire gentry. At the same time, however, they expanded their range of experience, bringing them into contact with the offspring of other shires and the wider worlds of learning and religion. For the parents who paid out £30 to £50 a year to house, clothe and educate their sons the main imperative was to see them equipped to take their place in gentlemanly society. University colleges were for the most part much less socially exclusive than the Inns of Court, with a majority of students from outside the ranks of the gentry. But it is apparent from correspondence between tutors and parents that the sons of gentlemen spent most of their time in the company of fellow gentry; and it was within this society that their activities and achievements were to be measured. When Thomas Leigh was persuading William Gamull that his son was being well tutored by Mr Andrewes, he was able to assure him that for ‘his behaviour in manners and proficiency in learning he hath not been inferior to any gentleman in the house’.80 Socialising with other gentlemen’s sons, and acquiring politesse and learning, these were the priorities for most parents. Whether or not they were intending to graduate, most of these young gentlemen took their academic studies rather more seriously than those at the Inns of Court. In the first year they spent much of their time in the study of logic and philosophy as outlined in the university curriculum. In the second year there was more divergence, 96

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with matriculands spending time acquiring gentlemanly attributes through extra-curricular activities such as dancing, fencing, riding and hunting. Only a small percentage of the offspring of the leading gentry actually obtained degrees, but those who did were often notably studious. The Latin notebook of the young Richard Grosvenor, who went up to Queen’s College Oxford in 1599 aged 14 and graduated four years later with a BA, shows him going through rhetoric and logic exercises to prepare him for the disputations which were required to obtain a degree.81 The importance of this education was later to be evident in the oratorical skills he demonstrated as a justice and knight of the shire. Grosvenor’s experience at Queens also illustrated another aspect of university: the ways in which it could inculcate religious behaviour and godliness. In his advice to his son Sir Richard described college tutors as ‘the fathers of spirits, having more influence over the resemblance of souls than carnall fathers over bodies’. His own tutor was probably William Hinde, who served as a fellow at Queens before taking up his living in Bunbury. Grosvenor shared Hinde’s staunchly Calvinist and anti-Catholic outlook and was later praised by him for his learning and godliness.82 It is harder to document the impact of a university education on Grosvenor’s fellow gentry, but it is likely that it encouraged many of them towards a godly religious stance. Brasenose and Queens, the two most popular colleges with Cheshire students, were renowned as two of the most puritan colleges in Oxford. The staunchly Calvinist William Webb certainly claimed that Brasenose had a significant influence, praising it for providing local gentry with a ‘most worthy education in all good learning and true religion’.83 The validity of his remarks is borne out by the examples of godly gentlemen who passed through the college, such as Philip and his son Thomas Mainwaring, John Done, Robert Bruen and Henry Hardware. One should, however, be wary of assuming any straightforward link here, because one of those who graduated as BA at Brasenose, in 1619 – and who again took his studies seriously – was the later anti-puritan Sir Thomas Aston.84 Attendance at university, then, like residence in London, offered a range of experiences which took the offspring of the Cheshire gentry outside their shire and broadened their horizons. Two other groups among the leading gentry had strong links with the metropolis. One was the lawyers and senior figures in the judiciary whose professional responsibilities required their regular attendance in London. These included, of course, the likes of Lord Keeper Ellesmere, Sir Ranulph Crewe and judges such as Peter Warburton of Grafton, Sir George Vernon of Haslington and the ship money judge Humphrey Davenport of Sutton Hall; but also less prominent local lawyers such as Peter Daniell, John Bradshaw, Henry Winnington and Thomas Bavand, who were forever shuttling back and forth to manage their clients’ affairs.85 The other was a tight-knit group of leading gentry who were connected to the royal court. Foremost among these, until his death in 1635, was Thomas Viscount 97

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Savage, revenue commissioner to Charles I when he was Prince of Wales, then chancellor to Queen Henrietta Maria. He spent much of his time in residence in his house at Tower Hill, or at Long Melford in Suffolk, both of which he had acquired by his marriage to Elizabeth Darcy. His son, John, who became Earl Rivers, another courtier-peer with a place in the queen’s household, also spent much of his time in the metropolis once he had inherited the Tower Hill residence.86 Two of the county’s other peers, Lord Cholmondeley and Viscount Kilmorey, were listed as more occasional London residents in the privy council’s sweeps of those gentlemen still in London in defiance of royal proclamations in 1632 and 1635;87 another, more regular inhabitant, according to the returns, was Sir Thomas Aston, who, following in the footsteps of his father and uncle, became a gentleman extraordinary of the privy chamber in 1637. During the late 1620s and 1630s Aston mainly resided at a variety of rented houses in and around London, while his mother lived at Aston lodge in Cheshire. It was not until late 1634, when he was appointed county sheriff, that he began to spend significant amounts of time resident in the shire, his fellow gentry remarking that ‘he was inexperienced in the extent of the county, having till then scarce lived amongst us’.88 However, the period of his shrievalty, together with the death of his wife in June 1635, appears to have altered his perspective. He invested considerable amounts of money in refurbishing and reconsecrating the hitherto neglected chapel at Aston and, as we shall see, he commissioned a striking mourning portrait to his wife to hang at Aston. Then, once his period of office as sheriff was over, he secured a place on the Cheshire bench. However, he did not neglect his court contacts and continued to shuttle between the county and his London lodgings. Aston, Rivers, Cholmondeley and Kilmorey were to comprise the core of the royalist party in the shire in the early 1640s, but they already formed a tightly knit London-connected grouping during the 1630s. Aston’s mother, Maude Needham, was Kilmorey’s aunt, and in 1638 Sir Thomas was transporting back to Cheshire a ‘beaver hat’ for the viscount. He was also among the chief mourners at Savage’s funeral in December 1635, as were Cholmondeley and Kilmorey.89 The London contacts of other senior gentry (with the exception of Grosvenor) were, for the most part, less obvious and less sustained than these two groups. Only two senior gentry (Sir Ranulph Crewe and James Massey of Sale) were recorded as resident in London when the muster of the county’s horse was taken in April 1628. Sir Ralph Done of Duddon, a junior branch of the Dones of Utkinton, was recorded as lodging in London when the 1632 and 1634 surveys were made; Sir Richard Wilbraham, John Done and John Crewe of Utkinton were among those gentry known to have visited London to have their portraits painted by fashionable metropolitan artists such as Marcus Geerhaerts and Cornelius Johnson; Sir Thomas Smith of the Hough was regular visitor in the late 1630s and may have had a house in Covent garden; and Thomas Wilbraham, with his new wife, stayed in 98

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the capital for six months between October 1620 and March 1621 before, as Thomas recorded in his family journal, ‘we began our housekeeping’ in Nantwich. He did not return until 1628, when he was made an esquire of the body to the king.90 More often it was younger sons, rather than heads of gentry families, who made their way to London in pursuit of their fortunes. The best-documented Cheshire example is the Moretons of Little Moreton Hall. William had five sons, but was too penurious to provide for the younger offspring out of his estates. Each went his different way. John, the heir presumptive, was disinherited after being sent down from Christ’s College Cambridge under a considerable cloud and then making an unsuitable marriage; Edward, the eventual heir, went into the church and, with the assistance of Archbishop Laud, obtained the living at Barrow in Cheshire; William went to sea to seek his fortunes as a colonial adventurer, therein following in the footsteps and under the mentorship of his cousin Matthew Moreton; Peter attempted to make a career at court as a diplomat in the service first of Sir Isaac Wake and then of Lord Feilding; while Philip, the youngest, pursued a career as an attorney. Both Peter and Philip spent considerable periods of time in London, the former attempting to butter up leading figures at court who might be able to offer preferment, and the latter attending to the business of a range of clients, the most demanding of whom was his own father.91 The difficulties involved in assessing the impact of these encounters with the metropolis and the wider cosmopolitan world beyond the borders of Cheshire are, of course, very considerable. Establishing ‘influence’ of this sort is notoriously problematic, especially when it relates to intangibles such as manners, deportment and conversation. But this has not prevented scholars from attempting the task.92 The approach that has received most attention has been the stylistic influence of London on country house building and tomb sculpture. Nicholas Cooper’s seminal work on the architecture of country houses has highlighted the importance of trends originating in London in the planning and design of provincial country houses.93 Similarly Nigel Llewellyn has traced the impact of London styles and Southwark-based tomb sculptors in transforming the shape and style of provincial funeral monuments.94 Evidence for the influence of London tomb sculptors and their styles within Cheshire in this period is limited. Most monuments constructed between the 1590s and the 1640s originated in local workshops or those of Burton-on-Trent in Staffordshire, rather than in London, and their styles remained mainly local and vernacular.95 In terms of country house architecture, however, the picture is a good deal more varied and complex. Much of the architecture that William Webb observed as he travelled back and forth across the built landscape of Cheshire was profoundly conservative, dominated by local traditions and the taste for ‘half-timbered’ buildings. This was why he waxed so lyrical about Rock Savage, built more than fifty 99

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years earlier. With its stone-based architecture and its decorated gatehouse flanked by octagonal towers, it remained the most architecturally imposing house in the shire (alongside the very similar Brereton Hall) in spite of the fact that even when it was being built its style was considered archaic in the South-East.96 Meanwhile, half-timbering continued to predominate in the new buildings of even the elite families well into the Jacobean period. When Thomas Leigh rebuilt parts of Adlington Hall in the 1580s he used half-timbering, as did Sir William Davenport when he added a long gallery to Bramhall in the 1590s. A pair of half-timbered houses near Audlem, newly built for middle-ranking gentry – Highfields built for William Dod in 1615 and Moss Hall built for Hugh Massey in 1616 – demonstrated that this was still a style which, locally, commanded respect and status.97 A range of considerations encouraged this conservatism: the limited availability of building stone, economies of cost, the skill sets of local builders and, not least, the concern to avoid accusations of ‘vulgarity’ or ‘vainglory’ which were sometimes levelled against the showier architecture of the day. By the latter part of James’s reign, however, tastes were changing. Webb’s comments indicate that innovative architecture was now coming to be regarded not as ‘vulgar show’ but as a statement of refined taste and fashion. His own aesthetic admiration was largely reserved for the new stone- or brick-built houses incorporating the symmetry and classicism that Cooper and others have identified with the London architecture of the Jacobean period. He especially admired Crewe Hall, which he described as ‘a model of that most excellent form of building which is now grown to a degree beyond the building of old times for loftiness, sightlines and pleasant habitation, as in and near London are seen many times in this age of ours’98 (see Figure 1). Crewe adopted the compact double-pile design and high windows of innovative houses in and around the metropolis. Webb’s comments suggest that he himself had observed these new styles at first hand and that they had done much to shape his own architectural sensibilities. This wasn’t the only London-style house that he admired. He described Dorfold Hall, begun in 1616 by Ralph Wilbraham, younger brother of the London-based Master of Requests, Sir Roger, as ‘a most neat and beautiful house of brick’. With metropolitan design and decorative features – such as its entrance concealed within a porch, its staircase located behind the hall and a spectacular plasterwork ceiling in the parlour (possibly the work of the London plasterer Edward Stanyon) – this has been highlighted by Cooper as a prime example of London styles being transmitted to the provinces.99 Webb also expressed similar admiration for houses like Richard Bostock’s Tattenhall Hall and Sir Thomas Stanley’s Alderley Hall, both built in brick and stone and incorporating some of the distinctive features of the ‘artisan-mannerist’ style which was coming to predominate in and around London between 1615 and 1640 – such as flat fronts, hipped roofs, double-pile structures, pedimented gables, classical columns and balustrading. Receptiveness to these features continued 100

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to be a characteristic of new houses built within the shire during the 1630s: for example, at Wettenhall Hall, commissioned by Ralph Wilbraham’s son Roger in 1635, or Peele Hall, built for Henry Hardware in 1632.100 The adoption of these new designs by the Cheshire elite, and the enthusiasm for them evident in the comments of the London-visiting William Webb, then, offer an indication of how London styles and fashion were subtly reshaping notions of taste and status within the borders of the shire. Another example of this sort of cultural transmission was the development of portrait painting among the Cheshire elite. Many of these portraits were painted at Chester, which, as Robert Tittler has shown, was a vibrant centre of provincial portraiture, with workshops operating under the auspices of the local Painter-Stainers Company, most notably that of the herald/arms painter, Randle Holme I. His best-known pupil was John Souch, and those associated with him also included the notable local artists Edward Bellin and Thomas Leigh. All of them painted attributable portraits of local gentry in the town’s Cheshire and north Wales hinterland, including Sir Peter Leigh of Lyme, Thomas Leigh of Adlington and Robert and Anne Davies of Gwysaney, Flintshire.101 However, for some gentry the outputs of these local workshops were not sufficiently fashionable. Local painters were, for the most part, trained in the heraldic painting tradition that John Treuherz has described as producing works which were ‘neat and carefully finished … especially in the costumes’, but with figures that were ‘flat and stiff’, lacking the depth and perspective of the new generation of Dutch artists such as Marcus Geerhaerts II and Cornelius Johnson who were coming to dominate the London art world towards the end of James’s reign.102 There are indications that some of these Chester artists were receptive to the new styles. Thomas Leigh served part of his apprenticeship in London in the 1620s and Souch was influenced by the more naturalistic imagery on display in the scrapbook of engravings collected by the Holmeses, father and son, in the 1630s and 1640s.103 However, their stylistic offerings were evidently not enough to satisfy the tastes and aspirations of a number of Cheshire gentry who were prepared to travel to London to have their portraits painted. One of the first of the local families to embrace this approach was the Wilbrahams, with their extensive London connections via the Master of Requests, Sir Roger. We know that in 1613 Sir Richard Wilbraham had his portrait painted by ‘M. Greenberry’, probably Richard Greenberry of the Painter-Stainers Company in London, and later on he had another portrait executed by ‘Mr Blackburn’, who shuttled between London and Chester.104 Ralph Wilbraham of Dorfold, patron of the avant-garde architecture on display at Dorfold, was painted by Cornelius Johnson in the early 1620s and his son Roger also sat for Johnson.105 The Crewes of Crewe Hall and the family of John Crewe’s wife, the Dones of Utkinton, were even more consistent in their patronage of London-based artists. Sir Ranulph Crewe had his portrait painted by both Marcus Geerhaerts and Cornelius Johnson 101

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12  The triple portrait of Mary Done, c.1635–38, by William Dobson

and both portraits were hanging at John Crewe’s house at Utkinton when it was plundered by royalists in 1644. The inventory of paintings at Utkinton also listed portraits of Sir John and Lady Mary Done by Geerhaerts, probably painted soon after Sir John was knighted in 1617; of himself and his wife, Mary (née Done), by Johnson; and of himself and his father by Peter Lely, who was establishing himself in London around 1643.106 However, the most interesting commission associated with John Crewe is a remarkable triple portrait of Mary Done, executed soon after their marriage in 1637 by the young English painter William Dobson. The design appears to have been copied directly from Van Dyck’s renowned triple portrait of Charles I painted in 1635, with which Dobson may have been familiar from his access to the royal palaces at Whitehall and St James’s, where he could view Van Dyck’s work.107 The collaboration between patron and artist which produced such an avant-garde portrait of a young Cheshire gentleman’s wife suggests an appreciation of fashions in portraiture which can only have come from considerable immersion in the London art world. Perhaps just as significant was Crewe’s perception that this was an appropriate image to display at Utkinton (Figure 12). Another, better known example of Cheshire portraiture that underlines 102

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13  Sir Thomas Aston at the deathbed of his wife, c.1635, by John Souch

some of the same themes is the remarkable funeral portrait commissioned from John Souch by Sir Thomas Aston following the death of his wife, Magdalene, in June 1635 (Figure 13). This has many of the features of the conventional ‘memento mori’ portrait, with a skull prominently displayed, biblical texts relating to the transience of life and the grief of mourning, a lute with broken string, a mourning jewel pinned to Sir Thomas’s chest and (less common) the inclusion of an empty crib denoting the child that Magdalene had died attempting to give birth to. There is also an enigmatic figure of a second woman by her deathbed that some have interpreted as a depiction of Lady Aston while still alive, representing her social body, and that others identify as one of the mourners at her funeral, perhaps her sister Jane. However, the most interesting features, from the point of view of tracing metropolitan influences, are the depiction of Magdalene in bed, as if asleep, and the various props which embellish the painting. Treuherz has suggested that this style of portraying Lady Aston may have been modelled on the Van 103

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Dyck portrait of Venetia Stanley, Lady Digby on her deathbed, commissioned two years earlier by Sir Kenelm Digby. Digby moved in the same courtly circles as Aston and this lends support to Treuherz’s suggestion that the stylistic differences between this and Souch’s other surviving works suggest that Aston, as patron, had a considerable say in determining the painting’s approach and content. In other words, as Treuherz remarks, it ‘can best be seen as a provincial parallel to the Digby portrait’.108 If Sir Thomas directed the way that his wife was depicted, he probably also did much to determine the props and points of reference on the lefthand side of the painting, which are unusual in portraits of the period. There are a globe showing lions and bears and tropical animals and a piece of table covering (probably of imported embroidered Indo-Portuguese cotton) which shows an elephant, a hunting scene and an oriental couple embracing. These were exotic consumer items only readily obtainable in London, and they appear to have been included to signal Aston’s familiarity with the cultural refinement and erudition of the metropolis. The ownership of a globe at this time was taken as one of the props which distinguished the learned ‘virtuoso’; and Caroline ‘orientalism’ was at its height at the royal court in the mid-1630s with the performance of William Davenant’s Temple of Love.109 However, the central message of the portrait is surely conveyed by the gesture of Aston’s left hand resting on a skull and his right hand holding a cross-staff, which is also being grasped and pointed to by his three-year-old son, Thomas. The cross-staff, used in navigation, carries a series of biblical quotations such as ‘He set a compass on the face of the deep’ (Proverbs 8), followed by the phrase ‘my grief is immeasurable’. The skull has the quotation underneath, ‘He who sows in flesh reaps in bones’, probably based on the text in Galatians 6: 8: ‘For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap life everlasting.’ There is a further quotation inscribed in the top left-hand corner of the picture: ‘The sorrows of death compassed me in the year of grief, 30 September 1635, aged 35. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: thy rod and thy staff comfort me’ (Psalm 23). Taken together, these can surely be read as an expression of the depth of Aston’s grief and the way in which it had brought him to a clearer understanding and commitment to taking up a life of faith and spirituality; and in doing this he is rejecting the earthly possessions and signs of temporal wisdom depicted within the frame of the portrait. In other words, it can be read as a ‘vanity’ portrait in which the subject rejects the worldly vanities characterising his material and intellectual life and embraces the life of the spirit. In this sense it can be interpreted in a similar fashion to the near-contemporary anonymous portrait of William Style of Langley, Kent which has been seen as a depiction of Style turning his back on his earthly possessions and embracing a Catholic spirituality.110 However, within this genre an integral part of the message was, necessarily, to convey the subject’s familiarity with 104

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the possessions that he is rejecting. In doing this, in a portrait which was hung at Aston Hall,111 Sir Thomas was signposting for a local audience his status as a man of wisdom, learned virtuosity and fashionable taste, as well as Protestant piety. This is testimony not only to the very deliberate self-fashioning that was intrinsic to contemporary portraiture but also to the complex interaction of London styles and fashions with local status systems and repertoires of honorific self-presentation. A third topic that helps us to comprehend the impact of contacts between London and the Cheshire elite is the dissemination of news. From the 1590s onwards London became a melting-pot for news and information about contemporary politics. News reports came in from foreign posts and provincial newsmongers and were synthesised with the rumours and reports emanating from parliament, the law courts and the royal courts, then retransmitted to a provincial public hungry for topical intelligence. St Paul’s Walk and the Royal Exchange were renowned as the principal sources of news and rumour throughout the kingdom, and their habitués as the best-informed ‘intelligencers’ of their day. It was essentially their reports that were relayed to the provinces via increasingly sophisticated networks for the circulation of oral gossip, newsletters and manuscript pamphlets or ‘separates’ (which contained accounts of almost anything attracting public interest, from parliamentary proceedings and legal cases to court scandal and high-level diplomacy).112 In their apparently insatiable appetite for this material the gentry Cheshire were typical of those of other shires. It is clear from surviving correspondence that anyone spending any length of time in London was expected to send back reports of the latest news; and most surviving Cheshire gentry archives of any size contain examples of topical newsletters and separates. The largest collection of these is in the correspondence addressed to William Moreton, mainly by his own sons. This is dominated by news; news from London, news from the royal court, news from Cambridge and a considerable amount of news from overseas. In 1626 his son Edward wrote from King’s College Cambridge with news of the impeachment of the duke of Buckingham, whom he described as ‘a main obstacle’ to ‘a happy accommodation of all things in our parliament’.113 In 1629, amid a rush of foreign news, Peter informed his father about the fate ‘of those parliament men which are imprisoned’, the debates about whom he described as having devolved into the question of ‘whether the Star Chamber or the parliament is the higher court’.114 Sometimes this sort of news combined the national with the local, containing information of pressing personal import as well as that of more general, political significance. Thus, in November 1640 John Ward, William’s nephew, wrote telling him that ‘I hear not that either my Lord’s Grace or Mr Secretary suffer anything in the king’s good opinion. I hear no bills preferred against Sir Philip Mainwaring nor of suppressing of chapters.’115 Since ‘my Lord’s Grace’ was almost certainly Edward Moreton’s patron, Laud, and ‘Mr Secretary’ Peter’s protector, 105

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Windebank, this was information of direct relevance to the fortunes of the Moreton family. Moreover, ‘Sir Philip Mainwaring’, the earl of Strafford’s secretary, was great-uncle to Philip Mainwaring of Over Peover. Various of Moreton’s correspondents assumed that in passing on such information he was a participant in a dynamic news economy and would be receiving information from a number of other sources. Thus, in 1624 Peter excused himself for not going into greater detail because he knew that ‘Mr John Weld [Moreton’s neighbour in Astbury] and my cousin John Ward have fitted you with such speeches as have been delivered in parliament, [since] they have better helps for the speedy obtaining of them than I have’.116 In June 1628 John Weld’s son, William, who had become the man-of-business to secretary of state Sir Edward Conway, told Moreton that he would ‘fill up a paper with some news if I had any worth writing’, for ‘of home business, and the manner of breaking up this session of parliament, the country will be full upon the coming down of the parliament men’.117 As a letter of August 1627 revealed, what were involved here were the workings of quite complex news networks. Thus, William Weld explained to Moreton that ‘I have made a collation of the news we have of late from several parts and made use of it to countenance a few lines to Mr Leversage [of Wheelock – his uncle], and because I have not time to make a copy of it for you, I send you my letter with a loose seal that you may read the news and then seal it up in Mr Leversage, his letter.’118 While Moreton senior was in receipt of a good deal of domestic news, much of the flow of information coming into Moreton Hall was predominantly concerned with the course and conduct of the Thirty Years’ War. In particular, as one might expect, his son Peter’s letters were full of such stuff. Sometimes he simply sent corantos,119 but far more often personal epitomes of the news gleaned from the myriad other sources that his status as a wannabe diplomat and man about the court made available to him. Peter’s news was either contained in the body of his letters to his father or in separate sheets, bespoke newsletters, crafted for a Cheshire audience, which he compiled and either included with his personal letters back home or sent under separate cover.120 The significance of this seems to be that such purely news-oriented letters could be circulated and read or copied out by others without divulging the private business sometimes conducted in Peter’s correspondence with his father. Dominated by events in central Europe, and particularly in Italy, where Peter had his postings – first under Sir Isaac Wake, then under Lord Feilding and finally, in his own right, as the royal agent in Turin – these letters included accounts of the exploits of the likes of Gustavus Adolphus, Bethlem Gabor and even ‘the Great Turk’ (the sultan of the Ottoman empire).121 As all this implies, William Moreton was something of a connoisseur of news. Accordingly, all of his correspondents evidently took considerable care not to be found palming him off with the commonplace or the inaccurate. 106

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With his father an informed consumer of his son’s dispatches, Peter took pains to make sure that William was in the best position to appreciate the significance of what he was sending back to Moreton Hall. Thus, in October 1629, when he was about to depart for Italy again, Peter procured for his father ‘a map of Piedmont and Montferrat’ that he left ‘with Mr Weld, which I desire him to send to you’, since it ‘will be a good help to you in viewing the towns you will find frequently mentioned in any news come from those parts’.122 Throughout, he was careful to explain the likely geo-political consequences of the moves and manoeuvres he was reporting. Thus, in 1631 he told his father that, if the French and the Swedes came to an agreement, ‘we must expect shortly to see the fire catch in Italy and that the Spanish dominion here will be attempted’. ‘We, in the meantime, are like to break off now our peaceable treaty with the emperor for the Palatinate and I have good guesses our ambassador there shall be shortly recalled and that our king will declare himself and join openly with Sweden …’123 Most of this did not happen; but, quite remarkably, in the rural fastness of Little Moreton Hall William was almost as well informed about these developments as any man about London or the court. For William’s part, it is clear from these exchanges that news mattered to him for a number of reasons. Firstly, he clearly found it intrinsically interesting and important. It also played a considerable role within the social and emotional economies of the Moreton family and its immediate environs. In terms of his relationship with Peter – which was always rendered uneasy by the son’s continuing need for ready money and the father’s chronic debt – the flow of news represented a gesture of deference, a discharge of obligation directed from father to son and the maintenance of a direct connection to the world of affairs and preferment for a gentry family otherwise threatened with precipitate decline. In terms of the social world of Moreton Hall, ‘news’ clearly represented a form of cultural credit, even a source of status, that could be deployed among William’s neighbours and connections in Cheshire. Similar levels of engagement with the news can be deduced from the surviving newsletters and manuscript pamphlets to be found among the manuscript collections of William Davenport of Bramhall, Sir Peter Leigh of Lyme, George Cotton and Sir Richard Grosvenor.124 Many of the separates were in the hands of scribal copyists; but a number, notably among those belonging to Davenport and Grosvenor, were copied in their own hand, suggesting that they too were involved in local networks which were passing newsletters and separates around.125 There is no doubt, then, that the Cheshire elite were thoroughly plugged in to London-based and more localised news networks. The question is, what impact did this have on their attitudes and habits of mind? Why did they immerse themselves in this news culture and how did it influence their ways of thinking in the pre-civil war period? Some of these questions have been addressed at a general level by Ian Atherton and Noah Millstone. Both emphasise that being accounted an expert 107

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in the writing of newsletters, and having a knowledge of the latest news, was regarded as one the attributes of the accomplished gentleman, providing him with a ready topic of ‘polite’ conversation and helping to develop an expertise in ‘matters of state’ which could only enhance his local status and reputation, as is evident in the case of William Moreton.126 Both scholars also demonstrate that becoming a ‘politic’ or ‘statist’, wise in such matters, was increasingly seen as part of the preparation for public office.127 And Millstone takes this further, arguing that the dissemination of topical newsletters and separates helped to fundamentally transform approaches to thinking about politics in the early Stuart period. They enabled the reader to construct a ‘politic’ or ‘prudential’ analysis which sought to interrogate and make sense of the motivation, character and activities of contemporary politicians – often in terms of the ‘dark arts’ of subterfuge, deceit and conspiracy – and thereby anticipate the trajectory of future political events.128 These themes can be explored in the Cheshire context by analysing the material collected by Sir Richard Grosvenor and setting it alongside the public speeches which drew on this. Grosvenor was a diligent collector of books and manuscript pamphlets, many of them acquired during his stay in London. He was also an assiduous writer of newsletters, and when he sat in parliament took considerable care in compiling parliamentary diaries which are among the most thorough to survive. He gave orders for his separates to be bound up and preserved, had many of his books stamped with his initials and built up a library which was renowned for its breadth and extent.129 In 1637, while he was in the Fleet, his son arranged to have some of the volumes of separates shipped over to his father-in-law, Sir Roger Mostyn in Flintshire, so that he too could copy them.130 In all this, perhaps, his principal concern was to prepare himself as ‘a parliament man’, someone sufficiently well informed, and well versed in the political arts to represent ‘the country’ in parliament. The material in Grosvenor’s collection covered the wide range of works that one might expect to find in the well-stocked library of any learned gentleman of the period: standard classical texts, such as Plutarch’s Lives and Morals, Virgil’s Aeneid, Seneca’s Workes … Morall and Naturall and Erasmus’s Epistles and Apothogethmes; poetry by the likes of John Donne, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson; guides to heraldry, such as John Ferne’s Blazon of the Gentrie and Thomas Milles’s Catalogue of Honour; and guides to conduct, such as Thomas Elyot’s Book Named the Governor, James I’s Basilicon Doron and Richard Brathwait’s The English Gentleman. However, two features of the collection are particularly striking. One was the number of books of reformed Protestant theology, such as Jewell’s Apologie and standard works by William Fulke, Joseph Hall, John Rainolds and William Whitaker, together with a large quantity of works of anti-papal polemic by authors such as Alexander Cooke, John Gee, Thomas Moreton, William Prynne and Thomas Scott. These were accompanied by several manuscript separates and a series of 108

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published volumes bound up together which focused on the Jesuits and their plots to destroy international Protestantism. This concentration is more in keeping with what one might expect to find in the library of a Calvinist minister; but that is, perhaps, unsurprising, given the evidence we have elsewhere of Grosvenor’s strongly puritan and vehemently anti-Catholic religious views.131 The other marked feature of the collection is the large quantity of material that would have enabled him to develop a ‘politic’ or ‘statist’ understanding of contemporary politics. Many of the standard works identified by Millstone as providing the means for this style of analysis were present in his library: histories by Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Philip Commynes, Francis Bacon’s History of the Reign of Henry VII, Sir John Hayward’s histories of Henry IV and Edward VI and works by Thomas Scott, such as his Aphorismes of State or certain secret articles for the re-edifying of the Romish church.132 These were complemented by the separates collection which contained manuscript works of recent history, such as Sir Robert Naunton’s ‘Fragmenta Regalia’ and Sir Henry Wootton’s comparison between the earl of Essex and the duke of Buckingham, topical material on proceedings in parliament, Star Chamber cases, diplomatic and ambassadorial material and a treatise outlining the ‘slipperines’, ‘plotts’ and ‘ambition’ encountered at court, entitled ‘A discourse of courts and courtiers’.133 One can see Sir Richard using this material to put himself forward in parliament as something of an expert in contemporary affairs. In November 1621, for example, he delivered a carefully crafted speech, partly in Latin, on the crisis in the palatinate. He set out the dangers of Spanish attempts at world domination and showed an understanding of the strategic difficulties of fighting a continental war for the recovery of the palatinate – no doubt informed by manuscript pamphlets by Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Robert Cotton in his collection, and also by a separate entitled ‘An estimate for a war for recovery of the Palatinate 1620’. This latter contained the minutes of the discussions of the Council of War in January and February 1621 and Grosvenor’s copy has his marginal notes reflecting on the logistical problems of mounting a land campaign on the continent.134 In the subsidy debate of 1626 he recalled, for the benefit of the House, an instance in Henry IV’s reign when parliament was reluctant to record the full extent of the grant lest they create a precedent. Again, this was presumably informed by his separates concerning grants of supply and Hayward’s The first parte of the life and reigne of King Henry IIII. He also drafted several speeches during the Petition of Right debates in 1628 in which he showed himself to be very much at home in using the language of common law and liberties which featured in his parliamentary diaries and separates.135 However, the two themes which he deployed most regularly, and returned to again and again, meshed together ‘statist’ readings of contemporary politics with a ‘providential’ analysis of popish and antichristian plotting to overthrow true religion. His ‘statist’ reading of contemporary politics was set out most fully in the 109

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draft of a speech for 13 May 1626 (which was probably never delivered) in response to the arrest of Sir Dudley Digges for delivering charges against Buckingham. Larded with aphorisms and examples from classical authors such as Tacitus, it framed the whole episode in terms of ‘the venomous shafts of falsehood and untruth’ by which ‘some (ill affected to the prosperity and good success of the house) have by the engines of a crafty wit laboured to sow the seeds of dissension between a king and his people’.136 He utilised very much the same narrative of ‘devilish counsel’, dressing up its actions in ‘specious shows and fair pretences’, in his attacks on the abuse of projectors before the Cheshire electors in February 1624 and in speeches that he prepared in support of Sir John Eliot’s Remonstrance against Buckingham in June 1628.137 Closely aligned with this was his providentially based rhetoric about popish conspiracy. This was developed most fully when, as sheriff, he addressed the gentry and freeholders of the shire before the parliamentary election in 1624. Drawing on the contents of his library, he was able to range back and forth across the recent history of the English Reformation, recalling how, although there was now ‘a difference put between light and darknes, the light of the pure gospel of Christ and the darkness of popery and superstition’, it had not always been so, and there was a danger of the nation becoming complacent about their good fortune. In particular, the plots and subterfuges of seminary priests and Jesuits (‘those instruments of darkness who were wont not to be seen but either in transformed shapes and disguised habits’) had led to a plot at the time of the recent Spanish Match to press for a toleration of Catholics, ‘with which they would not rest satisfied ’till they have used all plotts and practises for the quite extirpation of our religion’. Unless the Protestants woke up to the enormity of the threat and took measures to counter it there was a real prospect that God would ‘turn away his face from us’.138 These two narratives were brought together in his lengthy report to John Pym, the chairman of the Commons’ committee for religion, on 13 February 1629. It connected the recent permissiveness of Catholic practices and Catholic office holders with the rise of Arminianism in the church and the universities, and glossed both as evidence of the activity of classic ‘evil counsellors’ seeking to ‘seduce the king’s conscience, to misguide his judgement, to disjoint his affection from his people, to avert his mind from the calling of parliaments’. He combined this with a prophetic warning that through allowing this to happen, ‘God estrangeth himself from us … as by woefull experience we have cause to suspect, since he goeth not forth with our armies …’; and a caution that such machinations threatened ‘to wrest in sunder that link that ties and unites the hearts and affections of the prince and people together … [and] poison a public spring or fountain whereof all drink’.139 Grosvenor was, of course, exceptional in the level of his public prominence and political experience in Cheshire during the 1620s. No other local gentleman sat more than once as knight of the shire during this decade, 110

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and he was evidently regarded as better equipped than any of his fellows to represent the county’s interests in parliament. However, the stock notions and political clichés that he drew on in his speeches – both in parliament and at the local level – do appear to have had considerable resonance among the gentry and freeholders whom he was addressing.140 Insofar as these clichés were defined and developed in the newsletters, separates and printed works that were collected and circulated more widely within the shire, this points to another critical consequence of the shire’s interactions with London. It helped to develop a political culture within the shire which will be more fully explored in the next chapter.

VARIETIES OF CHESHIRENESS Encounters with London and the royal court, education at the universities and Inns of Court, new styles of portraiture and architecture, the spread of news, all had significant impacts on the multiple ‘identities’ of the Cheshire elite. Moreover, just as there were a number of ‘Londons’ available for the gentry to identify with, so too there were a range of ‘Cheshires’. There was ‘historic’ Cheshire with its palatine traditions of independence, liberty and martial valour; there was ‘dynastic’ Cheshire with its intermarried, longsettled networks of tightly knit families; there was ‘polite’ Cheshire, with its fashionable tastes in art and architecture, and new standards of civility and learning; and there was ‘country’ Cheshire, rooted in traditional values of paternalism and hospitality, its strong sense of hierarchy, degree, loyalty and obligation, and its devotion to ideals of unity and sociability. Each was available to be glossed in different ways and appropriated for different purposes. Local gentry were well versed in this. On one occasion Sir Peter Leigh’s friend Sir John Egerton, son of the lord keeper, joked with him that ‘I am turned courtier more in a month of late than heretofore in a year; but neither court nor country can make me other than your most assured loving friend’.141 In adducing these frames of reference, Egerton was invoking their shared familiarity with a whole variety of roles and archetypes. In some contexts the gentry could find their purposes best served by – or simply take a playful delight in – representing themselves as courtly sophisticates, in others as guileless and simple rustics.142 This is an indication that when exploring the mindsets and attitudes of the local gentry it is unwise to become tied up with the rather reductive either/or categories of ‘localism’ and ‘national consciousness’ within which the discussion of such matters has sometimes been framed. In the case of early modern Cheshire one is dealing with a society in which it was open to the gentry to ‘fashion’ themselves in a whole variety of ways according to what they perceived to be the needs of the moment. As we shall see in the next chapter, this had important implications for governance and politics within the shire. 111

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NOTES 1 Cust, ‘Heraldry and gentry communities’. 2 R. Jenkins, Social Identity (London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2004), pp. 106–17; A. Shepard and P. Withington (eds), Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Places, Rhetoric (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 1–12; A. MacFarlane, ‘History, anthropology and the study of communities’, Social History, 5 (1977), 631–52; C. Carpenter, ‘Gentry and community in medieval England’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994), 340–80. 3 Cited in Hughes, Warwickshire, pp. 49–50; Carpenter, ‘Gentry and community’, pp. 374–5; Cust, ‘Dugdale’, pp. 92–3. 4 Grosvenor papers, pp. 29–38. 5 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2nd edn, 1991); Jenkins, Social Identity, pp. 105–12; Shepard and Withington, Communities, pp. 8–9; P. R. Coss, The Origins of the English Gentry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 8; M.  L. Holford, ‘Pro Patriotis: “Country”, “Countrymen” and local solidarities’, Parergon, 23:1 (2006), 47–70. For a masterful example of this approach, see D. McCulloch, Suffolk under the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), ch. 3. 6 F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1967), 133–54; W. G. Hoskins ‘The rediscovery of England’, in W. G. Hoskins, Provincial England: Essays in Social and Economic History (London: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 209–229, at pp. 209–15; Collinson, ‘This England’, pp. 1–35. 7 Thornton, Cheshire, 54–6. 8 Camden, Britannia, 601–13; Vale Royal, pt 3, pp. 127–9; John Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (London, 1611), fos 69–70, ‘Cheshire’. 9 Morgan, ‘Cartographic image’, 129–54. 10 Ibid., 146–52; Heal and Holmes, Gentry, 281–2. 11 Speed, Theatre of Great Britain, ‘Cheshire’; R. A. Skelton, County Atlases of the British Isles, 1579–1703 (London: Carta Press, 1970), pp. 30–5, 41. 12 Morgan, ‘Cartographic image’, 134–5. 13 I. Warren, ‘London’s cultural impact on the English gentry: the case of Worcestershire, c.1580–1680’, Midland History, 33 (2008), 173; J. Broadway, William Dugdale and the Significance of County History in Early Stuart England (Dugdale Society Occasional Papers, 39, 1999), pp. 7–8, 14–15. 14 Fuller, Worthies, pp. 53–4. 15 Ibid., pp. 53–4. N. Key, ‘The localism of the county feast in late Stuart political culture’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 58 (1996), 211–37. 16 Vale Royal, pt 3, p. 4. 17 Thornton, Cheshire, pp. 43–4; Vale Royal, pt 1, pp. 9–11; pt 3, p. 130; CALS DLT/ B1, fo. 116, an epic poem on the history of the shire by Richard Bostock, Cheshire gentleman poet, written in the 1620s; D. Clayton, The Administration of the County Palatine of Chester, 1442–1485 (Chetham Society, 3rd series, 35, 1990), pp. 48–50. The ‘Cheshire Domesday’ was copied and recopied in the early modern period as an authoritative guide to the shire’s medieval property holdings: R. Stewart-Brown, ‘The Domesday roll of Chester’, English Historical Review, 37 (1922), 481–500. 112

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The culture of the Cheshire gentleman 18 T. Thornton, ‘The integration of Cheshire into the Tudor national state in the early sixteenth century’, Northern History, 29 (1993), 54–8. 19 Thornton, Cheshire, p. 67. 20 Ibid., p. 78. 21 ‘The rights and jurisdiction of the countie palatine of Chester, etc …’, ed. J. B. Yates, in Chetham Miscellany 2 (Chetham Society, 37, 1856), p. 26. 22 W. J. Jones, ‘The Exchequer of Chester in the last years of Elizabeth I’, in A. J. Slavin (ed.), Tudor Men and Institutions (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), pp. 123–70; Vale Royal, pt 1, p. 38. 23 ‘Rights and jurisdiction’, p. 25. 24 CALS ZCR 63/2/692/25. 25 On the importance of foundation myths, see A. D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), ch. 8. 26 Thornton, Cheshire, pp. 45–6, 49–50. 27 Vale Royal, pt 3, pp. 141, 143. 28 CALS DLT, B1, fo. 118. 29 Camden, Britannia, p. 607; Ormerod, ii.8. 30 E. Baldwin, Paying the Piper: Music in pre-1642 Cheshire (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2002), pp. 120–4; Ormerod, i.654–5. 31 Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion (London, 1612), song xl. 32 Vale Royal, pt 1, p. 19; Speed, Theatre of Great Britain, fos 69–70; Fuller, Worthies, pp. 173–4. 33 Broadway, ‘County community’, pp. 48–52; J. Broadway, ‘“To equall their virtue”: Thomas Habington, recusancy and the gentry of early Stuart Worcestershire’, Midland History, 29 (2004), 1–24, at 18–21. 34 MacCulloch, Suffolk, pp. 120–1. 35 Ormerod, ii.9; iii.10. 36 Ibid., i.408; ii.8, 360–1. 37 Jones, ‘Exchequer of Chester’, p. 167. 38 Ormerod., iii.10. 39 Ibid., iii.292. 40 Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT (hereafter Beinecke) Osborn MS b203, p. 39. 41 TNA STAC 8/96/8. 42 Beinecke Osborn MS b203, pp. 40–1. 43 Ibid., p. 41. 44 I. Warren, ‘The cultural horizons of the seventeenth century English gentry’, in J. E. Eales and A. J. Hopper (eds), The County Community in Seventeenth Century England and Wales (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2012), pp. 56–76, at pp. 59–62. 45 Grosvenor papers, pp. 29–38; Bootham and Parker, Savage Fortune, pp. lxvii– lxxxvi. For Aston’s London residences, see below pp. 000–00. 46 Heal and Holmes, Gentry, pp. 98–101; Grosvenor papers, pp. 29–38. 47 Grosvenor papers, pp. 33–4. 48 Ibid., pp. 35–6, 41. 49 Life of Bruen, pp. 197–9. 113

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The Cheshire gentry and their world 50 A. Fowler, The Country House Poem. A Cabinet of Seventeenth Century Estate Poems and Related Items (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), pp. 31–4; see also, Geoffrey Whiting, A Choice of Emblemes and Other Devises (London, 1586), pp. 15–16, 200–1. 51 Wrenbury Wills, pp. 202, 241, 260, 267. For Andrew Cotton’s testimony, ibid., pp. 340–4. See also the will of his sister Dorothy with its bequests of works by Perkins, Preston, Ball and other godly authors: ibid., p. 391–2. 52 J. E. Eales, ‘Herring, Julines (1582–1644)’, ODNB, xxvi.813–14. 53 For more on this see below, p. 127. 54 Wrenbury Wills, pp. 45–6, 55–6, 241–2, 271, 285–6, 299, 312–13. 55 F. Heal, ‘The idea of hospitality in early modern England’, Past and Present, 102 (1984), 66–93; F. Heal, Hospitality in early modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 108–12; F. Heal, ‘The crown, gentry and London: the enforcement of proclamation, 1596–1640’, in C. Cross, D. Loades and J. J. Scarisbrick (eds), Law and Government Under the Tudors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 211–226, at p. 127. 56 Wye Saltonstall, Picturae Loquentes, or Pictures Drawne Forth in Characters … (London, 1631), pp. 55–6. 57 Drayton, Poly-Olbion, song xi; Fuller, Worthies, pp. 171, 187. 58 Ormerod, iii.544–5; Richard Eaton, A sermon preached at the funerals of that worthie and worshipfull Master Thomas Dutton of Dutton esquire … (London, 1616), pp. 21–2. 59 Beinecke Osborn MS b203, pp. 23, 27, 32–3. 60 Heal, ‘Idea of hospitality’, 83–7. 61 Grosvenor papers, p. 32. See also the description of Viscount Savage’s regimented and ‘orderly’ approach to hospitality at his house at Long Melford, Suffolk: Bootham and Parker, Savage Fortune, p. 34. Whether the viscount applied this approach at Rock Savage is not apparent. 62 D. Beaver, ‘The Great Deer Massacre: animals, honor and communication in early modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 38 (April, 1999), 187–216; Heal and Holmes, Gentry, pp. 291–2. 63 Newton, House of Lyme. 64 Victoria County History (hereafter VCH), Cheshire, vol. 5, pt 2 (2005), pp. 255–6. 65 Records of Early English Drama. Cheshire including Chester, ed. E. Baldwin, L. M. Clopper and D. Mills, 2 vols (Buffalo, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2007) (hereafter REED Cheshire), i.674–8. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., i.668–679; CALS, DCH/L/53. 68 R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), ch. 5. 69 Grosvenor papers, pp. xix–xx, 52–95; ‘Sir Robert Hyde (c.1578–1638), House of Commons 1604–1629, iv.851–2. 70 A. Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); J. M. Rosenheim. The Emergence of a Ruling Order: English Landed Society 1650–1750 (Harlow: Longman, 1998). For a summary of this approach, see I. Warren, ‘The English landed elite and the social environment of London, c.1580–1700: the cradle 114

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71 72 73 74

75 76 77

78

79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90

of an aristocratic culture?’, English Historical Review, 126 (2011), 44–74, at 46–8. Warren, ‘Cradle of aristocratic culture’; Warren, ‘Cultural horizons’, p. 74. I. Warren, ‘The gentry, the nobility and London residence c.1580–1680’ (DPhil. thesis, Oxford University, 2007), ch. 1. P. Wallis and C. Webb, ‘The education and training of gentry sons in early modern England’, Social History, 36 (2011), 36–53. W. R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts (London: Longman, 1972), chs 1–3, 5–7. For attendance at the Inns of Court, see, J. Foster, The Register of Admissions to Grays Inn 1521–1889 (London: Hansard Publishing Union, 1889); Students Admitted to the Inner Temple, 1547–1660 (London: William Clowes and sons, 1887); H. A. C. Sturgess (comp.), Register of Admissions to the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple from the Fifteenth Century to the year 1944, vol. 1 (London: Butterworth, 1949); The Records of the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, vol. 1, Admissions 1420–1799 (London: Lincolns Inn, 1896). For heads of families see the pedigrees listed in ch. 1, fn.59. Prest, Inns of Court, chs 6–7; Kelsey, ‘John Lord Bradshawe’(1602–59)’, ODNB, vii.238–42. CALS DBW P/J, 6,7,8, Thomas Wilbraham’s household and farm accounts, 1613–1642; Newton, House of Lyme, p. 122. For university admissions, see J. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, 1500–1700, 4 vols (Oxford: Parker, 1891–2); J. and J. A. Venn (comp.), Alumni Cantabrigienses, Part 1: to 1751, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922–7). R. C. Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England: A Regional Study of the Diocese of Chester to 1642 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), pp. 61–2; Morgan, ‘Cambridge and the country’, pp. 183–245. Newton, House of Lyme, pp. 88–94. Heal and Holmes, Gentry, pp. 263–5; JRL Leigh of Lyme correspondence, William Gamull to Thomas Leigh, 2 Oct 1622. Trinity College Dublin MS 417. We are grateful to Ann Hughes for information about this volume. Grosvenor papers, pp. xiv, 31–2. C. Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 167–77; Ormerod, iii.544. Evidence of Aston’s erudition, in the natural sciences as well as theology, is provided by one of his commonplace books c.1630 in which he recorded copious notes, in Latin, from Aristotle’s De generatione et corruptione: Beinecke Osborn MS b143. TNA SP 16/56/72i. For the activities of some of these London–Chester based lawyers, see CALS DSS, 1/1, 4. Bootham and Parker, Savage Fortune, pp. xxi–xxviii, lviii–lx lxxix–lxxxii. Bodleian Bankes MS 14/26, 62/1; J. Rushworth, Historical Collections, 7 vols (London, 1659–1701) (hereafter Rushworth), ii.288–93. Bodleian Bankes MS 62/34; BL Harleian MS 2173, fos 27–9. Scott, ‘Sir Thomas Aston’; Maltby, Prayer Book and People, ch. 4; CALS DNE 7; Bootham and Parker, Savage Fortune, pp. 2–3. CALS ZCR63/2/6, fo. 40; Bodleian Bankes MS 14/26, 62/1; for gentry visiting 115

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91

92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

102 103 104 105

106

London to have their portraits painted, see above p. 98; for Smith, Bankes MS 38/29; Calendar of State Papers Domestic (hereafter CSPD) 1639–40, pp. 341, 547, 590; for Wilbraham, CALS DDX 210/1. BL Additional MSS 33935, 33936, passim. For Edward Moreton’s relationship with Laud, whose cousin, Margaret Webbe, he had married, see K. Fincham (ed.), The Further Correspondence of William Laud (Church of England Record Society, 23, 2018), pp. xxxvi, 172n, 177–8. I. Warren, ‘London’s cultural impact on the English gentry: the case of Worcestershire, c.1580–1680’, Midland History, 33 (2008), 156–78. Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, pp. 128–94; N. Cooper, ‘Rank, manners and display: the gentlemanly house, 1500–1750’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 12 (2002), pp. 299–301; P. Hunneyball, Architecture and Image Building in seventeenth century Hertfordshire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments, pp. 186–93. Ibid., p. 188; Cust, ‘Culture of dynasticism’, pp. 221–3. Ormerod, i.408; Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, ch. 3. Hartwell et al., Buildings of Cheshire, pp. 23–9; Figueiredo and Treuherz, Cheshire Houses, pp. 15–19, 39–43, 241, 256–8. Ormerod, iii.293. Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, pp. 103, 161–2, 187–9, 229; Figueiredo and Treuherz, Cheshire Houses, pp. 77–80. Ormerod, ii.292, 345; Figueiredo and Treuherz, Cheshire Houses, pp. 61–71, 135–7, 280; Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, pp. 37, 153–4, 173–81, 189. R. Tittler, Portraits, Painters and Publics in Provincial England, 1540–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); R. Tittler, ‘Early Stuart Chester as a centre for regional portraiture’, Urban History, 41 (2010), 3–21; S. Roberts and R. Tittler, ‘Tracking an elusive portrait painter through Stuart England and Wales’, British Art Journal, 11 (2010–11), 24–31; R. Tittler and A. Thackray, ‘Cultural relations between London and provincial towns: Portraiture and publics in early modern England’, in B. Wilson and P. Yachnin (eds), Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 123–136, at pp. 133–6; J. Treuherz, ‘New light on John Souch of Chester’, The Burlington Magazine, vol. 138, 1130 (May 1997), 300–7. K. Hearn, Cornelius Johnson (London: 2015), pp. 12–15. Roberts and Tittler, ‘An elusive portrait painter’, 24–31; Tittler and Thackray, ‘Cultural relations’, pp. 491–3. CALS DBW P/J, 6, 7, 8; Tittler, Portraits, Painters and Publics, pp. 75, 77–8. CALS ZCR 63/2/294, 20, 23–5; Dorfold Hall: Visitor Guide. Johnson attributions are notoriously unreliable; but these are based on family tradition and an identification by John Crewe of Utkinton, who also had his portrait painted by Johnson: Hearn, Johnson, p. 18. CALS ZCR 63/2/694, nos 20, 23–5. Johnson’s clients included a number of senior judicial figures, among whom was Sir Ranulph’s friend Lord Keeper Coventry, whose portrait by Johnson was also at Utkinton: Hearn, Johnson, pp. 19–21. The portraits of Sir John Done, with his staff of office as Keeper of Delamere Forest, and Lady Mary, hang in the Grosvenor Museum,

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The culture of the Cheshire gentleman Chester. 107 Grosvenor Museum, Chester, ‘Triple portrait of Mary Done’; Malcolm Rogers, William Dobson 1611–1646 (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1984), pp. 8–14. 108 Treuherz, ‘John Souch’, 303–6; Llewellyn, Death and Dying, pp. 46–8. We are greatly indebted to Rosemary Keep for her advice and insights relating to this and other group portraits of the period. 109 J. Knowles, ‘“The faction of the flesh”: orientalism and the Caroline masque’, in I. Atherton and J. Sanders (eds), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 111–37. 110 K. Hearn, ‘Commentary on the portrait of William Style of Langley Kent, dated 1636’ (2001), www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/british-school-17th-century-­ portrait-of-William-Style-of-Langley-t02308 (accessed 28 August 2016); J. Dixon-Hunt, ‘The portrait of William Style of Langley: some reflections’, John Donne Journal, 5 (1986), 290–310. 111 Treuherz, ‘John Souch’, p. 306n. 112 R. P. Cust, ‘News and politics in early seventeenth century England’, Past and Present, 112 (1986), 60–90; I. Atherton, ‘The Itch Grown a Disease: manuscript transmission of news in the seventeenth century’, Prose Studies, 21:2 (1998), 39–65. 113 BL Additional MS 33935, fo. 108r. 114 Ibid., fo. 248r. 115 BL Additional MS 33936, fo. 220r. 116 BL Additional MS 33935, fo. 28v. 117 Ibid., fo. 235r. 118 Ibid., fo. 200r. 119 BL Additional MS 33936, fo. 56r. Corantos were newsletters that were published, often abroad, containing foreign rather than domestic news. 120 Ibid., fo. 265r. 121 Ibid., fo. 104r. 122 Ibid., fo. 262r. 123 Ibid., fos 4r–5v. 124 Morrill, ‘William Davenport’, 118–22; Newton, House of Lyme, pp. 135–6; CLM MS A.6.8; CALS ZCR 72/30/10–15; Grosvenor papers, pp. 43–51. 125 For Davenport’s copying see the contents of CALS ZCR 63/2/19; for copies in Grosvenor’s hand of separates that he presumably saw and then passed on, see Houghton Library, Harvard, MS Eng 1266, vol. 1, fos 221–2; vol. 2, fos 188–90, 193–7. For a similar scribal network operating among some of the senior gentry of Worcestershire at this time, see S. K. Roberts, ‘The uses of scribal publication in the making of a Royalist: Henry Townshend of Worcestershire, his “diary” and parliament, 1640–3’, Midland History, 41 (2016), 162–7. 126 N. Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early-Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 178–84; Atherton, ‘Manuscript transmission’, 44; N. Millstone, ‘Seeing like a statesman in earlyStuart England’, Past and Present, 223 (2014), 77–127, at 121–3. 127 Millstone, ‘Seeing like a statesman’, 94–100, Atherton, ‘Manuscript transmission’, 45–6; I. Atherton, Ambition and Failure in Stuart England (Manchester: 117

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The Cheshire gentry and their world Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 153–7. 128 Millstone, ‘Seeing like a statesman’; Millstone, Manuscript Circulation, pp. 165–93. 129 Nearly a thousand printed books and pamphlets dating to the period before Grosvenor’s death in 1645 are listed in various nineteenth-century catalogues of the library, many of them inscribed by his father or with his own initials stamped on the binding. In addition there were at least a further twenty-five volumes of bound separates at Eaton; Grosvenor papers, pp. xvi. For his parliamentary diaries, see Proceedings in Parliament 1628, ed. R. C. Johnson, M. F. Keeler, M. J. Cole and W. B. Bidwell, 6 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977–83), i.23–6. 130 Senate House Library, University of London (hereafter SHL), MS 285, preface; CALS ZCR 63/691/1. 131 Cust and Lake, ‘Rhetoric of magistracy’, 41–3. 132 Millstone, Manuscript Pamphleteering, pp. 172–4, 178–84, 243; Millstone, ‘Seeing like a statesman’, 100–12. 133 SHL MS 285, fos 3–84. For one of Grosvenor’s volumes of bound separates which includes this discourse, with headings and notes in his own hand, see Beinecke Osborn MS fb60. 134 Commons Debates in 1621, ed. W. Notestein, F. H. Relf and H. Simpson, 7 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1935), iii.462; Beinecke Osborn MS fb178. Grosvenor only occasionally annotated his books or separates; for a further example, see Osborn MS fb60. 135 Proceedings in Parliament in 1626, ed. W. B. Bidwell and M. Jansson, 4 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991–6), ii.63. 136 Ibid., iii.259–60. 137 Proceedings in Parliament 1628, iv.76–7, 190–1. 138 Grosvenor papers, pp. 3–4. 139 Commons Debates for 1629, ed. W. Notestein and F. H. Relf, pp. 68–9. 140 For fuller development of this point, see Cust and Lake, ‘Rhetoric of magistracy’, 52. 141 JRL Leigh of Lyme correspondence, Sir John Egerton to Sir Peter Leigh, 20 June 1616. 142 For the self-conscious ‘northernness’ and ‘rusticity’ adopted by consummate courtiers such as Sir Thomas Wentworth and Christopher Wandesford in their correspondence when they were away from London, or the mantle of the ‘plain country gentleman’ that the ambitious place-seeker Sir Robert Phelips took on to deflect the charge that he was turned ‘courtier’, see R. P. Cust, ‘Wentworth’s “change of sides” in the 1620s’, in J. F. Merritt (ed.), The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 63–80, at p. 65; Warren, ‘Cultural horizons’, p. 70.

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3

The governance of the shire

GOVERNING PRINCIPLES

O

n 10 April 1621 Sir James Whitelocke, newly appointed Chief Justice of Chester, delivered the first of a series of charges to the JPs and grand jurors assembled for the Great Sessions (or assizes) at Chester. His main task was to inform them of their legal responsibilities and galvanise them into action; but he also used the occasion to provide a commentary on the nature of the English ‘body politic’.1 He presented a wide-ranging analysis of the quasi-republican modes of ‘mixed government’ that characterised what Patrick Collinson has called the ‘gentry republics’ of late Tudor and early Stuart England.2 The main purpose of this was to impress on his audience the need for them to engage actively at every level of local governance and take to heart the principal obligation of ‘every citizen of this commonwealth, a care of the public’. But in the process he delineated the self-governing features of the local political community in terms which highlighted the powerful impulses towards autonomy and self-responsibility under the direction of the local gentry that characterised the polities established in the English shires during this period. Such self-government, of course, could take place only under the umbrella provided by the sovereignty of the monarch. Local governors were just as much the servants of the monarch as were the assize judges. As Whitelocke reminded them, ‘our whole act is supported by the king’s regal power’, which was distributed as ‘a stream’ flowing from the ‘fountain of justice’ that was the royal person.3 But in the context of this charge it was the quasi-republican elements that he emphasised. Taking as his frame the classical tri-partite division between monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, he declared: ‘It will be granted that a monarchical state with some indifferent mixture of Aristocracy and Democracy as 119

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a­ ttending that other is surest and best settled.’ The clearest demonstration of this was ‘our Court of Parliament’, where the Lords and Commons embodied aristocracy and democracy.4 But it was just as much the case in the arena of  local government. Here the prime responsibilities of power and justice were devolved ‘by commission to the justices of peace, being the Aristocracy of the place’; while the grand jurors comprised the element of democracy, ‘a select number’, chosen by the sheriff, as MPs were by the freeholders, to stand as ‘the representative body of this whole shire’. For both groups, their oaths of office created an obligation ‘to stand between the king’s majesty and the body of this county’. The JPs were to take responsibility, alongside the assize judges, for ‘the administration of justice’ and to provide leadership in executing and overseeing ‘the affairs of the country’. They were also to keep the judges, and via them the king, informed of local matters, and then in turn to receive their advice.5 The grand jurors he described as the ‘oculus magistratus’, the ‘eyes and eares’ of the justices and judges without whom ‘we can see nothing’ and are ‘shut out from proceeding against any offendor if you open not the doore to us by your presentment’. Both sets of local officers must again follow their oaths of office by performing their duties according to their consciences, with ‘neither fear nor favour, nor reward, nor affection’. If they failed to do so, this would result in ‘breaches and ruptures of the government of this country’, ‘disorders and enormityes’, the nightmare of the collapse of government, order and unity, not just locally but throughout the commonwealth.6 Whitelocke, then, was presenting a vision of a ‘gentry republic’ in which justices and jurors were closely integrated with the monarch and his privy council via the assize judges, but at the same time exercised considerable autonomy and self-responsibility within the realm’s traditions of mixed government. These local officers not only comprised the ‘aristocratic’ and ‘democratic’ elements of county government but were ultimately responsible for activating its processes and determining its outcomes. Their performance in these roles was informed by two further themes highlighted by Whitelocke. The first of these was the understanding that right order was ultimately based on upholding a moral ethos and curbing man’s inherent sinfulness. Whitelocke explored the implications of Aristotle’s view that society was an aggregation of individuals and families and that the well-being of the whole depended on the good conduct of its individual members. You must begin first at the ethic – everyone must be of good manners – then you must proceed to the oeconomic – every one must prosper in his private family – and lastly you come to the pol[it]ic which is a commonwealth made and aggregated together in divers families well ordered and every family of divers persons well mannered.7

Whitelocke, like most contemporaries, took the view that contentiousness and criminality within society were largely a consequence of fallen man’s 120

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inherent sinfulness and his inability to control his conflicting passions. One sin led to another and crime was often seen as the logical consequence of vices such as greed, lust, idleness and drunkenness.8 From this perspective, as Whitelocke explained, the principal task of justices and grand jurymen was to ensure that ‘goodmen shall be cherished, evil men punished’; for ‘that commonwealth shall flourish where vice and vicious persons are suppressed’. The onus was on them to show themselves to be men of virtue and wisdom – ‘goodmen’ as Whitelocke addressed them – to set an example and then apply these qualities in the execution of law and justice. They must follow their consciences, use their discretion to inquire into ‘the injuriousness and ill manners of the inhabitants’, and promote the good and the godly. The end of their endeavours was the order, unity and peace in the commonwealth that would flow from this.9 To amplify this final point, Whitelocke also discussed law and justice, and drew important distinctions between them. The law he presented as a code, a set of principles and rules, given authority by the king, parliament and the traditions of common law, which would guide individuals not only in promoting moral rectitude and controlling their passions but also in upholding their ‘private’ and property interests. It was the essential yardstick by which one came to ‘distribute to every man that which he ought to have’, what contemporaries referred to as meum et tuum. The end of the right use of law was ‘peace, plenty and security’, in accord with the familiar biblical image that Whitelocke deployed that ‘Everyman shall sit under his own vine [and] enjoy that he hath without spoiling or rapine …’. Taking away the law would leave everything to fall into confusion.10 However, the law had to be applied, and this was where justice came in. Justice was about the application of law in such a way as to bring about social peace. As Whitelocke reminded the justices and jurors, we are come together to do justice … the end of our works is more public for it is peace … How beautiful are the feet of him that publisheth peace … for upon justitia pax; peace is the work of justice and wheresoever justice is done peace ensueth of it.11

Because of the nature of the jury charge, which was largely about galvanising magistrates and jurymen into action, the justice that he referred to most often was the vigorous and impartial application of the law. But implicit in all this was the message that justice was not always about rigorous application of the law. It was also about using discretion to waive the strict letter, about engaging in processes of arbitration and dispute settlement rather than prosecution where this was appropriate. What was implicit in Whitelocke’s charges was spelled out by his colleague on the northern circuit, Sir John Davies, addressing the York assizes in 1620: justice and peace have kissed each other (as it is in the psalm) for as peace is the mother and nurse of plenty … so justice is the mother and nurse of peace. For the 121

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The Cheshire gentry and their world scope and end of justice is to appease all tumults, to end all controversies, and to repose and settle all men and matters in quiet and safety.12

Whitelocke, then, was presenting a model of commonwealth and county government administered by active citizens conscientiously discharging their duties within local society, applying the principles of justice with wisdom and integrity, seeking to curb the inherent sinfulness of fallen man, and all to the ends of promoting peace, harmony and social order. These ideals and aspirations were commonplace among the governing classes in early Stuart England; and they were picked up and reiterated within Cheshire by Sir Richard Grosvenor, in two charges to the grand jurors at quarter sessions, and also in his advice to his son. Grosvenor spent much of his time focusing on the relationship between law and justice that was set out in Whitelocke’s charges. But he then developed this discussion in two further ways which supplemented what Whitelocke was saying. Firstly, he laid out clearly and explicitly the responsibility of the magistrate to waive the rigour of the law where appropriate and engage in processes of composition and settlement. This was a central plank of Grosvenor’s administration of justice. His approach rested on fundamental notions of Christian charity, coupled with acknowledgement of the importance of maintaining social peace. As we saw in the previous chapter, contemporaries were constantly being reminded of the obligation of all to promote the settlement of disputes and to be in love and charity with their neighbours, enemies as well as friends.13 Grosvenor sought to impress this on his son: ‘Differences may arise between the nearest friends but it is a Christian part to try all fair means to decide them before extremity be used.’14 The end must always be the ‘public peace’, which, Grosvenor insisted, was often best served by refraining from rigorous application of the law: Be a chancellor rather than a justice among your neighbours who are too apt to fall into contention and count it an honour to compose their differences and keep them from pick-purse lawing … persuade and move them to a reconciliation. Such an end will be lasting and beget hearty peace.15

Justice, then, for Grosvenor (as indeed for his fellow magistrates), was about the flexible and appropriate application of the law, about pursuing a ‘culture of reconciliation’ wherever this was feasible.16 Secondly Grosvenor extended this obligation – alongside his other responsibilities as a magistrate – to encompass not just the ‘gentry republic’ of Cheshire but the wider ‘monarchical republic’ of the English nation. This obligation was again couched in the language of classical republicanism. Like most magistrates, Sir Richard subscribed to the Stoic notion that a life of active involvement in politics and public service (negotium) was generally preferable to one of philosophical contemplation and withdrawal (otium). In some circumstances otium could be justified – Grosvenor’s enforced retirement while he was imprisoned for debt was a case in point – but for the most 122

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part he endorsed the Ciceronian precept that ‘every man owes his country a tribute of action’.17 The principles that should guide this action were in many ways summed up for Sir Richard in the distinction he drew between ‘public’ and ‘private’. At one level he used these terms simply to distinguish between family and personal concerns and those which related to a broader public interest. But at another level they took on a moral force and potency which allowed them to stand for fundamentally opposite approaches to government and magistracy. Here ‘private’ meant what was selfish, corrupt, even tyrannical, putting ‘profit, kindred, alliance, friendship, revenge and all by respects’, before the common welfare as he described it. ‘Public’ was its antithesis, a concept that embraced the common good, or the common weal, and the duty of the gentleman to serve it unselfishly. When he delivered a charge to the grand jurors at the Chester quarter sessions in January 1626 he summed up their duty as mementote reipublicae, which meant literally ‘be mindful of the public thing’, but which he translated as ‘be mindful of the commonwealth’.18 He gave the same advice to his son, counselling him to Remember your oath and work not your own ends by your public calling; for every good magistrate should have his thoughts so strongly possessed with zeal of the common good that he should have no leisure to harbour thoughts of private ends.19

The governor who followed such principles would earn the accolade of ‘honest’, which implied not only sticking to one’s word and demonstrating wisdom and justice in public affairs but also that one was worthy to be ‘honoured and esteemed’.20 Grosvenor himself, in his address to the Cheshire electors in 1624, proudly proclaimed that he was ‘an honest man and ever to be more respective of the public interest of my country than that more private of my nearest and dearest friends’. Then he went on to insist that such men were most fitted and best equipped to represent the county in parliament, and there to work together with other MPs to remedy the grievances of ‘the country’.21 Grosvenor, then, was spelling out the ways in which the languages and precepts that informed social, administrative and political action at a local level applied just as forcefully in the wider worlds of national government and politics. These various ideals and aspirations chimed closely with the Cheshire gentry’s own understandings of their social and neighbourly obligations as defined in notions of ‘good lordship’. As we have seen, they conceived of themselves as an aggregate of ancient families and kinship networks, rooted in their shire and providing the bedrock of a county commonwealth, with proud traditions of autonomy and self-government. On their discharge of familial and neighbourly responsibilities within the ‘countries’ defined by their patrimonial estates and kin networks depended the ordering and preservation of the organic, hierarchically configured, local communities. It was their duty to preserve peace and order, to uphold the interests of neighbours and dependents, to shelter the poor and to match up to ideals of honourable 123

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public service. But, as they recognised, while their wealth and status might provide them with the social clout and authority to discharge these responsibilities, they also relied on the active cooperation of wide swathes of those whom they were responsible for governing. Good governance rested additionally on the ‘element of democracy’, on processes of consultation and collaboration with those dependants, tenants and neighbours with whom they engaged in the localised processes of ‘downward deference’. The question is, how far were these ideals and aspirations realised in day-to-day practice? How far did the Cheshire gentry adhere to these models of an active citizenry conscientiously discharging their governmental duties within local society?

THE PRACTICE OF GOVERNANCE ‘Public service of the country’ was an important part of the Cheshire gentry’s raison d’être. It was a vocation which justified the freedom from having to work with their hands that their wealth afforded them, and it brought with it status and reputation within local society. This helps to explain why so many engaged with the often painstaking and unremitting responsibilities of governing their shires, without obvious material reward.22 The numbers of those identified as gentlemen in Cheshire at this time are difficult to establish, but it was probably in the order of five to six hundred.23 Within this group offices and responsibilities were largely allocated within three tiers, according to social ranking. In the top tier were the JPs and deputy lieutenants. Most justices during the 1620s and 1630s were drawn from the highest-ranked sixty families in the Adlington display, and the more senior deputy lieutenants from the top twenty.24 These comprised the county’s knights and senior esquires. Because of the considerable turnover of personnel on the county bench during this period – due to the deaths of serving JPs and occasional purges of the inactive or politically unreliable – and because the bench numbered between forty-five and sixty at any one time, this allowed scope for members of the majority of those sixty families to serve. Only eleven were not represented at some point between 1620 and 1642.25 Often there was good reason for this: the family dying out in the male line (in the case of Dutton of Dutton), non-residence in the shire (in the case of the Bulkeleys and the Egertons of Egerton) or financial penury (in the case of the Tattons of Wythenshawe). Otherwise the county’s social elite largely constituted its magisterial elite, and, given a capacity and ambition to serve, sons could generally expect to succeed their fathers on the county bench. Immediately below this group, was the large body of individuals comprising the county squirearchy, many of whom featured in the Adlington display of 186 families, but also extending well beyond this. This group has received much less attention from historians than those who served as county justices, but they often had considerable official and administrative experience in quasi-magisterial roles. They provided a pool of potential office holders 124

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from whom sheriffs and JPs might be drawn, but who were also available to serve on all sorts of commissions from the crown and the central courts at Westminster. When the commission of the peace was increased from forty-seven to eighty-one to provide assistance in the collection of the forced loan in October 1626, it was from this group that extra commissioners were largely recruited: substantial esquires such as Philip Oldfield of Somerford, son of a leading county lawyer (ranked 72 at Adlington), William Moreton of Little Moreton Hall, the impoverished head of a long-established county family (ranked 58), or two of the Wilbrahams, Thomas of Nantwich and Raphe the builder of Dorfold Hall (both established too recently as heads of dynasties to feature in the Adlington display).26 These were often men of as much weight and substance within their immediate localities as the members of the county bench. They also staffed the commissions of inquiry issuing from the Exchequer Court at Chester; they served as captains and officers in the county militia; they were regularly called on by the justices to carry out responsibilities at hundred level relating to bridge and road repairs or poor relief; and they turned up at the county court to confirm the election of knights of the shire and have their names recorded on the indenture.27 This group overlapped considerably with the third tier of office-holding gentry: those who served as grand jurors at quarter sessions and assizes, head constables within their hundreds – acting as the main channel between the county magistrates and the parish constables, with specific responsibilities for collecting local rates – and jurors and commissioners in other capacities, such as validating the inquisitions post mortem listing the property of deceased gentlemen. John Morrill has calculated that 609 individuals from 497 families served as grand jurors at the quarter sessions and assizes between 1617 and 1665, with around two-thirds of the head constables being drawn from the same pool. Many of these were on the cusp of gentility, from middling yeoman families, although all were designated with the honorific title of ‘gentleman’ by dint of their public service. But at the apex of this group, often serving for long periods, were members of the county squirearchy whose families were recorded on the Adlington display: men such as George Bostock of Churton esq., who served on twenty-seven of thirty assize grand juries 1627–42 (ranked 138); Paul Winnington of Birches esq., grand juror, head constable for Northwich and man of business to the Cholmondeleys at Vale Royal (ranked 145), John Bruen of Stapleford esq., son of the famous puritan who was a regular grand juror (ranked 68) and Humphrey Page of Erdeswick esq., who served on forty juries 1625–43 (ranked 181). These men added considerable clout and prestige to the offices in which they served and, by dint of the regular attendance at quarter sessions and assizes – often more regular than that of the JPs – they gained considerable experience in the affairs of the shire.28 Parish office holding, of course, extended well beyond the ranks of the gentry. One of the themes highlighted by historians of the law and local 125

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­ overnment has been the ‘social depth’ of participation in their processes. g Right down to the lower levels of property ownership, among yeomen, husbandmen and artisans, individuals were recruited as jurymen, parish constables, churchwardens, overseers of the poor and members of parish vestries. Like the vestrymen of Swallowfield in Berkshire, who described themselves as ‘honest and civil men … careful for the commonweal’, they often had a considerable sense of their political standing and responsibilities.29 The parishioners of Prestbury, for example, displayed considerable legal knowledge and political acumen in fighting off attempts by the parish’s outlying townships to spread the burden of poor relief across the whole parish. Between 1638 and 1641 they lobbied JPs, quarter sessions, the Cheshire-based judge Sir Humphrey Davenport and eventually the Long Parliament MP Sir William Brereton to secure a verdict in their favour.30 Whitelocke’s vision of a ‘gentry republic’ with ‘aristocratic’ and ‘democratic’ elements and different tiers of involvement in the ‘public service of the country’, then, was to a considerable extent realised in practice in early Stuart Cheshire. What Whitelocke’s jury charges do not reflect, however, is the extent to which this service was often performed within much more circumscribed arenas than the whole shire.31 Government by the JPs through quarter sessions was relatively devolved, with the instincts of the gentry tending to favour government within their hundreds or neighbourhoods. Devolved meetings of the quarter sessions were established in the county by the 1610s, with the Epiphany sessions meeting at Chester, Easter at Knutsford, Midsummer at Nantwich and Michaelmas at Middlewich, or sometimes Northwich. Attendance fluctuated markedly across different venues, but was never very high. Out of a bench with never less than thirty-five JPs based within the shire, it was highest at Chester and Nantwich, the two main county towns. But the average here was still only ten to twelve, and in Knutsford and Middlewich it dropped to six or seven. Some attended only those sessions nearest to their residence, like George Cotton of Combermere, who attended all the sessions at Nantwich but no others; or Henry Birkenhead of Backford and William Glegge of Gayton, both from the Wirral, who attended only the sessions at Chester. Others were more diligent and spread their attendance more widely. Sir William (later Lord) Brereton of Brereton and his eldest son, Sir John, regularly appeared at the eastern sessions at Knutsford, Middlewich and Nantwich, although they rarely travelled to Chester; Sir George Booth, who took over from his son as custos rotulorum in 1627, attended two to three sessions a year and was regularly at Chester, even though his house at Dunham Massey was well to the east of the shire. Sir William Brereton of Handforth, living even further to the east in Macclesfield hundred, was the most assiduous attender of all, generally present at three, sometimes four, sessions a year.32 At each of these sessions the sheriff summoned rosters of freeholders from every hundred and would then select from these panels to act as the grand jury and other juries. But, as Morrill has demonstrated, 126

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those impanelled were drawn disproportionately from the local hundreds – Macclesfield, Bucklow and Nantwich providing the jurors for Knutsford sessions; Broxton, Edisbury and the Wirral for Chester and so on. The bulk of presentments made and business transacted at the sessions would also relate to these local hundreds.33 Most of the complaints, petitions and presentments that came before these sessions would be sifted by the justices, then passed down to the local level to be investigated and resolved, often at meetings of petty sessions, which in Cheshire were organised for each of the seven hundreds.34 These had become established in the shire since the 1590s, and by the 1620s and 1630s each had its own distinctive group of local justices who would turn up regularly and take the lead: Sir William Brereton of Handforth, Thomas Stanley and Hamnett Hyde for Macclesfield hundred; Peter Venables and William Leversage esq. for Northwich hundred; and Sir John and Thomas Savage, supported by the clerical justices William Foster and George Byrom, for Edisbury hundred.35 At these sessions they would deal with most of the routine business of justices: overseeing poor relief, pursuing vagrants and beggars, licensing and suppressing alehouses and organising bridge and highway repairs. A good deal of this work was also devolved to an even more local level, with meetings in the justices’ parlours. Here, acting singly or in pairs, as statute sometimes required, they would arbitrate neighbourly disputes, investigate bastardy cases, deal with minor misdemeanours and issue recognisances to bind over more serious offenders to appear at quarter sessions or assizes. So, their areas of immediate activity and influence would often be much smaller than their hundred, bounded by an orbit around their estates. The locations referred to in the recognisances that they signed give a good idea of the extent of the neighbourhoods in which they were operating. George Cotton, for example, who regularly acted in tandem with his friend and neighbour Sir Richard Wilbraham, signed recognisances over an area up and down the eastern side of Nantwich hundred, as far north as Worleston, four miles to the north of Nantwich. The four most active justices in Macclesfield hundred, Brereton, Stanley, Hyde and Sir Edward Fitton ranged across the hundred as a whole but were still most active close to their estates (Figure 14).36 The justices’ engagement with local administration was another aspect of their exercise of ‘lordship’, and their activities tied in closely with their sense of obligation to tenants and neighbours. They often featured in the quarter sessions records as petitioners on behalf of their neighbourhood or as arbiters of local disputes. Sir Thomas Delves, for example, approached Sir George Booth as custos in 1630 to request that an indictment by his tenants against a local gentlemen who was blocking their access to church be heard at Nantwich in the summer rather than at the next sessions at Knutsford, because most were ‘old men and not able to travel’. Edward Warren, an esquire on the tier immediately below those on the county bench, was a ­persistent lobbyist on 127

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14  The distribution of a sample of recognisances signed by Sir William Brereton, Sir Edward Fitton, Hamnett Hyde and Thomas Stanley in Macclesfield hundred during the 1630s 02/06/2020 07:46

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behalf of his home parish of Poynton, petitioning sessions to alleviate the burdens of poor relief and keep the local highway open for the transport of coal.37 ‘Localism’, in the sense of identifying with and representing immediate neighbourly interests, was a notable feature of this everyday engagement with local government. There was a tendency to favour proceedings which kept local control of problems and applied localised solutions. A good example of this was the routine business of bridge repairs. In a county with an unusually large number of rivers and bridges, this was a constant preoccupation; and because the sums involved were often large – in 1634 bridge repairs in Nantwich hundred amounted to £310, compared to its ship money levy of around £500 – they often involved protracted negotiation and repeated orders from sessions to enforce payment.38 There was much to be said for centralising the process and levying county-wide rates for repairs, particularly in the case of Warrington bridge, the main crossing for the river Mersey, the upkeep of which was shared with Lancashire. But the consistent line of the majority of the bench was to stick with the principle that monies be levied, paid out and accounted for in the hundreds in which the bridges were located. When, between 1623 and 1625, the assize judges tried to overturn this and introduce county-wide levies there was an outcry. At the summer sessions at Nantwich in July 1625 the justices adopted an unusually highflown rhetoric to oppose it. The judges’ order was described as ‘a dangerous precedent for the tyme to come, against the power of justices of peace in like cases … prejuditiall both to the power and authority of this court and the liberties of the subject …’. The bench even offered to cover the costs incurred by any head constables for non-cooperation.39 The assize judges backed down and, as Morrill has noted, thereafter consistently referred contentious petitions and presentments back to the hundreds or the local justices.40 A similar approach was evident when it came to dealing with intractable problems of social regulation, such as poor relief, vagrancy and alehouse licensing. There were occasional efforts to ginger-up local officers and enforce regulations on a county-wide basis, via quarter sessions; but they then tended to fall back onto initiatives taken by individual justices operating within their local orbits. The most forceful set of such orders was issued at Knutsford sessions in April 1629 in response to what the grand jury had presented as the ‘growing evil’ of vagrants and beggars. The county bench issued a series of strict orders to apprehend such individuals and provide parish stock to put them to work. But the effectiveness of these depended on a viable house of correction, and this did not exist in Cheshire, since the administration of the house at Northwich had collapsed in the mid-1620s.41 More successful in resolving the problem – at least, according to the reports of the justices’ themselves – was the employment of hundred-based provost marshals in response to the Book of Orders issued in 1631. Again, the responses to the book, although it was intended to invigorate local government on a countywide basis under the auspices of the sheriff, tended to be localised. The 129

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reports sent in by JPs from their monthly sessions illustrated the variety of responses rather than any cross-county coordination. Some simply offered bland assurances to the sheriff that the threat of dearth had receded as grain supplies improved; others complained of the ‘backwardness’ of parishes in providing stock for the relief of their poor; and the Nantwich justices asked the sheriff to work with the judges to establish a new house of correction and procure warrants to force local inhabitants to pay for provost marshals.42 It is difficult to measure how far the local magistracy matched up to the ideals of public service extolled in the charges of Whitelocke and Grosvenor. But it does appear that many of them as individuals were both hard working and conscientious, in part, perhaps, because so much of their work was being done within their immediate locality and was subjected to continuous scrutiny by their neighbours. The most industrious among them, like Sir George Booth and Sir William Brereton of Handforth, or the less highprofile Thomas Marbury, one of the workhorses of the commission during the 1620s and early 1630s, must have been active from day to day, week to week. They attended sessions, dealt with small-scale crime, oversaw bridge and highway repairs, licensed alehouses, supervised the poor law, bastardy orders and apprenticeships, controlled the erection of cottages, arbitrated neighbourly disputes, made sure that rates were collected and so on.43 The sheer level of detailed engagement that this work often required was perhaps best illustrated in the administration of bastardy orders. Concern to relieve parishes as much as possible of the unpopular burdens of poor relief involved the JPs in an inordinate amount of time and effort, as they had to take depositions to establish paternity, track down fathers or more distant kin to provide for the upkeep of children, secure orders from quarter sessions where they defaulted on payment, arrange apprenticeships when the children were old enough and, sometimes, where all other means failed, issue licences to allow the mothers to beg.44 In some senses at least their efforts do seem to have borne fruit, with an estimate in one year that of 121 bastards in Northwich hundred only 10 per cent were having to be supported by local rates.45 The point at which administrative responsibilities intersected most obviously with the obligations of lordship was in the settlement of disputes. Mechanisms for promoting arbitration and reconciliation were many and varied, deeply embedded within the county’s judicial and administrative machinery. As an equity court, the Exchequer at Chester favoured the negotiation of durable settlements rather than providing the win or lose verdicts which tended to be the outcome of litigation at common law. To this end it frequently referred cases on to local gentry for arbitration; for example, the 1640 dispute between George Cotton and William Curdworth over lands at Newhall, which was settled by local justices Sir Richard Wilbraham and John Crewe.46 Assizes and quarter sessions, too, regularly referred matters to groups of local gentry for arbitration, often in response to petitions from groups of villagers begging for an intervention that would secure ‘the peace 130

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of the country’.47 This was where those gentry on the second tier below the county magistrates were frequently called on. For instance, a 1620 quarrel between local landowners was referred by Knutsford sessions initially to the arbitration of two local esquires, Robert Duckenfield and Lawrence Hyde, and then, if they were unable to resolve the matter, to the senior local justice, Sir Peter Leigh of Lyme, to be ‘umpire … for the final ordering thereof’.48 Sir Richard Grosvenor, who, as we have seen was a constant advocate of the importance of arbitration, regularly performed the role of peace maker. This applied to a whole range of quarrels, from composing property disputes between friends and neighbours to ending the squabbles arising out of the Chester election to the Short Parliament; and such was his reputation that he was known locally as ‘the honest chancelor’.49 The painstaking procedures that were often involved were illustrated in a star chamber case in which Sir George Booth was accused of partiality on behalf of his neighbour, Edward Vawdrey. In his defence, Booth cited more than twenty years’ service as a justice, much of it devoted to securing ‘a friendly composicon’ over ‘controversies and suits’. The matter had come before the Chester sessions in January 1616 and was referred to pairs of gentry to referee: Booth and John Venables on behalf of Vawdrey, and Sir Roger Mostyn and Edward Gregg on behalf of the plaintiff, Thomas Powell. They held a first hearing at Knutsford in July, but this dissolved into mutual recriminations between those involved. Booth then invited the referees to his house at Dunham, where he had drawn up articles which were ‘very well liked of by Sir Roger Mostyn … who acknowledged them to be very honest’ and then passed on to Gregg for approval. Further meetings were proposed which were still to take place.50 Again, the evidence points to the time and trouble taken by conscientious and public-spirited local gentlemen, particularly for those within the top two tiers of local governance. This sort of diligent service brought its rewards in terms of recognition and reputation. Webb hailed Sir William Brereton of Brereton, who was a knight of the shire, a deputy lieutenant and an active justice up to his death in 1631 at the age of over eighty, as the best sort of county office holder: A worthy governor in his country, a man whom the world acknowledgeth to have spent his study, his care, his years, even now to a full maturity in the upright managing of the great affairs of the country, both for military forces and the political government with admirable commendation of singular integrity.

Similar accolades were conferred on other gentry. Sir Henry Bunbury was eulogised for ‘his endeavours to do good in public government’, and Sir Richard Wilbraham as ‘a very worthy gentleman and a good justice of the peace, and provident for his country’.51 There is plentiful evidence, then, that Cheshire’s magistrates strove to live up to their self-image as promoters of the welfare of the ‘public weal’. How far they were successful in this is another matter. Steven Hindle’s 131

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work on the governance of the shire suggests that in many respects their achievements fell well short of their aspirations. Levels of crime were high, the implementation of social policy was ‘attenuated, haphazard and localised’ and the impact of measures such as the Book of Orders was minimal.52 On occasion they could also act with a notable absence of justice and compassion. Hindle’s analysis of the case of Margaret Knowsley of Nantwich, who had dared to gossip about the sexual harassment she had suffered at the hands of the town preacher, Stephen Jerome, in the mid-1620s is a case in point. Her accusations were seen as a threat to the integrity of the local ministry and a challenge to the authority of two of the local magistrates, Sir Richard Wilbraham and Viscount Cholmondeley. So, even though she was a nursing mother, she was sentenced to be whipped through the town and made to stand in the cage with her ‘slanderous’ charges pinned to her. Here one can see the gentry’s preoccupation with sustaining the power and authority of their class laid bare, illustrating the way in which, in spite of all the rhetoric about peace, charity and the ‘common weal’, when push came to shove they were quite ready to display the mailed fist.53 Magistrates may have fallen from the standards they aspired to; but there was general agreement on what these standards were. In line with Whitelocke and Grosvenor, they drew on the Ciceronian language of the vir civilis. This acknowledged the obligation of the propertied classes to serve the public weal and emphasised the need to curb man’s inherent vices, to exercise justice with impartiality and moderation and to promote order and the public peace; and all this in tandem with the neighbourly and ‘country’ values associated with good lordship.

GODLY MAGISTRACY However, the ideals of the vir civilis were not the only frame of reference held up before the Cheshire magistracy. An often quite different set of ideals and prescriptions were provided in the Calvinist language of the godly gentleman, or godly magistrate. During the late Tudor and early Stuart period these were set out and extolled in countless sermons and treatises in which ministers sought to impress on their hearers the notion that magistracy was a godly calling. The exercise of any form of public responsibility by a gentleman was a duty to God which required him to fulfil the divine purposes of promoting order and social justice and fighting sin. It was only through the conscientious discharge of these responsibilities that he could validate his claim to be numbered among God’s elect saints.54 Hence, in his funeral sermon for Thomas Dutton in 1614, Richard Eaton, puritan minister of Great Budworth, praised him as a paragon of godly magistracy: It is not the robe nor the sword nor the highest room that maketh a magistrate. He considered whose image he did bear, whose person he did present, what cause 132

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The governance of the shire he had in hand and whose judgement he did execute. It is certain the vine of the church doth spread out her branches with much cheerfulness when magistrates do execute justice without connivance.

Then he called on the assembled local governors and gentlemen to follow his example: You that are rulers in this our Israel, execution of justice upon riotous and inordinate livers is for the present a sweet-smelling sacrifice unto God. It will procure you even in this life many sweet blessings from above and thereafter it shall be the crown upon your heads.55

The natural ally of such men was, of course, the godly minister. The two must fight alongside each other to combat sinfulness and promote godly order. Further reformation could be achieved only if a godly gentleman was prepared to act as the secular arm of a godly crusade. Thus, in an assize sermon at Chester in 1586 Edward Hutchins insisted that, in isolation, ‘neither our preaching nor our penning can any way prevail’. Reformation must proceed through a partnership, ‘the minster by the word, the magistrate by the sword; the one by love, the other by fear, the one by softness the other by sharpness; the one by persuading, the other by punishment if that persuasion may not prevail’.56 This was a vision subscribed to by Grosvenor in his jury charges. The magistrate must work with the minister to curb man’s inherent sinfulness. If they failed to undertake this godly work, then the community was liable to face God’s providential wrath. Hence, alongside the more heinous secular crimes such as murder and manslaughter, he devoted much of his content to condemning moral and religious offences, such as perjury, swearing, drunkenness and the most odious sin of all, popery.57 Papists, he warned, were those locusts which eat up and devour the seeds of loyalty and religion, and who labour to seduce our wives and children from their profession whereby the latter prove disobedient to their parents, the former unconstant to their husbands, and both of them (with all such others over whom they prevail) disloyal to their prince and country.58

He also impressed on the jurors the need to be guided by a godly conscience: ‘By keeping a good conscience you shall be armed against all opposition’; to put aside ‘fear to offend great men’; and to act with utter impartiality. ‘God is greater than the mightiest and looks first to be served, first to be feared.’59 In Grosvenor’s rhetoric the obligations and attitudes implied by the humanist and Calvinist languages that he deployed complemented each other and rarely suggested any conflict of priorities. However, there was a tension there, and it was spelled out at considerable length in William Hinde’s remarkable biography of John Bruen. Hinde’s work was not published until 1641, but it was written in the late 1620s and, given the renown of both the 133

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author and the subject, it is likely that it was circulating in manuscript soon after this.60 The Life appears to have been intended by Hinde, in part, as a celebration of the considerable progress made by the gospel in Cheshire between Bruen’s conversion in the 1580s and his death early in 1626. But it was also a reminder to the local gentry that in the fallen world the work of godly reformation was never done, and that a particular responsibility lay with them to act as torchbearers, in the manner of Bruen. In this respect, it was important for Hinde to present Bruen as a respectable and recognisable member of the Cheshire gentry community; but in doing so he gave the qualities attributed to him a rather different slant from that of Webb and other commentators on the mores of the Cheshire gentry. Hence, in his introductory comments he highlighted Bruen’s ‘birth and blood’, the longevity of his descent and the prestige of being ‘linked and allied to many of the most ancient and worshipful houses’ in the shire. But, having pointed these up, he was quick to emphasise that it was not such attributes that ‘either he did or we do reckon of esteem, the ground of his true praise and honour’. Rather, it was the ‘true faith of Christ in his heart and the holy fruits thereof in his life’. Then, addressing ‘many of our gentry’, he stressed that they ‘should therefore learn at length less to admire themselves for their birth and blood, or any outward pomp and power in the world … What is nobility without religion and piety but an earthen pitcher covered with silver dross?’61 This was, of course, a commonplace of Calvinist preaching and humanist commentaries – that the highest form of nobility lay not in lineage or wealth, but in godliness and virtue – but Hinde, characteristically, drove home the lesson in unusually uncompromising language. He put a similar godly slant on Bruen’s exercise of hospitality. Again he stressed that his subject equalled if not surpassed most of his fellow gentry in his readiness to entertain strangers and provide generously for the poor. But he placed particular emphasis on the nature, rather than the extent or frequency, of this hospitality. Bruen was always careful to observe the Pauline injunction that in providing hospitality to strangers one may be entertaining angels unawares. He therefore set out to treat all those who stayed with him – of whom there were many, because his house lay just off the main road to Chester – as ‘fellow citizens with the saints … having a portion in his prayers and part in his praises unto God with him’, which meant that they were expected to participate in his regime of household worship. He also made it a condition of his entertainment that his guests ‘kept themselves within the lists and limits of moderation and sobriety’; and it was so well known that he disapproved of ‘excessive drinking, quaffing, carousing, drinking and pledging of healths and the like shameful disorders’ that few ever gave him ‘just occasion of offence’.62 Hinde’s purpose, then, was to present his subject as an exemplar of the sort of godly gentility that he believed to be essential to the work of further reformation. This meant, as he repeatedly emphasised, that Bruen was prepared to put his conscience first in all things and, if necessary, defy secular convention. 134

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A good example was Bruen’s acts of iconoclasm. He evidently shared Hinde’s radically nonconformist view that anything in the worship of God ‘destitute of the warrant of God’s word’ must inevitably be a work of ‘witworship, will-worship and idol-service, all of which are both hateful to God and hurtful to their own souls that either do them or consent to the doing of them’.63 This led him to engage in several very public acts of iconoclasm which involved his servants destroying churchyard and wayside crosses in 1603 and 1611. The latter episode led to Bruen being indicted by the attorney general in star chamber for encouraging his servants and threatening the local justices who attempted to investigate the matter.64 Hinde carefully drew a veil over these episodes, presumably to avoid any suggestion that Bruen might be a lawbreaker. But he did make a good deal of a much more private act of iconoclasm. This related to his subject’s family chapel in the parish church at Tarvin, where the windows were, typically, full of late-medieval armorial glass and images of his forbears as kneeling donors.65 Normally, as we have seen, the gentry took great pride in preserving such imagery as tokens of their distinguished pedigrees. But, according to Hinde, Bruen regarded them as superstitious images and idolatrous pictures … and considering that these dumb and dark images, by their painted coats and colours, did both darken the light of the church and obscure the brightness of the gospel, he presently took order to pull down all these painted puppets and popish idols, in a warrantable and peaceable manner, and of his own cost and charge, repaired the breaches and beautified the windows with white and bright glass.

Hinde was quick to emphasise that Bruen was acting within the law, referring to Elizabeth’s injunction to destroy all ‘monuments of idolatry and superstition’ and citing the example set by other authority figures such as the mayor of Chester and the earl of Derby.66 But this was still a remarkable repudiation of the imagery and values that his fellow gentry set such store by. This was entirely characteristic of the Bruen portrayed by Hinde, who was always ready to challenge the norms and conventions of contemporary gentility if they were at odds with his conscience. This applied most obviously to the domestic sphere. Bruen was never a JP, even though he belonged to the group of top-ranking county families from whom members of the bench were drawn. Because of this, much of his authority and influence was directed inwards, towards the governance of his household, which he cultivated as a model of godliness. He promoted the work of edification through a daily round of prayer, catechising, sermon repetition and discussion of cases of conscience. Then, on Sundays, he would lead the assembled household in singing psalms and reading scripture as they marched down the road to the parish church at Tarvin, where their presence set a powerful example to the assembled congregation. One of the purposes of his household, as he saw it, was to act as a seminary for the tutelage of young gentlemen and their 135

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families in the ways of godliness. To this end, he not only involved them in the full round of religious observance but also insisted that they abandon the ‘carnal pleasures’ that wasted time and lured men into sinfulness. He was especially severe on ‘unprofitable’ recreations that he saw as one of the scourges of gentility, remarking sardonically in his commonplace book that ‘If recreations be not callings then many a gentleman will prove himself to have no calling’.67 Hinde recounted how Bruen himself, after a youthful addiction to hunting and hawking, had seen the error of his ways, sold his ‘wide-mouthed’ packs of dogs, abandoned the sport and devoted the mis-spent time to ‘holy exercises’. Young gentlemen in his charge were expected to follow suit. They were persuaded, cajoled and, if necessary, coerced into giving up ‘vain’ pursuits such as cards and dice and ‘tables’. In their place he set up two Bibles, in his parlour and his hall, ‘wherein men of good minds might exercise themselves in reading and hearing the word of God’.68 Once again, Hinde drove home the message to the local gentry. They were strictly enjoined to give up their vain and profane exercises of May games and summer greens, of their foot-races and horse-races, of their weekly and almost daily meetings and matches on their bowling greens, of their lavish betting of great wagers in such sorry trifles and of their stout and strong abetting of so silly vanities amongst hundreds and ­sometimes thousands of rude and vile persons to whom they should give better and not so bad example and encouragement, as to be idle in neglecting their callings.69

This was a remarkable, virtually blanket, condemnation of the sociable pursuits by which the likes of Lord Cholmondeley and the other sponsors of the Farndon race meeting set such store. But Hinde and Bruen were uncompromising, seeing each of these pastimes as a slippery slope to profanity. Bruen’s own readiness to upbraid the practices of his fellow gentry went well beyond his household, to more public occasions. Hinde describes an episode when he was attending the sheriff’s feast at the assizes, which was one of the high points of the social calendar. Proceedings reached a finale with the drinking of a round of healths to the king, which gave the great and the good of the shire an opportunity to affirm their collective loyalty and identity. But both Hinde and Bruen regarded the drinking of healths as a ‘profane’ custom: ‘the very power and policy of satan set awork in them as to take up the time of their repast with such vanities and provocations to sin’. This put Bruen in an uncomfortable position. He could either swallow his principles or risk presenting himself as the sour and graceless killjoy of anti-puritan satire. He had no hesitation in following his conscience. As the healths passed around the table, ‘with a good deal of ceremonial solemnity’, and drew near unto him (many observing what he would say or do) he cast out in a moderate manner some words of dislike to this effect: ‘Here is a solemn service to the prince; yet did he never require it, nor will ever give you any thanks for it.’ 136

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The governance of the shire And when one pressed him to pledge and drink to the prince’s health he made this mild and gentle answer only: ‘You may drink to his health and I will pray for his heath and drink for mine own, and so I wish you may for yours.’ And so he put it off and passed it over …70

In rejecting the health, and in effect reproaching his fellow guests for what they clearly regarded as an unexceptionable demonstration of loyalty and collegiality, Bruen was ostentatiously setting himself against the canons of sociability and embracing the censorious self-righteousness mocked in caricatures such as Ben Jonson’s Zeal-of-the-land Busy. Unsurprisingly, this did not make him popular. His conduct on this and other occasions was, as Hinde observed, ‘much maligned, reproached, opposed and questioned abroad, and not only by the vulgar sort, but even by some of our masters in Israel’. Bruen himself told his friend Sir Robert Harley that he had long been disparaged as ‘Bishop Bruen’.71 But he appears to have remained unperturbed. Indeed, in some respects, he must have positively relished this criticism as confirmation of his uncompromising zeal in calling out sinfulness and profanity wherever he encountered it. In such matters he did not regard compromise as a virtue. This readiness extended even to his own friends, whom he was accustomed to ‘admonish’ if he saw them engaging in the ‘vain and foolish fashions and humours of the profane men of the world’. An intriguing example of this survives in a ‘godly letter of Christian admonition and reformation’ addressed by Bruen to an unnamed ‘cousin’. Bruen began by holding up as a paragon of godliness Thomas Wilbraham, father to Sir Richard, who had died in 1610. After settling at Tilston in the parish of Bunbury, Thomas placed himself under Hinde’s tutelage and became a diligent attender of Sabbathday services and the preaching exercises at Tarporley and Northwich. He had his family publicly catechised, promoted psalm singing and reading from scripture in his household, welcomed the godly and kept out all ‘roguish players’. Next to each of the qualities enumerated, Bruen wrote ‘you do not’; he then warned the cousin that ‘you are in a lethargy … the alarum bell of your conscience is silenced … You were best to look well about you that you may work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.’72 For Bruen and Hinde there could be no halfway house or temporising. This was a world of binary opposition between the godly and the profane. Restraint and accommodation, the sort of practical day-to-day compromises, enacted by what were sometimes described as ‘mere civil honest men’, were not permissible.73 Thus, Hinde reserved one of his most ferocious denunciations for those ‘formal hypocrites’, both in court and country, city and sanctuary, that pretend greater wisdom and moderation; they will not be so profane on the left hand as Esau, neither will they be so precise on the right hand with Jacob, but either just of Gallio his humour they care little for these things, or of the Laodicean temper, neither hot nor cold, yet 137

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The Cheshire gentry and their world think all is well and nothing is amiss amongst them. And these pretend they have … a form of knowledge, and a form of godliness, but wanting the fruit of the one and the power of the other, they are no friends to sincerity and purity of religion in themselves, and show themselves great adversaries to the holy profession and practice of it in others that desire to conform themselves to the tenor and truth of it.74

One of those whom Hinde apparently regarded as falling into this category was Sir Richard Wilbraham. To all intents Sir Richard appeared to be following in the footsteps of his much-admired father. He used his clerical patronage to provide livings for moderate puritan ministers and he had a reputation as a thoroughly hard-working and conscientious magistrate. But he was also easy going, sociable, widely connected and, perhaps most significantly, through his wife, Grace Savage, a friend of Viscount Savage and his Catholic acquaintances such as Sir Hugh Beeston and William Whitmore.75 Whatever the reason, Hinde included a section in Bruen’s Life in which he addressed Sir Richard and his brother and sisters, urging them to view their faces in their father’s glass and diligently see and consider how near they come unto him in the power and practice of religion; and that where they shall find themselves to come short of him they would seriously address themselves to express the virtues of him that is gone before and carefully endeavour to follow the gracious pattern and precedent which he hath left unto them.76

Balancing the worldly demands of gentility and the spiritual demands of godliness, then, was no easy task for the godly gentleman. Bruen, as portrayed by Hinde, was a dauntingly austere figure, dedicating his life to doing God’s work and combating sin in ways which are familiar from other studies of the preoccupations of coteries of ‘godly professors’.77 But the modes of semi-separation and cultural distancing in which he engaged were not necessarily appealing, nor indeed very practicable, for other gentry who identified with the principles of godly magistracy. Their more public profiles invariably pushed them into the sorts of compromises and tradeoffs of which Hinde so roundly disapproved. To maintain one’s reputation among the godly and avoid the sort of cold-shouldering among ‘civil honest men’ experienced by Bruen required a careful balancing of priorities. But it was achievable, as was demonstrated by Sir Richard Grosvenor. The young Richard had spent three years in Bruen’s household before going up to Queen’s College Oxford, where he was probably tutored by Hinde. As soon as he succeeded his father in 1619 Grosvenor began using his influence to promote a godly preaching ministry. Through the patronage of Sir Richard Wilbraham, his closest friend, he secured the services of William Harrison in his home living at Eccleston. Harrison was a moderate puritan who was appointed as one of the Queen’s Preachers for Lancashire in the 1590s, in which role he acquired a reputation as a fiercely anti-Catholic preacher and polemicist.78 Sir Richard, for whom popery was the very 138

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a­ ntithesis of true religion, followed the same line. In speeches in parliament, sessions charges and his election address of 1624, he identified popery as the principal threat to social, religious and political order, and made the battle against it his first priority. Arguably, his most courageous public act was to present the much-admired and ever-accommodating county leader, Viscount Savage, to the House of Commons as a Catholic officeholder, in both 1626 and 1628. This may have cost Grosvenor his place on the commission of the peace, since Savage was a protégé of Buckingham’s, who conducted a purge of those who had crossed him in the aftermath of the 1626 Parliament. Certainly Grosvenor’s action offended against the unofficial embargo within Cheshire on drawing attention to Savage’s Catholicism.79 However, this sort of action was assured of an appreciative audience among the godly. In 1628 the puritan lecturer in Chester, Nathaniel Lancaster, dedicated a funeral sermon to Grosvenor in which he was hailed as ‘a father of his country’.80 And around the same time Hinde singled him out for praise as one of those educated by Bruen who was ‘still increasing and bringing forth more fruit, both in his person and calling, whereof as we have seen a fair increase already in some of his more eminent employments so do we yet look for a more plentiful harvest of his holy and wholesome fruits’.81 Grosvenor, then, enjoyed considerable prestige among godly ministers. But at the same time he was able to make concessions to the demands of sociability of which Hinde would certainly have disapproved. On his visits to friends in Reading in the 1630s he engaged in social drinking, card games, bowling and backgammon. Meanwhile, in Cheshire during the 1620s he had, perhaps, also been involved in horse racing.82 Others who identified with the ‘godly professors’ made similar concessions to recreation and sociability. Alderman John Ratcliffe, mayor of Chester, husband of the saintly Jane Ratcliffe and also Bruen’s collaborator in sponsoring the smashing of wayside crosses, was a notably enthusiastic racehorse owner, who took particular pride in winning the Shrovetide cup in 1619.83 Sir John Done, another young gentleman educated in Bruen’s household, was another friend of the Catholics Savage and Whitmore, but he escaped censure. Indeed, Hinde commended his household as a beacon of godliness.84 Sir Henry Bunbury was hailed by Bruen, in another letter to Sir Robert Harley, as ‘truly religious, fearing God’ and one who displayed exemplary ‘zeal for God’s glory and the reformation of profanations’; and yet he was a regular sponsor of the mayoral stage shows in Chester.85 It was evidently possible to observe the norms of gentry sociability and recreation and still be regarded as ‘one of us’ by the likes of Hinde and Bruen. In practice the ideals and aspirations set out in the Life of Bruen were a good deal more malleable than at first sight appeared. What really mattered was that at critical moments, when the stakes were high and the work of godly reformation was threatened or challenged, the godly gentleman was willing to stand up and be counted. 139

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CULTURE WARS One such episode in Cheshire was the campaign against wakes, which was closely linked to the enforcement of Sabbath observance. Whereas in other parts of the country maypoles and church ales became the principal targets of puritan reformers, in Cheshire it was the wakes held once a year to commemorate the saints’ days of various parishes, accompanied by bear baitings, music and dancing. These had been a cause of contention in the shire since at least 1578, when the privy council ordered their suppression as a source of disorder: ‘the people … do for the most part no good exercise but fall to intemperate drinking and tippling’. In 1596 they became the focus of a local cause célèbre when a puritan justice, John Egerton of Oulton, attempted to suppress the wakes at Little Budworth. He failed, and he and his bailiff, Thomas Buckstones, faced a backlash of defiance, ridicule and assaults on their property. These came to head in the parish church on 29 September 1596 when a local shoemaker, egged on, it was alleged, by the Catholic gentleman Hugh Starkey, appeared at the service elaborately dressed as an Egerton retainer and then proceeded to ape the mannerisms of Buckstones, causing hilarity among the assembled congregation. The perpetrators were punished; but the damage had been done and this provided a template for later clashes over the issue.86 The agenda that the puritans subscribed to was outlined in the Life of Bruen, where Hinde linked wakes to three of the principal manifestations of sinfulness: popery, Sabbath breaking and personal immorality. They were ‘popish and prophane’, relics of a pre-Reformation past, ‘destitute of all warrant of God’s word … the base and bastard brood of the man of sin, begotten by satan upon the body of that whore of Rome’. These ‘idol feasts’ were accompanied by ‘all riot of excess of eating and drinking, dalliance and dancing, sporting and gaming and other abominable impieties and idolatries’, and led to a predictable rise in sexual licence, crime and disorder.87 They also directly threatened godly observance of the Sabbath. From the 1610s onwards this became a significant cause of religious dissension in and around Chester as the two puritan lecturers in the city, Nicholas Byfield and John Ley, aggressively promoted Sabbath observance.88 They were met with stiff opposition. In 1615 Mr Burrowes, a puritan minister at nearby Shotwick, was interrupted in his Sunday sermon by ‘threatening speeches … a horn blown … and great hallooing’, which prompted a group of justices, led by Sir Henry Bunbury and Sir Richard Grosvenor’s father, to complain on his behalf to Archbishop Abbot.89 Hinde was particularly opposed to mixed dancing on the Sabbath, which he described as ‘utterly unlawful, sinful, shameful, carnal, sensual and devilish, as hateful unto God as hurtful unto men’. And a notable victory was chalked up by the puritans when the godly magistrate Thomas Dutton, who was also hereditary Master of the Chester Minstrels, was persuaded by Bruen to outlaw the practice of fiddlers and pipers playing on the Sabbath.90 140

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To counter these challenges Hinde delivered a series of rallying calls to the local magistracy. His defence of the fourth commandment in his Office and the Morall Law of God, published in 1623, was dedicated to the assize judges, Whitelocke and Sir Marmaduke Lloyd, and urged them to ensure that the ‘adversaries’ of the godly, ‘whether popish or profane may be either restrained from doing hurt or reformed by your good means …’. He also called on the local gentry to suppress wakes, following the example set by Bruen, who, at the time of the Tarvin wakes on St Andrews day, would invite two or three of the best affected preachers in the diocese that there spent the most part of three days in preaching and praying in the church, so as the pipers and fiddlers and players and gamesters and bearwards had no time left for their vanities, but went away with great fretting …91

There were two overlapping sets of ideals and priorities driving forward this campaign. On the one hand there was the view shared across the social elite that disorder and disharmony within society were largely a consequence of vice and immorality. James I told his judges in 1616 that they should take it for ‘a rule of policie that what vice most abounds in a commonwealth must be most severely punished’, and specifically focused on drunkenness, alehouses, idleness and wandering beggars.92 Few disagreed with such an analysis. However, when it came to determining which vices should be curbed and the level of intervention that was required, agreement ceased. The puritans tended to target particularly those vices that they saw as challenging notions of godly order and reformation.93 But, as Hinde recognised, there were some gentry who were resistant to this and set a very disruptive example by themselves engaging in ‘vain and profane exercises’.94 He did not name names, but he may well have had in mind the likes of Viscount Cholmondeley, sponsor of the Farndon races, or Sir Robert Needham (later Viscount Kilmorey), who succeeded Dutton as Master of the Minstrels but steered clear of imposing any further restrictions on their freedom to perform; or, indeed, Sir Thomas Aston, whose collection of poems included one by John Smythe of Nibley that poked fun at those ‘severe and rigid coats … of too stern a judgement’ who were campaigning to suppress harmless pastimes like mixed maypole dancing, while hypocritically indulging their own sexual lusts.95 The call to action against wakes and challenges to Sabbatarianism did not pass unheeded and led to a campaign which was to continue through the 1620s and 1630s and had much in common with the ‘culture wars’ that historians such as Bernard Capp, Patrick Collinson and Kenneth Parker have described in other parts of the country.96 It began with the appointment in 1616 of a new Lord Chief Justice of Chester, Sir Thomas Chamberlain, a man with a godly reputation as a ‘loving friend’ of William Whateley, the famous puritan preacher of Banbury.97 At the first Court of Great Session over which he presided the grand jury presented a complaint ‘Concerning wakes used in the county of Chester’. They were denounced as occasions of ‘drunkeness, 141

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quarrelling and manslaughter’ at which alehousekeepers would invite ‘bearwards and their bears, minstrels, jugglers and such like to make the people sport’, and children and servants would be encouraged to defy their fathers and masters. Then, in what looks like a collusive lobbying encouraged by Chamberlain’s arrival, this was backed up by two petitions complaining of the violence and disorder caused by the activities of bearwards in Middlewich and Tettenhall.98 The assize judges responded with alacrity. Taking their cue from the recent charge to them by the king, they issued a set of ‘Orders and Directions’ to galvanise the county magistrates. At the head of the list were measures to ensure proper attendance at church and to regulate wakes, which, they insisted, led to the Sabbath being ‘much prophaned’. Extra watch was ordered to be kept on the Saturday before a wake and any ‘rogues’ and ‘idle wandering persons’, or the alehousekeepers who gave them shelter, were to be reported to the local justice and bound over to appear at the next assizes.99 The ‘Orders’ prompted a flurry of activity by local officers. Hinde himself led the way, presenting two of the alehousekeepers in his parish of Bunbury for entertaining a bearward, and then, for good measure, having the constable bound over for failing to present them. And Thomas Bressye, high constable of Broxton hundred, issued precepts which echoed the language of the godly, calling on them to suppress the ‘abuses of piping and minstrelsy … whereby God is both highly dishonoured and his Sabbath greatly prophaned’.100 No sooner was this campaign getting into its stride, however, than it was challenged by the king’s ‘Declaration of Sports’. This was issued in August 1617 in response to an even more draconian programme to clamp down on popular festivities in Lancashire. Initially applying only to the diocese of Chester, the ‘Declaration’ set out to curb the Sabbatarian excesses of ‘some puritans and precise people’ by allowing the king’s ‘good people’ their ‘lawfull recreacons upon Sundays & other holydays’.101 It was greeted in some quarters as a triumph for the proponents of festive culture. One of the Chester minstrels was indicted at the Knutsford sessions in 1618 for saying that ‘there had been a strife for many years betwixt pipers and preachers, but now (God be thanked) pipers had gotten the victory’.102 However, this was somewhat premature. By specifying that certain games were allowed only ‘after the end of divine service’ – which could include afternoon and evening services – and by explicitly prohibiting other ‘unlawful games such as bear and bull baiting and bowling’, the wording of the ‘Declaration’ offered a loophole that enabled the puritans in Cheshire to step up their campaign. James’s ‘Declaration’ was recorded in the crown book for the Chester assizes in September 1617, and Chamberlain and his fellow justice then proceeded to gloss it in the most restrictive way possible. In a fresh set of instructions, headed ‘The judges orders about the Sabbath’, they focused attention on those who disrupted divine service, not those who prohibited 142

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recreations. Recusants and anyone else who had ‘not been at church or chapel to hear divine service, both forenoon and afternoon’, were prohibited from ‘any exercise or recreation on that day tolerated by his Majesty’. Moreover, those who tried to engage in recreations in any parish other then their own, or were ‘tippling or drinking on the Sabbath’, or failed to conclude their recreations by sunset, were to be reported to the local justices and bound over to appear at the next assizes.103 In effect, then, the judges were able to use the ‘Declaration’ as a platform for an even more rigorous enforcement of restrictions on the Sabbath, and this was greeted with more strenuous effort by sympathetic justices and high constables.104 In the Catholic stronghold of Wirral hundred Sir Henry Bunbury and his fellow JPs bound over local alehousekeepers for piping on the Sabbath ‘at evening prayer time’ and presented the fiddlers who led a party of 200 revellers across the Dee to the Catholic shrine at Holywell. Elsewhere, Sir John Done, Richard Brereton, George Spurstow and Thomas Marbury (whose wife was a notorious nonconformist) all presented minstrels and bearwards, in some instances citing as the justification that they had acted ‘contrary to the Kings’ Majesty’s book’.105 The intense campaigning of 1616–19 was not sustained in Cheshire, but it established a pattern that was repeated during the following decades.106 Justices, grand jurors and high constables who supported the puritan agenda worked in tandem with local ministers committed to curbing wakes and promoting Sabbath observance. Ranged against them were local inhabitants who were determined to defend their festive culture against what they saw as the overbearingly authoritative intrusiveness of the godly. Ministers and Sunday services often became the target of these popular protests. At Knutsford chapel in 1624 the service was interrupted by a bearward actually bringing his bear into the church and encouraging it to lay its paw on the prayer desk, which led to the bishop prohibiting services for twelve months until the chapel was reconsecrated. At Lower Peover in 1631 villagers defied orders from the local magistrates, Sir William Brereton, Thomas Marbury, Henry Mainwaring and Hamnett Hyde, and gathered in the local alehouse to attend a bear baiting on the Sabbath. When the local minister went to remonstrate with them, he was abused and told that they would have their bear baiting, ‘do the justices what they would’.107 Some parishes became running battlegrounds for these confrontations. Perhaps the best example was Bunbury, where Hinde’s supporters were ranged against one of the largest concentrations of recusants in the shire.108 Hinde continued to preach aggressively against wakes within the parish, warning of God’s judgements against those who participated; and in 1618 John Witter, the puritan high constable of Edisbury hundred, prosecuted a number of bear baiters and alehousekeepers, again citing their actions as ‘contrary to the king’s book and our judges orders’. Some of the local inhabitants struck back in 1620 by ‘tumultuously gadding’ to the church hill on the Sabbath, led by Richard Coddington dressed as a woman, where 143

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they were received by Elizabeth Symme taking the part of ‘ Lady of the [May] game’. This was followed by further acts of defiance against Hinde involving cross-dressing, maypoles and fiddlers. One of the persistent ringleaders was Richard Brock, a Catholic alehousekeeper who was presented for entertaining bearwards at the wakes in 1621, then in 1638 was prosecuted by the new minister, Samuel Torshell, for openly displaying a brass crucifix and other ‘popish relics’ in his alehouse. But wakes and bear baitings continued in the parish and during the late 1620s and early 1630s Edward Burghall, the usher at the grammar school, recorded a series of God’s providences against those who attended them.109 Several of the recurrent themes in these ‘culture wars’ – resentment at godly prohibitions, disruption of Sabbath observance, defiance of the authority figures of ministers and magistrates and resistance expressed by adherence to a festive culture – were brought together in a confrontation at Wilmslow in April 1629. Sir William Brereton of Handforth issued a warrant to the constables to apprehend William Baxter, an itinerant bearward, and set him in the stocks after uttering loud drunken oaths in a local alehouse. Once he was in the stocks, a crowd of about fifty gathered to express their displeasure at what they saw as a challenge to their festive culture. Baxter was plied with drink; a drummer and musician played to keep his spirits up; and bystanders threatened to smash up the stocks and set him free. These included several members of the town’s property-owning middling sort. Henry Orrell, a local butcher, defiantly announced ‘we shall not be restrained; we shall have our pastimes in this town’, and added, for good measure: ‘shall our town of Wilmslow be abused by young justices’. William Kelsall, another ringleader, swore ‘two or three terrible oaths’, then, in mockery of Brereton’s godly reputation, urged one of the bystanders ‘to go and tell Sir William Brereton therof that he might take xiid for every oath he had sworn’. He and another reveller even impugned Brereton’s manliness, challenging him or his men to fight ‘if they durst’, confident of beating them because ‘Brereton keeps not such men as we are’. Brereton was eventually able to restore a measure of authority by having the ringleaders fined and stocked. But not before the townsmen’s responses had revealed the full extent of hostility to puritan initiatives.110 The commitment of the godly to promoting Sabbatarianism and stifling festive culture injected an overtly ideological element into local governance. The magistrates were divided over this more than any other set of issues before the late 1630s. Whereas on most aspects of social regulation there was a consensus around upholding commonwealth values and promoting order, here there was conflict. For the puritan justices who responded to the appeals of ministers, combating sin and vice was a matter of conscience and a validation of their sense that they belonged to the elect. The likes of Sir Richard Grosvenor, Sir William Brereton of Handforth, Sir Henry Bunbury and Sir John Done were prime examples, all acknowledged as puritans and fully 144

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engaged in the godly crusade to promote a reformation of manners. Ranged against them was a loose coalition of those who adopted a much more laissezfaire attitude. There were those, like the townsmen of Wilmslow, who openly opposed and vilified the puritans’ efforts, seeing in them the interfering killjoys of popular caricature. Abetting them, at least tacitly, were those within the magisterial elite whose attitude Hinde regarded as so corrosive because it served to legitimise the defiance of godly reformation. They supported official efforts to curb vice and maintain order, but at the same time were hostile to ‘puritans and precise people’, and supported the efforts to protect popular pastimes set out in the king’s ‘Declaration’. The stances taken by the different sides in these ‘culture wars’ fed into broader ideological differences among the county elite. On one side were those later known as the ‘Patriots’ who shared Grosvenor’s sense of the dangers presented to the Protestant religion and liberties of Englishmen by popery, corrupt courtiers, royal favourites and unparliamentary taxation, and who looked to parliament to remedy these grievances. On the other side were those like Savage, Cholmondeley, Kilmorey and Aston, who were antipuritan, indulgent towards Catholics and ready to support crown policy and the deployment of the royal prerogative. These differences tended to emerge at moments of tension or crisis as those involved drew on differing sets of assumptions and prescriptions to explain what had gone wrong and how it could be righted. However, alignments were far from being clear cut or fixed in place. Individuals could shift their stances depending on contingency and circumstance. As we shall see, within Cheshire on most issues other than the Reformation of Manners, differences remained submerged during the 1620s and 1630s. But in the elections and petitioning campaigns of 1640 and 1641 they came to the surface, with profound consequences.

NOTES

1 Longleat House, Wiltshire (hereafter LH) Whitelocke papers, vol. 21, fos 109–12. For the dating of this charge see the notes taken at the time in BL Harleian MS 583, fos 48–51. This is one of a series of draft charges (LH Whitelocke papers, vol. 21, fos 102–55), some of which contain specific references to Cheshire (fo. 121), but some of which can be dated to 1625, when Whitelocke was on the Oxford circuit (fos 147, 153–5.) However, when taken together these present a consistent view of the nature of the political order and the roles and responsibilities of local governors. On Whitelocke at Chester Great Sessions, see D. X. Powell, ‘Sir James Whitelocke, chief justice of Chester 1620–1624’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 143 (1994 for 1993), 1–34; Liber Familicus of Sir James Whitelocke, ed. J. Bruce (Camden Society, 70, 1858), pp. 78–84, 88. 2 Collinson, ‘De Republica Anglorum’, pp. 21–2; M. Goldie, ‘The unacknowledged republic: officeholding in early-modern England’, in T. Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 153–94. Medieval 145

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3



4 5 6 7 8

9 10

11 12 13



14 15 16 17

18

19

20 21 22

historians have long referred to the system of ‘self-government at the king’s command’ introduced through the legal reforms of the Angevins: P.  Coss, ‘The formation of the English gentry’, Past and Present, 147 (1995), 38–64, at 51–2. LH Whitelocke Papers, vol. 21, fos 109, 145. For these classical divisions, see M.  Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). LH Whitelocke Papers, vol. 21, fo. 109. See also fos 144, 150. Ibid., fos 109, 121, 143, 148, 150. Ibid., fos 136, 148. Ibid., fos 109, 146. C. B. Herrup, ‘Law and morality in seventeenth century England’, Past and Present, 106 (1985), 102–23, at 109–11. LH Whitelocke papers, vol. 21, fos 113,146. Ibid., fos 109, 143, 155; C. Muldrew, ‘The culture of reconciliation: community and the settlement of economic disputes in early modern England’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 915–42, at 939–40. LH Whitelocke papers, vol. 21, fo. 143. J. S. Cockburn, A History of English Assizes, 1558–1714 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 308–11. For more on this topic, see J. Bossy, ‘Postscript’, in J. Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements. Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 287–93; S. Hindle. ‘The keeping of the public peace’, in P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 213–48. Grosvenor papers, p. 41. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., pp. 37, 35. The phrase is Muldrew’s in ‘Culture of reconciliation’, 928–30. Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, ch. 2; R. Tuck, ‘Humanism and political thought’, in A. Goodman and A. MacKay (eds), The Impact of Humanism in Western Europe (Harlow: Longman, 1990), pp. 43–65, at pp. 43–9; R. M. Smuts, Culture and Power in England, 1585–1685 (Basingstoke: Macmillan), pp. 33–5. Grosvenor papers, pp. 38, 17–18. For a discussion of the ‘commonwealth’ principles on which this distinction was based, see Q. Sinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), i.221–8. Grosvenor papers, p. 37. A 1624 testimonial to the probity and integrity of the Chester alderman William Gamull, which had probably been drawn up by Grosvenor as sheriff at the time, emphasised these same qualities: BL Harleian MS 2090, fos 213–14. Grosvenor papers, pp. 31–2, 34, 37. Ibid., pp. 1–7. R. P. Cust, ‘Reading for magistracy: the mental world of Sir John Newdigate’, in J. F. McDiarmid (ed.), The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 181–99, at p. 191; Heal and Holmes, Gentry, pp. 168–75.

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The governance of the shire 23 Geoff Higgins’ calculation of 350–400 gentry is probably a considerable underestimate: G. P. Higgins, ‘County government and society in Cheshire c.1590–1642’ (MA thesis, University of Liverpool, 1973), p. 17. The county’s December 1641 petition in defence of the prayer book, attested by nearly 9,000 male inhabitants, identified 440 ‘gentlemen of quality’ among its signatories: PA HL/PO/JO/10/1/74. Morrill has identified 497 families who provided grand jurors between 1625 and 1659, all of whom were at least accorded the honorific title of ‘gentleman’: J. S. Morrill, The Cheshire Grand Jury, 1625–1659 (Leicester: Department of English Local History Occasional Paper, series 3, 1, 1976), p. 16. 24 The Adlington display was of course recorded in 1611 and families were dropping out of and arriving within the top ranks of county society all the time. However, the general validity of the rankings is confirmed by the closeness with which they matched the order of precedence in the commission of the peace: e.g. TNA E163/18/12. 25 Higgins, ‘County government and society in Cheshire’, appendix 1, pp. 254–60. 26 TNA C 193/12/2. For another central commission on which the esquires at this level featured prominently, see the Crown Commission on Fees issued in January 1635: BL Harleian MS 2078, fos 31–3. Gentry at this level were also recruited when the king augmented the commissions of the peace in the summer of 1642 to increase royal support: TNA CHES 24/126/3, 4. 27 CALS ZCR 63/2/6, fo 42; TNA C 219/37/76; 219/39/19; 219/42/pt 1, 50; 219/43/pt 1, 77, 78. 28 Morrill, Cheshire Grand Jury, pp. 58–60. 29 Herrup, ‘Law and morality’, 108; Hindle, State and Social Change, pp. 20, 28–9; Goldie, ‘The unacknowledged republic’, pp. 153–94. 30 CALS QJB, 1/5, fos 435, 485, 529; QJF 70/1, no. 59; J. H. E. Bennett and J. C. Dewhurst (eds), Quarter Sessions Records, with Other Records of the Justices of the Peace for the County Palatine of Chester, 1559–1760 (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 94, 1940), pp. 97–9. 31 Holmes, ‘County community’, pp. 54–73. 32 CALS QJB 1/5, 1/6. 33 Morrill, Cheshire Grand Jury, pp. 14–15; Morrill, Cheshire, p. 13. 34 Morrill, Cheshire, pp. 8, 237; Higgins, ‘County government and society in Cheshire’, p. 85. 35 TNA SP 16/198/51; 16/195/21; 16/194/37; CALS QJB 2/5, fos 140, 151, 157, 179, 233, 238, 371–2. The same principles applied to the lieutenancy, with different deputy lieutenants taking responsibility for different hundreds, then meeting (generally at Northwich) to coordinate their approach: ZCR 63/6/2. 36 For the recognisances surveyed, see TNA CHES 24/118–26. 37 Quarter Sessions Records, pp. 83, 97–8, 108–9; CALS QJF, 70/2, no. 34. 38 Higgins, ‘County government and society in Cheshire’, pp. 88–90; CALS QJB 1/5, fos 322–3, 361–2. It was estimated that in Macclesfield hundred alone there were sixty-three bridges. 39 Eaton Hall, Cheshire, MS 24, 29. 40 Morrill, Cheshire, p. 10. 41 Hindle, State and Social Change, pp. 163–7. 147

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The Cheshire gentry and their world 42 TNA, SP 16/198/51; 16/195/21; 16/194/37. On the devolved nature of local government in pre-civil war Cheshire, see Morrill, Cheshire, p. 13. 43 CALS QJB, 1/5, 1/6, passim. For a discussion of the industriousness of JPs in other shires at this time, see A. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces (London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 146–53. 44 For the complexities of dealing with bastardy cases, see the case at Prestbury (above p. 126) that rumbled on for four years and had to be referred to an opinion by the Lord Chief Baron Humphrey Davenport, as it raised the whole issue of whether the entire parish or its twenty-eight townships individually were responsible for the upkeep of a child: CALS QJB 1/5, fos 485, 529; Bennett and Dewhurst (eds), Quarter Sessions Records, pp. 98–9. 45 Hindle, State and Social Change, pp. 60–1. 46 CALS ZCR 72/9/104, 114, 116; 13/49, 50. 47 S. Hindle, ‘Aspects of the relationship of the state and local society in earlymodern England, with special reference to Cheshire, c.1590–1630’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1993), p. 240. 48 CALS QJB 1/5, fo. 32. 49 Grosvenor papers, pp. xi, xxv. 50 TNA STAC 8/228/31, ‘Sir George Booth’s deposition’. 51 Ormerod, ii.359; i.506; T. Malbon, ‘Memorial of the Civil War’, in Memorials of the Civil War in Cheshire, ed. J. Hall (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 19, 1889), p. 48. 52 S. Hindle, ‘Aspects of the relationship of the state and local society’, pp. 329–35, 343–6, 349–51; Hindle, State and Social Change, pp. 152–3, 165–70, 175. 53 S. Hindle, ‘The shaming of Margaret Knowsley: gossip, gender and the experience of authority in early modern England’, Continuity and Change, 9 (1994), 391–419. 54 The classic account of godly magistracy is P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), ch. 4. 55 Eaton, A sermon preached at the funerals of … Master Thomas Dutton, p. 21. 56 Edward Hutchins, A Sermon Preached at West Chester the xxv of September 1586 (London, 1586), sig. B3. 57 Cust and Lake, ‘Rhetoric of magistracy’, 42–3. 58 Grosvenor papers, p. 10. 59 Ibid., p. 17. 60 Hinde’s Life of Bruen was written at some point between Bruen’s death in January 1626 and Hinde’s in June 1628. 61 Life of Bruen, pp. 2–5; Heal and Holmes, Gentry, p. 32. 62 Life of Bruen, pp. 185–9. For asides on this theme addressed to his fellow gentry, see pp. 3, 193. 63 Ibid., p. 93. 64 Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England, p. 123; Hindle, State and Social Change, pp. 66–7. 65 Hegbin-Barnes, Medieval Glass of Cheshire, pp. cxi, 325. 66 Life of Bruen, pp. 78–9. 67 BL Harleian MS 6607, fo. 22. 68 Life of Bruen, pp. 28–9, 115–24. 148

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74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82

83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

Ibid., p. 104. Ibid., pp. 192–3. Ibid., pp. 74–5; BL Additional MS 70001, fos 164–5. Life of Bruen, pp. 194–6. This was the phrase used by the Northamptonshire puritan Robert Bolton; see P. G. Lake, ‘“A charitable christian hatred”: the godly and their enemies in the 1630s’, in C. Durston and J. E. Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 145–83, at p. 170. Bolton was a friend of Hinde from their Oxford days: Life of Bruen, p. 193. Hinde, Life of Bruen, pp. 171–2. Bootham and Parker, Savage Fortune, pp. 36–8, 72, 194. Life of Bruen, p. 196. Lake, ‘The godly and their enemies’, pp. 145–8. Grosvenor papers, p. xiv; Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England, pp. 20, 111, 157; Clergy of the Church of England Database, person ID 36913, www. theclergydatabase.org.uk (accessed 22 May 2019). Cust and Lake, ‘Rhetoric of magistracy’, 42–3; Grosvenor papers, p. xvii. Grosvenor papers, p. x. Life of Bruen, p. 97. Grosvenor papers, pp. 60–78. The evidence for his involvement in horse racing is ambiguous and rests largely on the survival among his papers of a series of verses celebrating the victory of what may have been his own horse in the St George’s day race on the Roo Dee in 1627: C. T. Gatty, Mary Davies and the Manor of Ebury, 2 vols (London: Cassell, 1921), i.270–5. Chester Public Library MS 94/3, ‘Edward Whitby’s List of Mayors 1300–1620’, entry for 1619. Bootham and Parker, Savage Fortune, pp. xxxviii, 38; Life of Bruen, pp. 113–17. BL Additional MS 70001, fos 138–9: REED. Cheshire, i.460, 466, 530, 548. Sir Henry was probably the ‘Sir H B’ who, according to Hinde, ‘loved [Bruen] most entirely and visited him on his deathbed: Life of Bruen, p. 219. S. Hindle, ‘Custom, festival and popular protest in early modern England: the Little Budworth Wakes, St Peter’s Day 1596’, Rural History, 6 (1995), 155–78. Life of Bruen, pp. 89–96; Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England, pp. 49–50n. J. Mawdesley, ‘Clerical politics in Lancashire and Cheshire during the reign of Charles I, 1625–1649’ (PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 2014), pp. 71–82. REED. Cheshire, ii.762. Life of Bruen, pp. 10–13, 30–1. W. Hinde, The Office and Morall Law of God in the Days of Our Gospell … (London, 1623), dedicatory epistle; Life of Bruen, p. 90. James I, The Political Writings of James VI and I, ed. J. P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 224–8. For this approach, see Grosvenor’s jury charges: Grosvenor papers, pp. 13–14, 16, 26; Cust and Lake, ‘Rhetoric of magistracy’, 45. Life of Bruen, p. 104. Maltby, Prayer Book and People, pp. 172–3. For equivalents in other shires, see Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, pp. 63–5. 149

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The Cheshire gentry and their world 96 B. Capp, England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and Its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); P. Collinson, ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean puritanism as forms of popular religious culture’, in C. Durston and J. E. Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 32–57; K. Parker, The English Sabbath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 154–60. 97 D. Ibbetson, ‘Sir Thomas Chamberlain’, ODNB, x.903. 98 TNA CHES 24/113/3, unfoliated; REED. Cheshire, ii.846, 724–5; Hindle, State and Social Change, pp. 196–7. 99 TNA CHES 21/3, fos 367–71. 100 REED. Cheshire, i.29, ii.667. 101 TNA CHES 21/3, fo. 371. 102 REED. Cheshire, ii.693. 103 TNA CHES 21/3, fos 371–2. 104 TNA CHES 24/114/4. 105 Ibid.; REED. Cheshire, i.30–1; ii.688–9, 724–7, 742, 774, 787. 106 There was a flurry of presentments in September 1621, probably in response to Whitelocke’s charge in April, which had again identified wakes as a particular problem: Hindle, ‘Aspects of the relationship of the state and local society’, p. 529. 107 REED. Cheshire, ii.692–3, 743–6, 763–72, 978–83. See also the clashes at Siddington, where Hamnett Hyde defended the local curate, John Fletcher, against the insults of parishioners led by Richard Meyer, a piper and alehouse keeper: ibid., ii.763–72, 978–83. 108 Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England, pp. 112, 169–70. 109 Edward Burghall, ‘Providence Improved’, in Memorials of the Civil War, pp. 1–22; REED. Cheshire, i.30–3; CALS QJB 1/5, p. 485. 110 REED. Cheshire, ii.790–4. Hindle, State and Social Change, pp. 99–201.

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C

heshire has emerged from the above analysis as a county almost ideally suited to the production of county consciousness. And sure enough, both in the prevalence of such talk and in the ways in which the gentry conducted their social relations and political and cultural lives, the notion of the county community, and the distinctive notion of Cheshireness that went with it, appears to have played a central role. The county’s past history and heritage, as well as its geographical situation and current institutional structure and economic life, all served to pull the gentry’s lives inward, towards the county, rather than forcing them outwards, either to London or into intense relationships with neighbouring counties or pays. Its distance from the capital, its possession – in the palatinate jurisdiction – of a court in which a great deal of local business could be transacted without recourse to the central courts in London, and the relative economic heterogeneity of its central regions all militated towards the county operating at the level both of practice and of theory – that is to say, both as an administrative and political unit and an idealised social whole – as a central organising pole in the lives of the gentry. Due weight has to be given here to the recent past of the county as a separate legal and political entity, a status which it had lost only during the reign of Henry VIII. Thus, if the county community, both name and thing, were to exist anywhere in early Stuart England, Cheshire would seem to be the perfect spot. And in many ways, we can conclude, the ideal of the county community was alive and well in post-reformation Cheshire. And yet, the county community as it has emerged in the current analysis was not simply rooted in the soil, or in the immemorial traditions and assumptions of Cheshire and Cheshireness. On the contrary, it had to be created, sustained and reproduced through languages and discourses of immediately contemporary origin and currency. Whether these involved ­heraldry and the 151

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vogue for family history and myth making, or the internalisation of the classicising rhetoric of political virtue and service to the commonweal, or of hot Protestant, even emergently ‘puritan’, godliness, these discourses represented relatively new cultural forms and modes of communication, used in response to the experience of wrenching change in the form of the breach with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries or the impact of price inflation and rising population. Moreover, the language of ‘the country’ or the county was used to integrate social worlds, arenas of administrative, political and social action that were anything but county wide, into a unified vision of the county. Those same languages were also being used to integrate the perceived interests and rights of the county thus constituted into the wider polity itself. The resulting image of an unchangingly stable Cheshireness, epitomised by the shire’s gentry families of ancient lineage, was therefore a cultural construct, the product of a particular time and place, made up out of a range of cultural materials and practices for a very particular set of purposes. Pace Alan Everitt, then, the emergent attitudes and attributes did not spring fully grown from ‘the world of obstinate, inarticulate custom in which they [the gentry] lived and moved and had their being’,1 an emanation of the way things were or had always been, unmediated by any representational or discursive forms or practices and unprompted by any attendant social or political change or circumstance. On the contrary, the sort of county consciousness we are dealing with here was a product of just such a confluence of cultural, religious and political discourses and circumstances, all of which involved dynamic contact with, indeed continuous interaction between, the locality and a series of national institutions and discourses; between, if you like, the demands made, and opportunities offered, by ‘the state’ to local interests and needs. The resulting system of government and nexus of attitudes can be viewed in various ways. On the one hand, we might think that we are dealing here with the operation of a certain sort of gentry republic, a self-governing society, which used the institutional forms and powers devolved into the locality by the central state for a variety of local purposes. This would be a vision of the ‘monarchical republic’ operating at the ‘republican’ end of the spectrum. On the other hand, precisely the same phenomena can be viewed as the operation of the local state as the organs of central authority and the tentacles of royal government, emanating from the privy council, the court and, indeed, via the dispositions and demands of statute, from parliament, reached deep into local society. Such a vision of the polity would represent a version of the ‘monarchical republic’ located at the monarchical end of the same spectrum. There is, we think, no particular reason to choose between these rival versions of how the system either worked (in practice) or was supposed to work (in theory). On the contrary, they represent divergent tendencies within the same system, the tensions between which were subject to persistent 152

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negotiation between and among different elements in local society and the variegated institutions and demands of the central state. Many of the purposes served by this sort of county consciousness were what we might term cosmetic, or ideological, in the purest, most meretricious sense of the word; that is to say, they were designed to disguise as something other than what they were developments at considerable variance with the claims being made about the nature of Cheshire or of the county community and its ancient gentry. The assumed hierarchies of worth or esteem based on lineage, service and honour at the centre of this notion of Cheshire gestured at a stability that was not in fact present or possible, even in a county like Cheshire, which, as we have seen, had been preserved from the most disruptive effects of the dissolution of the monasteries or the operation of the London land market. Thus, the Adlington display of coats of arms seemed to offer a sense of stable, consensual hierarchy, but in fact operated as a sort of (highly contestable) league table, with families moving up and down according to a range of demographic, social, political and cultural factors. Sir Ranulph Crewe might worship at the altar of ancient lineage and strain every financial sinew to reclaim what he took to be his family’s place somewhere near the apex of Cheshire society, buying up manors and building a house the magnificence of which was intended to leave no one in any doubt as to his and his family’s status. But Crewe himself was the son of a tanner, who, having made his fortune in the law and bought his way (back) into Cheshire landed society, spent a great deal of his time not in the county at all, but in London pursuing his legal career. Similarly, Viscount Savage might have sunk very considerable resources into his county seat at Rock Savage and placed great importance on his standing in Cheshire society, but he spent much of his time at court and in Suffolk, and a great deal of his local standing in Cheshire was dependent upon his connections at the centre. When Sir Thomas Aston’s financial resources were rescued by his marriage to Magdalene Poultney, a wealthy Leicestershire heiress, having not much resided in the county he then put a good deal of his new-found wealth into establishing a place for himself in Cheshire society. Like Savage and Crewe, this involved not only the outward display of his new status in bricks and mortar but also an attempt to build his local standing, using his contacts at the centre to further the interests of the county against those of the city during his time as ship money sheriff. But even as he did so, Aston continued to seek office at court and spent a good deal of time in London. Nor, pace Mark Kishlansky, did election to parliament as a knight of the shire serve merely to confirm an existing and stable hierarchy of social standing and honour, being ‘generally’ ‘distributed through rotational patterns, the cursus honorum, or a seniority system’. 2 The career of perhaps the most spectacularly upwardly mobile figure in early Stuart Cheshire, Sir Richard Grosvenor, gives the lie to such claims. Grosvenor was the only person to be s/elected knight of the shire more than once during this period, and he 153

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almost certainly owed his pre-eminence not so much to his ancient lineage or burgeoning wealth as to the carefully acquired habitus of a commonwealth man and statist, someone endowed with the intellectual attributes, the cultural credit and ideological purity necessary to convince his contemporaries, and (at least potential) rivals for office, that he was uniquely qualified to represent the shire in parliament. As we have seen, Grosvenor put a great deal of effort into acquiring the requisite ideological and rhetorical skills and attributes, and it was his success in so doing, together with his assiduousness as a county governor, that best explains his serial election as a parliament man. Thus, while Grosvenor’s career in part confirms, it also falsifies, Kishlansky’s claim that ‘selection was a social distinction that affirmed virtue rather than a political act that necessitated performance’. While Kishlansky is quite right to say that this was a world in which ‘personal attributes, prestige, honour, standing, godliness’ ‘qualified individuals for office’, and that election as a parliament man represented a recognition of such virtues, he is quite wrong to argue that, for the most part, ‘ideology was absent from the process of parliamentary selection’.3 For Grosvenor’s claims to virtue were based on other beliefs and assumptions about the nature of the public man, the workings of the parliament, the linked threats of corruption, popery and evil counsel and a certain vision of true religion, that were, quintessentially, both political and ideological. Moreover, his repeated s/election as knight of the shire was in part a function, as he himself instructed the electorate in 1624, of his own performance of those ideologically framed virtues at Westminster, as well as in Cheshire, as he represented the interests of his ‘country’ – a term which, as we have seen, encompassed a number of local, county-wide and national allegiances and perspectives. Of course, the careers of Crewe, Savage, Aston and Grosvenor were not anything like typical; indeed, they would not have been typical of any county, let alone one as (relatively) stable and inward looking as Cheshire. And yet, if such careers were not typical, they were anything but simply anomalous. One might even argue that they were, in some sense, representative or indicative of the ways in which county consciousness emerged and operated within an integrated vision of the monarchical polity of early modern England. Such life courses show how, even in Cheshire, which, as we have seen, was a shire as conducive to the development of a localist county consciousness as any, careers could be made, and dynasties established (or re-established), through active interaction with national institutions, events and discourses. In each of these cases the key was the interaction between centre and locality and the integration of local concerns and interests into national trends and events, an understanding of which could be parleyed both into increased local standing for the individual concerned and into tangible benefits for the county more generally conceived. Pace Kishlansky, performance was as necessary as social standing, virtue or honour, and politically effectual performance required contact with the centre, as well as clout in the locality. 154

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The nature of that engagement with national institutions, discourses and events did, of course, differ between these four men. Crewe’s career was dominated by the law and the holding of legal office under the crown; Grosvenor’s by his dual engagement with county government and the institution of parliament. (Interestingly, while Grosvenor’s rise might have been bankrolled by an income stream coming from his mines in Flintshire, this was not something which featured in his expensively produced and extensively disseminated self-image.) Savage’s political arena and point of contact of choice was the court, and Aston tried (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to triangulate between county office, court connection and parliament. Except for his enforced spell in debtors’ prison, Grosvenor spent the vast bulk of his time in Cheshire; the others oscillated between the court and the county, focusing their spheres of operation on the centre while establishing, or seeking to establish, themselves in positions of prominence, if not dominance, in the county. Crewe, Savage, Aston and Grosvenor were all ambitious and successful ‘coming men’; but even a family in what appears to have been, if not precipitate economic decline, then certainly serious financial straits, like the Moretons of Moreton Hall, found themselves forced to operate not merely on a local but, in their case, on a global stage. The financial exigence of William Moreton seems to have virtually forced all his sons to look outward, seeking their fortunes not only at court or in London but all over the world. Rather than shrinking back into their immediate geographical and social environs, disappearing into the circles of kin and contacts in Cheshire, upon whom William Moreton seems to have relied for loans, the Moretons’ situation propelled them out into a wider world, centred on the universities, London and the court, there to parley their gentle status, and whatever cultural or social credit it had enabled them to amass, into a modicum of status and wealth. As the descent into penury and desperation described by John and Matthew Moreton, in London and Virginia respectively, shows, this could be a decidedly precarious business. By the same token, that same high-stakes engagement with the wider world helped to sustain an intense interest in events hundreds of miles from their increasingly decrepit late-Elizabethan manor house. In that last respect, at least, they seem to have been typical of the Cheshire gentry. Certainly, such concerns penetrated deep within Moreton’s local circle. In the midst of details of rent and bills, both due and paid, in April 1635 a retainer named Thomas Whitehead concluded a letter to William Moreton with the sentiment that ‘God be thanked for Mr Peter’s good health, and direct him to walk aright for his master’s best service and his own discharge and most credit. According to promise, I have sent you a copy of my last received news.’4 We have spent a good deal of time in this first part dealing with the self-image of the gentry, with their account of themselves as patriarchs and governors, fathers of their country and so on. This account has also been 155

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rooted in an analysis of the real nature of their social networks, and activities as justices and magistrates, as the sources, both public and private, reveal them. But necessarily, for a good deal of the time, we have been dealing with ideology, with the images and ideal types in and through which the gentry sought both to describe and legitimate themselves and their role in society. Of course, in a book about gentry politics such an attempt imaginatively to inhabit, meticulously to reconstruct, just how the gentry conceived of themselves, and to recuperate the conceptual and normative frameworks, the practical assumptions and basic nostrums within which the gentry conducted both their private and public lives and made their political choices goes with the territory. To a certain extent, one has to go with the flow of the sources, reconstituting what the people who produced them took them to mean and intended them to convey. But, in doing that, it is important not simply to take them at their word, to accept what the Cheshire gentry said about themselves and their wider political and social roles as a simple description of something that, for want of a better phrase, we might want to call social reality. Indeed, as we have seen, in a good deal of what they said they were doing, in much of what they claimed about themselves, assumptions or statements implicit – or even explicit – in the linguistic and representational codes in which they projected and legitimated their various social and political roles served to cloak or altogether elide the realities of the situation. As at Adlington, forms of display designed to embody hierarchy and stability – even, in the case of funeral monuments, to project a form of effortless (both moral and social) superiority, a predominance in local society rendered patent in stone and paint – also permitted (and projected) change and mobility. The virtual obsession with proclaiming the peace and unity of the Cheshire gentry in fact depended on mechanisms of dispute resolution designed to keep under control their frequent fallings-out over property or standing, as epitomised by their disputes over the control of the sacred space of the church as well as their contests in Star Chamber – one of which involved that paragon of dispute settlement, Hugh Winnington of the Hermitage, engaging in a public spat with the JP Richard Brereton over church seating; while another involved Hamnett Hyde challenging his fellow justices Thomas Marbury and Sir Urian Leigh over access to coal mines.5 After all, almost all of the means whereby the Cheshire gentry asserted their place in the supposedly stable and peace-loving honour community of Cheshire involved the assertion of what were essentially competitive claims to honour, status and prestige. The capacity of someone like Grosvenor to make his name as an arbiter of the disputes of others – ‘the honest chancellor’ – was predicated on the propensity of his neighbours and contemporaries to keep falling out. Thus, Thomas Lytler’s eulogy to the peaceful arbitration of the long-running Holford–Cholmondeley dispute cuts both ways. On the one hand, it provides testimony to the investment in peace and harmony prevailing among the Cheshire gentry, but, on the other, it also represents proof positive of 156

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their equal and opposite propensity to produce bitter, long-running disputes centred on property, status and precedence. What were at stake here, on one level, were a series of discourses, all of them designed to justify the class power of the gentry. Here, you might argue, were the cultural resources, the material forms and literary tropes and genres through which the self-interest and the self-image of the landed class were expressed and legitimated. County consciousness, we might argue, functioned as the class consciousness of the gentry. It provided them with a legitimating ideology, a flattering self-portrait, a gloss placed on the real nature of the social and economic relationships, indeed of the power, upon which their place in the world actually depended. Here the sort of in-depth micro-study produced by Steve Hindle in his masterful recounting of the fate visited upon Margaret Knowsley comes into its own. This, one might suggest, was the underside, the dark underbelly, of Collinson’s consensual ‘religion of protestants’, his easy collaboration between godly minister and godly magistrate, united in their pursuit of justice and order.6 This, we might be tempted to think, is what we might find were we able consistently to look beneath the elaborately carved memorial stones left behind by the Cheshire gentry as monuments to their virtue and good government. Of course, even at the height of the current moral panic occasioned by the Me-Too movement, there is no reason to think that what happened to Knowsley was in any way typical, or even commonplace, but what such worked-up case studies do is lay bare the power dynamics in operation beneath or behind what the decidedly taciturn sessions records render as the smoothly efficient, and even beneficent, operation of local ‘justice’ as dutiful magistrates like Sir George Booth worked diligently to preserve the order of their ‘country’. If we are tempted to take the official transcript produced by the magistrates and their underlings as the literal truth of the matter, mistaking it for a transparent account of social relations and the workings of local government, then Knowsley’s experience stands as a reminder that, behind the laconic record of every contested bastardy case settled to the satisfaction of the likes of a Booth or a Grosvenor, there might very well lie all sorts of ruined lives and human suffering. But, be that as it may, we can, we think, conclude from the preceding three chapters that during the late Elizabethan and early Stuart decades the Cheshire gentry and their cultural enablers and facilitators had managed to produce a version of Cheshireness, an account of the county community, adequate to their purposes. That account was grounded in their own social experience; that is to say, in their own social networks and practices as magistrates and public men. But it also drew upon the history of the county as they had both experienced and reconstructed it, and a range of immediately contemporary cultural materials and discourses: heraldic, antiquarian, classicising and reformed. While the resulting version of ‘Cheshire’ legitimised and even celebrated the lives of the gentry, it also served to constrain their 157

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exercise of both social and political power. No doubt, opinions will differ about how effectively their pursuit of wealth, status and power was diverted into the service of ‘the commonwealth’ or ‘the country’, but there can surely be no doubt that the resulting norms and forms allowed them to take an essentially benign, and consensual, view of their activities as public men and magistrates. The extent to which constraints were placed on the behaviour of the gentry by their notion of Cheshireness and the county community shows most strikingly in the ways in which the considerable tensions created by the English post-reformation condition – tensions between and about Protestants, Catholics and puritans – were in fact contained. As is shown by the above analysis of the issue of Sabbath observance and wider concerns about the reformation of manners, there can be no doubt that such tensions existed at various social levels. Both puritanism and anti-popery had a sometimes quite central role to play in Cheshire politics. But the county’s affairs owed a great deal to the connections with the court and the social glue provided by a Catholic, Viscount Savage; and even some of the more puritan of the shire’s gentry were quite able to maintain easy social relations, indeed to share quintessentially gentlemanly pastimes like horseracing, with other far from godly, indeed even Catholic or crypto-Catholic, elements. As a comparison between the works of William Webb, himself a notably godly man, and Hinde’s Life of Bruen shows, by the early seventeenth century there were available two rather different godly and secular takes on what it meant to be a gentleman in Cheshire. Those two different renditions of the same social and ideological terrain shared a good deal, of course, but at the sharp end, where the demands of an austerely zealous puritanism met the life of the typical country gentlemen, there can be no doubt of the depth of the differences and the actual and potential seriousness of the disagreements. Hinde’s quite remarkable rebuke of the otherwise perfectly godly Sir Richard Wilbraham for the ease of his social relations with the wrong sort of gentry and the breadth of his social and recreational activities can leave us in no doubt on that score.7 And yet Savage remained a central figure in the politics of the county, and the ties between him and the likes of Wilbraham held. No doubt, godliness enabled Bruen to play a far more prominent role in local affairs, to exercise a far greater influence over local society, and the gentlemen bred up in his household, than his material resources would otherwise have allowed; for Bruen was never anything like the central figure that Hinde’s life portrays him as. Just as with Webb’s vision of essentially the same territory, we should not mistake ideology for reality. How far the unifying assumptions underlying this vision of ‘Cheshire’ survived the political and religious conflicts of the period between the mid1620s and the outbreak of the civil war is the question that Parts II and III of this book set themselves to answer. In order to do that, the tempo and mode of exposition and argument shift. While it would not be quite accurate to 158

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say that the second and third parts of the book move from the analytic to the narrative mode, it is the case that the narrative pace increases considerably, reaching its peak in a detailed, blow-by-blow account of the politics of 1641– 42. The analysis takes place in the course of recounting the increasingly rapid course of religio-political conflict. Here due attention is paid to the ecclesiastical politics of the period and what we might term the religious condition of both Cheshire and Chester under the impact of the Caroline regime and the activities of its opponents and critics, both radical and moderate.

NOTES 1 Everitt, Community of Kent, p. 123. 2 M. Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 108. 3 Ibid., pp. 8, 16. 4 BL Additional MS 33936, fo. 127r. 5 TNA STAC 8/33/7; 8/174/16; 8/215/12. 6 Hindle, ‘The shaming of Margaret Knowsley’, 391–417; Collinson, Religion of Protestants, ch. 4. 7 Life of Bruen, p. 196.

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Part II

The Personal Rule and its problems

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4

Cheshire politics in the 1620s and 1630s

RESPONSES TO CROWN DEMANDS

T

he levies exacted under the royal prerogative were the main flashpoints in early Stuart government. In many ways they can be taken to define the relations between the centre and the localities, perhaps even the Caroline regime and the political nation, during the late 1620s and 1630s. In county after county the forced loan, distraint of knighthood, ship money and the exactions associated with the lieutenancy led to opposition and obstructionism on the part of local taxpayers. But this was not, for the most part, the case in Cheshire. It was one of the promptest shires to pay the forced loan when it was demanded in February 1627. What little evidence there is of the knighthood fines suggests that these were paid with little opposition. Ship money was paid with minimal arrears up to the final writ of November 1639. And the various charges for the lieutenancy, including muster masters’ fees and coat and conduct, which caused opposition elsewhere, were paid without apparent protest until 1639–40.1 As late as September 1640, as the king’s Personal Rule was fast collapsing, the deputy lieutenants could still claim that ‘we find [the county] very willing and ready to serve his Majesty in the present expedition as may very well appear by their forwardness upon former occasions, as in the payment of loans, knighthoods, ship money, and in these last two years in setting out 750 with coat and conduct …’.2 Why was this the case? How do we explain the county’s general compliance with demands from the centre? It had to do with a combination of factors which included the functioning of the connections between centre and shire, the attitudes and approaches of local governors in their handling of these levies, the relatively harmonious relationships between leading gentry and the ways in which, at a local level, ideological tensions were largely 163

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contained. An investigation of these reveals a good deal about the dynamics of politics and governance within Caroline Cheshire. Part of the explanation for the county’s relative compliance lies in its relationship with the privy council at Westminster. The council’s role in instructing and superintending local governors was pivotal for the relationship between the localities and the centre. But the nature of this relationship varied a good deal from shire to shire. Until the advent of the Scottish war of 1638–40 – when its focus shifted to the northern borders – most of the council’s attention was concentrated on the southern and eastern counties. It was they that bore the main weight of the war effort against the French and the Spanish in the late 1620s, making preparations against invasion, providing the bulk of the troops for overseas service and having to sustain the extremely onerous burdens of billeting these troops on their return from Cadiz and the Isle de Rhe. Cheshire, in comparison, escaped relatively lightly.3 It was also a county, like Lancashire, about which the council was often ignorant and ill informed. Links between a county and the privy council tended to function most effectively where there was a local magnate actually sitting on the council. But there was no one in this category in Cheshire. Neither of the lord lieutenants, Derby or his son Lord Strange, was a privy councillor; nor was the county’s main go-between in dealings with the centre, Viscount Savage. Although a figure of considerable weight at court, and a trusted client of Buckingham, Savage was never made a privy councillor and therefore had to work at one remove in passing on directions and lobbying for the shire’s interests. This could often produce delays, mistakes and contradictory instructions which hampered the royal service. A good example was Sir George Booth’s failure to get a response from the council after he had taken considerable pains in certifying defaulters to the privy seal loan of 1625. He waited in vain for council directions on how they should be dealt with, and in the meantime, he reported, others who had promised to pay held back and he himself was thought ‘too forward’ and ‘very severe’ in continuing to solicit money when some were getting away with refusals.4 However, the council’s administrative shortcomings and lack of reliable intelligence could also be an advantage to local governors. A good example was the impact of their constant pleas that their shire was relatively impoverished and therefore that the crown’s demands on them should be reduced. Councillors were relatively receptive to such appeals, providing that they were couched in suitably loyal and deferential language. They also found it very hard to gauge their veracity and were generally accepting of the underlying argument – which went to the heart of contemporary understandings of mixed monarchy – that the king could be properly served only where his interests were balanced with those of his people. In Cheshire’s case, following concerted lobbying by the sheriff and justices in late 1635, the county was able to obtain a reduction on its ship money levy from £3,500 to £3,000. At the same time Lancashire’s levy was raised from £3,500 to £4,000 and 164

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Staffordshire’s from £2,000 to £3,000.5 The occasional success of such processes of lobbying and negotiation with the centre was very important for the politics of royal levies because it made it a great deal easier for local governors to sell the benefits of cooperation to the county. A particularly good example was the collection of the forced loan in early 1627. This was a potentially difficult task. Viscount Savage arrived in the shire at the start of February with the task of overseeing the service at a time when local taxpayers were well aware, through newsletter networks, that other shires were resisting the levy and that the previous October the local worthy, Lord Chief Justice Crewe, had been sacked from his post after leading the judges in refusing to sanction the legality of the loan. The viscount’s initial report reflected the uncertain state of local opinion. The city of Chester had readily subscribed to the levy and paid in its money by 10 February; but Savage reported that ‘I find a Northamptonshire and Warwickshire infection which I hope I shall cure in this county … to persuade and to bring in their money must be a work of some time’.6 He stayed in the shire for over a month and held a series of meetings at which he worked on the local commissioners and gradually brought them and the subsidymen round to making payment. The basic technique that he used was to demonstrate the benefits to be gained from the centre by being cooperative. To this end he wrote to Buckingham urging the cause of some Chester merchants who had had their goods impounded on a French ship, and asking him to help with the dismissal of a corrupt city official. The council responded promptly and favourably to both these requests. These signs of approval were calculated to arouse the envy and self-interest of the county, which had long been in competition with the city for the council’s favour.7 Savage recognised this and sought to push the process further by getting Buckingham to secure public recognition of the city’s cooperation; ‘if you would return an answer to us how well his Majesty doth accept of it it would do much good to the service in the adjacent shire’. A letter was duly sent from the council containing fulsome assurances of the king’s ‘very gracious interpretation and acceptance of your forwardness and your good indeavours … and to let them know that his Majesty will be very mindful of your dutiful and loving affection in any occasion that shall be offered for the good of your said city’.8 All this appears to have done the trick. On 10 March a group of county loan commissioners, led by three of the most trusted local magistrates, Sir George Booth, Sir Richard Wilbraham and Sir Richard Grosvenor, wrote to the council declaring that they had summoned the county taxpayers to meetings before them and found a ‘ready obedience in them to satisfy his Majesty’s important affairs’ and that they ‘did most freely pay in the money required or otherwise freely subscribed to pay it in less time than was required’.9 This made Cheshire one of the promptest and most cooperative counties in the entire service and provided a good example of how bargaining could facilitate a reciprocal relationship between 165

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centre and locality. By offering concessions and assurances of future favour to reward loyal performance, the council could not only provide tangible evidence of the benefits of cooperation, but, just as importantly, strengthen the hand of local governors when it came to the all-important process of negotiating with the taxpayers. We can see similar mechanisms at work, albeit operating in more complex ways, in a series of clashes between the city of Chester and the county over ship money. These began soon after the issue of the second writ for the county in August 1635, when the sheriff, Sir Thomas Aston, protested to the council that the city had been passing some of their liability on to the shire by awarding certificates to allow wealthy landowners with houses in Chester to pay a lower rate there, rather than contributing to the shire’s assessment. The council, impressed by Aston’s diligence and the county’s readiness in responding to the first writ, reprimanded the city and instructed them to cease the practice.10 The sheriff’s lobbying had paid dividends and ensured that the county had established an important point of principle. Thus far the negotiation was a relatively straightforward quid pro quo, the council rewarding the shire for its cooperation. However, the situation became more complicated when the city authorities struck back against Aston by assessing him to pay £5 on the profits of his patent for the import of French wines which were collected in the port of Chester. Sir Thomas was at first able to secure a reprieve for this from the council because of his exemplary record. But when the city claimed that Aston’s refusal to pay was setting an example which disrupted the service, they reversed their earlier decision and in April 1636 required him to pay. This he refused to do, presenting the whole issue as a matter of personal honour, since he had had his goods distrained for payment by the city authorities in ‘a disgraceful manner’.11 He also escalated the conflict by persuading the county justices to see this as a matter of protecting the shire’s interests. In December 1636 a group of leading magistrates wrote to the council claiming that the injury to Aston was the latest in a series of abuses by the city which were leaving ‘the country discontented’ and threatening to disrupt the service there.12 Over the following eighteen months both city and county lobbied the council vigorously, dredging up longstanding slights and grievances. After a series of meetings at the assizes in October 1637 twenty-seven leading noblemen and gentry petitioned the council in support of Aston’s claim to exemption from payment in the city and raised new grievances over the city’s intrusions in the Gloverstone (a liberty within the city boundaries traditionally regarded as part of the shire) and its efforts to persuade the bishop of Chester and cathedral clergy to pay towards the city rather than the shire.13 The aldermen retaliated by citing the various orders that had by now been given in the privy council requiring Aston to pay in the city, and also claiming that Chester itself was relatively impoverished compared with the wealthy nobles and gentry of the county.14 The council faced difficult choices if the 166

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collection of the money was not to be disrupted; but it was also in the happy position that these two local bodies were competing for its favour on the understanding that this would only be forthcoming if they demonstrated loyalty to the crown by prompt and efficient collection. It was thus able to exploit the overlap between its executive and judicial functions by trading cooperation over payment for the prospect of a favourable decision on matters of principle which mattered far more to the local parties than the relatively small sums of money at stake. The city was fighting for the protection of its charter and liberties against longstanding challenges from the shire; while the magistrates were trying to uphold what they described as the ‘right of the country’ to equitable treatment over the assessment of ship money and the preservation of its jurisdiction over Gloverstone. In all this the council benefitted too from the sheer length of time over which the dispute extended. This was more a matter of accident than calculation as divisions within its ranks, its openness to lobbying, its lack of clear and consistent information on the local situation and its inability to make earlier decisions stick held out to both parties the prospect that if they kept up the struggle they might eventually achieve their ends. But, of course, the condition of being able to do this was exemplary loyalty in the collection of ship money.15 The whole dispute came to a head on 27 May 1638 with a hearing before the king and council at which a rough and ready balance was struck. Aston attended with a deputation of twenty-two of the county’s nobles and gentlemen, and the city sent its representatives and attorneys. Debate ranged back and forth with some of the ‘great lords’ supporting the case for Aston and the shire, emphasising ‘the readiness of the county upon all occasions to do his Majesty’s service.’ The king, supported by Lord Keeper Coventry, then vouched for the city being equally ready ‘upon all occasions to show their loyalties in doing all service’ and reminded the council of its previous decisions to require Aston to pay in the city. As Aston saw the debate slipping away from him he became so desperate that he fell to his knees to beg the king to give him a further hearing; but Charles promptly ordered him to leave the room.16 In the end the dispute was resolved by giving something to both sides. On the original issue of Aston’s liability to pay in Chester the rights of the city were upheld and Sir Thomas was ordered not ‘to trouble his Majesty in that kind any more.’ But over the matter of Gloverstone the council confirmed an award made by the earl of Derby and the assize judges in favour of the county and then referred the matter of the bishop’s and cathedral payments again to Derby and the judges, with every likelihood that they would once more adjudicate in the county’s favour.17 All three parties thus gained something from the process. Aston and the county leaders had demonstrated to the local gentry and freeholders their determination to uphold the ‘country’s rights’ and their ability to secure concessions, all of which again served to demonstrate the benefits of co-operation with the crown and offset the dangers of 167

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being thought too zealous in the service. The city’s stand against Aston was vindicated and it had received a valuable demonstration of the king’s favour. And the council secured its main objective in the whole exercise which was to ensure the successful collection of ship money. This long drawn out dispute taught the county’s leaders and, in particular, the moving force behind their campaign, Sir Thomas Aston, important lessons about how to play the game of central-local politics. They learned that effective lobbying depended on mobilising the ‘voice of the country’ (in this case the leading nobles and gentry) in support of whatever cause they were promoting. This was one of the main reasons why they were able to exert leverage on some members of the council, in spite of the opposition of Charles and Coventry. They were also taught the importance of timing their insertions into the processes of central politics to achieve maximum impact; in this case at moments when the council was preoccupied with securing local compliance with ship money. Moreover, Aston himself learned that successful lobbying on behalf of the shire at the centre would enhance his prestige and status locally; and conversely that delivering the co-operation of the shire would advance his reputation at court. These were important lessons for the petitioning campaigns of 1641. Active compliance with the demands of royal service, however, was down to more than just bargaining and trade offs. The willingness of local governors to promote the royal service was prompted by a complex set of personal motives. Habit, ambition, altruism and ideological considerations all played a part, along with concern for status and fear of disgrace. At its root, there was the understanding – constantly reiterated in Whitelocke and Grosvenor’s charges – that obedience to commands from above and assiduous performance of magisterial duties were essential to securing peace, unity and order within local society. Coupled with this was a sense that loyal service was a fundamental duty, the expression of an inbred obligation to love and obey the king as ‘father of the country’. Thomas Cholmondeley, ship money sheriff in 1637–8 expressed this very clearly when he addressed the county’s high constables in November 1637. As ‘honest men of the county’, their main spur to dedication in this service was the ‘fidelity and diligence, the love and honour we owe unto his Majesty which certainly cannot but be great to so gracious a prince …’.18 These positive impulses were reinforced by a fear of being seen to fall down on the service. The threat of being reported to the council was a powerful incentive to diligent execution. Cholmondeley warned the high constables of it in his ship money address and the lord lieutenants, the Derby and Lord Strange, continually harped on this theme when they were passing on various instructions to their deputy lieutenants. The way in which this could act as a spur to performance was demonstrated in an anxious letter from Sir Urian Leigh to his fellow deputies in October 1626 when it looked as if Derby might ‘certify against us all’ for failure to provide adequate muster certificates. The 168

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deputies quickly conferred and produced their reports.19 Cholmondeley, who was a model of diligence as ship money sheriff, was mortified to be told by the council in June 1638 that ‘whatever cause of difficulty may be afterwise pretended’, they could not ‘but impute’ the small arrears still outstanding to his ‘own backwardness and remissness.’ Such a reprimand would not only touch on his sense of himself as a loyal servant of the crown but also, as he well understood, undermine his reputation and authority among his neighbours.20 This mix of motives and assumptions was part and parcel of the make-up of most local governors, and doubtless applied in some measure to all who provided loyal service to the crown. But what also characterised the approach of many of the Cheshire magistrates was a concern to balance this with defending the interests of their neighbours. This meant trying to minimise the burdens and disruptions caused by the various royal services and protecting those who lacked the means to contribute fully. Thus, considerable care was taken when it came to assessing for levies such as privy seal loans, with lists of those who deserved to be excused being drawn up and presented to the council.21 Similarly, the exchanges recorded between the deputy lieutenants often revolved around ways of ensuring ‘the ease of the country’ by protecting local taxpayers from extra expense while still fulfilling the privy council’s instructions: for example, in sparing them the massive costs in re-equipping the militia in 1626, or limiting training of the militia to one day in 1640.22 There was also a well-established practice in the county of consulting gentry and freeholders over crown demands. Thus, there were negotiations with the gentry assigned to pay the privy seal loans that Booth oversaw in late 1625, and meetings with county taxpayers to secure assent for the forced loan in February 1627.23 Such meetings were common enough in other shires; but they do appear to have been a particularly pronounced feature of the political culture of Cheshire, perhaps because of the traditions of a county parliament and consultation at the county court over levying the mise. Hence, when Aston became ship money sheriff in November 1634, having had no previous experience of local government, his first move was to take advice from the senior justices and undertake a lengthy consultation with the ‘constables and the principal men of every township’ before embarking on an additional assessment of the wealthier taxpayers to relieve the poorer.24 Even the deputy lieutenants who were accustomed to operating under the lieutenancy’s prerogative powers engaged in extended negotiation, notably in 1639 and 1640, when the council was ordering the trained bands to serve outside the shire.25 In addition to consulting the body of the shire on a regular basis, leading local governors were quick to represent the shire’s interests to higher authority. This meant not only lobbying for the reduction of burdens but also adopting a more combative stance to establish the red lines beyond which the county could no longer be relied on to cooperate. The practice developed in Cheshire, as in other shires, of drawing up collective petitions, subscribed 169

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by the leading nobles and gentry, to give voice to the ‘country’s right’ – by which they meant the right to enjoy their traditional laws and liberties, to be assessed equitably for taxes and to be secured against invasion or uprisings.26 These proved very effective in harnessing support from the body of the shire during the county’s struggles with the city over ship money; and similar support was being gathered in June 1639 when Booth and Wilbraham sponsored a petition against removing the county’s trained bands from the shire in the event of a Scots invasion.27 One of the key factors helping to sustain this united front in Cheshire was the relative absence of factional rivalries among the senior gentry. In some counties these did much to disrupt local government. The classic example is Somerset, where the rivalry between Sir Robert Phelips and John Lord Poulett continually undermined the work of the lieutenancy and the collection of ship money. Phelips’ determination to cast himself as the representative of the country’s interests, while identifying Poulett with the exercise of the royal prerogative and an overbearing authoritarianism, had the effect of continually escalating minor disagreements and administrative problems into major political conflicts. Similar circumstances can be identified in other shires, particularly in Cornwall and Yorkshire at the time of the forced loan.28 However, in spite of the tensions between leading gentry documented in previous chapters, no such feuds were evident in Cheshire. The argument has been put forward by John Morrill that from the mid1620s a major feud did exist in Cheshire between a faction of newly created Irish barons (William Lord Brereton, Robert Viscount Cholmondeley and Robert Viscount Kilmorey) and established baronets (such Sir George Booth, Sir Richard Wilbraham, Sir Richard Grosvenor and Sir Thomas Delves). But the evidence for this is slight and appears to rest on a reading back from the Short Parliament election of 1640 when an observer identified two parties of ‘barons’ and ‘baronets’ among the gentry.29 Morrill has identified an earlier manifestation of this feud in the 1626 county election, when there was a dramatic contest for the second seat between Peter Daniell and John Minshull, respectively brothers-in-law to Grosvenor and Cholmondeley.30 This was certainly a bitter contest, described by Thomas Stanley as having caused ‘a very great stir, such as was never in Cheshire before’. After an inconclusive attempt to settle the matter by a ‘shout’, and then three days of polling the county freeholders, it was finally resolved only by Minshull agreeing through intermediaries to stand down.31 However, there is no evidence to link this to a broader contest between ‘barons’ and ‘baronets’. The disputes over precedence that Morrill identifies as the cause of the feud emerged only after July 1629 when Charles tried to resolve a conflict over seniority between English peers, on the one hand, and Scots and Irish, on the other. He did so by confirming the ranking of the Scots and Irish immediately behind their English counterparts, but then demonstrating the greater value he placed on English titles by ordering that the Scots and 170

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Irish be removed from the commissions of the peace. This was the fate that befell Cholmondeley, Kilmorey and, after the death of the old Lord Brereton in 1631, his grandson and heir, William Lord Brereton. These peers must have found this apparent disvaluing of their service as hurtful and humiliating as did other Irish peers. But although this sparked off rivalries with baronets in some counties there is no indication of this happening in Cheshire.32 Cholmondeley continued to operate alongside Booth and Wilbraham as a deputy lieutenant, and all three of the Irish peers added their names to the petitions on behalf of the county drawn up by the JPs. There appears to have been a general willingness to work together to promote what were seen as the interests of the ‘country’, and a considerable degree of personal collaboration among the leading gentry. This was facilitated by the influence of the English peers within the shire. The lord lieutenants, Derby and Strange, tended to remain aloof from direct involvement in day-to-day county politics, Derby because he was living in semi-retirement and Strange because he was rarely present in the shire. But they were widely respected as spokesmen for the county’s interests at the centre and as arbiters of local disputes.33 The key figure in encouraging harmonious relations among the shire’s gentry, however, was Viscount Savage. As we have seen, he enjoyed immense local prestige as the wealthiest and most highly ranked landowner in the shire, from a family with a long record of local service and a wide range of friendships and connections with members of the county elite. He took considerable care to fulfil his obligations to his native shire in a manner which matched up to all the expectations of good lordship traditionally invested in a local magnate. His correspondence with local gentry and the city of Chester (where he was an alderman) was full of emollient and reassuring phrases about his willingness to support their interests and his desire for their friendship; and he repeatedly put himself forward as an intermediary between county and city, and both bodies and the central government. He was also approachable to local gentlemen who needed an entrée at court, as William Moreton’s son, Peter, discovered when he was trying to secure an introduction to the lord treasurer.34 This style of leadership went down very well. Perhaps the clearest indication of the general esteem enjoyed by Savage is how little was made of his Catholicism. He was reported to parliament in 1626 and 1628 as a Catholic officeholder. But this does not appear to have been an issue for the bulk of the local gentry and it is notable that while he was head of the family there were far fewer presentations of family members and servants for recusancy than became the case under his less accommodating son John, who succeeded him in 1635.35 Savage’s generally soothing presence did much to mitigate the potential for faction disputes. But, even though there was an absence of factional division among the leading gentry, this did not preclude the emergence of distinct groupings with differing political identities and attitudes. One of these, which can loosely be 171

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described as the ‘Patriots’ – an adjective applied in 1640 – revolved around the axis formed by Booth, Wilbraham and Grosvenor. Booth and Wilbraham were the de facto leaders of local government during the 1630s. Well into his sixties by the end of the 1620s, Sir George had been serving as a local magistrate since the latter years of Elizabeth’s reign. During the early 1620s he had begun the process of grooming his son William to succeed him, transferring to him his office of custos rotulorum (chair of the county bench) in 1621 and then securing his election as first knight of the shire in 1624. However, for reasons which are unclear, William gave up the custos-ship early in 1627 and Sir George resumed the post.36 In the process he took on a new lease of life. During the late 1620s and the 1630s he was the most active and authoritative of the deputy lieutenants, acting as treasurer for the collection of the forced loan and knighthood fines, and maintaining his record as one of the most diligent of the local justices. His wealth and social status, his commitment to promoting peace and unity within the shire and balancing the demands of the crown with the interests of his neighbours, together with his sheer industry, all made him a formidable figure among the county magistracy. Working in tandem with him, particularly on the lieutenancy, was Sir Richard Wilbraham. An active justice in different parts of the county since succeeding his father in 1611, he was also, as we have seen, the most widely connected and, when it came to acting as executor or trustee, the most widely trusted of all the leading gentry. Sir Richard Grosvenor, who enjoyed a particularly close relationship with his brother-in-law Wilbraham, was by the late 1620s widely acknowledged as the most fitting person to represent the shire in parliament.37 All three shared an evangelical Calvinist religious outlook, combined with a distrust of courtiers and royal favourites and a readiness to look to parliament to remedy the county’s problems. As the label ‘Patriot’ implied, they were strongly identified with the ‘country’ and were trusted to promote its interests, in the sense both of local concerns and of the broader package of ideological imperatives.38 The other axis consisted of a group of gentry who gravitated towards London and the royal court. They looked for leadership to Savage and his son John, who became Earl Rivers in 1640; and, essentially, it was their connections that held this group together. Among the chief mourners at Viscount Savage’s funeral in 1635 were Sir Thomas Aston, his cousin, Robert Viscount Kilmorey and the later ship money sheriff, Thomas Cholmondeley of Vale Royal. All were friends and political allies, and in Aston and Kilmorey’s case they enjoyed connections at court.39 In many respects, the pivotal figure in this network was Thomas Savage’s legal adviser, the Chester attorney John Werden. In his will Werden described the viscount as his ‘honourable good lord’, and bequeathed to his son his most precious heirloom, ‘the guilt bowl’ and the letter sent to him by Savage as acknowledgement of his service. Werden also acted as man-of-business for Aston during his frequent absences in London; he corresponded about spiritual matters with Thomas 172

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Cholmondeley, with whom he shared a pro-Laudian, anti-puritan approach to religion; and he acted as attorney to other allies, Sir Edward Fitton and Sir Thomas Smith.40 Those within the orbit of this connection also included Thomas Cholmondeley’s elder brother, Robert Viscount Cholmondeley, and his formidable wife, Lady Catherine, Hugh Beeston and William Whitmore.41 The members of this grouping tended to be anti-puritan and pro-Laudian in their religious stance, relatively indulgent towards Catholicism – if not Catholics themselves – ready to identify with the interests of king and court and willing to take an authoritarian line when it came enforcing the crown’s demands. In 1641–42 this grouping was to provide the basis for the Rivers/Astonled royalist party that emerged in Cheshire. But prior to this, where we can see them involving themselves in local politics, it was generally alongside the Booth/Wilbraham axis, balancing the interests of the shire and central government. Aston was a good example of this approach in his performance of his role as ship money sheriff. With his court connections, he was ambitious to ingratiate himself with the king and the council, and from the start he impressed them with reports of the extraordinary pains he was taking in raising the sums required. On one occasion the privy council even had to curb his enthusiasm by telling him that he was not authorised to examine local constables under oath to speed up the process of assessing personal estates.42 At the same time, however, having become involved with the shire relatively late in the day, he was very keen to establish himself there, and took care to consult the local JPs every step of the way. In his reports to the centre he emphasised how concerned he was to ‘appease the discontent of the country’, and was quick to act as spokesman for the county’s grievances against Chester. For a brief period, until he over-reached himself in his dealings with Chester, Aston accomplished the difficult task of balancing the royal service and the interests of the shire, in the process earning the plaudits of both the king and county.

IDEOLOGICAL DIVISIONS The factors discussed above go some way towards accounting for Cheshire’s relatively compliant response to demands from the centre. But, perhaps, the most important explanation for this was the relatively low visibility of ideological issues in county politics up until the late 1630s. In counties such as Essex, Gloucestershire or Northamptonshire there was a groundswell of opposition to the more controversial demands of the crown from the forced loan onwards. Disputes that arose were repeatedly blown up into matters of principle relating to the liberties of the subject and the scope of the prerogative.43 But this did not happen in Cheshire until relatively late in the day. This was not through any ignorance of the broader issues at stake. The content of local newsletters and separate collections indicates that gentry 173

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were well informed about the latest events in parliament and the more controversial nature of the demands being made by the crown. Some had detailed accounts of proceedings in the Five Knights’ Case, Hampden’s Case and various state trials, and their occasional comments suggest that they were concerned at the broader implications of these developments. William Davenport of Bramhall, for example, described the proceedings over distraint of knighthood in 1631 as ‘the strange commission which came down into Cheshire’; and Sir Richard Wilbraham was expressing his apprehensions about ship money to his friend Grosvenor in December 1634.44 But such concerns did not translate into overt expressions of opposition to prerogative taxation. For the Cheshire gentry and freeholders, as for the majority of Englishmen, the appropriate forum for expressing opposition to the crown’s actions was parliament. Parliament stood at the centre of the ‘Patriots’’ image of the political order and took on the main responsibility for upholding the liberties of the subject and the ‘true’ Protestant religion. Sir Richard Grosvenor set out what a parliament looked like from the perspective of the shire when, as sheriff, he addressed the county freeholders prior to the election of 1624. He described it as the focal point of the commonwealth, the linch-pin holding together king and people, centre and localities, ‘court’ and ‘country’. It was ‘the most honourable and highest court of the kingdom, having an absolute jurisdiction and an unlimited power to dispose of the lives, limbs, estates, goods, honour and liberties of the subject, yea of their religion too …’.45 This involved devising the legislation that provided the framework of rights, liberties and rules for good order which sustained a united commonwealth and guided magistrates towards administering justice and curbing sinfulness.46 At the same time it provided the most legitimate forum for voicing ‘the country’s just complaints and grievances’. This was through parliament’s counselling role in bringing to the attention of the monarch wrongs and injuries which would otherwise have been kept from him because of his dependence on the advice of courtiers with their own self-serving agendas. Thus, Grosvenor cited the instance of monopolies that he himself had brought to the attention of the Commons in 1621. It had become apparent that the king had been misled about these by the refereeing processes which enabled ‘these caterpillars, these projectors’ to ‘have fed and preyed upon his people’. However, in a textbook example of how complaint could lead to redress, the king ‘taking notice from the parliament of the damage sustained by many of his grants (which otherwise had still been kept from his knowledge) was pleased by his proclamation to decry many of them and showed himself (like a true father to his country) as willing to call them in as we were to complaine of them’.47 In the process, not only were grievances redressed, but what Grosvenor described as ‘that chain which links and ties and unites the hearts and affections of the prince and people together’ was also reinforced.48 174

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The House of Commons’ status as the ‘Representative of the People’ was firmly established in the eyes of ‘the country’. This made it uniquely qualified to take charge of these processes. But it also placed a heavy responsibility on those elected to serve as MPs. They must, according to Grosvenor, be sound Protestants, ‘untainted’ in their religion by any suspicion of popery, ‘faithful and trusty, those that are conversant in the affairs of the country … and such whose courage (upon all occasions) dare command their tongues without fear to utter their country’s just complaints and grievances’. The only way to ensure that such men were chosen was for the freeholders to participate fully in the electoral process as active citizens with the ‘care of the public’ that Whitelocke extolled. In this instance Grosvenor advised them to follow the recommendations of the leading gentry sitting on the platform alongside him. But this must not preclude them from exercising their own judgement in the whole process; ‘for a freedom of voice is your inheritance and one of the greatest prerogatives of the subject which ought by all means to be kept inviolable and cannot be taken from you by any command whatsoever’. Moreover, they should not stop at electing their MPs but be prepared to mandate them to speak out about particular grievances in the ‘name of the country’.49 Grosvenor was, of course, setting up an ideal model of how the relationship between county and parliament should operate. They were seen as parts of an integrated whole in which the counties were subsumed within the commonwealth and local needs and grievances were met by legislation and reform within parliament. In practice the relationship functioned rather less efficiently. Grosvenor himself repeatedly raised local issues in parliament. The one which most concerned him was the charging of excessive fees in the Exchequer Court at Chester, which he first mentioned in 1621 and returned to again in 1626 and 1629. He also spoke out about concealments on the Prince of Wales’s lands in Cheshire, and the import of Irish cattle which was undercutting the profits of local farmers. The seven other county MPs during the 1620s also regularly sat on committees which considered matters of local interest.50 But, aside from the Monopolies Act of 1624, none of this work amounted to very much in terms of delivering on legislation. Grosvenor acknowledged the problem in the 1621 Parliament when he entered an eloquent plea on behalf of local taxpayers: ‘when we come into the country what will they think of us? … We have given subsidies and have brought home nothing for them. I pray God we be not subjects of their fury …’.51 In the event, reactions in Cheshire and elsewhere suggest that parliament’s reputation for acting as ‘the Representative of the People’ and bringing benefits for the local community was less adversely affected than Grosvenor anticipated; however, in terms of the day-to-day governance of Cheshire during the 1620s and 1630s parliament had minimal impact. Where it was of much greater significance was in injecting an overtly ideological element into local politics. In reminding the freeholders that 175

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parliament was the proper and legitimate forum for bringing to the monarch’s attention threats or injuries that imperilled their interests and liberties, Grosvenor was opening up consideration of such issues for a local audience. In the 1624 address his abiding concern was to get the freeholders to act against the shocking prospect of a toleration for Catholics. This was something that required their active engagement. He urged them to ‘command your knights that if there be special occasion offered they shall in the name of the country, and as by special command of the country, make public protestation against a toleration of religion or the repealing of laws formerly made against recusants’.52 He also dwelt on the issue of monopolists and the pernicious influence of evil counsellors around the king, and again invited discussion of such matters. Moreover, in speeches that he prepared for delivery in the Commons Grosvenor indicated that this was an ongoing process, a dialogue in which local electors and their representatives must continually work together to bring the weight of the ‘country’s’ opinion to bear at the heart of government. Thus, in a draft for the debates on 3 June 1628 he described how he and other MPs were responding to the mandate of their electors in bringing forward such recent grievances as the forced loan and the Five Knights’ Case. They had been sent to Westminster ‘full charged from our country with many complaints touching our lost liberties, the violation of justice, the beggary of our country, the imprisonment of our bodies … the seizing of our goods …’.53 He followed through on this a few days later with another draft in which he called for Buckingham to be ‘sequestered from the king’s person’ because ‘his excessive power abused to the king and commonwealth’s detriment is the cause of our danger’.54 By raising such concerns in both a local and a national context, Grosvenor was alerting electors to the local impact of some of the broader political issues of the day and inviting them to take a stand. However, Grosvenor, and the other ‘Patriots’ who shared his misgivings about aspects of crown policy, readily acknowledged that there was a time and a place for doing this, and that was in parliament. Extra-parliamentary action would set an example of opposition – even ‘resistance’ – which could be profoundly damaging to the structure of order and obedience on which the unity and integrity of the body politic depended. This self-denying ordinance had a significant impact in lowering the ideological temperature of Cheshire politics. This can best be illustrated by the response of Booth, Wilbraham and Grosvenor to the forced loan. Grosvenor expressed misgivings about the loan in the 1628 Parliament, and these were probably shared by his fellow ‘Patriots’.55 In some counties ‘parliament men’ with such views had stood out against the levy and suffered imprisonment for doing so. Their martyrdom served to publicise the objections to the legality of the loan and legitimise local debate and opposition; and, having taken their stand on this, some persisted in opposing demands such as distraint of knighthood or ship money. In Cheshire, however, as we have seen, these 176

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three men held back from opposition and took the lead in promoting the service. The fact that Sir Richard was still elected as first knight of the shire in 1628 suggests that the ideological issues raised by the loan had a much lower profile among local freeholders than in those shires like Cornwall, Essex and Northamptonshire, where those cooperating with the service faced anathema.56 The first clear evidence of a connection being made between prerogative taxation and the broader ideological issues that it raised emerges from Thomas Cholmondeley’s ship money papers for 1637–38. Cholmondeley was attempting to collect ship money for the fourth time of asking; and the indications are that repeated invocations of royal authority were carrying less weight, and also that it was becoming harder to sustain the idea of a readily identifiable national emergency. What tilted the balance in Cheshire, however, was Hampden’s Case. In February 1638 Cholmondeley reported that ‘the great hopes of the event of these arguments of the reverend judges do stay these payments’.57 Then three months later he was describing to the council how the minority verdict in support of Hampden had served to encourage and legitimise opposition: the general bruit of the late arguments of those judges which have concluded against the ship money is so plausibly received by those which were before too refractory and countenanced by some of rank that I find more difficulty in that poor remnant uncollected then in all the rest of the whole assessment.58

The indication that ‘some of rank’ were now countenancing opposition marked an important shift; and in August 1638 the sheriff identified Sir William Brereton of Handforth as encouraging his tenants in Marleston cum Lache to refuse to pay. Among the most active and high profile of all the Cheshire magistrates, Brereton had flirted with the idea of refusing payment in 1636, but then backed off.59 Now, significantly, he was giving a clear lead to local opposition and lending credibility to the ideological arguments against the levy. Unfortunately, the lack of documentation for Cholmondeley’s successor, Philip Mainwaring, makes it difficult to establish the extent of opposition to ship money in 1639. But during the spring and summer there are indications of widespread discussion and considerable restiveness over measures being taken to prepare the county for war against the Scots. During the early weeks of 1639 the deputy lieutenants were bombarded with demands from the privy council and the lord lieutenants that they re-equip, train and increase the numbers of the county’s trained bands and horse troops, that they levy 150 troops for the Scottish service and that they send powder and match to Hull. This last demand was unprecedented, as the deputies pointed out to Lord Strange, and they refused to comply. The other demands were met with difficulty, with the deputies having to levy the equivalent of one and a third of a mise (c.£1,000) on the shire and distrain the goods of those resisting 177

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the payment of coat and conduct money.60 The main flashpoint, however, was a request made by the council in February 1639 that the trained bands be made ready to march into ‘the Northern parts’ in case of an attempted invasion by the Scots. This prompted the deputies to engage in a round of consultation with the gentry and freeholders which revealed a ‘general grievance & discont[ent]’ of the ‘whole county’. The resulting petition, organised and circulated by Booth and Wilbraham, pointed out that this was ‘a thing unprecedented by the notes of all men in these parts’ and that it would leave the shire defenceless in the case of its coastline being invaded. In the event, any prospect of the trained bands being removed from the shire was headed off by a truce with the Scots in June. But this was not before the extensive resistance to the crown’s demands, which paralleled the opposition to ship money.61 What did most to inject a more overtly ideological element into local politics, however, was the county election to the Short Parliament. As we have seen, parliament was regarded as the proper and legitimate forum for bringing out into the open the grievances of the king’s subjects. Up and down the country freeholders and townsmen were given opportunities to pass judgement on the Personal Rule and elect MPs who could express their grievances and assuage their anxieties. These were the most ‘open’ and most bitterly fought parliamentary elections that had ever taken place.62 In Cheshire they opened up the fault-lines between Aston and the peers who gravitated towards the royal court, on the one hand, and the ‘Patriots’ led by Booth and Wilbraham, on the other. First off the mark after a parliament was called on 6 December 1639 were the county’s peers, who immediately plumped for Sir Thomas Aston as their candidate. They were organised by John Viscount Savage, now, like his father, a senior figure in the queen’s household, and included not only Cholmondeley and Kilmorey but also Lord Strange and the earl of Shrewsbury, who held lands within the shire. Within a few days they were writing round to potential local supporters to test the level of support. To start with Aston did not have a running mate, but by 19 December, when Thomas Powell, the newly appointed sheriff, wrote to William Whitmore, it appears that he had formed an unlikely partnership with Sir William Brereton.63 The county’s leading opponent of ship money was in effect teaming up with its most prominent gentleman-courtier. This appears to have been brought about by the decision of the county’s two main power brokers, Booth and Wilbraham, to settle on alternative candidates, possibly Booth’s younger son, John, and Sir Richard’s eldest son, Thomas.64 Brereton, after sitting as second knight of the shire in 1628, was ambitious to be returned again. He therefore turned to the only available running mate and formed a surprising but pragmatic alliance with Aston. They complemented each other in terms of the support that they could bring to the ticket. Aston enjoyed the backing of the county’s leading peers, with their territorial influence, and, after his efforts to promote 178

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the shire’s case against the city over ship money, was a credible representative of the county’s interests; while Brereton was said to have particular strength among the freeholders, notably the puritans.65 Campaigning was long drawn out and intense, particularly once Aston and Savage (now Earl Rivers) came down to the county in early March 1640.66 Aston’s man-of-business, Werden, described ‘the contestation’ as ‘like to be the greatest that was ever heard of in our country’; and it is possible to discern from his letters and other election correspondence the character of the struggle. Resentment among Aston’s supporters was, according to Werden, fuelled by the way in which Booth and Wilbraham were stirring up division in the shire through campaigning on behalf of their candidates as ‘popular patriots’.67 This implied that they were pitching their appeals directly to the freeholders, in much the same way as Grosvenor had done in the 1620s, by campaigning on an anti-Catholic, anti-Laudian and anti-court platform. Although Booth and Wilbraham were heavily implicated in the policies of the Personal Rule through their activities as deputy lieutenants, their sponsorship of the 1639 petition over the trained bands gave them considerable credibility in this role. Brereton adopted a similar stance. Much in the manner of Grosvenor in 1624, he emphasised the importance of parliament in addressing the subject’s grievances and the right of the freeholders to an unfettered choice. ‘I could much wish,’ he told William Whitmore, as a potential supporter, that every man might have come so free to the election as that they might be under no manner of engagement, but might be at liberty to give their voices as they see cause; so might there be a fair and free election, suitable to the nature of a ­par­liament … seeing that we trust our estates, liberties, posterities and religion with them that are elected, and are concluded by whatsover they do … it may probably be conceived that there depends as much upon the good success of this parliament as upon any that ever was in our age.68

The ‘patriot’ approach, then, was all about opening up popular debate, encouraging discussion of religious concerns and the defence of the subject’s ‘estates, liberties, posterities’ and pressing parliament to take drastic action. Aston took a different line. Werden highlighted the factiousness and divisiveness of the ‘popular Patriots’ who, under cover of ‘a bare pretence of the public good’, were seeking to ‘advance their own interests and popularity’. By coupling the term ‘Patriot’, which was normally used as a term of approval for those serving the public, with ‘popular’, which in this period was nearly always a pejorative term, implying the cultivation of a popular following for factional, self-serving, even anti-monarchical purposes, he was stripping them of any pretence to principled independence and honesty. Sir Thomas took this further, emphasising the dangers inherent in the ‘patriot’ approach by linking their activities to rumours of a puritan plot to work with the Scots and return a House of Commons that could challenge royal authority. 179

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He would, he said, ‘endeavour a quiet election without trouble … [but] tis feared the puritan faction will universally through the kingdom struggle for a party’.69 Such alarmism played well with anti-puritans like Whitmore and with the lords Savage and Cholmondeley, whose dinner-table reflections Werden was picking up on. But Sir Thomas could not escape the pressure to address the concerns of ordinary electors. In early March it was being reported that he was forced to make ‘a judicial apology to all the freeholders’, perhaps in response to allegations that he had been overzealous in his actions as ship money sheriff.70 The intense debates about issues and alignments continued until the election finally took place in early April 1640.71 Brereton and Aston were returned and the indenture confirming this was headed with the signatures of Rivers, Cholmondeley and Kilmorey, followed by other Aston allies, Thomas Savage, Thomas Cholmondeley, Sir Thomas Brereton of Shocklach, Hugh Calverley and Thomas Cotton of Combermere. The names of Booth, Wilbraham and their principal supporters were conspicuous by their absence.72 Discussion of the broader ideological issues raised by the Personal Rule, both political and religious, had opened up the fault-lines within the local magistracy and set local governors, who had previously sustained a high degree of cooperation, against each other. This process continued through 1640 during the collection of ship money by the Aston-supporting sheriff Thomas Powell. Powell’s reports to the council present a picture of a shire that was bitterly divided over the levy. By the summer of 1640 he could identify a ‘faction’ among the justices who were threatening to prefer ‘bills of indictment … against me and my under officers’ at quarter sessions and were giving support to George Edgeley, high constable of Nantwich hundred, who was refusing to cooperate with the collection. Among these, he specifically identified the long-serving JP Thomas Stanley of Alderley, ‘the most forward and most opposing in it of all the refractories’, who had threatened Powell and his officers that he would ‘shoot guns at them’ if they tried to distrain the goods of refusers. He also named Peter Venables, after his tenants at Warmincham had ‘baffled and well beaten’ his officers.73 Hostility to Powell may also have been countenanced by the leaders of the ‘Patriots’. At the October 1640 sessions at Middlewich Sir George Booth entered a plea on behalf of a Roger Worthington against the ‘undue proceedings’ of the sheriff’s bailiffs in distraining his goods; and those townships seeking the repayment of ship money ordered by parliament in 1641 appealed to Booth and Wilbraham when Powell was dragging his heels.74 Powell probably did not help matters by following the line taken by Aston during the election and emphasising that some of the most prominent opponents of ship money were puritans, and that Edgeley was receiving their support in part because he was ‘of the purer sort’.75 Such partisan language was in part an attempt to deflect blame away from himself – with ship money collection collapsing around him and the privy council making ever more 180

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hectoring demands – but it was also an indication of the way in which politics in the shire was becoming polarised around a conjuncture of religious and ideological issues.76 As the collection of ship money collapsed during 1640 the deputy lieutenants were also struggling to keep going with preparations for the Scottish war. Booth and Wilbraham, acknowledging their responsibility to keep the wheels of local government turning, were still taking the lead in this, in spite of their role as critics of the Personal Rule during the Short Parliament election. With so many troops being levied they recognised that unless they managed the situation very carefully there was a danger of chaos breaking out within the borders of the shire. They also continued to protect the integrity of the county’s trained bands. When the privy council instructed them to levy 500 soldiers for Scotland, to be drawn from the bands, they explicitly ordered that they be raised from ‘able men, not of the trained bands’. Then, when the council’s proposal to march the bandsmen out of the shire to meet a feared Scottish invasion was revived in August 1640, they once more protested to Lord Strange, again emphasising the dangers of invasion from the Irish sea and adding their fears of a Catholic uprising in the bordering counties, ‘full of papists who have great store of arms’. Meanwhile, they engaged in a continuing struggle against the growing local ‘complaints and oppositions with which we are daily troubled’. In the event, the deputy lieutenants managed to hold the line and maintain their personal credit by cutting costs at every opportunity, consulting regularly with the gentry and freeholders and speaking out on their behalf to the lord lieutenants and the privy council.77 The collapse of the war effort against the Scots and the summoning of another parliament in September relieved some of the pressures. Booth and Wilbraham were now free to resume their role as ‘patriot’ spokesmen for the ‘country’. At the quarter sessions at Middlewich on 6 October 1640 they presided over a lengthy debate on ‘the many grievances & impositions by reason of the ship money since the first taxing of it, and coat and conduct money and other military affairs where with this county hath been sore pressed’. The decision was taken to commission two JPs in every hundred to draw up a petition of ‘the same (and all other) grievances wherewith the country is now grieved’, to be presented at the coming parliament.78 This was, in effect, the first move in the Long Parliament election campaign, and it appears to have set the tone. Sir William Brereton and Peter Venables Baron of Kinderton, the two candidates eventually returned, were both present at the Middlewich sessions, along with Powell’s bête noir, Thomas Stanley, and several other JPs who could probably be numbered among the ‘faction’ opposed to ship money: John Crewe, Richard Brereton and William Marbury.79 Both candidates could plausibly claim to represent the ‘patriot’ line that was being articulated there. Brereton, who had severed his ties with the ‘barons’ and made his peace with Booth, was an open opponent of ship money and spokesman for the godly. Venables, although no friend of the puritans, 181

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had nonetheless been identified as an opponent of ship money; and he may well have had the backing of Booth and Wilbraham, alongside whom he worked closely as a deputy lieutenant in the fraught months of 1639–40.80 Sir Thomas Aston, the third candidate in the election, had by now largely forfeited his credibility as a representative of the ‘country’. At the Middlewich meeting he was required to present his accounts as ship money sheriff to counteract ‘scandalous speeches’ that had been circulating in the shire since at least the early summer which alleged that he had collected ‘more for ship money than it had been right he should have done’.81 The strength of his connections with the royal court was also readily apparent and had become a liability. On his own account, during the Short Parliament he had tried to persuade the Commons to vote supply on terms remarkably favourable to the king; and he no longer trumpeted the backing of courtier peers such as Rivers. He and Rivers made some attempt to retrieve their reputations as county spokesmen at the Middlewich sessions by agreeing to help in collecting evidence of the extent of the burdens laid on the shire; but this was to no avail and he was eventually rejected by the electors after what was reported as ‘much feuding and faction’ between the three men.82 Venables was returned for the first county seat and Brereton for the second. Their indenture was signed by those conspicuous by their absence in April. Booth, Wilbraham and their ally Sir Thomas Delves led the way, accompanied by Delves’s and Wilbraham’s sons and other supporters of the ‘patriot’ line, notably Stanley, Crewe, Marbury and Richard Brereton. To underline the political divisions that had emerged, none of the principal supporters of Aston in April signed.83

NOTES 1 For the responses to the forced loan and ship money, see below pp. 165–8, 176–7; for distraint of knighthood, see ‘Distraint of Knighthood proceedings’, in Miscellany (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 12, 1885), pp. 191–223; for the lieutenancy, see CALS ZCR 63/2/6. 2 CALS CR 63/2/6, fos 79–80. 3 The only instance of local billeting was a levy of 450 troops for Ireland briefly billeted near Chester in April 1625: TNA SP 16/1/79. 4 TNA SP 16/25/15. For some of the implications of the privy council’s administrative shortcomings, see B. W. Quintrell, ‘Government in perspective: Lancashire and the privy council, 1570–1640’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 131 (1982), 35–62; D. M. Hirst, ‘The privy council and the problems of enforcement in the 1620s’, Journal of British Studies, 18 (1978), 46–66. 5 TNA PC 2/45, p. 212; SP 16/370/67; M. D. Gordon, ‘The collection of ship money in the reign of Charles I’, Transaction of the Royal Historical Society (3rd series, 4, 1910), 146–62. 6 TNA SP 16/53/18, 73. 7 Cust, Forced Loan, pp. 121–2. 182

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21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

9 2 30

31 32

33

34 35

TNA SP 16/53/18; 16/56/72; APC 1627, pp. 69–70. TNA, SP 16/52/72. TNA SP 16/298/64; Lake, ‘Ship money’, 46. TNA PC 2/45, p. 428, 2/46, p. 7; Lake, ‘Ship money’, 46–8. TNA SP 16/338/6, 7. TNA SP 16/370/67. See also the county’s follow-up letter: SP 16/390/10. TNA SP 16/378/77. Lake, ‘Ship money’, 51–5. BL Harleian MS 2173, fos 30–1. TNA PC 2/49, pp. 220–2; Lake, ‘Ship money’, 53–5. JRL English MS 1091, fos 11–12. CALS ZCR 63/2/6, fo. 32. JRL English MS 1091, fo. 30; E. Marcotte, ‘The shrieval administration of ship money in Cheshire, 1637: limitations of early Stuart governance’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 58 (1975), 137–72, at 157–9; TNA SP 16/390/157. TNA SP 16/20/40; 16/56/72i. CALS ZCR 63/2/6, fos 27, 80. TNA SP 16/25/15; 16/52/72. TNA SP 16/327/11; 16/370/11. CALS ZCR 63/2/6, fos 68–9, 79–80, 96. TNA SP 16/370/67; CALS CR 63/2/6, fos 79–80. For other counties petitioning over benevolence in 1614 and ship money in 1628, see Cust, Forced Loan, pp. 84–5, 153–5. TNA SP 16/370/67; 16/390/10; CALS ZCR 63/2/6, fos 63–4, 68–9, 79–80, 97–8. T. G. Barnes, Somerset 1625–1640. A County’s Government during the ‘Personal Rule’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 36–9; Heal and Holmes, Gentry, pp. 209–11. TNA SP 16/448/63; 16/449/14. J. S. Morrill, ‘Parliamentary representation’, in VCH, The County of Chester, vol. 2, ed. B. E. Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 207; C. R. Kyle, ‘Cheshire county elections’, in A. Thrush and J. P. Ferris (eds), History of Parliament. The House of Commons 1604–1629, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ii.41–2. Lawson, ‘Family memoranda of the Stanleys of Alderley’, 99–100. Cust, Aristocracy, pp. 106–16; R. P. Cust, ‘A Rutland quarrel: the Court of Chivalry and the Irish peerage during Charles I’s personal rule’, Midland History, 35 (2010), 149–73. Kilmorey did, however, engage in a lengthy feud with his Shropshire neighbour, Sir John Corbet, over his Irish barony; R. P. Cust, ‘Sir John Corbet, 1st bart (1594–1662)’, ODNB, xiii.388–90. See, for example, Sir Richard Wilbraham’s report to Grosvenor in October 1634 of a recent visit to lobby Strange at Knowsley, his main seat in Lancashire, where they received all sorts of gracious assurances: CALS ZCR 63/691/1. BL Harleian MS 2125, fos 52–3, 127; Additional MS 33936, fos 39–57. Grosvenor papers, p. xvii. J. H. Barlow, ‘Catholicism in early Stuart Cheshire’ (MA thesis, University of Birmingham, 2015). We are grateful to Howard Barlow for sharing this and other information on Cheshire Catholics. 183

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The Personal Rule and its problems 36 Kyle, ‘William Booth, 1595–1636’, in Thrush and Ferris (eds), House of Commons 1604–1629, iii.253–4. 37 Grosvenor papers, p. xvii. 38 For the more general implications of the term ‘Patriot’, see R. P. Cust, ‘“Patriots and popular spirits”: narratives of conflict in early Stuart politics’, in N. R. N. Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c.1590–1720. Politics, Religion and Communities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 43–61. 39 Bootham and Parker, Savage Fortune, pp. 69–73, 182. For Kilmorey’s connections with Laud, see H. D. Harrod, The History of Shavington in the county of Salop (Shrewsbury, 1891), chs 6–13. 40 CALS WS 1645 (John Werden); BL Additional MS 36914, fo. 176; UCNW Mostyn MS 2691; Beinecke Osborn MS b.103, b.426; East Sussex Record Office, Glynde Place MS 556. 41 Bootham and Parker, Savage Fortune, pp. 165–6, 193–4. 42 TNA SP 16/305/19, 16/327/11. 43 Cust, Forced Loan, pp. 233–4, 250, 255–86, 310, 333–6. 44 Grosvenor papers, pp. 43–51; Morrill, ‘William Davenport’, 122; CALS CR 63/691/1. 45 Grosvenor papers, pp. 1–2; Cust and Lake, ‘Rhetoric of magistracy’, 45–6. 46 Grosvenor papers, p. 2. 47 Ibid., pp. 5–6; Cust and Lake, ‘Rhetoric of magistracy’, 46–7. 48 Commons Debates for 1629, pp. 68–9. 49 Grosvenor papers, pp. 5–7. 50 Ibid., p. xvii ; Kyle, ‘William Booth, 1595–1636’, ‘Sir William Brereton, 1550–1631’, ‘William Brereton, c.1569–1630’, ‘Sir William Brereton, 1st bart, 1604–1661’, ‘Sir Robert Cholmondeley, 1584–1659’, ‘Peter Daniel, 1584–1652’, ‘Sir Anthony St John, c.1585–1651’, in Thrush and Ferris (eds), House of Commons 1604–1629, iii.253–4, 301–2, 300–1, 302–3, 520–1; iv.15–16; vi.139–40. 51 Commons Debates in 1621, ii.407. 52 Grosvenor papers, p. 5. 53 Proceedings in Parliament 1628, v.76–7. 54 Ibid., v.323. 55 Ibid., v.76–7, 323. 56 Cust, Forced Loan, pp. 308–15, 333–6. 57 JRL English MS 1091, fo. 27. 58 TNA SP 16/390/157. 59 JRL English MS 1091, fos 34–5; Marcotte, ‘Ship money’, 157. 60 CALS ZCR 63/2/6, fos 58–61, 65, 66–8. 61 Ibid., fos 63–4, 68–9. 62 Cust, ‘“Patriots and popular spirits”’, pp. 43–9. 63 UCNW Mostyn MS 9082, nos 18, 19. We are grateful to Simon Healey for alerting us to the existence of this election correspondence. 64 Morrill, Cheshire, pp. 32–3. These candidates are simply referred to as the ‘esquires’; but a policy of promoting their sons, that Booth had followed in 1624 with his son William, makes these the most likely candidates. This would explain why Sir George overlooked his former son-in-law and protégé Brereton, whose candidature he had probably supported in 1628. Over the winter of 1639–40 Sir George Booth quarrelled with his grandson and heir, George, possibly over 184

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65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83

his marriage negotiations, which makes his second son, John, a more likely candidate: D. Scott, ‘Booth, George (1622–84)’, History of Parliament trust unpublished article for the 1640–60 section. We are grateful to the History of Parliament trust for allowing us to cite this article in draft and to David Scott for advice on this point. TNA, SP 16/448/63. UCNW Mostyn MS 9082, no. 17. TNA SP 16/448/63. UCNW Mostyn MS 9082, no. 21. TNA SP 16/449/14; UCNW Mostyn MS 9082, 19. For this mode of electioneering, see Cust, ‘“Patriots and popular spirits”’, pp. 47–9. TNA SP 16/448/63. Such suspicions appear to have been behind an investigation into his accounting for ship money which was finally reported to quarter sessions in October 1640: CALS QJB, 1/6, fos 15–16. TNA SP 16/450/23. TNA C 219/42/1, pt 1, 50. TNA SP 16/459/21, 16/466/58. CALS QJF, 69/3, no. 22; 70/3, nos 12, 13; 70/4, nos 10, 45; 71/1, no. 19. TNA SP 16/450/28i, 16/457/21. TNA SP 16/450/28. CALS ZCR 63/2/6, fos 70–8, 90–8. CALS QJB 1/6, fo. 13. Ibid., fo. 13. D. Scott, ‘Venables, Peter (1604–69)’, History of Parliament trust unpublished article for the 1640–60 section of the History of Parliament. We are grateful to the History of Parliament trust for allowing us to cite this article in draft and to David Scott for discussion of Venables’ role. CALS QJB, 1/6, fos 15–16. Lake, ‘Puritans, popularity and petitions’, p. 261; CSPD 1640–1, pp. 146–7. BL Harleian MS 2125, fo. 133. TNA C 219/43/pt 1, 73, 78.

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5

Puritans and ecclesiastical government

PRELATE AS PASTOR OR PURITAN AS STOOGE?

T

he tenor of ecclesiastical government in Cheshire down to the 1630s had much in common with that outlined in Part I for secular affairs. The diocese was presided over by a series of evangelical Calvinist bishops, anxious to defuse the puritan issue by coming to a series of accommodations with puritan nonconformity. This was a line prompted, and later justified, by the prevalence of popery in the diocese and the relative scarcity of Protestant preaching ministers. Deals done with a variety of puritans, and a lenient definition of what constituted conformity, were taken to be a price worth paying for the maintenance of a common Protestant front in the face of popery and the preservation of the relatively scant preaching resources at the disposal of the national church. This approach had not been entirely uncontroversial. It prompted direct royal intervention in the form of the Declaration of Sports in 1617, and Bishop Morton believed that his lenience towards the local puritans had cost him preferment to the much richer and more prestigious see of Lincoln. After vindicating himself in a lengthy printed defence of the controverted ceremonies, however, Morton was translated to Coventry and Lichfield in 1619, and thence to Durham in 1632.1 Morton’s were admittedly typical characteristics of a certain style of Jacobean bishop, but in the diocese of Chester the churchmanship that such views prompted was also a function of the material circumstances of the see. Newly created by Henry VIII, as Christopher Haigh has shown, the see was seriously underendowed. While the diocese was vast, stretching from Cheshire in the south all the way to the northernmost edge of Lancashire, the bishop had only one residence, in Chester. Relatively poor, with almost no ecclesiastical patronage at their disposal, and devoid of the extensive landed 186

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estates that might otherwise have conferred economic and social clout on the bishops, in the post-Reformation period they had fought an unequal fight against the religious conservatism, indeed at times overt Catholicism, of both the gentry and the people. While much of the diocese was dominated by Catholics, from the late sixteenth century there were puritan enclaves developing around Manchester and in parts of Cheshire. The result was that the bishops of Chester tended to feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, reliant on what were often puritan (i.e., overtly, and sometimes aggressively, nonconformist) ministers for what little supplies of Protestant zeal they could muster in their ongoing struggle with popery. All in all, it was an unenviable position, and one which goes a good way to explaining a good many of the behaviours and proclivities – ranging from his complaisance in the face of puritan nonconformity to the zeal, indeed the apparent avarice, with which he fostered his limited financial resources, not to mention his (otherwise unfathomable) desire to spend a good deal of his time in Wigan – that got Moreton’s successor, Bishop Bridgeman, into such bad odour with the Caroline court.2 A creature of James’s reign – as he told Viscount Wentworth, ‘I forget not what I was (a worm, a poor creature) when that (now blessed saint) James raised me up out of the dust’3 – Bridgeman remained in post throughout the 1630s. Where Morton had been extremely active as a polemical writer, mostly of anti-Catholic tracts, Bridgeman was as silent as the grave, devoting most of his energies to administration, in particular the conservation of the fiscal resources of his see. However, he also, in effect, continued the policies towards puritanism that had been pursued by his predecessors. In so doing he used various puritan ministers almost as surrogates, certainly as go-betweens to manage his relations with the godly, cajole recalcitrants into at least the appearance of conformity and in general maintain a version of evangelical Protestant unity and order in the diocese. Of these men, the most important, and a central figure in what follows, was John Ley, an Oxford man, vicar of Great Budworth, a large parish not far from Chester, lecturer at St Peter’s church Chester, a leading member of the Warrington exercise (his local combination lecture) and prebend and sub-dean of the cathedral. The tenor of their relationship, and the sort of role played by Ley in the religious affairs of the shire, emerges clearly from a remarkable set of exchanges between Ley and Bridgeman from 1622. This was very early in Bridgeman’s episcopate and shows just how quickly both men had slipped into a double act, a series of collusive exchanges of influence, of both covert and overt mutual support, that was to last down to 1641. The correspondence concerns one Mr Roles of Knutsford, whom Bridgeman was in the process of prosecuting for nonconformity and on whose behalf Ley was interceding. Bridgeman wrote to inform Ley that all bets were now off, since Roles had just ‘in a letter to my wife sent her some gold’. Incensed by the implication that he might be susceptible to ‘corruption 187

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or bribery’, Bridgeman told Ley that ‘Mr Roles hath now made himself incapable of any favour from me’.4 In response, Ley conceded the heinousness of the affront to both Bridgeman and his lady wife, but not only begged the bishop not to rush to judgement but also sought to ‘mitigate’ Roles’s offence. But if, as Ley now feared, ‘this be too much grace for me to either desire or expect’, Ley pleaded with Bridgeman ‘to give him leave to give over his ministry under your charge rather by a kind of voluntary cessation (which he hath begun already) than to put him from it by forcible suspension’; or, if Bridgeman insisted on taking ‘a legal course’, to make it clear that ‘excepting his Christian conformity, your lordship is perfectly reconciled to him’. Either way, after Roles’s ‘departure from Knutsford’ Ley begged the bishop ‘to see his place there supplied with a sufficient successor’. Such an outcome was now the best that could be hoped for, since Ley had recently ‘fallen from my former hope of his yielding, or propension towards, conformity’. Roles ‘perceives your lordship will urge him to entire allowance and observation of the ceremonies and therefore he had rather stand out in all, than yield in any, and this, I think, is his settled resolution, which I knew not ’til Saturday last and sooner than now I could not inform your lordship of it’.5 Because of Roles’s misjudgement this negotiation had ended in failure, but, evidently, others did not. In ‘an humble advertisement to the high court of parliament’, appended to the (posthumously published) A defence of church government exercised in presbyterial, classical and synodal assemblies, by John Paget, one T. P., that is to say John’s brother, Thomas Paget, outlined a series of exchanges about conformity between himself and first, Bishop Morton, and then his successor, Bridgeman. These involved initial threats to enforce conformity, followed by protracted interviews during which the bishop ‘assayed to win us to conformity in a scholastical way’.6 Such exchanges could go on for a very long time and allowed both sides to demonstrate their bona fides as godly learned divines while putting off, almost indefinitely, the evil day when a final decision to either conform or suspend would have to be taken. The tenor of Ley’s relationship with his diocesan bishop and the role he played as a mediator between episcopal authority and puritan recalcitrance emerges from a long letter to Bridgeman from July 1632. The letter was occasioned by a rumour spread by a local clerical rival of Ley’s, William Case, canon of the cathedral from 1613 to 1634 and sometime rector of St Peter’s Chester between 1624 and 1627, where Ley held a lectureship. Therein, very likely, lay the root of their enmity. According to Ley, Case had alleged that ‘I made light of your lordship’s inhibition concerning my preaching of the sabbath’. When a local controversy about the Sabbath broke out, ‘divers ministers in and about Chester … wrote to me a letter in common to desire my resolution of divers doubts about the doctrine and practice of the Sabbath’.7 The fourteen signatories to this letter included the leading members of what may be described as the moderate puritan establishment in the west of the shire who, in course of the 1630s, coalesced around Ley: Nathaniel Lancaster, 188

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Thomas Holford, John Glendole, Samuel Clark, Alexander Clark, Richard Holker and Charles Herle, the minister at Winwick, just over the Lancashire border, who, with Ley, acted as moderator of the Warrington exercise in 1640. Their letter was prompted by a revival of the Jacobean disputes arising out of the publication of an anti-Sabbatarian screed written by Edward Brerewood in 1611, which had found its way into print only in 1630, when the decidedly anti-puritan atmosphere of the Personal Rule allowed the publication of such opinions. On that basis, Case maliciously inferred that ‘not your lordship but I am bishop of Chester’ and joked that he had ‘begged a taffeta cap of your lordship for me’ and that ‘your lordship consented to his request and that he had brought me the hat, but that he forgot to take possession of your grant of it’. ‘This conceit’, Ley complained, ‘hath been so pleasant to his fancy that he hath, with jollity, bruited abroad so far that at divers places at good distance I hear of it.’8 News of these local disputes had reached the king, who had written to Bridgeman in February 1632 admonishing him, somewhat tartly, for something ‘which your Lordship’s own vigilance in your function should put continually in your mind’, namely ‘debates about the sabbath’ in which ‘one Mr Ley, vicar of Budworth, prebend and lecturer at Chester, hath put himself upon that subject in opposition to some others’. Consequently, the king required Bridgeman, for avoidance of further strife, to command him that in his lectures he raise no occasion of controversy which may disturb the union and peace of the church and that he do nothing to unsettle or question the received doctrine by curious strains or speculations or by anything which may perplex or trouble the minds of the people. Do you what belongeth to a good bishop to make your clergy capable that disputes engender strife and that true religion must be planted and preserved by unity and good life.9

When Bridgeman passed this instruction on in the form of an inhibition on further discussion of the topic, Case claimed that Ley had presumed upon the closeness of his relationship with the bishop, and his entirely unofficial standing as a leader of local clerical opinion, to ignore him. On this basis, Ley surmised that the intent behind Case’s conceit of the taffeta cap was not merely humorous. Rather, he wanted, ‘by reciprocation of slander betwixt us … to make abatement of my affiance and observance towards your lordship, as of your lordship’s favour and affection towards me’. But if that was his adversary’s intent, Ley was confident that he would not succeed.10 Case also implied that the relationship between the two may very well have been collusive, with Bridgeman covering himself by formally suppressing further discussion, while his henchman Ley, in effect, reaffirmed an essentially puritan consensus on the subject of the Sabbath. Judging from Ley’s elaborate defence of his conduct in continuing to speak on the subject of the Sabbath after Bridgeman had issued his (temporary) ban, Case had a point. 189

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For Ley explained that he had glossed that instruction in terms of the initial royal command that the clergy should ‘do nothing to unsettle or question the received doctrine by curious strains or speculations’. Seeing that the king had recently ‘preferred the handling of the heads of the catechism before other points of divinity in our preaching’, Ley had assumed that that must privilege ‘the teaching of the decalogue’, and that ‘out of the decalogue I had no reason to conceive that your lordship would except the fourth commandment which (as Calvin saith) containeth the total sum of all religion’. Accordingly, Ley had concluded that ‘in delivering of that commandment, it was not probable to me that your lordship should forbid me to preach any doctrine not contrary to the word of God or the points contained within the compass of our common subscription … nor that you would think it a good inference in logic or religion to say such a one hath preached against such a truth therefore a more orthodox minister may not preach for it’. If such arguments – ‘as weak as water’ – were to ‘prevail’, ‘heresy might easily triumph over the creed, as well as impiety over the decalogue’. In addition, when he had first heard of the bishop’s inhibition, Ley ‘offered myself to your judicial censure of my dictates’. When Ley heard nothing in reply except the bishop’s verbal compliments, delivered in person by Edward Mainwaring, the diocesan chancellor who often acted as Bridgeman’s intermediary, he took that as a signal to proceed. Anyway, having initially effectively ignored the bishop’s prohibition, Ley maintained that ‘as soon as I had finished the point that I had begun, though I stood engaged by public promise to proceed far further, I gave over until I might give your lordship a true account of what I had done’.11 So that was all right, then. Two things stand out here. The first is the depth of the relationship revealed between Ley and Bridgeman, and the collusive nature of the double act they had now perfected. The second is the involvement of the king. At this distance, it is impossible to work out quite how Charles heard about the Sabbatarian spat in Chester and Ley’s role therein. It is, however, easier to surmise why, once alerted to the situation, Charles felt moved to insert his personal authority into what might otherwise seem to be a storm in a very local teacup. The answer to that conundrum lies in Bishop Bridgeman’s increasingly contradictory and problematic relationship with the policies of the Personal Rule.

THE TROUBLES OF BISHOP BRIDGEMAN REVISITED The later 1620s had found Bridgeman in good odour with the king and council. On 26 March 1627 Viscount Savage, that crucial linch-pin between the political world of Cheshire and the court, wrote to Bridgeman to tell him that he had personally informed the king of ‘your great zeal to his service’ over the forced loan and to assure him that the king took ‘most graciously’ his efforts in that regard.12 For all his links with the local godly, judging from his 190

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correspondence, Bridgeman also enjoyed a very close working relationship with Savage, who was not only a client of the duke of Buckingham but also, of course, a prominent court Catholic. Thus, in a letter of November 1628 Savage both sympathised with the bishop over his intermittently fractious relationship with the mayor and aldermen of Chester and explained how he might make a favourable purchase of the land to be sold out of the royal forest of Delamere.13 But perhaps most remarkable was another letter in which Savage made arrangements to bankroll the erection of a stained-glass window in Chester cathedral. Since he was paying the piper, the Catholic Savage felt no compunction in calling the iconographic tune. ‘I desire the birth of our saviour that by his humility it may teach our spirits how to humble ourselves.’ Again, Savage offered to put in a good word with the king, remarking that ‘I must recommend to his Majesty your lordship’s great care to repair that mother church of Chester to her ancient rights.’14 On this basis it must come as small surprise that Bridgeman also struck up what appears to have been a close working relationship with Thomas Viscount Wentworth, the recently appointed Lord President of the Council of the North. Their collaboration started with Bridgeman’s involvement in an attempt to induce northern Catholics to commute their recusancy fees at rates that bore some relation to the value of their estates. Judging from their correspondence, Bridgeman was an eager collaborator in the ticklish business of estimating the true worth of the Catholic gentry of his diocese, who, Wentworth surmised, were proceeding on the belief that ‘their number should effect an impunity’.15 Bridgeman evidently played his dual role as part snitch and part part-time tax inspector with a will, for in March 1630 Wentworth was able to assure him of ‘how graciously his Majesty accepts of your care and service in the commission for the finding out of all recusants’ estates’. The letter concluded with a postscript informing Bridgeman that ‘his Majesty, in contemplation of the good service done him in this business … is graciously pleased to dispense with your Lordship’s remove to Chester, so as you may securely remain at Wigan’ until further instruction.16 This effectively gave Bridgeman immunity from a recent royal injunction that all bishops should henceforth reside consistently in their cathedral cities. Indeed, so high did both Bridgeman and Wentworth think that the bishop was now riding in royal favour that as late as July 1631 they were both talking about him as a likely candidate for episcopal preferment in the reshuffle occasioned by the deaths of the archbishop of York and the bishop of Ely.17 Having failed to gain Bridgeman preferment this time around, Wentworth wrote again in November reassuring him that, at ‘the next moving of the waters’, he would get his reward.18 Flexible in his relations with the local puritans, eager and efficient in such matters as the loan and the compounding scheme, tight first with Savage and then with Wentworth, Bridgeman seemed set fair to navigate his way through the Personal Rule with some aplomb. Except that his style of churchmanship 191

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was entirely antithetical to that of the Laudians, and at first, overconfident in the strength of his connections at court, he fatally misjudged how to handle this new situation. The precise nature of Bridgeman’s troubles has been brilliantly reconstructed by Brian Quintrell and the details of the affair need not detain us here.19 However, the roots of his difficulties do require some attention. For these lay initially not in any financial malfeasance or rapacity but, rather, in his falling-out with the new broom of Laudian reformation brought to the North first by Samuel Harsnet and then by Richard Neile, as archbishops of York. Bridgeman’s relationship with Harsnet started with a cordial-enough exchange of pleasantries and technicalities about the workings of Harsnet’s up-coming metropolitical visitation. Harsnet had particularly praised Bridgeman’s expression of a ‘cheerful and speedy willingness’ to observe his Majesty’s injunction to live in Chester.20 Harsnet wrote again in March 1631, reminding Bridgeman of the king’s command that he should provide a list of the lecturers within his diocese, begging for ‘a speedy manifestation of your lordship’s remembrance unto me that I may at least make it appear unto his Majesty that we are not asleep nor slumber in this royal and religious work’. He closed with another warm appreciation of Bridgeman’s own ‘pattern of obedience by resorting unto your episcopal house at Chester’.21 But Harsnet’s next letter, of 11 May 1631, was a good deal less cordial. It opened with the scathing observation that, despite his fulsome expressions of compliance, it now appeared that Bridgeman had acquired a dispensation not to obey the royal injunction to live in Chester, after all. Harsnet did not try to hide his disapproval. ‘I list nor conjecture the means that procured it, nor dispute the inconveniency. I am willing still to conceive that you meant then and do mean still, as you professed, to address yourself to satisfy his Majesty’s desires.’ The next order of business, which again, Harsnet emphasised, came directly from the king, concerned ‘your lectures and catechists’. Bridgeman had evidently failed to provide a detailed list, and Harsnet was scathing in his response: How your lordship in going this way should become diabolus fratrem my weak understanding cannot well conceive. Your lordship’s clearer understanding may help me out. Mean time your lordship’s pen hath besprinkled more than your paper. Good my Lord, let me tell his Majesty at least that you mean something.

Bridgeman had also clearly argued that, given the local customs of his diocese, the austere levels of conformity now being required by Harsnet would prove, at best, simply unrealistic and, at worst, counter-productive. Harsnet responded with incredulity and scorn to Bridgeman’s contention that ‘your congregation should be so stiff at the knees as to stand from kneeling at the communion since queen Elizabeth’s days unto Easter last’. This, Harsnet concluded, ‘is a bad sign of a strange rigidity. A little oil of scorpions would have done them good.’22 192

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All of which should have left Bridgeman in no doubt as to which way the wind was blowing, but Harsnet’s next letter, of March 1632, strongly implied that Bridgeman had still failed to take the hint. An account of how ‘every particular instruction of his Majesty had been enforced in his diocese’ had been due at court on New Year’s day. Not only had the king himself written in advance of that deadline to remind Harsnet et al. not to miss it, but the bishops of the southern province had complied before Christmas. Harsnet had sent ‘a lame report of mine own, by way of excuse’, but feared that he was now likely to be directly questioned ‘for not calling more earnestly upon you for performance thereof’; and he virtually begged Bridgeman to send a detailed account of himself to the archiepiscopal residence at Bishopthorpe as quickly as possible.23 As if all this were not bad enough, in August 1631 Laud, as bishop of London, had written to Bridgeman to get him to contribute to the king’s pet project to restore St Paul’s. Both Laud and Abbot had contributed £100 a year, and other bishops of roughly Bridgeman’s rank and wealth £40.24 Bridgeman replied by giving £40, but only as a one-off payment, and Laud had to write again to prompt him to make his contribution an annual one, pointedly adding the rider that while ‘looking upon nothing but your bishopric, the gift is great’; ‘we say here that God hath blest your lordship otherwise with a very fair and plentiful estate’.25 All of the topics and projects about which Bridgeman had been dragging his feet – the yearly episcopal reports, the obligation on every bishop to reside permanently in his cathedral city, the issue of lecturers, the drive to turn afternoon lectures into catechising sessions, the rebuilding of St Paul’s, not to mention the enforcement of conformity on recalcitrant puritans – were of direct personal interest to the king himself, who now had multiple reasons to regard Bridgeman as the personification of the sort of laxity, and very possibly of the sort of corruption, of which he was determined to rid the church. It is in this context that we should set Charles’s very pointed intervention into the Sabbatarian spat involving Ley and Bridgeman and his decidedly stinging remark that, in so doing, he was merely moving Bridgeman to do ‘what belongeth to a good bishop’, the strong implication being, of course, that that was precisely not what Bridgeman was, nor how he normally behaved. All of which goes a long way towards explaining why, when a malcontent clergyman with a grievance against Bridgeman for depriving him of his livings at Ormskirk and Preston in the 1620s turned up at court with wild allegations that Bridgeman had amassed, and was currently sitting on, £10,000 worth of fines taken in commutation of penance, this charge was believed to such an extent that an official investigation was started. In a personal letter from Charles himself, Bridgeman was told to hand over the £10,000 forthwith or else suffer a legal going-over to be administered to Bridgeman by Sir Paul Canon, ‘one of our commissioners for fees and corruptions in officers’ and 193

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‘Nicholas Hunt, a proctor of the Arches’, operating under the direct authority of the crown and using such interrogatories as they saw fit.26 The evidence suggests that Bridgeman’s real problem lay with Charles himself. At court, his friend Wentworth pulled out all the stops. He remonstrated with Laud about the bishop’s treatment, caballed with Secretary Coke and Sir Francis Cottington and manoeuvred to get the bishop’s case decided by the privy council, sitting in the absence of the king.27 At one point in June he actually prevailed upon some of the council to take Bridgeman’s part and ask Charles to bring the proceedings against the bishop to a halt.28 That drew a decidedly dusty answer from the king: ‘his Majesty liketh not well that you interpose in a business not left to you, of which his majesty hath a special care and depending in a judicial way’.29 Having insisted that High Commission hear the case, Charles was clearly determined to let proceedings run their course until he decided otherwise.

THE LAUDIAN NEW BROOM Just what was at stake here appears more clearly if we widen the focus away from the details of Bridgeman’s finances and the legal proceedings against him and take in the broader politico-ecclesiastical scene. For, through the summer and autumn of 1633, just as Bridgeman’s case was grinding its way through the courts of High Commission and of court and public opinion, Archbishop Neile’s metropolitical visitors – the Laudian attack dogs William Easdall, Patrick Wickham and John Cosin – were cutting a swathe through Bridgeman’s diocese. In November and December, as his case neared ­resolution – with the king at long last conceding that Bridgeman’s offences ‘might not be so heinous as at the first we had reason to suspect’ and allowing that ‘because of his gracious regard of your place and person’ the king might be prepared to ‘extend his grace and mercy – Neile’s visitors were drawing their conclusions together into a damning account of the condition of Bridgeman’s diocese.30 Immediately after Bridgeman was forced to acknowledge his fault, accept the king’s mercy and agree to pay a fine of £500 a year at the royal pleasure, the visitors’ report, redacted by Neile for the convenience of the royal eye, landed on Charles’s desk.31 Shortly thereafter a more detailed version of essentially the same (damning) document was sent to Bridgeman for his immediate attention, laced with assurances that ‘his Majesty’ had taken particular note of certain problems and issued orders that they be addressed forthwith.32 The result was a comprehensive indictment of the compromises and fudges that had hitherto characterised episcopal governance in Cheshire. What, to the likes of Bridgeman and Ley, looked like a form of order, indeed like a perfectly acceptable version of uniformity, mitigated by the demands of the puritan conscience and the need to preserve hot Protestant unity in the face of the popish threat, was here denounced as a mere hotch-potch, a 194

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form of disorder, verging on sacrilege, produced by decades of weakness and neglect. The visitors summarised their experience of the diocese of Chester to Neile thus: ‘we had not service read twice alike in all the diocese, so well is the act of uniformity observed. The truth is everywhere they use the service book as they list (and I dare say) the congregation in most places spend twice the time in singing of psalms than the minister doth in it.’ The visitors also found, to quote Neile’s report, that ‘the administration of the sacraments, the forms, rites and ceremonies prescribed’ were ‘very much neglected and many were found that thought themselves well deserving and conformable men, though they observed not the book and orders prescribed, so long as they did not oppose them’.33 Nor were these irregularities confined to the clergy. ‘The disrespect that the ministers have showed of all the public prayers of the church hath bred such irreverence in the people that it is a rare thing in many places to see any upon their knees at the reading of the prayers, or (almost) at the receiving of the sacrament, and some stick not to say that sitting was the fitting gesture, both at prayers and at the sacrament.’ As for the churches themselves, in many places they were profaned by being put to entirely secular uses. The visitors complained that it was ‘the common custom … to teach school in churches and chapels’ and hold courts and meetings there, often using the communion table to conduct business. Accordingly Neile told the king, ‘it was scarce found at any place that the communion table was placed in such sort, as that it might appear it was any whit respected’.34 The visitors’ report (and Neile’s redaction thereof) was overwhelmingly concerned with those referred to throughout as ‘puritans and disorderly persons’, ‘novelists’ or, alternatively, persons whom the visitors recognised as ‘puritans, though they will not endure to be thought any such’. Neile proceeded to ventriloquise the rationale that was habitually given for laxity towards such people. While ‘I can neither justify nor excuse’ the conduct of the bishops concerned, Neile explained, ‘yet this I know they will say, that, finding their dioceses so distracted with papists and puritans, they thought, by a mild way, to recover the puritan part, lest that, by carrying a severer hand upon the puritans than they had power to carry upon the papists, the popish party might take heart and opinion of favour’; which observations drew from the king the uncompromising marginal comment that ‘the neglect of punishing puritans breeds papists’.35 Neile also conceded that, in such circumstances, confronted with complaisant or uncooperative ‘churchwardens and sidesmen’: ‘If the bishop be not very vigilant and resolute to have things kept in order, and exact the same of his officers, and an accompt of their doings, things will be amiss, be the bishop, in his own person, never so well disposed and affected to government.’36 Which, of course, was a kind way to observe that Bridgeman had been anything but either ‘vigilant’ or ‘resolute’, and that, without the slap of firm episcopal government, in the diocese of Chester things had indeed been 195

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allowed to go to rack and ruin. Given his own very recent and very personal interest in Bridgeman’s financial dealings and conduct, this was a claim from which Charles was extremely unlikely to have dissented. In March 1634, when Neile forwarded a copy of his visitors’ report to Bridgeman, he accompanied it with a detailed account of Charles’s response. In this way he turned the report, and his own comments thereon, into a direct insertion of the royal will into the affairs of the diocese. Neile told Bridgeman that he had explained to Charles how the back-sliding of the churchwardens and the laxity, if not corruption, of the ecclesiastical officials had hitherto tied the hands of the bishops in the North-West. At one level this served to cut Bridgeman some slack. However, Neile’s comment that he had also assured the king that, due to his own and Bridgeman’s efforts, ‘we may the next year present unto him a good reformation’, as well as the information that Charles expected a full report at year’s end of what Bridgeman had done in response to the faults found in his diocese by the metropolitical visitation, also served to put the bishop on notice that things now had to change. Neile’s promise that ‘I shall give you all the good assistance therein that I can, either by archiepiscopal power or by the High Commission’, was surely as much a threat as a promise, since it constituted a reminder that Neile and his officials would be not merely standing behind Bridgeman, overseeing his efforts at reformation, but also actively intervening in his diocese and forcing his hand. Thus, on the topic of church fabric, Bridgeman was reminded that ‘my visitors left order with certain ministers in every deanery for the viewing of churches. If your lordship follow that course you will quickly find a reformation.’37 What we have here is a concerted attempt on the part of Laud and Neile, and, indeed, of the king himself, to bring Bridgeman to heel, in the process extending the reach of Laudian ‘reformation’ into the dark corners of the diocese of Chester and sending a message to his fellow bishops about the consequences of sustained recalcitrance in the face of the moral and spiritual imperatives of the Personal Rule. We get to watch Harsnet, Neile and Laud not merely acting as conduits for the royal will but actively framing and eliciting expressions of that will, the more easily to get Bridgeman on side. But Bridgeman was not to be brought into line at a stroke. Rather, having been taught a lesson at court and in High Commission, he was to be reduced to compliance through an extended process of archiepiscopal oversight, applied either personally by Neile himself or by his creatures like Easdall, with the personal interventions and direct commands of the king being both held strategically in reserve and intermittently deployed to remind Bridgeman of just where the real power lay, of just who enjoyed the royal ear and of just what was now required of him. And, of course, lurking in the background, was that annual fine of £500 payable, if not in perpetuity, then certainly at the king’s pleasure.

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LEY AND BRIDGEMAN; BRIDGEMAN AND LEY How, then, did this little onslaught to alter Bridgeman’s behaviour as a diocesan bishop work? What effect did it have on the religio-political condition or atmosphere of Cheshire? When Bridgeman’s troubles had first hit, for all of his brave talk to Wentworth about now lying at the mercy of aggrieved papists and puritans, alienated by his recent, royally induced, turn towards severity, at least some of Bridgeman’s puritan contacts and clients had rallied to his defence. Perhaps predictably enough, among these was John Ley. Thus, in March 1633, when allegations of Bridgeman’s corruption were swirling around both country and court, Ley and his colleague as minister of St Peter’s Chester, John Glendole, were providing the bishop with attested copies of earlier correspondence on matters such as the Roles case to demonstrate his fiscal probity. Ley also offered an exhaustive account of the way in which a fine of 20 marks taken in commutation of penance at Great Budworth had been used for county bridge repairs.38 Ley was not merely active, he was also positively effusive in his support of his bishop, urging Bridgeman to ‘leave no means untried which may recover your honour from the obloquy of vulgar as well as virulent persons’ and looking forward to the time when ‘you will come down [from London] with credit and comfort (as my prayer and hopes are you will)’.39 There can, therefore, be no doubting the intensity of Ley’s desire to help his bishop in his time of trouble. But the irony was that, while the correspondence between Ley and Bridgeman about Mr Roles demonstrated Bridgeman’s financial probity, the collusive shenanigans around the enforcement of conformity that it also revealed would surely have done nothing to improve Bridgeman’s wider reputation with the Laudian authorities. Given the closeness of their relationship, and the extreme unlikelihood that, if Bridgeman were to be disgraced, his replacement would be anything other than some sort of Laudian zealot, it is perhaps small surprise that the likes of Ley and Glendole should have rallied to their bishop’s cause. And the assiduousness of their support was not without effect. For, for all Neile’s exhortations to vigilance in the pursuit of nonconformity, Bridgeman continued in his efforts to connive at, that is to say, to contain and elide, rather than simply to punish and repress, puritan nonconformity. Thus, Thomas Paget’s account of his brother John’s encounter with conformity Bridgeman-style contains the admission that some two years after Bridgeman had first suspended him in preparation for Neile’s metropolitical visitation, when ‘the storm of the bishop’s visitation had been blown over’, permission was obtained for ‘three of us’ ‘to go on in preaching as formerly’. This time, however, the respite was brief, and after a mere three months ‘attachments were brought from the High Commission … to apprehend and bring us to York, and there to imprison us until we should give security to satisfy the court’, whereupon, having been forewarned, the three men simply ran away.40 197

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Far to be preferred, and far more effective than merely conniving at overt nonconformity, was the reduction of puritans to at least an outward show of conformity. One notable case, from the summer of 1634, shows Ley continuing to do just that, with the close collaboration of the bishop. Ley had ‘in public and open conference’ ‘convinced and persuaded’ one Mr Hopwood ‘of the lawfulness of his conformity to the ceremonies of the church of England’. However, Hopwood had then complained or bragged that thereafter, ‘at other times and in secret and privately’, Ley had persuaded ‘him otherwise, not to conform to the same’. Presumably this meant that, having in public convinced Hopwood to outwardly conform, to seal the deal in private Ley had then explained that while he had formally to conform in order to satisfy the authorities, Hopwood did not need thereafter actually to perform every jot and tittle of conformity as the law, still less as Laudian authority, defined it. Indeed, judging from a marginal note in his later fast sermon before the Long Parliament of 1643, The fury of war and folly of sin, Ley may well have gone somewhat further than that. There, in praising ministers who had administered the sacrament to parishioners who had refused to kneel, Ley had argued that in such a ‘case it is not only lawful to receive them, but unlawful to reject them’. And, in assuring his readers that in making this claim in the relative safety of 1643 he was not engaging in any form of ‘timeserving’, Ley cited in the margin ‘my own discourse (penned and perused by divers learned divines fourteen years ago)’, i.e. c.1629–30, ‘to prove that the canon cannot discharge a minister from his duty, charged upon him at his ordination, for preaching the word and administering the sacraments to any, unless greater exception can be taken against them, than their doubting of the lawfulness of any particular gesture’.41 If this was Ley’s settled view of the matter in the early 1630s, if not before, then we can well imagine the sort of conversations that led Hopwood to claim that Ley had indeed advised him to conform and not to conform, almost in the same breath. Either way, in light of Bridgeman’s recent run-ins with both royal and archiepiscopal authority, and in the immediate aftermath of Neile’s metropolitical visitation, both Ley and Bridgeman needed rumours like this like a hole in the head. Thus, when Ley confronted Hopwood before the bishop and demanded that Hopwood be made to testify under oath, Bridgeman readily agreed. And, surprise, surprise, Hopwood now maintained that while Ley had indeed both ‘publicly convinced and persuaded him’ of ‘the lawfulness of yielding to conformity’ and ‘divers and several times in private’ ‘conferred with him to that purpose’, he had ‘never uttered or used any words … which might tend to the dissuading or withdrawing him from his conformity’.42 That this was not quite business as usual is shown by Ley’s own run-in with Neile’s metropolitical visitation, in the summary of which we find Ley’s name included in a list of ‘such ministers as we found inconformable or suspended of inconformity within the diocese of Chester’. But where many ministers were described, like Matthew Clayton, curate of Hargrave, as ‘a 198

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non-conformist’ and therefore as ‘suspended’ or ‘admitted and enjoined’, Ley was merely noted as having been ‘inhibited and restored’. Some sense of the nature of his offence – apart, that is, from the afterglow of the spat over the Sabbath – comes from an earlier entry about the parish of Great Budworth, where it was noted that ‘there is a gentlewoman (one Mrs Marbury, a justice’s wife) whom all the ministers there cannot persuade to kneel at the communion, and many such there be among them though we could not get the churchwardens to present any …’. In Ley’s later account of the life of Mrs Ratcliffe, wife of a mayor of Chester, he described how puritan ministers like himself had overcome her scruples about kneeling to receive the communion and thus reduced her to conformity. This showed him presenting one side of his (moderate) puritanism to public view. The visitors’ account of the situation at his cure at Great Budworth, not to mention that aside in his fast sermon of 1643, reveals another.43 It is clear that the heavy-duty connections in Chester revealed by his life of Ratcliffe and consequent upon his standing as a prebend, sub-dean and lecturer at St Peter’s played a considerable role in Ley’s rapid reinstatement. There survives among the mayors’ letters at Chester a missive from the mayor and aldermen asking Archbishop Neile to restore Ley to his ministry. Since he had been suspended not for inconformity per se but, rather, for his pluralism in enjoying both his cure at Great Budworth and his lectureship at St Peter’s, the letter opens by explaining that ‘by reason of the nearness of his vicarage to this city his weekly preachings on the Sundays at his own cure is not, by the said lecture or sermon, neglected or hindered’. This was followed by a veritable encomium on Ley’s qualities as a minister. His learning is both here and in other places well known and for his judgement and opinion concerning the rites and ceremonies of the church, and his practise therein for the future [our italics], we hope your honour’s visitors have received good satisfaction. We have found his ministry so successful that we may truly inform your honour that he hath wrought such reformation amongst us, and his life and conversation suitable and agreeing to his doctrine, so inclinable in his disposition and desires of peace and unity, that he is likewise always ready to do good offices that way.44

Ley himself was to evoke precisely the same image of his own character, ministry and local connections in his life of Mrs Ratcliffe. We might add, however, that, for all his professions of conformity, the phrase in the mayor’s letter about ‘his practice thereof for the future’ more than implies that to that point Ley had combined a theoretical acceptance of complete conformity with a less than punctilious practice thereof; not always wearing the surplice, not insisting that his parishioners kneel to receive communion, never bowing to the altar or at the name of Jesus and not reading the Book of Sports. This was very likely precisely the pick-and-mix combination of (formal) compliance and (informal) non-compliance that Ley had urged, in private, on Mr Hopwood in June 1634. It was also, almost certainly, the style 199

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of conformity that had been enforced in the diocese of Chester for decades, and that Neile and his visitors had denounced with such vituperative elan in their respective reports to Neile and the king. It was also certainly not the style of conformity that the likes of Neile and Laud, or indeed the king, expected the episcopate to be enforcing from now on.

LAUDIANISM, BRIDGEMAN STYLE It had reached the point where Bridgeman had little choice but to formally support and enforce the Laudian agenda. However, even here there was still some space for fudge and compromise. This is illustrated in the enforcement of the Book of Sports. In Bridgeman’s 1634 triennial visitation William Lawton of Church Lawton, Robert Halliday of Middlewich and Ley were all presented for not having read the book, and made to certify that they would do so before 26 September 1634.45 This was Bridgeman being seen to enact royal and archiepiscopal injunctions. But James Mawdesley, in his research on the enforcement of Laudian reforms in the dioceses, can find no examples of a minister being suspended for his refusal to read the Book of Sports, and Bridgeman never mentioned the issue in his annual reports.46 Given the long-standing sensitivities over Sabbath observance among local puritans, both clerical and lay, of which Bridgeman had been made acutely aware, it is perhaps unsurprising that since this was a matter on which it was less easy for Neile’s informants to nail him, it was an issue on which the bishop appears to have been prepared to cut the godly some slack. But, equally, there can be no doubt that Bridgeman did push other positive aspects of the campaign for Laudian reformation quite hard. Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke detect evidence of sustained campaigns to rail-in communion tables and reduce pews to some sort of uniformity.47 Bridgeman’s zeal on this question reflects a long-standing concern with church fabric and what we might term the beauty of holiness that predated the arrival of Laudian priorities in his diocese. His rebuilding of the chancel in Wigan church was one of the few things that actually drew favourable comment from Neile’s visitors.48 Similarly, as Peter Yorke has shown, the stained-glass window, bankrolled by Savage and discussed above, was only part of Bridgeman’s efforts to beautify Chester cathedral. Indeed, in 1638 he was to brag of having ‘disbursed’ ‘500 lib at least’ ‘upon the fabric thereof’.49 The railing-in of communion tables might well have fallen under that same rubric of order, uniformity and beautification. After all, the minimum case for ‘the altar policy’ turned on such adiaphoristic considerations. The defence of that policy in terms of the value and need for ‘altars’, and the sacramental theology that went with them, was disseminated only relatively late in the day in printed polemic, much of which was produced in 1637 and after. Certainly, it may well have been the case that it was upon those more limited terms that railed communion tables were sold to and accepted by the 200

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majority of clergy in the diocese. As Mawdesley has shown, the railing-in of communion tables over much of the shire proceeded relatively rapidly in the months following the metropolitical visitation of 1633, including at St Peter’s Chester, where Ley was the lecturer and Glendole the minister.50 That is until, Bridgeman erected a stone altar in Chester cathedral, almost certainly in an attempt to curry favour with Neile and Laud. The mere existence of this might be thought to gloss the meaning of the railed communion tables spreading through his diocese in altogether new and controversial terms. That certainly is the implication of a remarkable open letter sent to Bridgeman by Ley in June 1635 in response to his discovery of the existence of the altar. Ostensibly a private letter from Ley to Bridgeman, Ley’s text was in fact a position paper, almost a manifesto or apologia, in which he outlined his relationship both with altars – name and thing – and with the bishop.51 In this it shared many central characteristics with his earlier letter to Bridgeman about Mr C., the text and margins of which had been studded with an elaborate scholarly apparatus encompassing detailed citations of a range of authorities culled both from the history of the church and more recent polemic. This marked the text down as no ordinary private letter but, rather, as both a personal apologia for Ley’s handling of the topic of the Sabbath and a defence of a certain vision of the workings of episcopal power in general, and of Ley’s position within the particular power structures and pecking orders of the diocese of Chester in particular. The letter about the altar did essentially the same thing. Both texts were defences of what Ley took to be the status quo; a status quo based on a broadly reformed consensus about what the church was about, and underpinned by the subtly collusive mutual admiration society that Ley and Bridgeman had constructed for themselves. Moreover, both were intended to circulate in manuscript and, as such, both documents represented interventions in a roiling local public sphere driven by print, scribal publication, pulpit exchange and rumour, both spontaneously generated and spread with malice aforethought, and all in response to the changing political and ideological circumstances of the Personal Rule.52 Both, in short, represented Ley’s attempt to explain himself to local godly opinion, and perhaps to mobilise such opinion in order to induce the bishop to take Ley’s view of the matter. Ley was first told about the altar by a popish parishioner who informed him with what Ley described as a ‘confident jollity’, telling him ‘“Nay you will all of you come to us, or to it, at length”’. Accordingly, on his first return from Chester Ley had tried to put a brave face on it, telling the exultant papist that the structure was but ‘a funeral monument of St Werburgh’s burial in that which was anciently called by the name of her chapel’. But others, more closely observing the offending object and hearing of ‘your [i.e., Bridgeman’s] purpose of employment of the place to religious uses’, quickly disabused Ley of this comforting fantasy. This was an altar plain and simple, and, as such, Ley lamented, a clear ‘propension to popery’.53 201

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However unequivocally negative his views on the subject of altars were, Ley was careful to remind both Bridgeman and his readers that, as things stood, ‘in this discourse of mine’ he was arguing ‘against that dull and dumb text of the handycraftsman’, that is to say, with the brute fact of the altar’s physical existence, and ‘with the over quick conceits and crafty comments (which popishly effected persons have set upon it)’, rather ‘than against your intentions, in either appointment or permission of it, because yet I know not what they are. And I will not presume to determine anything without direction from your lordship.’ Up to this point, all that Ley had himself been able to say in Bridgeman’s defence was that ‘I had known you long … yet I could never observe anything in you which might induce me to doubt of your liking of a communion table above an altar, or of your dislike of popish either building or bowing to altars.’54 So Ley was now writing to Bridgeman, in effect, to ask the bishop to defend himself by revealing what Ley was implying he really thought on the topic. In so doing Ley stressed that he was acting as an associate, advisor, even intimate of the bishop for the best part of twenty years; a relationship which had allowed him to speak freely to the bishop as ‘my conscience hath directed’ and ‘disposed you patiently to hear me and to value my speech by the justness of the cause and the validity of my reasons’. He was also drawn to give advice by his position as sub-dean and prebend of the cathedral, and therefore an appropriate counsellor to the bishop. Indeed, this made it of paramount importance to clarify Bridgeman’s position, because ‘some said (as I was told to my face) that though your lordship (as bishop) were the author, I (as sub dean) was some way an actor or approver of that, which was so great an eye sore unto many good people’.55 Despite his declared unwillingness ‘to determine anything without direction from your lordship’, Ley soon found himself speculating about Bridgeman’s motives in erecting the altar. His lordship might ‘perhaps conceive it to be of some use unto you to clear you from all imputation of puritanism, which some have … very undeservedly put up against you, and for that purpose perhaps you raise it up, to support your episcopal reputation against that reproach’. But, things being what they were, such desperate expedients were unlikely ‘to purge you from all appearance of Puritanism’ because even King James had found himself being called ‘puritan’ ‘(though he was the greatest enemy of such as were truly worthy of that title)’, ‘by some papists’.56 But, Ley maintained, if the erection of the altar would not have the benign effect on Bridgeman’s reputation that he perhaps intended, it undoubtedly would have an entirely malign one on the condition of his diocese. In fact, Ley argued, in setting up the altar Bridgeman risked undermining the spiritual benefits that twenty years of his style of churchmanship had brought to the locality. On the one hand, such a policy could serve only to encourage the Catholics, and on the other it would have an equal and opposite effect on the puritans. For the erection of this altar, if altar it was, would altogether 202

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change the terms of trade with the local godly. ‘We have hitherto told them, that we are clear from all suspicion of popish adoration’; a claim firmly based on ‘the Articles of our Religion’ which expressly stated that ‘the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper’ was not ‘to be reserved, carried about, lifted up or worshipped’. Now, Ley explained, ‘if altars be set up, they will be more stiff in standing out against conformity in gesture at the sacrament, and we that are conformable shall be less strong to contest with them in that particular … wherein in former times (as your Lordship knows) our labour hath not been in vain bestowed on divers of them’.57 Ley was here harking back to what he clearly took to have been the foundational principles underlying both Bridgeman’s episcopal style and his own long-standing record of collaboration with the bishop in dealing with the problems of both popery and puritanism. But, as we have seen, what for Ley (and Bridgeman) was an entirely acceptable version of conformity, based on the prayer book but modified to fit the dictates of puritan conscience or the vagaries of local preference or custom, was to Neile and Charles tantamount to chaos. Protestant unity bought at this price was just not worth the having. Nor did the popish threat have anything to do with it, since at court, Canterbury and York the belief that – in Charles’s own words – ‘the neglect of punishing puritans breeds papists’ had hardened into a point of principle. But Ley’s letter to Bridgeman did not represent merely or mainly a paean of praise to some sort of moderate puritan/Calvinist episcopalian status quo ante. It was also an attempt to render life in the diocese of Chester tolerable for ministers like Ley, even if the tone of Bridgeman’s churchmanship continued to move in a distinctly Laudian direction. For Ley’s objection to the altar turned on a basic distinction between an altar and a table. Quoting Origen, Ley maintained that the only altar known to the church fathers was that provided by ‘“our mind”’, ‘“from which are sent up the sweet incense of prayers, out of a pure conscience”’. The church fathers who mentioned altars were ‘to be understood, not of an altar properly, but of a communion table … which, as for the matter of it, was not made of stone but of wood. So for the site of it, it was not set at the end of the chancel, but in the middle, at least so as it might be removed and so placed at the communion, that the people might come round about it,’ on which point Ley cited the authority of bishops Jewel (writing against Harding) and ‘Morton (in his late learned book on the lord’s supper)’. For the papists, on the other hand, ‘the altars that give the strongest support to their superstition are stony and fixed fabrics, which … are most in use in the popish churches and required as necessary by popish doctors to be of stone (else they may not be consecrated), as signifying Christ the rock and his resting in a stony sepulchre’. It was from such altars that ‘the danger of depravation and corruption of the doctrine of the church, by changing the Christian sacrament into a popish sacrifice’, sprang; ‘for from literal and real altars (properly so called) Bellarmine and Brierley infer a literal and real sacrifice’.58 203

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Applied to the current experience of the diocese of Chester, where communion tables were, even then, being moved and railed in, this was to draw a hard and fast distinction between such wooden tables and the stone altars that Ley found so objectionable. This allowed Ley to have his cake and eat it. On the one hand, he could make his own objections to altars crystal clear, in the process warning Bridgeman about how this most recent and blatant act of obeisance to the religious sensibilities of Neile and his ilk might be construed by Bridgeman’s erstwhile allies among the godly. But, on the other hand, the very rigour of Ley’s distinction between (stone) altars and (wooden) communion tables also allowed him to interpret the policy of railing communion tables currently sweeping through the diocese as not necessarily involving the introduction of altars of the objectionably popish sort (allegedly) erected in the cathedral by Bridgeman and energetically condemned by Ley in the pages of this tract. The point emerges all the more clearly when we factor in Ley’s claim, made retrospectively in a ‘postscript’ added to the published version of 1641, ‘that I never bowed head or knee either to or towards an altar or holy table’.59 If, as Ley’s claim suggested, railed communion tables were indeed being introduced without any insistence that they be bowed to, or indeed that the sacrament be received kneeling at the rails, then the likes of Ley might well have been able, within their own churches – and, perhaps even more importantly, between their own ears, and in the eyes of at least some of the godly – to accept aspects of Laudian ‘reformation’ as it was being introduced by Bridgeman. They were, in effect, able to evade having to perform, accept or even acknowledge the utterly objectionable, patently popish and at least potentially idolatrous consequences that the most vociferous apologists for the altar policy insisted were inevitably attendant upon that policy. Ley and others would have been materially aided in this act of willed cognitive dissonance (or self-deception) by the fact that, as Anthony Milton has shown, the most aggressive glosses upon the altar policy, in which the liturgical, doctrinal and affective implications of that policy were drawn out with crystal clarity, did not start to roll off the presses until 1637.60 We might say the same about the issue of the Sabbath. It was not the Book of Sports so much as the various anti-Sabbatarian screeds published thereafter, and in particular John Pocklington’s Sunday no Sabbath of 1636, which made explicit the Laudian assault on the scriptural basis of devoting one whole day in the week to the worship of God. Laudianism was as much a matter of words as of things, of the theological and devotional frames within which certain changes in outward observance and behaviour were placed or viewed, and of the both affective and performative consequences or conclusions extruded therefrom. Of course, even unglossed, such changes could matter a great deal, both to the people enforcing them and to at least some of those on whom they were being enforced. But what really determined the significance of those changes in outward 204

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behaviour, those shifts in the physical plant of the church, was not what Ley rather memorably termed ‘that dull and dumb text of the handycraftsman’ but, rather, what those objects and practices were taken to mean; what words could or should be applied to them, or conversely, what words were being rendered no longer licit or applicable by those changes. To be specific, what really mattered was not so much, or rather, was not only, whether communion tables were being reordered and railed in, or whether the Book of Sports was being read. The real issue was whether the table, thus moved and railed, was still a table or had definitively become an altar. Or, for all the tinkering of the Book of Sports, was Sunday still a Sabbath? For someone like Ley it was those linguistic changes, and the interpretative moves that they prompted and the intellectual and affective consequences that flowed from them, that were truly crucial. That was surely why Ley found Bridgeman’s act in erecting his altar in Chester cathedral so threatening. For, as things stood, even Ley had to admit that what Bridgeman had erected was an altar, and the sheer brute fact of that single altar’s existence might serve to convert the process of moving and railing communion tables, then taking place across the diocese, into an altar policy indeed. One might make the same point about Pocklington’s book, Sunday no Sabbath. For Pocklington’s screed did not merely or mainly defend the Book of Sports upon a variety of adiaphoristic or prudential grounds but, rather, called into radical question the very idea of a Christian Sabbath.61 Glossed in that way, the Book of Sports was a great deal more threatening than a mere royal licence for certain recreations after service time on Sundays, bad as such laxity remained, of course. On this view, in writing his open letter on the altar, and indeed his tract on Sunday a Sabbath, both of which circulated in manuscript before their ultimate publication in 1641, Ley was trying to keep open certain discursive, and even physical, spaces in which his version of true religion could continue to subsist, if not thrive, even in a church being reformed along essentially Laudian lines. This was moderate puritanism at the very end of its tether; seeking, at almost any cost, to construe the policies of an increasingly hostile and aggressive Laudian regime in terms that allowed ministers like Ley to remain in their posts, the better to edify the godly, oppose popery and wait to fight another day. But if the erection of the altar in Chester cathedral put a spoke in the wheel of Bridgeman’s hitherto cosily collusive relations with Ley, from Bridgeman’s point of view that was almost certainly a price worth paying for improved relations with the Laudian authorities at York and at court. Quintrell has plausibly argued that Bridgeman’s conduct during his troubles of the early 1630s revealed him as having failed to learn the new idiom of Caroline politics.62 However, from the mid-1630s on he revealed himself to have come to terms with the new dispensation with such success that, by the end of the decade, he had constructed a relationship of no small mutual admiration and trust with none other than Laud himself. By assiduously doing Laud’s 205

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bidding over the protection of the patrimony of the church and the disposal of livings, helping Laud’s client Edward Moreton to a clutch of decent livings, cultivating the archbishop with a mixture of compliments and gifts, having failed to appoint his son Orlando as his own chancellor, he now succeeded in getting him appointed as Laud’s steward.63 On the basis of his newly strengthened position, Bridgeman was able to convert his yearly reports on the state of his diocese into a series of omnia benes of such haiku-like brevity that in 1637 Neile was moved to urge him to ‘enlarge yourself as you have done in former times’.64 However much he might have resented the encroachment on their own jurisdictions represented by the metropolitical visitation of 1633 and its aftermath, it would appear that by the mid to late 1630s Bridgeman had seen that threat well and truly off. No Laudian himself, but by now securely located in Laud’s good books, Bridgeman seemed set fair to sail serenely on through the otherwise increasingly turbulent waters of the Personal Rule of Charles I.

MR PRYNNE COMES TO TOWN Until, that is, 1637, when, through no fault of poor Bridgeman’s, William Prynne came to town. In August 1637, on his way to his final place of imprisonment at Caernarvon castle, Prynne stopped off at Chester. One Calvin Bruen, the son of John Bruen and recently sheriff of Chester, ‘rode out to meet him and brought him jollily to his house where he gave him great sup’. The resulting dinner was attended by a number of other citizens, among them one John Aldersey, an alderman, who, along with his wife, engaged Prynne in what Bridgeman described as ‘idle discourse’, bemoaning ‘Prynne’s persecution as they called it, and spake divers words about his censure’.65 Thereafter, under pretence of shopping for bedding for his incarceration in Caernarvon castle, Prynne was treated like a celebrity, being carried ‘up and down upon the walls of the city and from shop to shop, from house to house’.66 He also sat for various portraits, all produced by a local painter named Pulford. At his departure Prynne was ‘brought out of the city on horseback’ by the same Calvin Bruen who had ushered him in a few days earlier. Later, under interrogation, Bruen tried to mitigate his fault by claiming that he had accompanied Prynne for only a measly half a mile, but, as Bridgeman pointedly remarked, that was the very same half a mile ‘I use to bring the Lord-Deputy of Ireland, when he hath been my guest at Chester’.67 Perhaps fortunately for Bridgeman, all this happened while he was away in Lancashire. On his return he wrote immediately to Neile to report what had occurred in Chester in his absence and then sought to get out ahead of the issue by orchestrating a preaching campaign across the city designed to distance official Chester from any involvement in the affair. It was aggressively condemnatory both of Burton, Bastwick and Prynne and of those ‘schismatical persons of this city of Chester’ who, ‘to the affront of authority’, 206

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by ‘factiously countenancing’ one of the malefactors ‘have most audaciously testified their approbation of the offenders’. Since the city of Chester had, ‘God be praised’, hitherto been ‘continually free from any inconformable and schismatical practices’, it was ‘thereby much defamed, and the government thereof, as well by ecclesiastical and civil magistrates, may in time receive some blemish, unless speedy course be taken therein’. To avoid that fate, Bridgeman gave order ‘at this his triennial visitation’ that ‘henceforth [our italics] every lecturer in any parish church of this city, before every his lecture or sermon, shall henceforth, in his surplice, read prayers distinctly, reverently and fully, according as is prescribed in the book of common prayers, and shall not preach but in his surplice’.68 This, of course, was in itself a remarkable pronouncement. Fully seven years after his dressing-down by Harsnet over the issue of lecturing, and some four years after Neile’s metropolitical visitation, Bridgeman was only now seeking to reduce the lecturers of his cathedral city to something like conformity as Caroline or Laudian authority would have recognised it. After all, his use of the word ‘henceforth’ in the passage quoted more than implies that to this point none of the above had been done. And, after all, he was acting now only to pre-empt the wave of thoroughly unwanted official attention likely to ensue from the Prynne business. On this evidence, it is small wonder that the likes of Harsnet, Neile and, indeed, Charles I did not trust Bridgeman further than they could throw him. But the crucial business was transacted in the next part of the order, which enjoined the preaching corps, thus (belatedly) reduced to conformity, in their next sermon to ‘make a public expression of their hearty dislike’ of the offences for which Burton, Bastwick and Prynne had been initially condemned and punished, and ‘effectually to exhort the people to obedience and to avoidance of the like schism’. Bridgeman emphasised that this was not optional; refusal or failure on the part of a parish minister would lead to the ‘suspension’ of the minister concerned and to the ‘suppressing’ of the lecture itself. Finally, ‘no stranger of any other diocese’ was to be allowed to preach in Chester without ‘special licence’ from the bishop himself, his chancellor or surrogate.69 This attempt to sign up not just official Chester but preaching Chester to the almost ritual repudiation of what had just happened was accompanied from the outset by an attempt both to limit the blame for the incident and to pass off the task of investigating and punishing the culprits to Neile. Despite the large numbers of people involved in the entertainment of Prynne, initially Bridgeman fingered just five individuals: Bruen, Aldersey and his wife, Peter Ince, a stationer, and his brother Robert Ince, a hosier. While Bruen had presided over Prynne’s arrival and departure and even asked him to lodge with him – although, Bridgeman mordantly observed, ‘Prynne forebore it, finding him (as who will not, if he hear him speak) a silly fellow’ – it was the Ince brothers, Peter and Robert, who had squired Prynne around town, ­introducing him 207

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to people and even taking him, uninvited, into people’s houses. Throughout, Bridgeman worked hard to restrict the number of culprits to a knot of what he represented as extreme puritans. Thus, Bridgeman explained, ‘as soon as Dr Leighton’s book called Sion’s plea came forth’, Calvin Bruen ‘had got one of them into his shop, which, as soon as I heard, I sent and took from him and then, being threatened and affrighted, he faithfully promised future conformity’. As for Peter Ince, ‘we have no other stationer in the city, yet no puritanical books but the citizens get them as soon as any, which I suppose come by his means …’.70 Having added Alderman Aldersey and his wife to the list, Bridgeman noted that ‘all these seldom come to our Sunday sermons in the cathedral, although I have ordered the other preachers in the city to end all their sermons before ours begin’.71 Thus, Bridgeman painted a picture of a small group of radical puritan recidivists in Chester as the prime movers behind the embarrassingly warm welcome given to Prynne; a group he later termed ‘those Prinnians now at York’, in Neile’s custody. Even as he sought to restrict the guilty parties to a narrow circle of already known puritans with a track record of schismatical speech and seditious activity, Bridgeman also begged to doubt his own capacity to bring such people to book, since, as he explained, ‘I myself have no authority in Chester to punish them but what my consistory doth afford, and I am not so much as a Justice of Peace to bind them to behavior.’ That being the case, the only solution was for Neile himself to send ‘a pursuivant to fetch them into the High Commission’. If such action were taken, Bridgeman opined, it ‘may be good for example to others of that strain’.72 In this way, Bridgeman might be thought to have been trying to limit the reach of the inquiry and to keep his own role within it, and in meting out the subsequent exemplary punishments, to a minimum. In response, on 22 September Neile pressed Bridgeman for further information and tried to broaden the investigation beyond the narrow focus suggested by Bridgeman’s initial reports. Thus, he told Bridgeman that he intended to call in ‘those good gossips that showed their great affections to that godly religious martyr Mr Prynne’. Sensing a conspiracy, he demanded to know ‘how long Prynne stayed at Chester?’ The elaborate demonstrations of sympathy and support described by Bridgeman could not have been ‘done in an evening or a morning and if his being there was for any longer time than a night’s lodging and away, it is to be presumed it was done by compact and of purpose’. The aim here and throughout was to ‘better furnish our proceeding ex officio’ by packing the ‘articles and examinations’ being drawn up at York with as much damning circumstantial detail as possible.73 Nor was Neile as prepared as Bridgeman to let slide the small matter of ‘the sermon of the affliction of God’s children that was then (as yourself sayeth) very unseasonably preached’ during Prynne’s visit. Whether or not Prynne himself had actually been present at the sermon was, Neile claimed, beside the point. If the preacher was from ‘this province’, Neile demanded to know 208

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‘his name and place of abode’. If he was ‘a mere stranger to your diocese and this province’, it became even more pressing to discover ‘wherefore he came hither to preach such a sermon’ and to obtain a copy of precisely what he had said.74 By 14 October Neile was hot on the trail of Pulford the painter, whom he described as a desperate character, ‘both painter and poet and may therefore dare to say and do anything’. He was also, he told Bridgeman, going after ‘the inn keeper where Prynne was lodged, where I find there was an assembly at prayers the morning that Prynne went from Chester’.75 Bridgeman was therefore being dragged into what was becoming a gradually widening inquiry. And, of course, given the circumstances, he had no choice but to go along to get along. Indeed, in a letter of 10 November he expressly asked Neile not to be ‘too hasty in the dispatch of those men’ already at York ‘until I have searched a little into the depth of this business’; ‘I would not have only shadows to that honorable company but certainties and of substance’. But, having, as he hoped, established that he was indeed on the case, Bridgeman then advised Neile to revert to plan A and concentrate his attentions on the small core of real offenders and not allow his investigation to suck in other, more peripheral figures, ‘who never spake to Prynne or bestowed any courtesies upon him but only in curiosity saw him as a stigmatised monster’.76 Then, to further demonstrate his own zeal, and perhaps to further divert Neile’s attention away from Chester altogether, Bridgeman named another name, ‘one Bostock’, whom he described elsewhere as a ‘young lawyer but an old puritan’, who, having already fled the scene, was perfect for the purpose.77 On Bridgeman’s account, Bostock was a lawyer of the first head, yet one who hath horn enough to run withal against ecclesiastical authority and as busy in prohibitions as the best. This man, they say, is informed against, and fears a summons from York, for he was more inward with Prynne than any others. If he come before your grace I pray examine him narrowly about schismatical books for I verily believe there hath been no libellous or scandalous books published either from beyond the seas or printed in England for divers years but he hath gotten it and dispersed it. He hath been a great conventicler (as his neighbours affirm and report to be true), of long acquaintance with Prynne, ere he wrote his libels … Men thought lately he would have been a minister but about five years since he began to study at the Inns of Court and is now become a lawyer … He hath been, as I hear, a great expounder of scripture in private families and a follower of seditious ministers at exercises, as they call them.78

A number of remarkably similar phrases recur throughout this virulent pen portrait – ‘as his neighbours report and affirm to be true’, ‘as I hear’, ‘this man, they say’ – all of which reveal the extent to which, despite Bridgeman’s claim (made in the same letter) that ‘it is much below me to be an informer’, his account of Bostock’s career was based entirely on hearsay, indeed sometimes on hearsay about hearsay, and the merest surmise. As a wannabe minister turned common lawyer, long-time friend of Prynne, 209

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eager consumer and disseminator of the schismatical outpourings of the underground press, an inveterate attender at conventicles and exercises, a lay preacher and groupie of the most seditious ministers, Bostock emerges from Bridgeman’s construction of him as the very quintessence of the puritan boute-feu. This is the stuff of which Laudian nightmares were made, and Bridgeman’s ‘Bostock’ was precisely the sort of bugbear that, as Stephen Foster and Jason Peacey have both shown, stalked the darkest recesses of the Caroline political imaginary.79 In response, Neile reassured Bridgeman that he was precisely not going on a fishing expedition. The accused’s own testimony in High Commission had ‘made manifest’ that they had all ‘seen some of the seditious libels and that they did know how Prynne hath been punished and censured by the state for them’. There was, therefore, no question of such ‘as only casually, out of curiosity, might or did see Prynne, and did not, by their doing, manifest their partiality to Prynne and disaffection (or rather disloyalty) to the proceeding of the state’ being caught in the net. As for Bostock, Neile was already on the case. Bridgeman was urged to come forward with any further information about him or any others, and Neile eagerly awaited the results of ‘some examinations which you were contented to be troubled with’.80 Neile’s letter to this effect was dated 16 November 1637. When Bridgeman replied on the twentieth of the same month he used the testimony of Peter Ince’s wife to emphasise Ince’s long-standing connections with Prynne, and his recent interrogation of Alderman Aldersey’s wife to remove both her and her husband from the list of suspects. Having cleared the inner circles of the Chester elite from all association with these unfortunate events, Bridgeman reverted to the sinister figure of Bostock, then ‘hovering’ ‘in London’. It would be good, Bridgeman opined, if ‘Mr Blanchard or some were sent by authority from York to search his study, but they must have power to break open his door or no good will be done, for certainly he hath more schismatical books … than anyone in my diocese.81 The outcome of these transactions was something of a compromise. Bridgeman’s approach might be thought to have generally won the day, with the investigation culminating in the conviction of a tight core of puritan troublemakers and extremists; a group still centred on Bridgeman’s initial ‘usual suspects’ of choice, Calvin Bruen and Peter Ince. But the resulting knot of ‘Prinnians’, tried, found guilty and fined by the High Commission at York, had now expanded to six, comprising Bruen, Ince, Peter Leigh, Thomas Hunt, Richard Golborn and a Mr Trafford, with Pulford the painter playing a subsidiary role. Bruen and Golborn were fined £500 pounds, Ince £300, Leigh £200, Trafford £150 and Hunt £100. Pulford was not to be fined at all, but, along with the rest, was to acknowledge his fault ‘in a public assembly of the common hall’, at which time the offending ‘pictures [of Prynne] are to be burned’. Despite his best efforts to discover the identity of the preacher of the offensive sermon on ‘the affliction of God’s children’, Neile admitted that he 210

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‘cannot get out of them anymore but that his name is Rutt or Rutter and that he came from London’.82 With the core of ringleaders thus identified and punished, all that remained was the transfer back to Chester of what it was to be hoped would be the both admonitory and purging effects of that outcome. As early as 16 November Neile had been planning how this should be done. No detail seemed too small for the archbishop’s attention. He directed careful consideration to Pulford’s paintings of Prynne and, after an initial impulse simply to have them defaced, gave orders for a public burning.83 Regarding the offenders’ submission in the town hall, he insisted that ‘something should be there said to declare the nature and merit of the offense and also to say something on the behalf of the city upon which they have endeavoured to bring an imputation of having in it a company of factious men and women that durst give such an affront to the proceedings of the state’.84 In other words, if Neile was going to join Bridgeman in scapegoating a groupuscule of puritan radicals, and leave the city elite out of it, then that same elite would have, if not exactly to eat some form of humble pie, then certainly explicitly to distance itself from the malefactors, in the process endorsing what Neile termed ‘the proceedings of the state’ not only against Burton, Bastwick and Prynne but against their local well-wishers as well. As all this implies, the broad outlines of how that was to be done were laid down by Neile himself, although it was left to Bridgeman to arrange the precise ‘ordering of the business’.85 In the end, the relevant performances were stretched out over two weeks. Richard Ince and Hunt went first. As Bridgeman told it in a letter to Neile of 12 December, on Sunday last, ‘standing on a form’ ‘in the quire of Chester cathedral’, they had made an ‘acknowledgement of their offences, after a very good sermon purposely studied for this occasion, in as full a congregation as ever I saw in this Cathedral, saying it audibly after the preacher, according to the schedule sent from York by Mr Blanchard’.86 However, there had been one snag. This proved a happy accident, since it provided Bridgeman with another opportunity to perform his zeal in this matter; which performance he now recounted, in some detail and with equal relish, for Neile’s benefit. Whereas the offenders should have admitted that ‘“we have audaciously and wickedly offered an affront”, and so the preacher read it to them, they left out the word “wickedly” and instead thereof they pronounced “ignorantly”’. At that point Bridgeman interrupted proceedings, ‘telling them that they thereby offered as great an offence unto the court of High Commission’ in its proceedings against them ‘as they had done formerly unto the court of Star Chamber’ in that court’s proceedings against Prynne. ‘For if their action was not “wicked” then it might be thought or said that the commission had censured them for that which was not worthy censure.’87 Stopped in their tracks by Bridgeman, the culprits got it right the second time, pronouncing the crucial form of words aloud after the minister, just as the schedule had insisted that they must. 211

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Events the following Tuesday again followed the script laid down by Neile. Ince and Hunt, now joined by Calvin Bruen, repeated essentially the same performance before the secular authorities in the Guildhall, where the carefully choreographed programme of performed penance hit yet another snag. This time the fault lay not with the offenders themselves but with the mayor, who, Bridgeman claimed, ‘hath deceived me’. For, having assured him that he would play a full and active part, and having ‘intimated so much to Mr Blanchard two days before the performance, yet, at the appointed time, when they came to the acknowledgement, he spake not a word’. Rather, ‘after their penance was performed in the Guildhall, he and his brethren, with a great multitude of the citizens’, simply filed out of the room and ‘went and stood near the fire when Prynne’s pictures were brought forth and publicly burned in the market place’.88 Clearly, the Chester authorities wanted as little as possible to do with the public humiliation of leading members of the godly community, even ones as notorious, and indeed as ‘silly’, as Bridgeman painted Ince and Bruen to be. As for Calvin Bruen, standing alone in the cathedral the following Sunday he got to play the role, as leading malcontent and chief conspirator, that Bridgeman had ascribed to him all along. The sermon was preached by ‘Dr Snell, the archdeacon of Chester, who took occasion to show both the foulness of the seditious persons’ (i.e., Burton, Bastwick and Prynne’s) offences and the great mercy of the king in sparing their lives, as also the danger which ‘the countenancer of the offenders [Bruen] had rushed into, being by law liable to the like punishment, if mercy had not convented him before the church’, rather than ‘before the temporal judges at King’s Bench’. And, at the end, ‘the penitent Bruen’ had been brought to acknowledge ‘as much’.89 The reception of Prynne, which saw him being carried around the walls, paraded through the town, feasted and generally made much of, like some carnival king or lord of misrule, might be conceived as a form of festive inversion, a way of turning the world, at least as the likes of Neile, Laud and Charles I conceived it, upside down, and thus, from the perspective of the puritans doing the celebrating, of restoring the world as they conceived it to order again. If we take that view of the matter, then the coordinated preaching campaign, the public penances, the equally public burning of the central malefactor, if not in effigy then in multiple images, were surely all designed to invert that inversion and thus, from the perspective of the authorities, to restore a world turned upside down by puritan subversion to order, Laudian style. The whole of Chester society, the ecclesiastical and civil authorities, plus the people, had to be publicly seen to be purging themselves of any trace of the schism and sedition for which Prynne and his mates had been condemned. Hence the careful choreography of the public penances; hence Neile’s insistence that they be performed first in the cathedral and then again in the Guildhall and that the mayor and aldermen play a central part; hence his concern that the portraits of Prynne be burned in the market 212

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place; and hence, too, the significance of the mayor’s refusal fully to endorse the proceedings by denouncing the malefactors after they had eaten humble pie in the Guildhall. At one level, the Prynne affair had shown the reach of national news and reputations into the provinces, the strength of what we can only call puritan sentiment in Chester and, perhaps even more, the potential there for some sort of anti-Laudian reaction. But, viewed more narrowly, from Bridgeman’s perspective, he had been remarkably successful in his efforts to contain the potentially explosive effects of Prynne’s visit. Indeed, arguably, he emerged from these events in his strongest position since the later 1620s. Now firmly embedded in Archbishop Laud’s good books by his response to the Prynne business, he seems to have persuaded even Neile of his anti-puritan bona fides. And, in the immediate aftermath of that kerfuffle, by actually getting Laud to side against Neile in a dispute over his fractious relations with both Mr Mallory, the dean of Chester, and the mayor and aldermen of that city, he seems to have pulled off what was surely his greatest political and personal coup since his troubles of the early 1630s.90 Not that everything in Bridgeman’s world was coming up roses. As we have seen, he had tried to restrict the investigation into the Prynne affair to a few ‘radical puritan’ scapegoats; but he had not been entirely successful in that attempt. Once the High Commission got their hands on it, the circle of those to be made an example of widened to include the likes of Hunt, Leigh, Golborn and Trafford. A previous link can be established between Trafford and Golborn, since they had both witnessed the 1628 will of Martha Bate, who had left Lancaster in the 40s, and requested that Lancaster preach her funeral sermon. One of the executors to that will had been Calvin Bruen.91 All of which gives the lie to Bridgeman’s rather convenient (implicit) claim that only radicals, outliers and complete strangers, like the Ince brothers, Bruen, Bostock or the mysterious preacher ‘Rutter’, had been centrally involved in the Prynne incident. It also reminds us that, far from being members of an exclusive club of extremists, even engagés like Calvin Bruen were in fact networked with a range of other puritan ministers and laymen. The fact that, rather than suffer public penance, Golborn and Trafford, along with Peter Ince, appear to have gone into hiding shows just how deep the effects of the Prynne affair might have gone, and how serious they actually were for certain members of the Chester godly community.92 This, of course, should not surprise us. The disaffection with the policies of the Personal Rule and sympathy for Prynne as a martyred victim of ‘persecution’ that surfaced in 1637 very likely had roots among the Chester godly far deeper than either Bridgeman had cared to admit or Neile and his henchmen had been able to discover. Hence, we might surmise, the mayor and aldermen’s refusal to say a word during the ritual outing of Bruen, Hunt and Ince at the Guildhall in December 1637. No wonder Bridgeman (and indeed Laud) were so anxious, through the good offices of mayor Thomas 213

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Throppe, to get the corporation back to worshipping in the cathedral, even if, as Bridgeman himself put it, Throppe’s efforts were undertaken ‘maugré many of his brethren’.93 In seeking so severely to limit the scope of the investigation of the Prynne demonstrations and of the prosecutions and penances that ensued, Bridgeman had not merely been keeping the intrusive gaze of Neile and his agents out of his diocese, he had also been protecting Chester puritans like Ley and Lancaster and their ilk. As we shall see, the unfortunate necessity of having to make scapegoats of the likes of Bruen and the Inces was to come back to bite him in the early 1640s. But, insofar as it enabled Bridgeman to retain some hold on the loyalties of the likes of John Ley and Charles Herle well into 1641, it also stood him in rather good stead.

EMERGENT DIVISIONS AMONG THE GODLY However, there is evidence that the after-effects of the Prynne business were starting to have disruptive and divisive effects on the Chester godly long before the calling of the Long Parliament. On 12 January 1638 Thomas Holford, minister at Plemondstall, deputising for Ley at the Friday lecture at St Peter’s church, Chester, preached in direct confutation of a previous sermon delivered by John Conney, minister of St Oswald’s, Chester, in Chester cathedral. Holford maintained that ‘full and ample conformity now-a-days would not serve the turn, but if a man be more zealous or more religious than other men, then is he branded with the name of heretic, schismatic or puritan, and that not by the least, but by the greatest men of this kingdom’. In addition it was alleged that for at least three years he had been ‘a favourer of factious and schismatical persons and puritans’ and had refused to conform in his ministry at Plemondstall, not reading the service in his surplice, administering the sacrament to those who were not kneeling and refraining from using the sign of the cross in baptism or bowing at the name of Jesus. Moreover, he was said to have ‘privately and publicly affirmed that the rites and ceremonies of the church of England by law established were superstitious’ and that the ‘godly affected may not, with any good conscience approve them, use them, or as occasion requireth, subscribe them’.94 Further allegations expatiated on Holford’s account of the ways in which the accusation of puritanism was being currently used not to refer to heretics like Novatus, against whom the term had first been coined, but, rather, to abuse those ‘who labour to keep a good conscience towards God and men’. If such people ‘be more zealous than others’, then, Holford had lamented, ‘they cannot escape the infamous aspersion of puritanism, though that name belong properly to papists. And thus we see that the mystery of godliness finds harsh entertainment, not only amongst the vulgar, but even amongst the learned also.’ By which words, it was alleged, Holford ‘did intend to commend and magnify puritanism for down-right godliness and puritans 214

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for godly persons, and by the learned you meant and intended the governors of the church and such as exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the same’.95 Quite what was at stake here emerges more clearly when we factor in the purport of the sermon by John Conney that Holford was said to have been confuting. Conney was a man with godly connections. He was one of the group of divines who wrote to John Ley asking him to produce the definitive discussion of the Sabbath issue that became Sunday a Sabbath. His will reveals that his personal library contained a range of puritan volumes, including the complete works of Perkins, Gouge’s Of domestical duties, and Thomas Goodwin’s Child of light walking in darkness. He also owned ‘two books by Mr Byfield on the first chapter of the first epistle of St Peter’.96 He was, in short, no stranger to puritan godliness, nor altogether unconnected in local puritan circles. And yet, in the immediate aftermath of the Prynne debacle, he had preached a sermon in the cathedral choir at Chester wherein he had ‘declared and expressed that it was not the intention of the governors of the church to put down godliness or holiness, but to have true conformity in the church, according to the discipline therein established’. He had also ‘exhorted the auditory to conform themselves to the laws of the church and then be [as] zealous and religious towards God as they could possibly be, and then their rulers and preachers would all stand to them’.97 Or that, at least, was what Conney claimed to have said. What we are dealing with here are two very different responses to the Prynne affair. Conney was taking what we might call the Bridgeman-friendly line. On this account, Prynne and his most zealous supporters really were the factious schismatics that even Bridgeman accused them of being. Punishing people like that was not the thin end of a sinister wedge that led inevitably to an assault on broader definitions of puritan godliness or zeal. Rather, the authorities had merely been a drawing a line in the sand against extremists, a line which left plenty of room, on the right side of ‘conformity’, for those who devoted themselves to being, as Conney phrased it, ‘as zealous and religious towards God as they could possibly’. For Holford, on the other hand, preaching less than a month after the submissions by Bruen and others, that was precisely what the assault on Prynne and his sympathisers was: the start of an across-the-board assault on ‘sincerity and godliness’, now denounced as a form of heresy called ‘puritanism’. Bridgeman’s attempt to limit the range of the official response to the Prynne affair to obvious ‘radicals’ and ‘extremists’ was designed to lead to Conney’s view of the matter. However, the inclusion of the likes of Trafford and Golborn in the lists of those prosecuted to the edge of ruin, not to mention the whole tenor of later Laudian polemic, lent considerable credence to Holford’s rather more alarmist take on what was happening. Reading between the lines of the charges against him, Holford emerges as a typical, Ley-style, moderate puritan – that is to say, as someone prepared to conform in theory while varying his actual practice of conformity to the promptings of 215

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his own conscience and the demands of his flock. For such people the entire course of the 1630s had been alarming enough, and for Holford, although evidently not for Conney, the official reaction to the Prynne affair had represented a bridge too far. Or had it? Judging from the various responses to Holford and Conney’s pulpit performances, there were those for whom Holford had indeed gone way too far; so far, in fact, as to confirm the existence of the sort of radical puritan threat to all order that Holford himself was presenting as a mere bug-bear, used by those in authority to outlaw almost any genuinely zealous expression of true religion. Thus, Conney himself confirmed that Holford’s sermon had indeed been intended as a confutation of his own attempt to defend the governors of the church from the charge of trying ‘to put down godliness or holiness’, when in fact all they were doing was enforcing conformity. William Clarke, the anti-puritan petty-canon of the cathedral, went further, insisting that Holford had clearly meant to defend ‘the kind of puritanism which tends to non-conformity, according to the discipline of the church of England’ and had indeed ‘meant or intended, by the words “learned men”, the governors of the church, or such as exercised ecclesiastical discipline therein’.98 On the other side of the equation we find what we might take to be the usual (moderate puritan) suspects, Nathaniel Lancaster and John Glendole. Lancaster maintained that Holford had not endeavoured ‘to magnify or applaud any puritanism contrary to the discipline of the church, now established in England’. Nor by ‘learned men’ had he meant ‘any that exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction at this present in the church’, a contention that he attempted to prove by citing Holford’s own citation of Stephen Gardiner, whom Holford had identified as both ‘a learned man’ and ‘a papist and persecutor’, which, of course, on a hostile view of the matter, was far from being an entirely reassuring example. As for Glendole, he limited himself to the assertion that Holford ‘did not utter any words in his said sermon willfully or willingly which tend to the contradiction of the discipline of the church of England, for that this deponent knoweth him to be a man conformable to the discipline of the church now established in England’, a claim which, of course, entirely depended on just what you meant by the term ‘conformable’. That Holford himself had not intended to precipitate any sort of final show-down with the authorities but, rather, to continue to speak in the sort of moderate puritan code that enabled his auditory to know precisely what he meant, without rendering him liable to prosecution, is clear from the denouement, which found Holford affirming that he had only ever meant ‘to justify’ ‘such men as are truly conformable but also peaceable’. He had certainly not intended to ‘magnify’ ‘such as are schismatical or factious disturbers of the peace of the church of England’.99 Both of which claims, when viewed from within his own terms of reference, were almost certainly true enough. That, however, was decidedly not enough for the authorities, and Holford 216

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was forced to make a public ‘submission’ at the scene of the original crime in St Peter’s, Chester. There he professed that ‘I am fully persuaded in conscience that the Church of England is the most flourishing and orthodox church upon the face of the earth, both for doctrine and discipline, and I do bless God for the great mercy towards me who hath called me to be a member thereof and hath suffered me to live under the happy government for so many years as I have done.’ Nor had there been ‘any thought in me to tax my superiors, or any the learned governors of our church, with any rigid or unbefitting proceedings against such as do refuse to submit to the discipline of the church or her authority for the use of such ceremonies as are prescribed in the same’.100 The coerced repetition of such absurdly over-the-top forms of submission could scarcely even paper over, let alone effectively suppress, the divisions of opinion which were now appearing not merely between the Laudians and their critics, or among various sorts of conformist, but also within the ranks of the erstwhile godly themselves. The nature of these incipient divisions started to appear in print with the publication in 1640 of John Ley’s life of Mrs Jane Ratcliffe, and in 1641 of William Hinde’s life of John Bruen. Ley’s book was based on a funeral sermon preached in Chester in 1638, some six months after Mrs Ratcliffe’s death in London, while the life of Bruen, written in the late 1620s, was brought to the press in 1641 by Hinde’s son Samuel.101 Ratcliffe was the widow of the notoriously puritan mayor of Chester and friend of Bruen, John Ratcliffe, and a well-known patron of the godly clergy, Ley himself included. The life memorialised her strenuously affective style of piety as the very best of which the church of England was capable. Godly divines like Ley, and before him Nicholas Byfield, figured only as her admiring mentors, an enabling presence, praised for converting her to true religion in the first place, and then for reconciling her to the outward forms of the national church, of which, otherwise, she was portrayed as the most eager of communicants, greedily consuming the spiritual benefits on offer in both the word preached and the sacrament. This last task they performed, most obviously, by stilling her doubts about kneeling to receive the communion.102 While Ley presented Mrs Ratcliffe as a prime example of the spectacular, transformative effects of the Holy Spirit acting on the souls of the elect – the intensity and efficacy of her prayers being equalled only by the perspicacity of her scriptural insights – he also stressed that her zeal had been wholly contained within the overarching structures of clerical and patriarchal authority and the institutional and liturgical forms of the national church. While he claimed a certain level of personal and spiritual intimacy with his subject, Ley modestly left the identity of the minster chiefly responsible for her conversion to full conformity wreathed in anonymity. Despite that, especially to a local audience, the life would have served as a vindication of his vision of the right relation of the puritan impulse with the national church, particularly as he took care to scotch rumours, which had spread immediately after her 217

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demise, that, at the last, on her deathbed, she had come greatly to regret her previous conformity.103 Hinde’s life of Bruen purveyed a subtly but palpably different version of puritanism. Unlike Ley, Hinde had been an overt and unapologetic nonconformist as well as a zealous propagator of the reformation of manners in his parish of Bunbury. His life of Bruen portrayed Bruen’s household as the ultimate change-agent, a centre of edification and reformation, converting all who came into contact with it to true religion and a life of godliness. Those thus transformed ranged from his own servants, often picked out for their prior inclination to godliness, to family members who ‘tabled’ with him and the members of the local gentry who, as we have seen, were placed in his household to be schooled in godliness. Hinde unashamedly applied the rhetoric of edification to the workings of the Bruen household, which he described as ‘a very Bethel, and a little church of God, 1 Cor. 6.19, a true house of God and the very gate of heaven’.104 Bruen was also praised as a patron of the godly clergy, in which role the initiative was almost always attributed to him. Hinde referred habitually to ‘his ministers’ and depicted Bruen supplying not merely the material and moral support expected of godly patrons but also spiritual encouragement and, when it was called for, admonition to his clerical protégés. Indeed, in his efforts at edification Bruen took on several of the functions of a minister. An assiduous attender at godly exercises, he amassed a vast library of sermon notes and then repeated the exegetical insights of the godly clergy in order to legitimate his practice of interpreting and applying the scripture both to the members of his own household and to anyone else who cared to turn up. This was preaching in all but name, and Hinde depicted Bruen discharging all of the other core functions of the clergy except the administration of the sacrament. He is shown leading his household in prayer, operating as a doctor of the soul, even at one point ministering at the death-bed of a minister Mr Dickon, overcome by despair.105 Bruen also presided over an attempt to exorcise a young boy possessed by the devil. It would not be going too far to say that throughout Hinde’s Life the clergy enjoyed only a walk-on part in the processes of reformation emanating from the Bruen household, both in Chester, where Bruen was presented as an equal partner in a double act with the puritan divine Nicholas Byfield, and at Bruen Stapleford. It was Bruen and his household that were shown initiating, and then presiding over, the reformation of what, at the start of Bruen’s career in godliness, had been a decidedly ‘dark corner of the land’, almost devoid of godly preachers and reformed magistrates. But, for all Bruen’s zeal, Hinde went out of his way to stress that he remained committed to the worship of his parish church, to which, every Sunday, he led his household as a phalanx of psalm-singing Christian soldiers to whom, in the church after service, he repeated the heads of the sermon, thus setting his own imprimatur on the day’s proceedings and emphasising 218

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his household’s standing as the acme of godliness.106 That commitment to a vision of true religion within the parish church also expressed itself in the acts of iconoclasm performed first in the Bruen family chapel and then throughout the church – acts that, as we have seen, Hinde assimilated to the state-sponsored iconoclasm of Elizabeth’s reign.107 At no point in Hinde’s text was the issue of conformity mentioned, and the local bishops featured only once as, having failed to exorcise a possessed young boy, authorising the efforts of Bruen and the godly towards the same end.108 The take-home message here, then, was not so much that the puritan impulse had been contained within the parochial and liturgical structures of the national church – although that point was undoubtedly being made – but, rather, the extent to which the zealous activism of Bruen had been able to bend those same structures to the purposes of further reformation, thus transforming an unreformed church and society, as it were, from within; a process which, predictably enough, Hinde described in terms of the struggle against popery in all its forms. Of course, a good deal of the contrast between Bruen and Mrs Ratcliffe was a function of gender, with her status as first a wife and then a widow putting her in a markedly different situation to his as a gentleman, head of household, landlord and patron. Nevertheless, the vision of puritanism and its relation to the host society and national church contained within Hinde’s life of Bruen was decidedly more ‘radical’, more uncompromisingly ‘puritan’, than that implied by Ley’s life of Mrs Ratcliffe, or indeed Ley’s (or Bridgeman’s) version of the status quo ante, as it has emerged above. At the very least, here are the emergent differences between Conney and Holford, or Calvin Bruen and John Ley, being given expression in rival versions of the puritan impulse as it had been instantiated and exemplified over the previous decades in the godly lives of two notable puritan saints. By publishing his father’s book in the midst of the crisis of 1641, young Hinde was surely seeking to mobilise a version of the recent (puritan) past in order to legitimate and further a vision of the reformed future of the national church. That gesture toward the prospect of something like root-and-branch reform was lent far greater local resonance and polemical force by the fact that the name of the person being memorialised in such uncompromisingly puritan terms was Bruen. For John Bruen was the father of the newly notorious Calvin Bruen, to whom the very last words of the tract were, in effect, addressed. For there the reader was reminded that it had been ‘the godly desire … of this gracious gentleman, that, when he should be dead and gone, he might yet live in his children, especially in the heirs of his body and family, that they might be followers of his faith and religion, both for the power and practise of it …’.109 This was, in effect, to endorse Calvin as his father’s son – if, that is, he had the guts and the grace to live up to his father’s example. Just what that meant, in the changed circumstances of the early 1640s, was about to be revealed. On this evidence, therefore, it may well have been no 219

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accident that the biography of Bruen père appeared in print just as Bruen fils was launching the most radical proposal for further reformation to come out of Cheshire in the early 1640s.

NOTES 1 B. W. Quintrell, ‘Morton, Thomas, 1564–1659’, ODNB, xxxix.433–40. 2 C. Haigh, ‘Finance and administration in a new diocese: Chester, 1541–1641’, in F. Heal and R. O’Day (eds), Continuity and Change: Personnel and Administration in the Church of England, 1500–1642 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1976), pp. 145–66; Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England. 3 Staffordshire Record Office (hereafter SRO) D1287/18/2 (P1399/ 3B), Bridgeman to Wentworth, 3 February 1632/3. 4 Ibid. (P1399/12), Bridgeman to Ley, 18 December 1622. 5 Ibid. (P1399/12), Ley to Bridgeman, 23 December 1622. 6 John Paget, A defence of church government exercised in presbyterial, classical and synodal assembled (London, 1641) ‘An humble advertisement to the High Court of Parliament’. For a comparable episode in the life of the young Lancashire minister, John Angier, see A narration of the holy life and happy death of … Mr John Angier (London, 1683), pp. 13–17. In this case he recounted that Mrs Bridgeman, ‘a gracious woman, who was at that time much afflicted in conscience’, interceded for him after he had provided her with spiritual counsel. 7 The letter was reproduced in John Ley, Sunday a Sabbath (London, 1641), ‘The coppie of the letter mentioned in the preface’. 8 SRO D1287/18/2 (P/399/67), Ley to Bridgeman, 9 July 1632: Mawdesley, ‘Clerical politics in Lancashire and Cheshire’, pp. 74–6. 9 TNA SP 16/211/87. 10 SRO D1287/18/2 (P/399/67), Ley to Bridgeman, 9 July 1632. 11 Ibid. 12 SRO D1287/18/2 (P/399/32), Savage to Bridgeman, 26 March 1627. 13 Ibid. (P/399/41), Savage to Bridgeman, 27 November 1628. 14 Ibid. (P/399/32), Savage to Bridgeman, 28 February 1626/7. 15 Ibid. (P/399/45), Wentworth to Bridgeman, 22 July 1629; (P/399/48), Wentworth to Bridgeman, 23 December 1629; F. Pogson, ‘Wentworth and the Northern Recusancy Commission’, Recusant History, 24 (1999), 271–87. 16 SRO D1287/18/2 (P/399/ 51), Wentworth to Bridgeman, 24 March 1629/30. 17 Ibid. (P/399/60), Wentworth to Bridgeman from Westminster, 28 July 1631. 18 Ibid. (P/399/63), Wentworth to Bridgeman, 30 November 1631. 19 B. W. Quintrell, ‘Lancashire ills, the king’s will and the troubling of Bishop Bridgeman’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 132 (1983), 67–102. 20 SRO D1287/18/2 (P/3999/ 49), Harsnet to Bridgeman, 3 March 1630/1. 21 Ibid. (P/399/52), Harsnet to Bridgeman, 30 March 1631. 22 SRO, D1287/9/8 (A/93), Harsnet to Bridgeman, 11 May 1630. 23 Ibid. (A/93), Harsnet to Bridgeman, 27 March 1631/2. 24 SRO D1287/9/8/2 (A/14), Laud to Bridgeman, 12 August 1631. 220

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Ibid. (A/109), Laud to Bridgeman, 22 October 1631. Ibid. (P/399/100), letter from Charles to Bridgeman, received 21 May 1633. Ibid. (P/399/101), Wentworth to Bridgeman, 16 May 1633. TNA SP 16/241/78. Ibid., 16/242/41. Ibid., 16/250/72; 16/254/47; 16/243/69. Ibid., 16/259/78, ‘Certificate of the Lord Archbishop of York to his Majesty’. SRO D1287/9/8 (A/92), ‘A relation of what was observed and done in the Lord Archbishop of York’s visitation of the diocese of Chester, anno domini 1633’. We would like thank Ken Fincham for providing us with a photocopy of this fascinating document. TNA, SP 16/259/78. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. SRO D1287/9/8 (A/93), Neile to Bridgeman, 21 March 1633/4. SRO D1287/18/2 (P1399/87), Ley to Bridgeman, 16 March 1632/3. Each letter is endorsed ‘that this is a true copy agreeable to the original we testify whose names are subscribed’, signed by Ley and Glendole and dated 7 March 1632/3. Ibid. (P1399/87), Ley to Bridgeman, 7 March 1632/3. Paget, A defence of church government, ‘An humble advertisement to the High Court of Parliament’. John Ley, The fury of war and folly of sin (London, 1643), p. 44. CALS, EDC1/52, 7 June 1634. We are grateful to James Mawdesley for this reference. SRO D1287/18/2 (A 92), ‘A relation of what was observed and done’; John Ley, A pattern of piety, or the religious life and death of … Mrs Jane Ratcliffe (London, 1640); P. G. Lake, ‘Feminine piety and personal potency: the “emancipation” of Mrs Jane Ratcliffe’, The Seventeenth Century, 2 (1987), 143–65. CALS, ML/2/273, Mayor’s Letters, 31 August 1633. There is another letter to the same effect sent on the same day to ‘Dr Easdal, Dr Wickham and Dr Cosins his grace’s visitors’ in ML/2/274; M. J. Crossley Evans, ‘The clergy of the city of Chester, 1630–1672’, Journal of the Chester and North Wales Archaeological Society, 68 (1986, for 1985), 107–8. CALS EDV 1/33, fos 4, 6, 9. We are again indebted to James Mawdesley for these references. Mawdesley, ‘Clerical politics in Lancashire and Cheshire’, pp. 79–83. K. Fincham and N. Tyacke, Altars Restored (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 200–1, 213–14. SRO D1287/9/8 (A/92), ‘A relation of what was observed and done’. P. D. Yorke, ‘Iconoclasm, ecclesiology and the Beauty of Holiness. Concepts of sacrilege and the “Perils of Idolatry” in early modern England, c.1590–1642’ (PhD thesis, University of Kent, 1997), ch. 4; SRO D1287/18/2 (P/399/165B), Bridgeman to Neile, 28 March 1638. Mawdesley, ‘Clerical politics in Lancashire and Cheshire’, pp. 83–5, 88–90. John Ley, A letter (against the erection of an altar) written June 29, 1635 to the reverend father, John, Lord Bishop of Chester (London, 1641), pp. 1–22. 221

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The Personal Rule and its problems 52 We know this because Ley tells us that multiple copies of his letter about the altar were in circulation by or before 1641 and the version of the letter about Mr C. in Bridgeman’s papers in the Staffordshire Record Office is subscribed ‘a true copy examined by us, Isaac Ambrose, Thomas Nashe’: Ley, Altar, pp. 23–32; SRO D1287/18/2 (P1399/12), Ley to Bridgeman 23 December 1622. 53 Ley, Altar, pp. 3–4, 16. 54 Ibid., pp. 19, 4. 55 Ibid., pp. 2, 4. 56 Ibid., p. 20. 57 Ibid., pp. 16–17. 58 Ibid., pp. 7–9. 59 Ibid., p. 26. 60 A. Milton, ‘The creation of Laudianism: a new approach’, in T. E. Cogswell, R. P. Cust and P. G. Lake (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 162–84. 61 Parker, The English Sabbath, pp. 202–5. 62 Quintrell, ‘Troubling of Bridgeman’, 67–102. 63 Fincham (ed.), Further Correspondence of William Laud, pp. 74–5, 105, 172, 177–84, 211–14, 216–17. 64 SRO D1287/9/8 (A/93), Neile to Bridgeman, 4 January 1636/7. 65 SRO D1287/18/2 (P/399/5B), Bridgeman to Neile, 20 August 1637. 66 SRO D1287/9/8 (A/93), Neile to Bridgeman, 22 September 1637, paraphrasing Bridgeman’s earlier account of Prynne’s reception. 67 SRO D1287/18/2 (P/399/6B), Bridgeman to Neile,10 November 1637. 68 SRO (P/399/5B, 6B); D1287/9/8 (A/93). Prynne himself later named two of the preachers: Charles Duckworth, a prebend of the cathedral, and a Mr Coldwell whom Prynne identified as one of Bridgeman’s chaplains. For this, and another account of Prynne’s visit, see Mawdesley, ‘Clerical politics in Lancashire and Cheshire’, pp. 124–39. 69 CALS EDA 3/1, Bridgeman’s register, pp. 378–9, dated 24 August 1637. 70 SRO D1287/9/8 (A/93), Bridgeman to Neile, 20 November 1637. 71 SRO D1287/18/2 (P/399/6B), Bridgeman to Neile,10 November 1637. 72 Ibid. (P/399/5B), Bridgeman to Neile, 20 August 1637. 73 SRO D1287/9/8 (A/93), Neile to Bridgeman, 22 September 1637. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., Neile to Bridgeman, 14 October 1637. 76 SRO D1287/18/2 (P/399/6B), Bridgeman to Neile, 10 November 1637. 77 SRO D1287/9/8 (A/93), Bridgeman to Neile, 20 November 1637. 78 SRO D1287/18/2 (P/399/6B), Bridgeman to Neile, 10 November 1637. 79 Stephen Foster, Notes from the Caroline Underground (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979); Jason Peacey, ‘The paranoid prelate: Archbishop Laud and the puritan plot’, in B. Coward and J. Swann (eds), Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe: From the Waldensians to the French Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 113–34. 80 SRO D1287/9/8 (A/93), Neile to Bridgeman, 16 November 1637. 81 Ibid., Bridgeman to Neile, 20 November 1637. 82 Ibid., Neile to Bridgeman, 26 November 1637. Mawdesley, ‘Clerical politics 222

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83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

in Lancashire and Cheshire’, p. 132, has identified this individual as Samuel Rutter, chaplain to Lord Strange. SRO D1287/9/8 (A/93), Bridgeman to Neile, 10 November 1637; D1287/18/2 (P/399/158), Neile to Bridgeman, 16 November 1637. SRO D1287/18/2 (P/399/158), Neile to Bridgeman, 16 November 1637. SRO D1287/9/8 (A/93), Neile to Bridgeman, 26 November 1637; Neile to Bridgeman, 5 December 1637. According to Prynne, this sermon was preached by Mr Cordwell, Bridgeman’s chaplain, on the text Proverbs 24: 21–2, ‘My son, fear thou the lord and the king: and meddle not with them that are given to change. For their calamity shall rise suddenly, and who knoweth the ruin of them both.’ Mawdesley, ‘Clerical politics in Lancashire and Cheshire’, p. 136. SRO D1287/18/2 (P/399/7B), Bridgeman to Neile, 12 December 1637. Ibid. SRO D1287/9/8 (A/93), The High Commissioners, Neile, Easdall, Stanhope, Hodson and Wickham, to Bridgeman, 4 December 1637. Fincham (ed.), Further Correspondence of William Laud, pp. 205–7. Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England, p. 137. SRO D1287/9/8 (A/93), Neile to Bridgeman, 5 February 1637/8. For the quarrels, mainly over church seating, that underlay the aldermen’s withdrawal from worship in the cathedral church, see Mawdesley, ‘Clerical politics in Lancashire and Cheshire’, pp. 144–5. CALS EDC 5/1637/32. Mawdesley, ‘Clerical politics in Lancashire and Cheshire’, pp. 140–4; Crossley Evans, ‘Clergy of Chester’, pp. 109–10. Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England, pp. 57, 70. CALS EDC 5/1637/32. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ley, Pattern of piety; Life of Bruen. Lake, ‘Feminine piety’, 143–65. Ibid. Life of Bruen, p. 114. Ibid., pp. 74, 77, 103, 145–54, 191–2. Ibid., pp. 210–11. Ibid., pp. 79–80. Ibid., pp. 145–54. Ibid., p. 221.

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I

n both politics and religion, secular and ecclesiastical affairs, the sorts of accommodations and collaborations that had contained what had always been intermittently considerable areas of tension in Cheshire had continued to operate until quite late in the day. In comparison with counties like Somerset and Northamptonshire, where there is considerable evidence of either factional divisions or opposition to the demands made by the crown, Cheshire was governed in a relatively stable and settled fashion during the 1620s and 1630s. Leading gentry, for the most part, subscribed to the values and ideals set out in Whitelocke and Grosvenor’s charges. Participation and active citizenship, consultation, mediation, promoting the ‘public’ interest, not the ‘private’, and defending the ‘country’s’ interests were acknowledged to be the guiding principles in the exercise of magisterial office. This unity was encouraged by the networks of kinship and intermarriage between longestablished local families, the strong identification with the palatine traditions of self-government and the relative absence of factional division among leading gentry. It also helped that for much of the period the dominant voices on the commission of peace and lieutenancy were those of the likes of Booth, Wilbraham and Grosvenor, patriot gentry who did their best to balance the requirements of central government with the interests of ‘the country’ and were prepared to speak on behalf of their neighbours when grievances became pressing. Pivotal roles were also performed by Savage and Aston, who acted as intermediaries between the court and council and the localities and did much to grease the wheels of local politics. Savage’s use of his connections and clout in both arenas lay at the heart of the relative success of the forced loan in Cheshire; and Aston operated in similar fashion to pursue the interests of the county in its disputes with the city of Chester, while using the local

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influence gleaned from the success of those efforts to enhance the success of ship money, and his own local standing, in the county. Aston may have overreached in the end, but in putting various jurisdictional and ratings disputes with the city front and centre he certainly did manage to square the circle of defending local interests while pushing the effective collection of the levy. The effect of Aston’s having framed the issue in these terms almost certainly helped to ensure that controversy about the legitimacy of ship money itself came to Cheshire relatively late. It also established him as a leading defender of the county’s interests and thus had a central role to play in his election to the Short Parliament. The nature of Aston’s rise to prominence in the county, effected by these means, served to occlude the very considerable differences in political outlook and ideological orientation which divided him from much of the county elite – divisions the nature and depth of which emerged only at the time of the Short Parliament election. The consequence of all this was that for most of the 1620s and 1630s Cheshire earned a reputation for responding positively to the crown’s demands. What finally broke this habit was the repeated levies of ship money. By the time of the fourth writ of 1637–38, invocations of royal authority were beginning to carry less weight, and Hampden’s Case was arousing considerable interest and discussion in the shire. For the first time evidence survives, outside of a parliamentary election, of broader ideological issues being introduced into the local political arena. The petition against the removal of the county’s trained bands in 1639 again raised issues about central government breaking with law and precedent and making unprecedented demands on the shire. And the campaigns for the Short and Long Parliament elections allowed the county’s political and religious grievances to be thoroughly aired and debated, bringing out into the open the differences between the ‘popular patriots’ and those nobles and gentry among the county elite who gravitated towards the royal court. These divisions were to provide the backdrop to the petitioning movements in Cheshire during 1641. There was a similar trajectory for the issues around conformity, among both the puritan clergy and laity, in parts of the county. The strains conventionally organised by both contemporaries and historians under the sign of ‘puritanism’ were contained in Cheshire for much of the period under discussion. This was due in part to the weakness of episcopal control exercised by the relatively new bishops of Chester, the frailty of whose institutional and financial positions has been amply demonstrated by Christopher Haigh; in part to the relative scarcity of godly preaching ministers in an area of the country still regarded in many circles as a dark corner of the land; and in part to the conciliatory, mutually back-scratching efforts of evangelical Calvinist bishops like Morton and Bridgeman and moderate puritan ministers like John Ley, who worked assiduously, from either side of the issue, to smooth over the main points of difference. Indeed, even William Hinde’s Life of Bruen reflected essentially the same concordat between ‘puritanism’ and the 225

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established church in Cheshire. For, while Hinde himself was a recalcitrant nonconformist and his text, in many ways, was an uncompromising account of puritan religion, it made little of the issue of conformity, or of the authority of the local bishop, who featured only in a walk-on role, authorising the attempted puritan exorcism, fronted by Bruen himself. In short, however radical or proto-presbyterian Hinde’s version of true religion may have been, in his Life of Bruen the incompatibility of that account with the structures and strictures of the national church was either omitted altogether or left entirely implicit. As we have seen, this is not to argue that Cheshire remained untouched by the destabilising effects of Laudianism. Far from it. But it is to emphasise that the tensions and conflicts surrounding even the topic of religion remained latent until relatively late in the day, as the real-enough impact of Laudianism was mediated, indeed in part contained, by the continuingly collusive relationships linking the likes of Ley, or Herle or Glendole or Conney, to Bishop Bridgeman, whose own ‘troubles’ had, by the later 1630s, been seriously mitigated through his increasingly close relationship with Archbishop Laud. Admittedly, the cosiness of those accommodations was placed under real strain by the intrusive efforts of Archbishop Neile and his acolytes; but even then Bridgeman had been able to recalibrate his relations with York, while maintaining his understanding with local moderate puritans like Ley. It was only relatively late on that this state of affairs started to break down, with the fall-out from Prynne’s visit to Chester. Thereafter, over the course of the elections for the Short and Long Parliaments and beyond, the politics of Cheshire would turn on the two issues of the backwash from the collection of ship money and the question of what to do about Laudianism and the prospect of further reformation. Put crudely, the questions posed by the political crises of the later 1630s and early 1640s subjected the norms and assumptions that had hitherto governed gentry politics in Cheshire to a sort of stress test. The notion of the county community outlined in Part I as the unit whose integrity was to be preserved and interests protected, and of local politics as a struggle over who got to speak for Cheshire, to whom – and, indeed, over what it was appropriate to say and do in the county’s name – remained at the centre of events and argument. As the divisions became greater, the appeals to the county became ever more insistent. But what was supposed to be a consensual process – and all parties contended that it still was, if only the other side would start behaving properly – became something approaching an adversarial one. The demands of national, ideological allegiances played a central role here. Even as virtually everyone was claiming to be a moderate of one sort or another, rival renditions of the appropriate relationship of ‘Cheshire’ to very different accounts of how the monarchical polity and (episcopal) church of England ought to work started to emerge. How that process played out is the subject of Part III of this book. 226

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The crisis, 1641–42

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6

Petitioning and the search for settlement

T

he Long Parliament opened with the ‘Patriots’ of the Booth–Wilbraham group who had supported Brereton and Venables in the parliamentary election for the shire re-established as the dominant group in county affairs. That situation did not last long, however, disappearing in a process of ideological and political polarisation that took place simultaneously at Westminster and in the county itself. Religion was the catalyst, in particular, radical puritan plans for further reformation and the reaction to those plans elicited both at the centre and in the localities. While in Cheshire Brereton and a number of puritan clergy were the agents of the former, the latter phenomenon provided the already anti-puritan, court-connected Aston with a way to ingratiate himself with the king, seize back for himself a central role in Cheshire politics and start the process of party building that was to culminate in his leadership of the royalist cause in the county.

OPENING GAMBITS Puritan activity in the shire during late 1640 and early 1641 proceeded on two fronts. These would come together in the county’s petition for root and branch reform, presented to the Commons by Sir William Brereton on 19 February 1641. On the one hand, as James Mawdesley has shown, there was a concerted campaign against Bishop Bridgeman, following his persecution of puritans when Prynne visited Chester in 1637 and his local efforts to enforce the ecclesiastical canons and et cetera oath of 1640. John Ley and a group of puritan ministers had met together in August 1640 and drafted a protest against the oath which eventually found its way into print in 1641 in Ley’s Defensive doubts. Meanwhile, on 3 December 1640 three of those persecuted by Bridgeman in 1637, led by Calvin Bruen, petitioned the Commons, and 229

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this led the committee investigating the treatment of Prynne to begin gathering evidence against Bridgeman.1 While critical scrutiny of Bridgeman was gathering momentum a variety of local puritan radicals had started a home-made course of reformation, if not quite without tarrying for, then at least considerably anticipating, the actions of the magistrate. In January 1641 the radical puritan Samuel Eaton, who had recently returned from New England, could be found preaching in St John’s church, Chester that bishops were ‘the mighty enemies of God and his church’; the book of common prayer was ‘unsavoury and loathsome to God’; the ministers of ‘particular congregations’ must be chosen by the people (or else) their entrance is not lawful’, and that ‘the supreme power in church matters, next under Christ is in the church, meaning (as he clearly explained himself) particular congregations, for he denied all national, provincial or diocesan churches’.2 In Tarporley, since his arrival in the parish in 1638 the minister, Nathaniel Lancaster, and his curate, John Jones, had been embarked on the public performance of further reformation puritan-style, which led to complaints from some of their parishioners. According to a series of later petitions against them neither Lancaster nor Jones would ‘read the book of common prayer but publicly labour by all means they can to seduce and persuade the ignorant people that it is superstition and idolatry and that it is a vain and idle fable’. They refused to perform baptism or administer the sacrament at Easter, and, having ‘invented a new catechism’, Lancaster would not ‘give communion to old nor young unless they will learn his catechism’. Lancaster also ‘called diverse young men and scholars who had endeavoured to have attended an interlude for their recreation rogues and rebels’, and at his behest Jones had ‘pulled down the pinnacles at the end of the church to the great defamation thereof’.3 In a string of letters to Sir Thomas Aston written in the spring of 1641 John Werden reported further examples of puritan nonconformity and iconoclasm. ‘At Neston they have pulled down the rails from the communion table and at Chester’ tried to do the same at St Werburgh’s, ‘which I send you to see we have as well mad men in our town’.4 On Good Friday 1641 Werden wrote that at Wybunbury ‘a notorious infamous adulterer being the curate there would not read the absolution nor the litany, he did not, nor ever doth, read either proper lessons or psalms for the day and the psalms he did read he would not read them out of the service book but the bible; and in the creed (which is most observable) when he should have said “I believe in the holy ghost, the holy catholic church” he read “I believe there is a catholic church”’. ‘I was told yesterday’, the indefatigable Werden continued, ‘by one that loves Sir William Brereton well but yet (as I do) loves decency and good discipline better, that his lady, being lately in the church of Weston [in Staffordshire] where she lives, did send to the minister or parson of the church to take down some painted ancient imagery which was in the glass widows.’ The churchwardens refused, whereupon Mrs Brereton took matters into her own 230

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hands and ‘came presently and brought a man with her who, with a staff, most zealously broke all the windows’.5 Most of our knowledge of all this puritan activity comes, of course, from hostile sources, compiled for their own parti pris purposes by men like Werden and Aston. They were convinced that they were collecting and collating seemingly disparate evidence for what remained a unitary puritan assault on episcopacy and, through episcopacy, on all order in church and state. But even on the basis of their own reports it is clear that we are dealing here with a number of very different levels or types of puritan activity. They range from Eaton’s outspoken advocacy of independency, through Lancaster’s newly aggressive performance of nonconformity and the pursuit of the reformation of manners, to clerically or gentry-sponsored iconoclasm, and finally to a more sober, moderate puritan modification of the norms and forms of the public liturgy like that being practised by the infamously adulterous curate of Wybunbury. We should beware, therefore, of simply accepting Werden and Aston’s accounts of Cheshire puritanism as though they were simply true, or as though all respectable and responsible non-puritan or moderate puritan contemporaries would have agreed with them. For, as we shall see below, they did not. All this puritan activity culminated in the raising of the petition for rootand-branch ecclesiastical reform. This appears to have been coordinated in the county by Calvin Bruen and was presented to the Commons by Brereton on 19 February. One of those who appear to have supported it – and who was probably collecting signatures during January – was Henry Bradshawe of Marple, who was active in puritan circles around Edward Shalcross, the minister at Stockport.6 Aston reproduced a text of this in his Remonstrance against presbytery as ‘the petition which was spread abroad in the country amongst the common people by some private persons to procure hands but was concealed from the gentry’.7 If that was indeed the case it may be that Brereton was here continuing to cultivate the same following among the godly middling sort that, at least according to his enemies, had secured his election to both the Short and Long Parliaments. According to the parliamentary diarist Simonds D’Ewes, the petition was endorsed by 1,100 signatories who, as James Mawdesley suggests, probably represented a coming together of those hostile to Bridgeman and episcopacy and supporters of the radical reformation that many anticipated would follow root-and-branch reform.8 The petition condemned bishops as ‘usurping prelates’ and ‘the Pope’s substitutes’, ‘lording it over God’s heritage, both pastors and people and assuming the power of the keyes only to themselves’. It called on parliament to ‘utterly dissolve … their Antichristian offices and government’ ‘which give life to the most superstitious practices in or about the worship of God’, and also to sweep away ‘their impious courts … their corrupt Canons, book of articles, the English refined Mass-book of Common Prayer’.9 These efforts by the Cheshire godly to make the most of the new mood 231

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in Westminster also represented an opportunity for Aston. With his London contacts, he would have been well aware of the hostility to the mass London petition calling for the removal of episcopacy with all its ‘roots and branches’ that was presented to the Commons on 11 December 1640. He would also have known that the king was unlikely to agree to any such proposals, a position confirmed in Charles’s speech to both Houses on 23 January 1641, in which he warned parliament against tampering with ‘the present established government of the church’.10 By early 1641, across the country, the combination of in-your-face acts of nonconformity or iconoclasm, spontaneous outbreaks of do-it-yourself reformation and growing pressure from the Scots and their English puritan allies for the abolition of episcopacy was creating a powerful and spontaneous anti-puritan backlash.11 In Conrad Russell’s view, this reaction was providing Charles I with his first real chance since the Short Parliament to build a party in both parliament and the nation and thus to escape the various political and religious settlements and strait jackets being prepared for him by the junto and their Scottish allies.12 It is as much such national trends as anything happening in Cheshire that provides the appropriate context in which we should set Aston’s next move, which was to raise a mass petition in defence of episcopacy in his native county and then present it to the House of Lords on 27 February 1641. This was a remarkable initiative. It must have been evident to him that there existed a constituency at a national level, and also within Cheshire, that regarded the abolition of episcopacy as a development fraught with all sorts of religious and political dangers. But, aside from an undated petition from Devon, his was the only county petition in the bishops’ defence that actually got off the ground in early 1641.13 The techniques he deployed were highly innovative. His petition was at the very start of the process of mass popular petitioning in the name of the shire that was to take off so spectacularly in late 1641 and early 1642.14 Hitherto, petitions to parliament over public grievances had normally come from corporate entities – county assizes and quarter sessions, town corporations, guilds or wardmotes in London and so on – and were signed by groups of gentlemen and aldermen, or other public officers such as grand jurors; alternatively, they came from interest groups, like the puritan engagés who subscribed the root-and-branch petitions of early 1641. Some of these attracted large numbers of signatures, running into the hundreds or in excess of a thousand, but none – apart from the London ­petitions – could match the six thousand-plus subscribers that Aston eventually collected for his Cheshire petition.15 It might have been anticipated that Sir Thomas would simply rely on the support of the leading peers and gentry who had hitherto backed his election efforts. He could have compensated for any lack of numbers, as compared to the puritan petition, by emphasising the quality and status of his subscribers.16 Indeed, as we shall see, the ‘popular’ and ‘tumultuary’ nature of puritan mass petitioning was to be a constant theme in his rhetoric over the following 232

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months. But he did not follow this course and instead took the significant step of engaging in his own mass petitioning. The explanation for this is twofold. From a personal perspective, one of his aims was to challenge his electoral rival Brereton for the role of the true representative of the county. This could best be achieved through a petition in favour of episcopacy so massively backed by both elite and popular county opinion that it would make Bruen and Brereton’s puny effort look both unrepresentative and silly. In relation to his wider campaign in defence of episcopacy – which, of course, again in personal terms, he hoped would advance him in the king’s favour – he also recognised that within the fast-developing politics of the public sphere the widest possible mobilisation of support could be considered not only legitimate but highly advantageous.17 Aston’s main tactic for gaining mass support in the shire was to play down the content of what he knew would be a controversial petition and instead present it as a measure to re-establish the gentry’s role as spokesmen for the county. In doing this he was able to draw on the social and cultural make-up of the shire in which notions of a semi-autonomous county community and gentry class-consciousness were, as we have seen, closely connected. Hence, from the start he represented his campaign in terms of the need for the county’s traditional ruling class to reassert their status as the county’s true representatives against this petition ‘spread abroad … amongst the people’.18 Although in the end he was less successful than he had hoped, this approach at least enabled him to draw the ‘Patriots’, who had been so hostile in 1640, into an extended discussion of the precise terms of the petition. In a retrospective account of his conduct Aston claimed that his action had been prompted by the ‘clamorous petition in the name of the freeholders’ against episcopacy that had been doing the rounds in Cheshire in December 1640. Staying in Derbyshire over Christmas, Aston had been alerted to its existence by a letter from Roger Wilbraham of Dorfold, ‘who writ to me full of passionate distaste of it’. Later, on a trip through Cheshire, passing by my Lord Kilmorey’s, my cousin Cotton’s, Sir Thomas Brereton and Lord Cholmondeley I found them all full of dislike of it, holding it not only fit, but necessary, to take some course to vindicate the country from the injury of such a clamour I was desirous to offer once more to draw both ends together, presuming where public interest was all private respects would be set apart.19

Aston thereupon offered himself as an honest broker to the county gentry to arrange a unanimous repudiation of the freeholders’ anti-episcopal petition as a genuinely representative expression of Cheshire opinion. To draw ‘both ends together’ and repair the differences that had emerged among the county elite, Aston arranged a meeting with the most biddable of the ‘Patriots’, Sir Richard Wilbraham and his kinsman Thomas Wilbraham of Nantwich. Despite the claim by his nephew Roger Wilbraham that ‘no greater sense of such an affront to the country’ could be found ‘in any man’, 233

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Sir Richard then proceeded to ‘take many exceptions to what had been with the assistance of very good advice rough drawn’. He proposed the customary solution to such problems in Cheshire: a general meeting of the gentry where the matter could be thrashed out and a general response agreed. This was agreed on, and the next morning Aston and a man of Lord Cholmondeley’s called on Wilbraham at his seat at Woodhey to tell him that if ‘it pleased him to send to those gentlemen he had most usual recourse to my lord would assume to bring all his friends and give meeting in any part of Cheshire where they would’. Meanwhile, Aston claimed, a version of the petition, ‘languaged as near the dictamen of his [Wilbraham’s] will as was possible’, was prepared for circulation. For reasons which remained unspecified in Aston’s account, a general meeting of the gentry proved impossible to arrange. Aston and his friends went on circulating the petition that was now ‘conceived without exception, if Sir George Booth might see it and were pleased to approve of it’. Booth, however, returned answer that ‘when he saw Sir Richard Wilb[raham’s] hand to it, he would dispatch it’. Another meeting with Wilbraham was arranged ‘at which time it pleased Sir Richard Wilbraham to make some new exceptions to it’. It was once more ‘framed to his mind’ and all seemed set fair for the petition’s general acceptance, except that now it was to be sent ‘to Chester to Sir Richard Grosvenor for his approbation’. This proved the sticking point. While, Aston claimed, Grosvenor’s approval ‘truly was heartily wished’, this was one delay too many. It was now the end of January and although, Aston claimed, ‘the matter [was] not contradicted … this was but to be tossed from hand to hand and we advanced nothing’. He and his associates, therefore, decided to go ahead with collecting signatures. They wrote to selected magistrates in each hundred on 30 January requesting that they contact local gentry and clergy to organise the signing of the petition, apparently expecting, even at the last, to get Wilbraham’s assent – which, strangely, never came.20 According to Aston, then, everyone essentially agreed with what his petition said; but for mysterious reasons of personal pique and amour propre the likes of Booth, Wilbraham and Grosvenor had never been quite able to bring themselves to sign the thing. But, reading between the lines even of Aston’s own account, that seems not to have been the case. On Sir Thomas’s account the differences were personal and procedural rather than ideological or substantive; but then, since he was desperate to present his petition as the expression of the united view of the county (papists and puritans excepted), he would say that, wouldn’t he? In fact, even according to Aston’s version, Wilbraham is quoted as having agreed only to the proposition that the antiepiscopal petition was a fraud whose claims to represent the opinion of ‘the county’ had to be repudiated. This, of course, did not necessarily imply agreement with the content of Aston’s petition as it finally emerged. As befitted what was essentially a coalition-building exercise, much of the content and tone of the petition was calculatedly moderate. It opened with 234

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genuflections towards the need for reform. Thus, the petitioners proclaimed that ‘we, as others, are sensible of the common grievances of the kingdom and have just cause to rejoice at, and acknowledge with thankfulness, the pious care which is already taken for the suppressing of the growth of popery, the better supply of able ministers and the removing of all innovation’.21 They then made a plea for further reform of the workings of the church courts. But that was the extent of the petition’s anti-Laudianism. Thereafter the petition got down to the business of defending the episcopal government of the national church and denouncing puritan schemes for reformation. Of the institution of episcopacy itself the petition gave an exaltedly moderate account, claiming that bishops were instituted in the time of the apostles; that they were the great lights of the church in all the first general councils … that to them we owe the redemption of the purity of the gospel we now profess from Romish corruption; that many of them, for the propagation of the truth, became such glorious martyrs; that divers of them (lately and) yet living with us have been so great asserters of our religion against its common enemy of Rome; and that their government hath been so long approved, so oft established by the common and statute-laws of this kingdom; and as yet nothing in their doctrine (generally taught) dissonant from the word of God or the articles ratified by law.22

By the standards of the 1630s this was a decidedly downbeat, studiedly unLaudian defence of the institution. It retreated from the dominical account of episcopacy as not only apostolic but directly divine in its origins. While it might gesture at it, the petition did not even embrace an explicitly apostolical account of those origins. Moreover, rather than centre the case for episcopacy on a visible institutional succession linking the present church to that of the apostles through the church of Rome, Aston chose to highlight the role of the martyr bishops of Mary’s reign in vindicating the doctrinal truths upon which the post-reformation English church was founded. All in all, this was a position carefully crafted to avoid the dominant Calvinist conformist, erastian and moderate puritan critiques of Laudian episcopacy as incompatible with the royal supremacy of the crown in parliament and as the Trojan horse through which popish, Arminian doctrine had been introduced into the church. But, if the petition’s treatment of episcopacy was, in some sense, ‘moderate’, the same cannot be said of its approach to puritanism. The petition, just as Werden and Aston did in their private correspondence, sought to run together all sorts of puritan behaviour and belief to create a picture of a levelling Presbyterian threat to all order. When we consider the tenor of such writings as in the name of petitions are spread among the common people; the tenets preached publicly in pulpits, and the contents of many printed pamphlets swarming amongst us, all of them dangerously exciting a disobedience to the established form of government … we cannot 235

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The crisis, 1641–42 but express our fears that their desire is to introduce an absolute innovation of presbyterial government.23

Through these means ‘such popular infusions spread as incline to a parity’. Instead of the present government by twenty-six bishops, England would be exposed to ‘the mere arbitrary government of a numerous presbytery, who together with their ruling elders will arise to near forty thousand church governors’. Such a system would represent a serious danger to all order in church, state and society. A Presbyterian church would be neither ‘reducible by parliaments’ nor ‘consistent with a monarchy’. On the contrary, it was ‘dangerously conducible to an anarchy’, all too likely to ‘produce an extermination of nobility, gentry and order, if not of religion’.24 The result was a remarkably political (even in some sense secular) defence of the ecclesiastical status quo, conducted more in terms of the likely political and social consequences of further reformation than in any very developed positive account of the spiritual benefits likely to be conferred on the nation by episcopacy. Even so, there was plenty in its sharply anti-puritan tone and its determinedly episcopalian bent that the likes of Grosvenor and Wilbraham, with their evangelical Calvinist and moderate puritan religious views, probably found hard to stomach. Certainly, we cannot accept the picture conjured by Aston’s petition and perpetuated in much of the secondary literature, of a spectrum of religiopolitical opinion stretched tight between a Presbyterian, and even cryptoseparatist puritan, left and Aston’s ‘moderate’ defence of episcopacy.25 On the contrary, there existed a moderate puritan position, explicitly opposed to Laudianism, but not (yet) to episcopacy, or even to the increasingly embattled Bridgeman, that was committed to an open-ended programme of further reformation which fell short of Presbyterianism, on the one hand, and Aston’s simple defence of the status quo ante on the other. The best place to find such a position adumbrated in a Cheshire context is in the works of John Ley published in the spring of 1641.

THE IDEOLOGICAL STAKES We have already encountered Ley as the moderate puritan henchman, counsellor and, latterly, critic of Bishop Bridgeman. In a number of publications Ley projected that position into the political situation of 1640–41. Many of these texts had existed and circulated in manuscript during the Personal Rule. But now, with the relaxation of censorship, he was able to get into print his letter to Bridgeman about the stone altar in Chester cathedral; his Sunday a Sabbath, a reply to John Pocklington’s rabidly anti-Sabbatarian screed of 1637, Sunday no Sabbath, and his Defensive doubts, a response to the et cetera oath, which had originated in internal discussion in the Warrington exercise.26 In deciding to publish these texts in a few weeks in early 1641, 236

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Ley was not merely making up for lost time and getting his own back on the censorship regime that had prevented him from going public during the 1630s. No doubt there was some of that going on.27 But he was also – and more significantly – positioning himself very carefully within the context of 1640–41, seeking, as he did so, to carve out a middle position between the  out-and-out Presbyterianism of Calvin Bruen and the aggressive antipuritan episcopalianism of Aston and his friends. Here, Ley’s account of how and why he came to publish his letter on the altar is particularly telling. On his first arrival in London, on 13 January 1641, he had learned that someone else was planning to publish the text without his permission and so decided to do so himself, not least so that he could add ‘some particulars’ thereto to explain the real context and significance of the letter to his readers. These involved the bishop’s response, about which Ley had refreshed his memory by consulting Bridgeman himself, who had reassured Ley that he had never had any thought of erecting an ‘altar’ but, rather, ‘a repository to the preacher in the use of a table’. Moreover, ‘hearing great offense was taken at it’, Bridgeman ‘had given order for it to be taken down, which is done accordingly’. Thus was the tract effectively converted from an (admittedly muted) attack on the bishop, indeed from an attempt to associate him with one of the signature ecclesiastical policies of the Personal Rule, into what Ley himself called ‘an apology’ for Bridgeman.28 What Ley was doing in print his colleague in the Warrington exercise, Charles Herle, was doing in private. Bridgeman had evidently asked Herle to find out what charges his critics were about to bring against him in parliament. In a letter of April 1641 Herle duly obliged, outlining various charges, including Bridgeman’s role ‘in the pretended [our italics] altars at Chester and Bangor’, and warning that there was a concerted campaign ‘to join the Wigan, Chester, Bangor and Kirkby petitions, to be put up by one Mr Fleetwood’. In all this he expressed the loyal hope that ‘they may be utterly deceived’.29 Here were Ley and Herle, two erstwhile moderate puritans, leading members of the Warrington exercise, strident critics of the et cetera oath and future Presbyterians, continuing to lend aid and succour to their beleaguered bishop, as late as the spring of 1641. The same essentially collaborative and collusive relationships are to be found in Ley’s account of the origins and eventual publication of the text that became his Defensive doubts. This owed its origins to internal discussions among the clerical members of the Warrington exercise. After the public part of the exercise was over on 18 August 1640, the two preachers, Ley and Herle, together with the other clerical members of the exercise, had withdrawn to ‘a place of convenient repose’ where it emerged that they shared a ‘perplexity of mind’ about how to respond to the et cetera oath. Casting around for a ‘means to ensure’ ‘that our consciences might not be entangled in it’, the assembled ministers resolved to put their concerns to their bishop and Ley was chosen to draw their several doubts together into a treatise. 237

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Noting that their initial meeting had been decried as ‘a schismatical conventicle and a seditious assembly’, Ley was at pains to insist upon the legality of their proceedings. The Warrington exercise itself had been set up ‘with the good liking and allowance of’ the late king ‘as a godly and grateful memorial’ of the nation’s deliverance from the ‘powder treason’. Thereafter it had enjoyed such episcopal patronage that Bridgeman himself had once preached at the exercise. Throughout, the plan had been to proceed through an approach to Bridgeman and ‘by him to advance higher (though in the low and humble way of petition) if there were cause’. But this had been forestalled first by an order from Laud postponing putting the oath to the clergy, and then by ‘news of a parliament’. There was now no need formally to present the document to Bridgeman, but as a matter of courtesy Ley decided to show it to him anyway, acting not, he hastened to add, as ‘an agent of the clergy, but as of mine own private and particular respect unto my diocesan’.30 Again, therefore, we have an attempt to associate Ley’s anti-Laudian writings with Bridgeman and to locate Ley’s form of dissent within the authority structures of the church, at least as those structures were construed by Ley, rather than by Laud and his minions. However, if Ley’s epistolary tract about the altar (and indeed his assault upon the et cetera oath) represented an act of solidarity with, even a sort of apology for, Bridgeman, they were anything but for the Laudian policies of the Personal Rule, with which Ley’s initial letter had at least appeared to associate Bridgeman. Ley printed alongside his original letter about the altar a later verse libel that had been circulating in manuscript. This was written as a mock lamentation delivered in the voice of the altar, after its destruction, to its former devotees among the Cathedral clergy: Come holy fathers of the convocation, See and lament my woeful desolation. Come deans and prebends (in your surplice clad) From whose examples I much reverence had. Loud petty canons come roar out your cries, in sad elegies, For my departure stick not now to lend Your tears to whom your knees did bend.

Ley professed that he liked ‘well enough’ both the squib’s content and form. ‘As Elijah mocked the priests of Baal, 1 Kings 18, 27,’ so all that set up altars for idolatry or that superstitiously bow unto them, should have their blind devotion played upon, both in prose and verse, and to be sacrificed to derision, and therefore since I see the composer of this poem showeth a great deal of zeal against that which my soul hateth as well as his, and from which my body is as free as his can be (for that I never bowed head or knee either to or towards an altar or holy table), I will not call it (as some would do) a libel.31

The complex interactions and negotiations being conducted in and between these passages enabled Ley to make a number of not obviously 238

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compatible claims; claims about his continuing relationship of intimacy and trust with Bishop Bridgeman; about his capacity, nevertheless, to perform the role of a good counsellor and vindicate his own status as a ‘presbyter’ of independence and principle by telling the bishop the unvarnished truth both about his errors and about the likely response thereto of papists and puritans; and about his own strong belief that altars, and all the affective and performative paraphernalia that went with them, had no place in a properly reformed church. These were all retained from the first version that had circulated in manuscript since 1635, with the force of his condemnation of the altars as popish very considerably strengthened by the publication of the verse libel. That move was balanced by the remainder of the ‘postscript’, which worked hard both to exonerate Bridgeman from the charge of ever having really intended to do anything as offensive as erect an altar in his cathedral church and to assert that, in fact, the offending object, hidden away as it was in the former consistory court, had never, in practice, save for the attentions of the odd ‘simple papist’, received so much as ‘one cap or congee from anyone’.32 In short, by printing the letter in this form in 1641 Ley was allowing Bridgeman to make up for lost time by doing for him what he had so clearly wanted Bridgeman to do for himself in 1635 – that is to say, explain away this excrescence on his otherwise sterling record as a solid defender of true religion against popery, and thus distance himself definitively from the more offensively popish aspects of Laudian reformation. Ley’s explanation for his decision to publish Defensive doubts constituted a similarly subtle positioning exercise. Publication, he claimed, was the easiest way to satisfy the still considerable demand for copies of the piece while clearing the text of the various errors and emendations that had accreted to it during the process of manuscript circulation. It also enabled him to respond to criticism of those who had refused the oath as hypocrites and schismatics who were merely using the pretence of conscientious scruple to undermine episcopal and royal authority. But, just as his tract on the altar was designed to affirm both his closeness to Bridgeman’s decidedly un-Laudian churchmanship and his unstinting opposition to Laudianism itself, so the purpose of Defensive doubts was to establish the entirely mainstream, un-sectarian roots of that same anti-Laudianism. But that was not the extent of it; for Ley was not merely seeking to defend, still less arguing for a mere return to, what we might term the Calvinist episcopalian and/or moderate puritan status quo ante, personified by his ties to Bridgeman. Rather, he was advocating an open-ended process of further reformation, for which his tract on the oath provided the agenda. For the tract ‘compriseth many very observable matters concerning the purity of religion (without mixture of idolatry), the duties of Christianity, the predominance of prelates, and the privileges of presbyters, with many other particulars of moment worthy of public view, if that so offensive … canon had never been made’.33 239

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Of course, in the eyes of Aston and his allies the espousal of further reformation of any sort opened Ley and his ilk up to the accusation of puritan radicalism and Presbyterian fellow travelling. Accordingly, Ley had been outed as the author of the radical tract England’s complaint to Jesus Christ against the bishops’ canons, and he was now printing Defensive doubts in part to clear himself from that allegation.34 Ley does not say so, but, given the prominence of this tract in Sir Thomas Aston’s attempt to assimilate any and every impulse toward further reformation to a radical puritan threat to all order in church and state, it is perfectly possible that this charge was of a local, Cestrian, even Astonian provenance. Moreover, while, as his friend Mr E. B. had told him, the offending tract savoured ‘nothing of your style, spirit or judgement’, as we shall see below, there was more than enough overlap between what Ley was saying and the contents of England’s complaint to make such an allegation plausible. Thus, in systematically repudiating the suggestion that he was the author of the offending text, Ley was able to emphasise the distinctive moderation and modulation of his own version of further reformation. Just as in the midst of the Personal Rule, the polemical task now before Ley was to establish his bona fides as a staunch supporter of a recognisably ‘puritan’ version of true religion and, hence, as an unequivocal opponent of Laudianism and all its works, while simultaneously asserting what we might term his establishment credentials. It was an increasingly hard balance to strike, but his works of the 1630s, repurposed to meet the changed circumstances of 1641, seemed a perfectly sensible way to go about it. Certainly, however ‘moderate’ their framing, these tracts left the reader in no doubt about Ley’s opposition to Laudianism, the central elements of which Ley persistently described under the rubric of popery. Indeed, Ley’s position on the altar shared vast swathes of territory with the formally far more radical England’s complaint.35 Like Ley, that tract denied that there had been any altars in the primitive church, and assimilated the Laudian altar to popery. It denounced the altar policy as ‘an easy inducement to popish idolatry and superstition to which use all papists use it’, and agreed with Ley that such changes in the practice of the English church greatly encouraged the papists in their belief in ‘England’s backsliding to popery, as a thing whereof England is grown nowadays very ambitious’.36 But, unlike Ley, England’s complaint made absolutely no attempt to reprieve any bishop from implication in the altar policy or the in idolatry implicit within it. If Ley was explicit in his loathing of the altar policy, he was equally clear about his opposition to the Laudian campaign against the Sabbath, which he memorably described as ‘the training day of military discipline by which the church of Christ is unto the synagogue of Satan … terrible as an army with banners, which, if it should not be well united and often exercised, the powers of darkness would be mightily exalted’. The doctrine and practice of the Sabbath ‘contained (as Calvin saith, and other learned divines in effect 240

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say the same) the sum and substance of all religion’.37 It was thus ‘the fairest mark for Satan’s malignity to aim at’;38 and it was, therefore, a disgrace that the topic should have now become an occasion of ‘mutual contradiction, not only betwixt the godly and the profane (which is no news), but among many of those who are in no mean accompt in the church of God, whether they be valued by the eminency of their places, the excellency of their parts or the holiness of their lives’.39 Not only was this to type the Laudian opponents of the Sabbath as at least as profane and ungodly as those who wanted to besmirch the day itself with their corrupt pleasures and pastimes, it was to out both groups as agents of the devil in the great struggle waged throughout human history by the godly against the profane, the elect against the reprobate, the true church against the false. Ley never quite said that in as many words, but it is the clear implication of these remarks, and one that he never tried to qualify or retract. According to Ley, in seeking to anathematise the word, the Laudians were trying to sever the connection between the observance of the Sabbath and its moral foundation in the fourth commandment.40 On this basis, Ley felt able to warn his readers that ‘if we let go the name of the time, we may be like to lose the thing in time to come, or, at least, to loosen and weaken its claim to the best authority on which it depends’.41 For there were those who, like John Pocklington, ‘by caviling at the name, bewray a mind to undermine and overthrow the thing itself’. ‘There lurketh a kind of poison under syllables, as in every page of Dr Pocklington his book which wears the title Sunday no Sabbath.’42 For Ley, with the Sabbath, just as with the altar, what was at stake was an attempt to return the country to popery by covert means. ‘For if ever popery (like the unclean spirit) return to the place whence it was expelled, the common breach of the fourth commandment, by violation of the Sabbath, will be, if not a wide gate, yet at least an open wicket, or window, to receive it again.’43 Again, Ley’s complaints here reflected rather closely those put forward by England’s complaint. Indeed, if anything, Ley’s emphasis on the popishly inclined nature of Laudian usage on this and other topics went beyond anything that England’s complaint had to say on the subject, although the effect of that different emphasis was merely to strengthen their common claim that the Laudians were opening the door to popery. However, Ley’s critique of Laudianism was not limited to the hot-button issues of the altar and the Sabbath, but expanded to encompass the realm of doctrine and religious practice. Thus, he complained bitterly that ‘some episcopal divines (conceiving the summoning, presiding and voting in synods by presbyters to be a presumptuous usurpation of the peculiar privileges)’ had taken to referring to the synod of Dort as ‘the synod of dirt, as some of us have heard’. Here, Ley claimed, might lie part of an explanation for the conundrum that, despite ‘King James having been so zealous in the procuring and promoting of the happy proceeding of that synod for the suppression of Arminianism’, Arminianism had since ‘prevailed and advanced 241

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higher in England than it did before that synod had condemned it …’. This was the more serious because, as Ley maintained, ‘many hold that divers of the Arminian tenets are nothing else but popery, blanched over with a specious subtlety, and for holding them have some been publicly censured as popish …’.44 The result was that the articles of religion themselves had been undermined by ‘leaving such liberty for the points of free will, predestination and the possibility of keeping of God’s commandments which by the 10, 15 and 17 articles are resolved against the opinions of the papists’. On this basis, the articles of religion might be thought to have been ‘published and not published, their words being read and their meanings not wrought’, ‘as if the convocation that concluded them had had no mind or meaning to contradict the Council of Trent’.45Again, England’s complaint made essentially the same case, arguing that ‘for Arminianism’s sake’, they have ‘made the Articles touching grace, election, predestination etc. to speak as well in favour of it, as of the truth itself’.46 Nor were these the only areas in which topics that ‘for the most part have been held as a partition wall betwixt protestants and papists’ were now being construed (by some at least) as merely ‘adiaphoral problems’.47 Out of a whole range of topoi – ‘images and Antichrist … prayers for the dead, the estate of the fathers’ souls before Christ’s ascension, free will, predestination, universal grace, the possibility of keeping God’s commandments’ – Ley zeroed in on just two: the role of images in Christian churches and the belief that the pope was Antichrist. On the first, Ley observed that ‘the homily of the peril of idolatry is so little heeded and so much liberty of late taken to control it with new pictures in churches that, if the homily was read in some of them, it might be doubted … whether there were one religion for the ears, another for the eyes …’.48 On the second, he lamented that there were now those prepared to ‘make themselves the pope’s compurgators against that criminal charge’. In the past the denial of the pope’s identity as Antichrist had been ‘esteemed by most a point of popery’; but now, ‘with many’, those making precisely that case ‘go for very good protestants’. Not only that, but ‘in divers other particulars (reputed popish), papists glory in our approaches towards them and stick not to say of our church “that protestantism waxeth weary of itself and that Calvinism is accounted heresy”’.49 The irony here was that the et cetera oath required all who took it to oppose ‘popery’, and yet, with things as they were, it was by no means clear what precisely the word ‘popery’ meant in Caroline England50 – particularly when there had been ‘some persons’ in the very convocation that passed both canons and oath who had been ‘suspected of unsound doctrine of a popish strain’. Not that Ley held popery to be an inherently nebulous, infinitely glossable phenomenon, nor all oaths taken against it inherently doubtful or unlawful. Far from it, for in this instance circumstances altered cases, and he was thus perfectly happy to defend the legitimacy of the oath taken by ‘the people of Geneva for shutting out of popery and setting up of the presbytery’, for ‘their 242

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oath was not in ambiguity like ours, nor is ours (like theirs) regulated by scripture’.51 This point provided the basis for his defence of the parliamentsponsored Protestation Oath of 1641, as opposed to the et cetera oath. For the Protestation made quite clear what it meant by the public doctrine of the church, and that doctrine in its turn defined with equal clarity what the popery was that was being forsworn. Ley was referring, of course, to the thirty-nine articles, which he took to be the established doctrine of the church of England, ‘most opposite to popery and popish innovations, for that they were framed and tempered of purpose for an anti-dote to popery, in the reign of queen Elizabeth … This doctrine and these articles are in congruity of right reason to be intended in this protestation.’52 In the following section of the tract Ley proceeded to prove the point by juxtaposing the doctrine of the articles with what he termed ‘the popish doctrine opposite unto it’. The consequent certainty about what it was that constituted ‘popery’ allowed Ley to assert the ‘integrity’ of those who had devised and propagated the Protestation in the first place, since, he claimed, ‘the protestation came from those who give undoubted evidence of their dislike of all, both black and blanched, popery, opposing not only the grosser tenets and superstitions of Romish religion, but the Arminian fallacies which are devised to ensnare the subtler, as the other to deceive the simple, sort’. The same, however, could not be said of those involved in composing the canons, who were tainted with the popishly Arminian fallacies that it was the purpose of the Protestation to suppress once and for all.53 It was because of considerations such as these, Ley maintained, that the bishops had ‘yet lost more friends by proposal of this oath and penalty than by any act that is known to be theirs …’.54 England’s complaint produced similar, albeit longer and more shrilly phrased, lists of Laudian enormity, similarly laced with allegations of popery, which culminated in a denunciation of ‘the Antichristian jurisdiction and government of prelates’ that the Laudians were attempting to ‘father upon the divine institution and upon the practise of thy holy apostles’.55 That last association of episcopal government with Antichrist was, as we shall see, a bridge too far for Ley. Nor was Ley’s critique of Laudianism restricted to substantive issues of doctrine and practice. It also encompassed the whole authoritarian Laudian style of rule. By imposing the oath on pain of deprivation the bishops were, as Ley put it, threatening ‘with the pastoral staff, to drive away the pastor from the fold of Christ’.56 And in so doing they were responsible not merely for all the spiritual damage that flowed from depriving various flocks of their pastors, but also for the sin committed by any and every minister who took the oath against his conscience in order to save his ministry.57 And all this when the chief obligation of bishops, as spiritual fathers, was, ‘as much as in you lieth, to secure your inferiors from the peril of sin, whether preachers or people’.58 This was decidedly not the ‘fatherly moderation’ that Ley took to be the mark of a true bishop.59 243

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In the same key, in his tract on the Sabbath Ley blamed the Laudian bishops for the recent ‘schism and distraction’ between the English and the Scots which ‘hath been made and maintained, not by a kind and respective correspondence betwixt persons or churches of a different discipline … but by a proud and supercilious disdain, rash and peremptory censures, rigorous usages of such as have had the advantage of the upper ground, to trample on those that were placed below them, which had been a principal cause of the great hatred and contempt of prelacy …’.60 On the spiritual tyranny involved in imposing the oath, England’s complaint agreed with Ley that, since ‘this oath is backed with’ the threat of deprivation, many men would take it with a repining conscience and thus ‘to save their livings, foreswear themselves’, which came close to being an unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost. Ley himself had said as much; it was just that England’s complaint was utterly explicit in typing this as an exercise of positively Antichristian tyranny, whereas Ley never allowed himself to go quite as far as that.61 For Ley, it seems, the church was currently in the hands of the wrong sort of bishop, whereas for the author of England’s complaint that same church was being increasingly vitiated by the influence of an irredeemably corrupt and corrupting institution. Because of that, and, of course, because of his continued conformity, Ley was almost certainly one of those time-serving weaklings of whom England’s complaint floridly complained, and, indeed, despaired. Had not such men read the Book of Sports, forborne preaching in the afternoons, admitted altars into their churches and severely curtailed their preaching of ‘the doctrines of grace’ contained in the seventeenth article? In their consequently weakened spiritual state, with their consciences ‘made wide enough to swallow down this monstrous and damnable oath’, the enfeebled remnant of conforming ministers were, England’s complaint lamented, on the point of completely selling the pass to the Laudians.62 One of the things that Ley’s sustained recourse to print of early 1641 was surely intended to do was to answer such claims; to prove to himself and the world that his moderate puritan mode of accommodation, pursued even under the Laudian ascendancy, had left him neither irredeemably ideologically tainted, nor spiritually enervated. For all his ‘conformity’, he had never bowed either knee or neck to an altar. As his self-consciously orderly opposition to the oath showed, his determination to continue to exercise his ministry within the national church had not rendered him impotent in the face of idolatry, or of episcopal and archiepiscopal overreach. The strong implication here – underlined by his explicit rejection of the suggestion that he was the author of England’s complaint – was that you did not have to be the sort of irreconcilably nonconformist, Presbyterian/independent fellow traveller that the author of England’s complaint proclaimed himself to be in order to stand out against this, the latest and worst enormity visited on the English church and clergy by the Laudian regime. 244

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Ley conceded that there were many aspects of episcopal and archiepiscopal power, as it was at present constituted and exercised, that ‘stand by the support, or fall by the weight, of royal authority, from which their jurisdiction is derived’. The High Commission, which dated but from ‘the beginning of queen Elizabeth’, was ‘not so established, but by that regal power it may be demolished’. Similarly, all prelates, ‘whether archbishop or bishop’, were ‘to be regulated for his courts and other jurisdiction’ by royal authority.63 Thus, by making the clergy swear to perpetuate the current system against all change, those drafting and imposing the oath were not only setting up a potential rift between the power of the bishops and that of the prince, they were also making a very considerable power grab on their own behalf. Moreover, neither the canons nor the oath had been framed ‘by common consultation’, but by Laud and his cronies ‘who overawed the rest’.64 ‘Those canonical dictators’ were the very people, he complained, who ‘have long enjoyed and yet are possessed of an awful pre-eminence over their brethren’, many of them, no doubt, the very same men who had been ‘suspected of unsound doctrine of a popish strain’.65 They wanted to impose an oath on others to defend their position from any change or challenge in the future, which led Ley to conclude that this amounted to nothing more nor less than ‘a bond of assurance of their episcopal pre-eminence’. This was an allegation that compounded his earlier claim that, for all its brave talk about resisting popery, the oath was in fact directed far more against ‘those who are the greatest adversaries of popery than against papists themselves’.66 Ley coupled all this with an assault on the Laudian view of episcopacy, homing in on Laud’s opinion, based on a fundamental misuse of a saying of Jerome, to the effect that no true church could exist without, and therefore salvation could not be available in the absence of, what Ley termed ‘an ordaining bishop’. This he condemned as ‘an uncharitable error, which casteth not particular Christians only, but many orthodox churches, out of the communion of saints and consequently out of the state of salvation’.67 Not only that, but ‘the over high exaltation of prelates hath depressed presbyters so far below the rights and powers of their order that it is made (in some men’s conceits) a strange thing, and a kind of presumption, in any case to take upon them the ordination of ministers’. Now Ley was quite sure that that was precisely not what Jerome had believed, since, ‘in the first of all his epistles’ he gave to presbyters ‘the honour (which some episcopal parasites appropriate to bishops) to be accounted the successors of the holy apostles.’68 But he was equally certain that that was what Laud and his minions did indeed hold. Similarly, Ley believed that Laud believed that ‘by the necessity of discipline’ was meant the presence of what he called ‘a ruling episcopacy’ – a claim rendered evident ‘by the speech of the now Archbishop of Canterbury, the most authentic interpreter, because the most architectonical (if not the only) composer of the late canons’.69 Not only was this not a view that Ley shared; 245

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as will emerge below, it was one that he now saw as almost entirely antipathetic to the settlement of peace in both kingdoms. England’s complaint agreed that the iure divino case, as deployed by the Laudians, broke new ground and that ‘this oath is a plot to swear in the conceit of episcopacy to be jure divino’, a position which tended both to undermine the authority of the prince and ‘to unchurch … all other reformed churches’. However, where the author of England’s complaint went on to launch a full-on assault on episcopacy as an Antichristian institution, Ley held back.70 His carefully hedged position was explicitly designed to leave considerable room for reform of the church not merely as the Laudians had left it, but as it had existed before. In this, of course, his position represented a marked contrast with the root-and-branch reform advocated by Calvin Bruen and his allies in their petition of January 1641 and with the pro-episcopal reply being canvassed by Aston et al. Nor was Ley’s stance some extraneous exercise in theory grounded in national rather than local politics. On the contrary, given his deep roots in Cheshire and close ties with succeeding bishops, the Chester elite and the local godly, and county gentry such as Philip Mainwaring, an ally of the ‘Patriots’ to whom his A letter against the erection of an altar and A case of conscience concerning the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper were dedicated (see below, p. 255), it was one embedded in local experience and existing (pre-Laudian) practice. All of which may well go a good way towards explaining why Grosvenor, Wilbraham and Booth, alarmed as they were by the root-and-branch radicalism and popularity of the anti-episcopal petition, nevertheless refused to be strong-armed into supporting Aston’s equally polarising attempt at a reply.

ASTON DIVIDES THE SHIRE Fortunately, for all that we have only Aston’s account of the negotiations with Wilbraham and his allies, there are other bits of evidence that throw light on the coalition-building efforts of the Aston group and allow us a glimpse of the sorts of arguments and discussions that went on about the form of words to be used in the petition. A manuscript copy of the Cheshire petition for the bishops in a commonplace book containing a range of political materials generated during 1640–41 has appended to it some of the objections raised in the Commons against it. According to these, ‘the hands of the men of Cheshire were not underwritten to this petition but to the subsequent brief declaration of the intent of the petition’. This ran, or so it was being alleged, a petition to be presented to parliament against innovation in religion and alteration in church government, praying that both be settled as in the purest times of queen Elizabeth and to regulate what was amiss either in church and state. Hereunto your hands are required and being put to this paper will warrant the inserting thereof into the schedule annexed into the original petition.71 246

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If we turn to the actual text of the petition and the schedules of signatures as they were turned over to the House of Lords we find considerable corroboration for this claim. Potential supporters were asked to sign on schedules with a variety of different formulae at their head. Of these, some were very sparely worded indeed; as in the following: ‘we whose names are underwritten give our consent to the petition agreed on by the gentlemen of this county for settling the church government as it was in the purest days of queen Elizabeth’; or again, ‘upon consideration of the copy of the petition agreed on by the nobility and gentry of this county for the settling of church government as now it is by the bishops without alteration’.72 Others were more extended, as the following presented to the parishioners of Sandbach: ‘a petition to be preferred in parliament against innovations in religion and alteration of church government, praying that both may be settled as in the purest times of queen Elizabeth and to regulate whatsoever is amiss in ecclesiastical courts’.73 In many cases these relatively brief forms of words were presented along with lists of the leading gentry and clergy who had already endorsed them. The schedule for Rowton in Broxton hundred, where Cholmondeley was the lord of the manor, came accompanied with a personal endorsement by the viscount himself. This informed potential signatories that a petition was being prepared by myself and others of the nobility and gentry and inhabitants of this county to be preferred to the parliament house concerning the establishment of church government according to the practise of the happy days of queen Elizabeth and both myself and many of the gentry have already signed it and we desire that as much of the inhabitants as well freeholders as others of you … may join with us. I desire you to subscribe your name to the paper enclosed.

This missive was signed ‘your loving friend R. Cholmondeley’74 (Figure 15). Evidently, Cholmondeley believed that his personal approval would give the petition added weight within the township. In evaluating the precise meaning of these schedules, much turns upon what was meant by the phrase ‘the purest times of queen Elizabeth’. As S. R. Gardiner pointed out, this was a phrase that, during the 1630s, had been used by Charles I to underwrite a high Laudian vision of the church, but which, by 1641, Charles himself was using to repudiate Laudian ‘innovation’.75 But, by then, similar references to ‘the purest times of Elizabeth’s reign’ were also being deployed by many a moderate puritan, like Ley, to justify a variety of packages of ecclesiastical reform that, while they might fall short of the complete abolition of either episcopacy or the prayer book, did not in fact constitute a simple return to the pre-Laudian status quo, however conservative the terms in which they were couched. This was something that the gentry who orchestrated the final presentation of the bundle of the various parish schedules to the House of Lords as a coherent statement of county opinion would appear to have realised. For, confronted with schedules which featured 247

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15  The schedule of signatures to the February 1641 petition in defence of episcopacy from Rowton township in Broxton hundred, headed with the letter from Viscount Cholmondeley endorsing the petition

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the phrase ‘according to the purest times of queen Elizabeth’, they sought to close down the implications of moderate reform of church government which that formula might be taken to have implied or allowed by sometimes adding in a different hand and in a different ink the further qualifying phrase, ‘without innovation in government’ or, more simply, ‘in government’.76 We can see, then, inscribed in the composite body of the petition the dim outlines of the sort of discussion about the precise content and tone of the final version of the petition that must have comprised the substance of the conversations between Aston and Wilbraham and his friends. We can also gain some sense of the disparate pitches whereby a variety of people were induced to sign off on the petition and watch those different messages being massaged into a univocal endorsement of what, after their negotiations with Wilbraham, Booth and Grosvenor had broken down, Aston and his allies decided was to be the final purport of the petition. The point being made here is not, therefore, that Aston’s petition was in any straightforward way ‘fraudulent’ and therefore not a ‘real’ representation of popular opinion in the county, but, rather, that it was a product of a complex series of local and national, political and polemical negotiations and manoeuvres, whereby as wide a range of persons and opinions as possible were being aligned behind the defence of ‘the church of England’ against ‘innovation’ and ‘puritanism’. What was meant by any and all of these key terms might differ very considerably between the various strands of opinion whose support was being canvassed and whose expression was being framed and finessed by the various forms of words circulated around the county. In short, rather than an unproblematic articulation of some pre-existing ‘prayer book protestant’ tradition, a straightforward product of a stable middle ground located between and defined by equally stable, Laudian and puritan extremes, Aston’s petition emerges from this material as the product of a relatively open-ended and unstable process of negotiation. Viewed in such ‘political’ terms it can be seen as seeking to create a pro-episcopal, antiPresbyterian coalition that could or would encompass a spectrum of opinion running from conviction Laudians – anxious to save as much as possible of episcopal and monarchical government from the burning wreck of the Personal Rule – through various sorts of Calvinist and erastian episcopalians, to encompass many an erstwhile moderate puritan, alarmed and alienated by the extremism of current puritan nonconformist behaviour and political agitation and by the imminent prospect of a genuinely Presbyterian church settlement. On this basis, and in light of the ‘moderate puritan’ position sketched out by Ley’s printed works of the late winter and spring of 1641, we can see the final refusal of Wilbraham, Booth, Grosvenor and others to sign off on Aston’s version of the petition as a product not only of personal pique and misplaced amour propre but also of real ideological differences about how they wanted the church to be ‘settled’ or ‘established’; and just as pressing doubts as to the wider, national political purposes to which Aston and his 249

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allies might put the petition once it was signed and sealed and sent off to Westminster. These considerations, as well as the continuing distrust of Aston and his associates engendered by the election campaigns of 1640, were also evident in the support that was eventually gathered for the petition. When it was finally presented to the House of Lords on 27 February 1641 it was subscribed by around 6,600 names and signatures and it affirmed that it was ‘signed by all the lords that were not popishly affected and by most of the best of the gentry’.77 But, for all its mass support and claim to speak in the name of ‘the county palatine of Cheshire’, it was clearly the product of radically fractured gentry community. The lists of leading signatories – with the exception of Earl Rivers and his brother Thomas Savage, who were probably in London on the queen’s business78 – comprised those who had emerged as Aston and Brereton’s leading supporters in the Short Parliament election (Viscounts Kilmorey and Cholmondeley, Sir Thomas Brereton of Shocklach, Thomas Cholmondeley, Peter Warburton of Arley, Thomas Powell, Thomas Cotton of Combermere and John Werden), with several others who were to remain loyal allies of Aston over the following months and would eventually provide the basis for the royalist party in the shire (Lord Brereton, Sir Edward Fitton, John Minshull and Thomas Cotton of Cotton).79 Moreover, the distribution of parishes that eventually signed the petition accorded closely with the areas where Aston’s gentry associates exercised most influence, both territorially and administratively. The mechanics of collecting signatures rested heavily on gentry leadership. The initial letters sent out to the hundreds by Aston’s supporters on 30 January depended on leading gentry responding to the request and initiating the process of subscription. Then names were generally subscribed after Sunday service, with the local gentry and the minister leading the way.80 Subscription across the county was extremely patchy. There were fifty-four lists of signatories for Chester and a variety of parishes, chapelries and townships, but this was out of a total of 101 parishes and chapelries and 540 townships across the shire. Of the fifty-four lists, it has been possible to establish the provenance of thirty-eight81 (Figure 16). These were concentrated in the shire’s western hundreds, most notably the Wirral, where the four active justices (Henry Bunbury, William Glegg, Henry Birkenhead and William Whitmore) were all signatories to the petition. In Broxton, where Cholmondeley and Sir Thomas Brereton exercised considerable, influence there was another cluster of parishes; and in Edisbury and the western side of Bucklow hundred, where the Savages and Aston were the pre-eminent landowners and justices, there was a further concentration. On the eastern side of the shire a cluster of parishes around Lord Brereton’s seat at Brereton and in Nantwich hundred, the town itself, where Cholmondeley and Kilmorey owned manors, and the large parish of Wrenbury, in which the Cottons of Combermere were resident gentry, stood out in providing support for the ­petition. But in Macclesfield, 250

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251

16  The distribution of Cheshire parishes and townships that are known to have signed the February 1641 petition in defence of episcopacy

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where the three puritan JPs, Sir William Brereton of Handforth, Hamnett Hyde of Norbury and Thomas Stanley of Alderley, were the dominant justices, only the parishes of Cheadle and Wilmslow were represented. The ‘patriots’ and associates of Booth, Wilbraham and Grosvenor were conspicuous by their absence from the rosters of signatures, as for the most part were the parishes where they exercised the greatest influence. Only one of the justices who had sided with them in the elections of 1640 (William Leversage, whose name appeared at the head of the schedule of signatures for Sandbach) supported the February petition. Sir Thomas’s efforts to bring together ‘both ends’ of the local gentry community, then, had signally failed. Indeed, his aggressive promotion of his petition in the face of the reluctance of the ‘Patriots’ produced a backlash in which they drew together to form a ‘middle group’ which positioned itself in the political space between radical puritan proponents of further, often Presbyterian, reform and conservative defenders of the ecclesiastical status quo.

CHESHIRE PETITIONS AND THE PROJECTED SETTLEMENT OF FEBRUARY 1641 In part this was due to local dynamics, but there were also ideological differences in play. Moreover, it is almost certain that the main reason why Aston broke off negotiations in Cheshire and proceeded to submit his petition to the Lords stemmed from the rhythms not of local but of national politics, and in particular from his determination to contribute, as he hoped definitively, to a major turning point in the relations between the Long Parliament and the king. For, as Conrad Russell has observed, the moment in February at which Aston presented the petition to the Lords was a pivotal one. It came in the midst of Commons debates about church government that were themselves a crucial part of negotiations between the Scots, the junto and the king over a projected settlement for the three kingdoms, a projected settlement that failed, in part, over the issue of church government. The king felt able to extricate himself from this precisely because of the groundswell of antipuritan and anti-Scots feeling then sweeping the nation.82 In a speech at the Banqueting House to both houses of parliament on 23 January 1641, Charles had issued a public statement of what he was prepared to yield and what he was not: reform of the courts ‘according to the law’; removal of those aspects of his revenue that were deemed oppressive or illegal; frequent, but certainly not annual, parliaments. ‘He would trust to the affections’ of his subjects for supply, and admitted ‘that frequent parliaments are the best means to keep a right understanding between me and my people, which I so much desire’. In general, he professed his desire to effect ‘the reformation of all innovations both in church and commonwealth’ in order ‘to reduce all things to the best and purest times as they were in the time of Queen Elizabeth’. However, there were limits to his reforming zeal, and on 252

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the issue of church government he made it clear that, while he might consider preventing the bishops from encroaching ‘too much upon the temporality’ in future, such efforts would fall short of removing their places in parliament. Such measures, whatever they might in the end amount to, would be the extent of the reformation that he was about to allow in the church. Indeed, this was the issue upon which Charles made his stand, playing the order and anti-puritan cards hard, as he complained vigorously about the distractions that are at this present occasioned through the connivance of parliament; for there are some men who more maliciously than ignorantly will put no difference between reformation and alteration of government. Hence it cometh that divine service is irreverently interrupted and petitions in an ill way given are neither dismissed nor denied … There are some very strange (I know not what term to give them) petitions given in, in the names of divers countries, against the established government … and of great threatenings against the bishops, that they will make them to be but ciphers or at the least their voices to be taken away.83

In effect, Charles was announcing episcopacy as the wedge issue which he was going either to drive between the would-be parliamentary participants in ‘the projected settlement of 1641’ and their erstwhile Scottish allies or else to use to break up the settlement entirely.84 Here, of course, was Aston’s issue, Aston’s language and Aston’s political programme. There was now clearly a perfect fit between Aston’s attitudes and agenda and those of the crown. In a peroration in the February petition that followed closely the sentiments of the king’s Banqueting House speech, Aston proclaimed that his Majesty persevering in his gracious inclination to hear the complaints and relieve the grievances of his subjects in frequent parliaments, it will so unite the head and body, so indissolubly cement the affections of his people to our royal sovereign, that without any other change of government he can never want revenue nor we justice.85

All that remained to bring such a much-to-be-wished consummation about, the petition implied (again echoing the king), was the active suppression of the puritan campaign for further reformation, and it was that that the House of Lords was being petitioned to do. Moreover, Aston was able to introduce the Cheshire petition into the cockpit of national politics on what Russell has identified as the crucial day. For Aston presented his petition to the Lords on 27 February, precisely the moment when, in the House of Commons, ‘in a debate forced with the skill of a modern question time’, Hyde was forcing the junto into choosing between their alliance to the Scots and their attachment to a settlement with the crown with episcopacy at its heart. Introduced at precisely this moment into the Lords, as Russell laconically remarks, Aston’s petition indicated ‘that the king too had a body of public opinion to appeal to’.86 The salience and 253

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s­ ignificance of Aston’s intervention seems to have been recognised immediately by members of ‘the zealous party’ in the Lords who tried, if not to prevent, then at least to delay Aston’s petition from being read. According to one diarist, ‘Lords Say, Brook, Paget and Mandeville and others’ all argued long and hard that it might be ‘deferred the reading’, and it was only after ‘long debate’ that ‘it was at last admitted to be heard’.87 Small wonder; for on Russell’s account ‘this debate seems to have brought the settlement scheme to an end’. The overtures that Charles had made to the junto by appointing several of them as privy councillors had failed, as they refused to distance themselves from the Scots. At the same time a new wave of anti-Scots and anti-puritan feeling was emerging in the Commons. ‘It offered him a chance, not to reunite a country much of which he disliked, but to undertake what he always found the much more congenial task of leading a party.’88 In building that party, of course, Charles needed not merely parliamentary spokesmen like Hyde but local agents, mediators between events at the centre and the localities, and that was precisely what Sir Thomas Aston had now become (perhaps, in a way, had always been) as he transformed a petition that may well have been intended – certainly by those who, in the end, did not sign it – as an agent of conciliation, even an endorsement of some moderate process of further reformation and modified episcopacy, into a far more subversively and divisively ‘royalist’ document. Aston was a gentleman of the privy chamber and, during the crucial period of spring 1641, seems to have been consistently in London rather than in Cheshire. Werden and Cholmondeley’s letters, which were all designed to keep him abreast of events in the county, were addressed to him either at the lodgings of his brother John (a gentleman usher in the household of the Prince of Wales) in Falcon Court, Fleet Street, or at Mr Garland’s house, Holborn. Sir Thomas was therefore perfectly placed to pick up the nature and nuances of royal policy and propaganda from its very source, coordinating his efforts in the country with the statements and initiatives coming out of the court.89 Again, the nature of his subsequent campaign against Brereton, designed to set the Lords against the Commons and to play upon issues of privilege and fears in the Lords of puritan radicalism and disorder, fits perfectly with Charles I’s wider political strategy during this period, which, as Russell has described it, revolved around the exploitation of precisely the same structural and ideological forces and tensions.

THE PROJECTED A SETTLEMENT OF FEBRUARY 1641: THE IDEOLOGICAL STAKES But, if Aston was bound and determined to dish a settlement based on some version of limited episcopacy, John Ley was equally committed to bringing such a settlement about. If the dedicatory epistles of his printed works of 1641, which were all written from his lodgings in St Paul’s churchyard, are 254

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anything to go by, Ley, like Aston, was living in London during this period. Most of these tracts were being prepared for the press in February 1641. The one outlier was his A comparison of the parliamentary protestation with the late canonical oath and the difference between them, the dedicatory epistle to which (addressed to Sir Robert Harley) was dated September 1641 and written in Great Budworth.90 His A letter against the erection of an altar and Sunday a Sabbath were both dated February 1641, and the former and his A case of conscience concerning the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper both bore dedicatory epistles to the ‘Patriot’ and middle-group gentleman Philip Mainwaring, whose ‘benignity to me’ Ley warmly acknowledged.91 The decision to print Defensive doubts was similarly taken in February 1641, and this time the book was dedicated to the Cheshire knights of the shire and city burgesses, whom he hailed as ‘public patriots’ brought to prominence by ‘the good will of your country’ and the ‘design of public service of church and state’.92 What we have here, then, is a mini print campaign directed at both his local contacts and a national audience, and all during the same political conjuncture as Aston’s pro-episcopal petition. It was just that while Aston’s petition, presented to the Lords at what turned out to be a crucial moment, was designed to stymie a settlement based on reduced episcopacy, Ley’s printed works were all designed to further it. As he explained in his tract on the et cetera oath, Ley held that it would be beneficial to the government of the church ‘if, in some particulars, it were more conformable to the condition of the ancient church …’. This meant restoring ‘presbyters to their ancient rights and participation in the government of the church, which they had in primitive times’. Here, he cited Jerome’s testimony that the church was governed by the common council of the presbyters, supported by Cyprian’s insistence that ‘“those things that concern the government of the church”’ ought to be decided both ‘“as the public benefit requireth”’ and ‘“with common counsel”’. He then cited those great champions of iure divino episcopacy, Bishops Downham and Bilson, to prove that Ambrose and others thought it similarly ‘needful that a presbytery of grave ancient ministers should, with their counsel, advise and assist the bishops in cases of doubt’.93 While Ley’s views on the proper relationship between bishops and presbyters thus turned on the history of the primitive church, they also reflected practices and structures that he discerned in the post-reformation church of England. He had made much of Bishop Bridgeman’s use of the dean and chapter as counsellors, and of his own attempt to act in just such a counselling role in his letter about the altar. His letter about Mr C and the Sabbath of 1632 had found him being consulted by a group of clergy in and around Chester, an eventuality that had prompted Mr C’s allegation that ‘I am a bishop unto them’. According to Ley, ‘this was a very weak and wayward inference for did not a reverend prelate (well-known and honoured by your lordship and all good men)’ – identified in the margin as Joseph Hall, bishop 255

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of Exeter – ‘desire the judgement of some that were his inferiors in degree … and yet they were not the more for that, nor he the less a bishop than before’. Moreover, even had Mr C really wanted to elevate Ley to the status of bishop, ‘he needed not to have deposed your lordship to make room for my new promotion, for there were, above 1300 years ago, a sort of bishops subordinate to diocesans, which the Greeks called chorepiscopi, who, as their vicars, did in some things officiate under them …’. Here was Ley associating himself, only partly in jest, with a subordinate or devolved form of episcopal authority, a de facto version of which Ley’s own works, not to mention Mr C’s satire, showed him to be already (unofficially) discharging.94 Elsewhere in his tract on the oath, Ley noted how ‘in this diocese the deans for many years had a great part of episcopal jurisdiction shared among them, and this by patent for lives or years from the bishops, allowing sometimes larger, sometimes less, authority unto them’. Only lately had those functions been reassigned by the bishop to archdeacons operating under ‘the authority of your chancellor for that jurisdiction’.95 The implicit claim being made here was that the remains of such structures and processes of consultation and devolution remained discernible within the church even as currently constituted. Such vestiges could provide not merely local precedents but institutional and legal foundations for a redistribution of power between the bishops and presbyters very different even from the Elizabethan status quo ante and a world away from that laid out in the canons and envisaged by the authors of the et cetera oath. Just as Ley cited residual elements in the structures and practices of the English church to legitimate his vision of just how bishops should relate to presbyters and vice versa, so he also relied on a range of human authorities, centred on the Church Fathers and recent English Protestant (both Calvinist conformist and moderate puritan) commentary upon them.96 His discussion was largely innocent of reference to Continental reformed divines and to the English Presbyterian opponents of episcopacy. Instead, his attention was concentrated on a range of English conformist and moderate puritan divines, running from Jewel to Whitaker and Willett, through more stridently conformist figures like Whitgift, and culminating in the likes of Bilson, Downham and Hall, the last of whom Ley described as ‘a most zealous patron of episcopal pre-eminence’.97 Of course, there were exceptions, like his reference to Thomas Cartwright on the entirely unscriptural origins of archbishops.98 But, for the most part, Ley was seeking to assemble a list of solidly English establishment, both pre- and anti-Laudian, moderate puritan and Calvinist episcopalian authors in order to prove that his account of the origins and nature of limited episcopacy was soundly based on the ideological and institutional heritage of the post-reformation English church. On this topic Ley continued to share much common ground with England’s complaint, except that that tract insisted that the powers of excommunication and absolution, currently usurped by the bishops and their officials, 256

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really belonged to ‘every [pastor] of his congregation, to whom, with others appointed by the parish, according to Gods word, belongs the power of ecclesiastical censures’.99 In such passages England’s complaint revealed itself to be what Ley’s tract most definitely was not; that is to say, a radical puritan, vehemently nonconformist and overtly Presbyterian and/or independent attack on the church of England; an attack premised on the assumption that, even before Laud, that church had been guilty of idolatrous will-worship and that the rule of the bishops had been, from the outset, an inherently usurped and Antichristian tyranny. That was most definitely not Ley’s view of the national church before the rise of Laud. Given the very large amount of common ground uniting Ley’s tract on the et cetera oath and England’s complaint, one can quite see why Ley was so keen to deny any association with that screed, lest his position be taken by hostile commentators, or even by innocent bystanders or casual readers, as either tantamount to or leading inexorably towards the root-and-branch reformation being advocated therein. In his pro-episcopal petition, and later in his Remonstrance against presbytery, Ley’s near neighbour (both in London and Cheshire) Sir Thomas Aston was attempting to characterise the contemporary religio-political scene as a straight choice between his version of church-andking royalism, on the one hand, and the imminent threat of a Presbyterian/ independent/separatist-induced chaos, on the other. For Ley and, indeed, the Cheshire middle group that was a false choice, and his little spate of publications of the spring and summer of 1641 is best seen as an extended attempt to carve out a space for his own distinctively moderate puritan position. Here, he was saying, was the basis for a lasting negotiated settlement between the Scots, the king and his English critics assembled in parliament. In order to make that case in 1641 Ley had to address the various arguments from divine right being advanced not only in the extreme forms favoured by the Laudian authors of the canons and sponsors of the et cetera oath but also both by Calvinist conformist authors like Joseph Hall, in defence of episcopacy, and by Hall’s puritan opponents, the so-called Smectymnuans, in favour of Presbyterianism.100 The result was a confrontation between two mutually exclusive, albeit identically structured, iure divino cases; a bun-fight that Ley did his best to avoid. But, if he avoided taking sides in that struggle, Ley also took very great pains to position himself in relation to the central terms set by that debate. As we have seen, he had explicitly rejected the extreme Laudian version of the iure divino theory of episcopacy, which asserted the necessity of episcopacy for the being of a church, and hence for salvation itself. But, having done this, he then proceeded to hedge his bets, even on the more conventional rendition of the iure divino case, which saw episcopacy as an apostolic rather than a dominical institution, necessary for the well-being, but not the being, of a true church. Here, ignoring domestic debates about the rights and wrongs of episcopacy between the English puritans and their conformist opponents, 257

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Ley cited the exchanges on this topic at the council of Trent and, in particular, the verdict of ‘the chiefest of the prelates’ assembled there, the cardinal of Lorraine, that ‘the question was boundless’. He then rehearsed some of the evidence that had led him to the same conclusion. Not only did Paul in his epistles use the words bishop and presbyter pretty much interchangeably, but when commenting upon those very epistles Jerome had remarked that he ‘would have bishops to know that they are greater than presbyters, rather by custom, then by truth of any constitution or disposition of the Lord’.101 But, if Ley was prepared to leave the precise roots of episcopal authority wreathed in uncertainty, he showed no such compunction on the subject of archbishops. Even those who ‘hold bishops to be superiors to presbyters (as the apostles were superior to the 72 disciples) do not, for the most part, allow of archbishops in the sacred episcopacy’.102 The claim was often made ‘that archbishops were set up for the keeping out of schism among bishops, as bishops for that end were set over presbyters’; but, Ley remarked, the crucial issue concerned not ‘the politick end’ but, rather, ‘the original right of their exaltation’, ‘for we can have no great confidence in the end … unless the means, the raising up of bishops to that height, be found to be warranted by the word of God’.103 Ley’s treatment of the origins of archbishops had a very particular part to play in his original case against the oath. It enabled him to argue that since there was even more doubt about the ‘authentic tenure’, that is to say, the divine right claims, of archbishops than of bishops, ‘though that also be very much doubted of’, then the inclusion of archbishops within the scope of the oath represented yet one more reason why conscientious ministers like Ley should or might feel unable to take it. However, in the process of making that case he had been able to advance other ancillary – and in many cases more wide-ranging – observations on the origins and nature of episcopacy. He suggested not only that both archbishops and bishops shared a common origin as offices or institutions of purely human devisal, created to avoid the threat of schism, but also that, unchecked, the urge to avoid schism could itself lead to exorbitances and abuses, up to and including the rise of the popish Antichrist. Unless, that is, the power of both bishops and archbishops were to be properly constrained by the consent and counsel of the clergy, and the overarching jurisdiction of the Christian prince. Indeed, Ley had felt able to affirm ‘that a presbyter is equal with a bishop by God’s law’, and therefore, by consequence, that the superiority of bishops rested on ‘positive or ecclesiastical right by humane constitution or prescription’.104 In that way his minimum position, constructed to justify his refusal to take the et cetera oath, merged into his maximum position, which was something like the straightforward assertion of a iure humano vision of episcopacy. While he never simply endorsed or embraced such a view, it was very clearly visible, both within and between the lines of his tract, as Ley’s own preferred position. Which, of course, only raises the question why Ley should have not so 258

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much failed as purposefully refused to use his publications of 1641 to articulate unequivocally just what he really thought about this (now) most central of topics. The answer to that question surely lies in the nature of the political project which those very works were designed to foster. For at stake was a coalition united behind the idea of a reduced or modified episcopacy that might encompass everyone who was neither a committed iure divino Presbyterian nor a devotee of the hyper-Laudian version of iure divino episcopacy. In other words, the relative reticence of Ley’s take on the conventional version of iure divino episcopalianism was a function of his desire to attach to the cause of reduced episcopacy believers in both the iure humano and iure divino theories of episcopacy. For there were two possible versions of reduced episcopacy. The first, attached to the conventional iure divino view espoused by the likes of Bilson and Hall, saw the crucial powers and prerogatives of both ordination and excommunication inhering, by apostolic ordination, in bishops. On this view of the matter, reduced episcopacy involved the devolution of such powers downwards from the bishops, in whom they naturally inhered, to ordinary presbyters, who were thus associated with the bishop in the discharge of crucial functions that remained, in some fundamental sense, innately episcopal. That, for instance, was the view of the matter taken by George Morley, and very likely by Ussher himself.105 On Ley’s iure humano view of the matter, what was at stake was the creation, by human design or convention, of a purely artificial superiority. On this rendition of the origins and powers of episcopacy, bishops exercised a merely supervisory role, which left the crucial capacities both to ordain other ministers and to excommunicate recalcitrant sinners inherent in the prerogatives of ordinary ministers of the word. On this view, the government of the church was genuinely collective, an expression of the spiritual powers and prerogatives inherent in each and every presbyter. Viewed from one perspective, there was all the difference in the world between those two positions. To adherents of the first, iure divino position, bishops as defined under the second, iure humano dispensation, were not really bishops at all. To devotees of the second, iure humano view of the matter, bishops defined in terms of the iure divino version were potential spiritual tyrants, at best usurping powers that were not inherently or solely theirs, at worst proto-popes waiting to happen. The crucial spiritual prerogatives of ordination and excommunication remained inherent in all presbyters, and the only powers that could be claimed legitimately for bishops were derived from the collective authority of the clergy and could only properly be exercised under the supervisory control of ordinary presbyters. We have good reason to believe that, in taking this tack, Ley was reflecting – perhaps merely faithfully following, or perhaps seeking actively to shape or inflect – the ways in which Ussher himself was seeking to build a coalition of not entirely like-minded persons around the notion of reduced episcopacy. In the course of denying that he was the author of England’s complaint, Ley had 259

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illustrated how wholly innocent third parties could have books attributed to them that they had not written by citing the example of Archbishop Ussher, who had been forced to ask parliament to call in a pirated version of a book issued with his name on it. That book, Directions propounded and humbly presented [by Ussher himself] to the high court of parliament concerning the book of common prayer and episcopal government, contained a spirited defence of set prayer, an outline of some fairly minor changes that might be made to the prayer book and an unequivocally iure divino defence of the status of bishops; one tempered by the suggestions that in future bishops should constantly preach in ‘the metropolitan church or in the parochial church during visitations’; ‘that they might not ordain any ministers without the consent of three or four at the least, grave and learned presbyters’; and that they might not ‘suspend any minister ab officio et beneficio, at their pleasures … but only with a necessary consent of some assistants’. We might assume that Ussher was so keen to have this squib suppressed because he did not want to go public with what then remained the subject of delicate back-room negotiations between the junto and the king. But it might also have been because the version of his proposal for reduced episcopacy that was actually being circulated at the time eschewed precisely the sorts of arguments from divine right that were made so stridently in the offending pamphlet.106 This was not because Ussher himself did not hold such views – we know from other sources that he did – but, rather, because he did not want support for the reduced episcopacy scheme to turn on acceptance of the full iure divino case for bishops; for, if that were to become the case, he would surely have risked losing the support even of people like Ley. On this basis we can conclude that the whole scheme rested on the proponents of both the iure divino and iure humano cases bracketing their theoretical views in favour of a de facto compromise. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, in practice the bishops would exercise their ordaining and disciplinary powers in association with, and only after having taken counsel from, presbyters organised in various forms of synodal association. The precise nature and origins of the powers being thus collectively exercised would remain, if not unspecified and undiscussed, then at least subject to a variety of (mutually incompatible) readings; the topic would be reduced to the status of a purely theoretical question upon which people could agree to disagree without their disagreement reducing in the slightest their capacity to collaborate enthusiastically in the actual administration of the church. Alternatively, such differences, left purposefully unaddressed, might be thought to represent a source of potential contradiction, an open wound available to be picked at by anyone – whether Presbyterian, independent or episcopalian – determined to see off the spectre of reduced episcopacy; a role that, as we have seen, Sir Thomas Aston had already enthusiastically taken on and would take on again in even more vitriolic and explicit terms in his Remonstrance against presbytery. 260

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However much Ley might try to root his vision of what the national church should look like in the prayer book, the homilies or the thirty-nine articles; however intensely he might search for precedents in the de facto procedures and practice of the recent past; however much he might seek legitimation in principles culled from the writings of the great and the good of the English reformed tradition, the position he was outlining represented real change. Indeed, from some, not merely Laudian, conformist perspectives, this was puritan reformation, red in tooth and claw. For both jurisdictional and spiritual powers were to be radically redistributed, and the relations between bishops and ordinary ministers of the word were to be transformed, as indeed was the office of the bishop. In short, the structures of the national episcopal church were to be fundamentally reordered. Given Ley’s stated nonconformist sympathies, the public worship of the church was also likely to be seriously modified, even if the Book of Common Prayer would not have been entirely supplanted. It is important to remember, in this context, that Ley’s too was a form of prayer book Protestantism. Here was the culmination, indeed the consummation, of myriad moderate puritan blueprints for further reformation, all of which had, to this point, turned out to be mere chimeras, broken apart on the intransigence of various monarchs and their conformist clerical henchmen. Not merely was Laudianism and all its works to be relegated to the dustbin of history; a certain strand of moderate puritanism was about to be not merely ideologically vindicated but given palpable institutional form. This might not be ‘root and branch’ reformation, but it was anything but business as usual. Indeed, in terms of the recent history of the early Stuart church such a scheme’s only claims to moderation stemmed from the fact that it fell some way short of the full-on Presbyterian revolution being urged by the Scots and espoused by a relatively small, albeit highly vociferous, minority of English puritan radicals and conviction Presbyterians. And therein, of course, lay a very large part of the problem. For the coalition that would have to be mobilised behind the cause of reformation, reduced-episcopacy-style, included not merely moderate puritans like Ley and their erstwhile clients and protectors in the hierarchy, many of whom were themselves, at least formally, committed to the iure divino case for bishops, but also Charles I. Moreover, as the example of Aston and his allies in Cheshire and at court shows, there were many who were determined to avert this sort of settlement at all costs, in large part by typing it as a puritan revolution – the start of a very steep and slippery slope that led directly to various forms of social, political and religious upheaval. All of which meant that the topic of puritanism was one of extreme difficulty for Ley. If he simply repudiated it, both name and thing, he would lose the support of the godly that was absolutely essential if the prospect of Presbyterian revolution were to be staved off and if his own position as honest broker, the epitome of godly moderation and good judgement, were 261

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to be vindicated. If he simply embraced the zealously apocalyptic rhetoric of Christ and Antichrist that increasingly attended the cause of root-and-branch reformation, he would lose the support in more conservative circles – most notably in the House of Lords and the court, not to mention among the more moderate of the Cheshire gentry – without which any sort of projected settlement based on reduced episcopacy would inevitably fail. Just how he handled this issue emerges most clearly from his treatment of the Sabbath.107 Ley defined his own position here as a moderate statement of mainstream orthodoxy by locating it between extremes represented by the Saturday Sabbatarianism of the likes of Theophilus Braborne, on the one hand, and the Laudian anti-Sabbatarianism of Pocklington, White, Ironside and Heylin, on the other. While he presented those extremes as inexorably opposed, Ley also saw them as inextricably linked, indeed as emanations of the same satanic nexus of error and profanity. Both tended to refer disparagingly to their opponents as ‘puritans’.108 But the similarities between the two positions went much further than that. As we have seen, by disallowing the word ‘Sabbath’ Ley claimed that the Laudians were breaking the irrefrangible bond between Sabbath observance and the fourth commandment. This, Ley warned, risked becoming ‘a more dangerous snare to Judaism’; for, by thus giving ‘up the fourth commandment wholly to the Jews, both for title and tenure’, the Laudian position gave very considerable encouragement to Saturday Sabbatarians like Braborne, while leaving ‘our Lord’s day floating upon the uncertain conjectures of an apostolical tradition, as some account it’. Therefore, Ley concluded in triumph, anyone who really wanted to refute the Saturday Sabbatarianism of Braborne and his ilk, as Bishop White and other Laudians claimed to want to do, would admit as much.109 In this way Ley was able to perform the enviable trick of presenting his own position both as a moderate via media located between opposing extremes and as the godly side of the basic binary opposition, the stark either/or choice between the cause of godliness and true religion, on the one hand, and of satanic error and profanity, on the other. Ley’s profession of ‘moderation’ did not consist only in the substantive content of his opinions, but also in the tone in which he canvassed them. In the preface to the reader, Ley’s work on the et cetera oath was praised for its ‘equitable temper of judicious moderation’, which, ‘without all mixture of humour or passion’, ‘neither mounts too high, with any strain of presumption, nor coucheth too low, by any servile insinuation’. If some readers found that Ley’s text had ‘too many relishes of reverence for bishops’, they should remember not only that when it was written the bishops had still been at the height of their power but also that, because of ‘the many excellent endowments’ to be found ‘in them’, ‘many bishops are, in good manner and accustomed civility to be entertained with respective terms’, considerations which should be applied, the reader was reminded, ‘even to those who have been thought bad enough to be deposed from the episcopal dignities’.110 In 262

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precisely that spirit, even as he stripped the office of archbishop of its basis in scripture and warned of the spiritual dangers inherent within it, Ley insisted that ‘there have been, of that elevation, men of as eminent desert for learning and devotion, both in ancient and later times, as any that lived in the same ages with them’.111 In exercising such restraint, Ley was, of course, a million miles away from the sort of radical puritan rant purveyed by England’s complaint and other anti-episcopal tracts which, as we have seen, took every opportunity to deploy the rhetoric of Antichristian, popish tyranny, idolatry and will-worship. While such language was not altogether absent from Ley’s linguistic palette, he remained careful to modulate his use of it with the gestures towards moderation and restraint of the sort outlined above. His tone was even further from the intense anti-puritan invective that had become Sir Thomas Aston’s preferred, indeed habitual, mode. Ley consistently went out of his way to appear even handed in his handling of the controversies of the age. Thus, he deprecated the propensity of the Presbyterians and conformist defenders of episcopacy to accuse one another of popery and to assert their version of ‘discipline’ as alone necessary to salvation, at one point observing that ‘it had been more for the honour of the English prelacy and much better for the public peace both of church and state if there had been more courteous correspondence betwixt episcopal and presbyterial divines, notwithstanding the differences betwixt them in opinion or pre-eminence’.112 In the heightened polemical atmosphere of 1641 such strictures could well apply to the more virulent of the puritan pamphlets currently pouring off the press; but when Ley reached for examples of such inordinate speech it was always to the Laudian end of the spectrum that he looked, contrasting such Laudian rant with what he termed the ‘sincere affection to all the faithful labourers in the Lord’s vineyard, whether of Geneva or any other church of the reformed religion’, displayed throughout his career by Archbishop Ussher.113 Just how such passages worked to locate Ley along the spectrum of contemporary religious opinion emerges from his extended treatment of a passage from the works of Joseph Hall. Once the epitome of Christian moderation, a safe pair of hands able to defend a version of reformed orthodoxy from Arminian assault without lapsing into extremities of either expression or opinion; a bishop able to embody the fatherly moderation, the mixture of collegiality and authority, of learning and godliness that allowed many a moderate puritan like Ley to accept, and even to celebrate, the rule of bishops, Hall’s recent, stridently assertive defence of iure divino episcopacy had rendered him a newly controversial, not to say polarising, figure. Ley cited Hall’s response to the claim made by the puritan writer Robert Parker that ‘“the fathers which erred in this matter of discipline did not offend out of will, but out of want of knowledge, not through apostasy or contempt, but through infirmity and ignorance”’. This seemingly moderate, even anodyne, remark had elicited from Hall what Ley described as ‘words of high disdain, 263

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viz. “but can I now forbear to ask, who can endure to hear the braying of this proud schismatic?”’ To this display of episcopal hauteur, Ley responded that ‘I should have thought that his [Parker’s] great learning (well known from his printed works though against the cross and the cross to the crosier) might have secured him from such a brutish scorn’ for, ‘as it is hard to prove, so none should be hasty to impute, either pride or schism where conscience is pretended, reasons abundantly alleged and secular comforts deferred, as in this case it was.’ After all, all Parker had said was that certain fathers had erred in matters of ‘discipline’. They might, therefore, ‘for all that, in matter of doctrine, be very learned and orthodox doctors’. Erring not through ill will, apostasy or contempt, but rather because of ‘want of knowledge in that particular … they might then (notwithstanding all this) be very good and holy men (as indeed they were). And must master P, for saying but this, be so far undervalued and vilified, as to be made but as the emblem of grossest stupidity?’ In the face of this unfortunate performance, Ley appealed from the ‘pontifical tribunal of the judge, decreeing the divine right of episcopacy’, that Hall had recently become, ‘to the closet of the devout doctor’ that, until recently, he had been. Hall, Ley admitted, ‘hath not been wont, in this sort, to break out of the way of Christian moderation’, and he begged his readers not to think that in these passages he was acting as ‘a mocker of so reverend a father’.114 Where Ley used Hall’s former moderation to counter-balance his new-found acerbity – and thus preserve both the memory and prospect of a genuinely moderated (and moderate) episcopacy – genuine Presbyterians, like the Smectymnuans or Robert Baillie, did the opposite. Dwelling solely on the asperities of Hall’s tone and what they took to be the de haut en bas nature of his authorial persona, such men not only pitched into Hall with no holds barred, they also used the supposed moderation of his (theological) opinions and professed preferences to underline the pusillanimity of his recent conduct.115 Thus the track record of even the most insistently antiLaudian of the Caroline episcopate was being used not to mitigate but, rather, to compound an entirely negative evaluation not only of their conduct but also of the institution of episcopacy itself; which, of course, was precisely not what Ley was doing by thus subtly positioning himself betwixt and between the shifting reputations of Hall and Ussher. It was no accident that this performance took place in the midst of a dedicatory epistle addressed to Archbishop Ussher in which Ley sought repeatedly to associate both his present and younger self with the Irish primate. For by this point Ussher had not only displaced the likes of Hall as the model moderate Calvinist bishop, he had also emerged as the poster child for the schemes for reduced episcopacy that were widely regarded as central to the projected settlement that dominated the politics of early 1641. Those, certainly, were the terms in which Ley praised Ussher. Ussher provided, Ley gushed, precisely the example of personal godliness and episcopal zeal that 264

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‘our tribe [the clergy] and most of all those of your own orb’ [the bishops] most needed to emulate.116 For Ussher, as Ley described it, ‘the calling of a bishop’ was rather ‘a matter of duty than of dignity’, with the chief duty at stake being ‘the preaching of the word, making more account of the canons which concern the substance than the ceremonies of their calling, as all men see your grace doth, preaching every week in the parish of your abode, according to the canon of the first Aurelian council’.117 The centrepiece in Ley’s paean of praise to Ussher was his description of the mode of reduced episcopacy, for which Ussher had by now become the figurehead. Here, Ley proclaimed, was ‘a form of ecclesiastical government wherein you might be but one of us in a sociable participation of ordination and jurisdiction with the rest of your brethren, the incumbent pastors and preachers of particular churches’.118 Here, then, was Ley’s own project to square the circle being given full form and substance in the scheme for reduced episcopacy developed, advocated and personified by Archbishop Ussher. As Russell and others have pointed out, Ussher’s scheme was at the centre of the projected settlement between the king, his leading critics and wannabe privy councillors in the junto and, it was to be hoped, the Scots.119 Ley left no doubt that his hopes were firmly set on Ussher as just the man to broker such a deal. He praised Ussher, despite considerable ‘disadvantage and inconvenience to yourself’, for ‘abiding’ ‘where you may do most good’, that is to say, in London, ‘making the choice of the prophet Jeremiah, “I will get me to great men and speak unto them, for they” saith he, “have known the way of the Lord”. Jer. 5.5.’120 Among those to be converted were, of course, the Scots, and Ley fervently hoped that God would make Ussher an effectual instrument of a blessed accord both of churches and kingdom … God forbid that either we of England or our brethren of Scotland should be so stupid as not to apprehend that the safety of both nations is bound up in our union one with another, our ruin like to be let loose in our rent and distraction … rather than so, we should yield to anything but sin, part with anything, but with a good conscience,

as, he implied, Ussher’s scheme for modified episcopacy allowed both sides to do.121 But also to be persuaded was, of course, Charles I himself. Here again, for Ley, the answer was Ussher. Such were the archbishop’s personal qualities as both man and preacher – in the pulpit ‘he was not word bound to a piece of paper’ and his ‘life’, as well as his ‘doctrine’, ‘a pattern … and a rule of religious conversation’ – that Ley felt able to compare the tonic effects that Ussher could be expected to work on Charles I to those effected by Plato on Dionysius of Syracuse. If Plato could do that to the court of so notorious a tyrant, Ley exulted, ‘how much rather may we expect that the court of so good a king (as blessed be God, we have) should be much bettered by your grace’s addresses to his Majesty’.122 All of which, Ley maintained, explained 265

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his dedication of his current, intensely anti-Laudian, treatise on the Sabbath to the archbishop. Moreover, if Ley’s printed works looked towards the construction of a sort of moderately reformed coalition at the centre, they also gestured at the achievement of the same sort of thing in the locality. For, remarkably, his A letter against the erection of an altar had two dedications, a practice that he typically sought to legitimate through reference to precedents provided by the sainted Bishop Hall. As we have seen, the first dedication was to Philip Mainwaring. There, quite remarkably, Ley attributed the tract, when it had been but a ‘private’ manuscript and not a ‘public’ printed pamphlet, in part to Mainwaring himself, since it owed its origins, Ley claimed, to an epistolary exchange between Philip Mainwaring, his uncle Edmund, the chancellor of the diocese and Ley himself. That ties Ley and the Mainwarings together in an interesting triangle as they manfully sought to respond to and argue away Bridgeman’s altar in 1635. But the other dedication was even more interesting, since it was to that stalwart of the Aston connection, Viscount Kilmorey. Ley thanked him fulsomely for past favours and for recently including his name in a petition to the parliament – now lost – as a minister whose living deserved augmentation.123 In thus suspending himself and his tract – which, as we have seen, represented an unequivocally anti-Laudian defence of a bishop, Bridgeman, and thus fitted perfectly within Ley’s wider case for further reformation, to be organised around reduced episcopacy – between a prominent member of the middle group and an ally of Aston, Ley gave public, and highly personal, expression to his own position as one around whom a range of groups and individuals might unite. Thus might both the county and nation be spared a show-down between an Aston-style defence of episcopacy and the ecclesiastical status quo, on the one hand, and the radical vision of England’s complaint, on the other. In taking this line as late as February 1641 Ley may have been identifying himself as one of those who had taken Aston’s pro-episcopal petition to be more moderate than, in the end, it turned out to be. Ley, then, was an enthusiastic proponent of, indeed propagandist for, ‘the projected settlement’ of February 1641, just as Aston was an equally determined opponent of it. While we cannot simply assimilate the middle group to Ley’s position, we can say that Ley’s stance on the issues was firmly grounded on at least a certain version of the recent ecclesiastical history of Cheshire, and upon his own personal experience in Chester and its environs as a link man between more radical (overtly nonconformist) puritans and the bishop. Moreover, Ley’s own self-conscious moderation in tone and substance; his sedulous avoidance of extremes; his determination to reserve his judgement on some of the most controversial issues of the day; and his insistence that men of good will and sincere Protestant principle could all unite around a moderate – albeit also distinctively puritan – programme of further reformation all closely echoed what we know of the values and 266

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commitments of the central members of that group. All of which, at the very least, strongly suggests, firstly, that developments in Cheshire were linked very closely to developments at the centre, and secondly, that the differences between Aston and the middle group were not merely procedural, organised around issues of personal pique, precedence and amour propre, but also had an emergently ideological and substantively political edge to them as well.

NOTES 1 Mawdesley, ‘Clerical politics in Lancashire and Cheshire’, pp. 166–71. 2 Aston, A Remonstrance, pp. 5–6. 3 BL Additional MS 36913, fos 136, 139–40; Cheshire Quarter Sessions Records, pp. 118–19; TNA CHES 24/126/5. 4 BL Additional Ms 36914, fo. 211. 5 BL Additional MS 36914, fos 214–15. Good Friday fell on 29 March in 1641. 6 Journals of the House of Commons (hereafter CJ), ii.89, 123; The Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, ed. W. Notestein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1923) (hereafter D’Ewes 1), p. 375; CALS DDX 69/9. 7 Aston, Remonstrance, sigs ar–a2v. 8 D’Ewes 1, p. 375; Mawdesley, ‘Clerical politics in Lancashire and Cheshire’, p. 171n. 9 Aston, Remonstrance, pp. 1–4. 10 A. Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), pp. 91–9. 11 D. Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chs 9–11; D. M. Hirst, ‘The defection of Sir Edward Dering 1640–1’, Historical Journal, 15 (1972), 193–208, at 202–6. 12 Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, p. 270. 13 Fletcher, Outbreak, p. 107; Maltby, Prayer Book and People, pp. 238–9. 14 Fletcher, Outbreak, chs 3, 6. 15 D. Zaret, ‘Petitions and the invention of public opinion in the English Revolution’, American Journal of Sociology, 101 (1996), 1497–555, at 1516; Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 91–9. 16 For this approach to petitioning, see Zaret, ‘Petitions’, 1535–6. 17 J. Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chs 1, 2. 18 Aston, Remonstrance, p. 1 19 BL Additional MS 36913, fo. 66. 20 Ibid., fo. 66; Aston, Remonstrance, pp. 7–8. 21 J. Maltby (ed.), ‘Petitions for episcopacy and the common prayer book on the eve of civil war’, in S. Taylor (ed.), From Cranmer to Davidson: A Church of England Miscellany (Woodbridge: The Church of England Record Society, 1999), pp. 103–67, at p. 116. 22 Ibid., pp. 116–17. 23 Ibid., p. 117. 24 Ibid. 267

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The crisis, 1641–42 25 Morrill, Cheshire, pp. 45–52; Maltby, Prayer Book and People, ch. 4. 26 John Ley, Defensive doubts. Hopes and reasons for refusal of the Oath imposed by the sixth canon of the Synod (London, 1641). 27 Of his tract on the Sabbath, Ley tells us himself that he had ‘purposed to publish in Latin’, because he knew that ‘it would not pass in English’: Sabbath, sig. A4v. When even that proved a bridge too far, it appears that he allowed the text to circulate in manuscript. In 1637, on one his annual trips to Oxford via his family in Warwickshire, Ley left copies of his Sabbatarian tract and letter about the altar with William Dugard. Dugard read the letter to his friend John Bryan, and sent a copy of it to his former tutor and uncle in Lincolnshire. As for the Sabbatarian tract, Dugard spent a month in 1638 editing it for Ley, perhaps in preparation for the day when it could be published: A. L. Hughes, ‘Thomas Dugard and his circle in the 1630s – a parliamentary, puritan connection’, Historical Journal, 29 (1986), 771–93, at 786. 28 Ley, Altar, p. 28. 29 SRO D1287/18/2 (P/399/210), Herle to Bridgeman. The letter is dated only 20 April, but the context makes it clear that the year in question was 1641. 30 Ley, Defensive doubts, dedicatory epistle, sigs a4v–b2v. 31 Ley, Altar, pp. 23–7. 32 Ibid., pp. 24–5, 27. 33 Ley, Defensive doubts, preface to the reader, sig. Cr. 34 David Como has identified the probable author as Henry Burton: D. R. Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 67–72. He describes the tract as ‘exceptionally radical’ and potentially ‘incendiary’. 35 Ley, Altar, pp. 12, 15–16. 36 England’s complaint, sigs Ev, D2. 37 Ley, Sabbath, preface, sig. c4r. 38 Ibid., preface, sigs c4r–v. 39 Ibid., preface, sig. c3v. 40 Ibid., pp. 186–7. 41 Ibid., p. 200. 42 Ibid., p. 198. 43 Ibid., p. 142. 44 Ley, Defensive doubts, pp. 33–4, 32. 45 Ibid., pp. 40–1. 46 England’s complaint, sig. Cv. 47 Ley, Defensive doubts, p. 35. 48 Ibid., p. 38. 49 Ibid., pp. 34–5. 50 Ibid., p. 32. 51 Ibid., p. 113. 52 Ley, A comparison of the parliamentary protestation with the late canonical oath and the difference between them (London, 1641), pp. 6–7. 53 Ibid., p. 35. 54 Ley, Defensive doubts, pp. 122–3. 55 England’s complaint to Jesus Christ against the bishops’ canons, sig. C2v. 268

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Petitioning and the search for settlement 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74

75 76 77 78 79

80 81

82

Ley, Defensive doubts, p. 116. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., pp. 111–12. Ibid., p. 118. Ley, Sunday a Sabbath, dedicatory epistle, sig. b3v–b4r. England’s complaint, sig. G2r. Ibid., sigs C3r–C4r. Ley, Defensive doubts, pp. 63–4. Ibid., ‘Preface to the reader’, sig., Cv. Ibid., ‘Preface to the reader’, sig., C3v. Ibid., pp. 57, 7–8. Ibid., pp. 21–2. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 25. England’s complaint, sigs F4r–v., Gv. BL, Harleian MS 4931, fos 118–19. Parliamentary Archives, London (hereafter PA) HL/PO/JO/1/53, Petition of 27 February 1641, fos 57, 42. (The foliation provided in the original petition shifts between folio numbers in the centre and the top right. We have used the most obvious folio numbers where these are provided.) Ibid., fo. 40. Ibid., fo. 62. The schedule does not mention Rowton; but its origin can be deduced from the fact that John Maddocks of Rowton esq. headed the list of signatories. Ormerod, ii.781, 783. S. R. Gardiner, The History of England 1603–1642, 10 vols (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1883–84), ix.268. PA HL/PO/JO/1/53, fo. 57. Lords Journals (hereafter LJ), iv.174. Historical Manuscripts Commission (hereafter HMC), 4th Report, House of Lords MSS (London: 1876), p. 81. These were the men whose names appeared on some of the schedules of leading gentry supporters later signed by subscribers (along with Thomas’s father, George Cotton, and John Grimesditch) or at the head of the petition eventually sent up to the Lords: PA HL/PO/JP/1/53. Aston, Remonstrance, 7–8; BL Additional MS 36914, fo. 64. Our identification of parishes differs from those in Maltby, Prayer Book and People, appendix 2, pp. 248–53. We have used the original petition, and where schedules do not have a heading we have drawn on the names of gentry and clergy among the signatories to identify parishes and townships: PA HL/PO/ JP/1/53; Ormerod, passim; Mawdesley, ‘Clerical politics in Lancashire and Cheshire’, appendix 3, pp. 315–21. Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, p. 270. For evidence of anti-Scots feeling among Aston supporters, see Lord Cholmondeley’s letter to Aston on 20 March 1641: ‘I prayed God send our dear brethren the blue-caps [a derogatory nickname for Scottish peasants] soon to Scotland again and give us leave to make laws in England ourselves, without their directions’: BL Additional MS 36914, fo. 199. 269

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The crisis, 1641–42 83 Rushworth, iii, pt 1, 154–5. 84 Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, ch. 6; J. Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007), chs 6, 7. 85 Maltby, ‘Petitions’, 117–18. 86 Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, p. 270. 87 BL Harleian MS 6424, fo. 43. 88 Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, p. 270. 89 BL Additional MS 36914, fos 197, 200, 210, 217, 218, 221. For his brother’s position, see Bodleian Nalson MS, vol. 13, fo. 74. 90 Ley, A comparison, sig. A2. 91 In the prefaces to these two works Ley described how, through the good offices of his brother, the diocesan chancellor Edmund Mainwaring, Philip had approached him first to clarify his views on the bishop’s altar in 1635 and then in 1637 to resolve a case of conscience involving the administration of communion to a woman in his parish who was disabled: Ley, Altar, dedicatory epistle; John Ley, A case of conscience concerning the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (London, 1641), sig. a2. 92 Ley, Defensive doubts, sig. a2. 93 Ibid., pp. 87–9. 94 SRO D1287/18/2 (P/399/67), Ley to Bridgeman, 9 July 1632. 95 Ley, Defensive doubts, pp. 50–1. 96 Ibid., p. 71. 97 Ibid., pp. 119, 82. 98 Ibid., p. 82. 99 England’s complaint, sig. F2r. 100 For the Smectymnuans and debates about Presbyterianism, see T. Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 17. 101 Ley, Defensive doubts, pp. 67–71. 102 Ibid., p. 74. 103 Ibid., pp. 72–8. 104 Ibid., p. 121. 105 For Morley see George Morley, A modest advertisement concerning the present controversy about church government (London, 1641). Morley’s tract was a restatement of the iure divino case for episcopacy with one gesture made to the notion of reduced episcopacy, where he conceded that ‘a bishop in the laying on of hands and use of the keys ought to be assisted by presbyters; in the former he is already; the other we shall not much stand upon’: ibid., sig. Bv. Morley’s tract was a response to Alexander Henderson’s pamphlet The unlawfulness and danger of limited episcopacy (London, 1641), and in turn attracted a further reply from Robert Baillie, The unlawfulness and danger of limited episcopacy, whereunto is subjoined a short reply to the modest advertiser and calm examinator of that treatise (London, 1641). 106 The reduction of episcopacy unto the form of synodical government received in the ancient church proposed in the year 1641 as an expedient for the prevention of those troubles which afterwards did arise about the matter of church government, by James Ussher, published by Nicholas Bernard (London, 1658). For a discussion as to 270

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107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123

whether this was the form of Ussher’s proposal doing the rounds in 1641, see Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History and Politics in Early Modern Ireland and England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 246–7. See also, Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, pp. 197–9, 268. Ley, Sabbath, p. 138. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., pp. 154–5, 188. Ley, Defensive doubts, sig. c3r–v. Ibid., pp. 77, 123. Ley, Sabbath, dedicatory epistle, sig. br. Ibid., dedicatory epistle, sigs br–b2r. Ibid., dedicatory epistle, sigs B2r–3v. Baillie, The unlawfulness and danger of limited episcopacy, sig. F4v; Smectymnuus, A vindication of the answer to the humble remonstrance (London, 1641), p. 207. Ley, Sabbath, dedicatory epistle, sigs a2v, a3r, a4v. Ibid., dedicatory epistle, sig. b4r. Ibid., dedicatory epistle, sig. a4v. Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, ch. 6. Ley, Sabbath, dedicatory epistle, sig. b3. Ibid., dedicatory epistle, sig. b3. Ibid. Ley, Altar, dedicatory epistle, sig. a2.

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7

The search for the centre as partisan enterprise?

THE EMERGENCE OF THE MIDDLE GROUP With the various projected settlements at Westminster in the process of collapse it should come as small surprise that the tensions and differences that had emerged during the negotiations over the wording of Aston’s petition and the collection of signatures escalated in the weeks following its presentation to the Lords. This process was, at the very least, exacerbated by the fact that the petition was published soon after it had been delivered,1 and by a letter from the king commending the efforts of the petitioners which was widely circulated in the shire. Ideological divisions were further ramped up by the effects of what has been described as the ‘print explosion’ of the 1640s. With the effective collapse of censorship and regulation of the press at the beginning of the Long Parliament the numbers of known printed titles soared from an average of six to seven hundred a year during the 1630s to over two thousand in 1641, and more than four thousand in 1642.2 These included huge numbers of cheap pamphlets and printed news sheets which cost as little as a few pence and were therefore well within the means of literate artisans and the middling sorts. This material was not just available in London. The stock of a Warrington bookseller in the 1640s included numerous polemical works by the likes of John Ley (including his Sunday a Sabbath), but also cheap pamphlets and newspapers. A similar range of material was available in Chester.3 Local gentry continued to receive separates and newsletters, but the bulk of the topical material that they were now acquiring was printed. William Moreton, who was particularly interested in the debates on episcopacy, received packages of books and pamphlets from his son Philip in London, including, in February 1641, Joseph Hall’s defence of episcopacy.4 Sir Richard Grosvenor’s library at Eaton Hall contained an increasing accumulation of printed material, including a collection of over three hundred 272

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printed pamphlets from 1641–42 covering everything from Long Parliament fast sermons and the trial of Strafford to a large collection of county petitions, including two from Cheshire. He too was especially interested in the debates on episcopacy, collecting heavyweight contributions such as Henry Parker’s The question concerning divine right of episcopacie stated and John Milton’s Of prelatical episcopacy, as well as printed copies of parliamentary speeches on the subject.5 While many among the elite consumed this material in vast quantities they were also becoming alarmed by its effects in opening up previously hidden processes of politics and government to popular scrutiny. Sir Thomas Aston, who had more experience of the impact of this than most, complained in 1642 of the ways in which the groundswell of news and debate was leading the ‘multitude’ into rejecting the voices of reason, order and moderation. Old women without spectacles can discover popish plots; young men and prentices assume to regulate the rebellion in Ireland; sea men and mariners reform the House of Peers; poor men and labourers spy out a malignant party and discipline them; the country-clouted shoe renew the decayed trade of the city; the cobbler patch up religion; and all these petition for a translation both of church and state.6

However, these concerns did not prevent Aston and many other politicians – from the king downwards – resorting to print to get their message across. The result was an intensity of debate and public participation in the political issues of the day that was completely unprecedented in its scope and scale. The effects of all this in Cheshire were evident in the intense, and often highly partisan, public discussion stirred up by Aston’s petition. By late March Werden was reporting to Aston from Chester that news of hostility to the petition at Westminster was stirring up dissension. There were some so brazen foreheaded who have divulged that your petition was rejected as a libel and threatened by the lower house if it were offered again to be read … to have all the subscribers questioned as infamous.7

A few days later he was reporting that the godly were organising against it: at an exercise in Neston … two zealots … preached. Both of them were said to inveigh against our petition and to exhort the godly to certify against it … and to make a collection for a solicitor therein.8

The certifying took the form of drawing up statements to show that signatures to Aston’s petition had been collected fraudulently, either by soliciting subscribers with the misleading preambles already mentioned or simply by forging the names of those who had never assented. This activity was being coordinated from the centre, it was alleged, by Sir William Brereton, who had written to one of his principal allies, John Crewe, ‘to help to speed those certificates which must discredit our petition’.9 Locally, much of the direction was being provided by Calvin Bruen and his associates in Chester who were 273

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to present the evidence of their investigations before the Commons on 19 April.10 Meanwhile, two tracts were published which further exacerbated the divisions. The first was a petition to parliament denouncing Aston’s petition as the work of ‘prelates and our present diocesan’ and reinforcing the case against bishops in the earlier Cheshire root-and-branch petition. It purported to have come from the ‘nobles, knights, gentry ministers, freeholders and … inhabitants’ of the shire and to have been signed by precisely twice the number of persons in each of these categories as had signed Aston’s petition.11 It was, of course, a fraud. In Aston’s later indignant words, ‘never any such petition seen in Cheshire, never presented to the house, no such persons ever signed it’. He identified the author as Henry Walker, a London-based radical pamphleteer with a track record in publishing anti-episcopal pamphlets.12 The second tract, which probably originated with Bruen, took the form of a ‘Humble Remonstrance’ to the Lords setting out the claim that Aston’s petition had included 118 signatories ‘who are now ready to profess that they never attested to any such petition and that their hands were forged without their consent or knowledge’. It also suggested that some of the other signatures were from ‘dead men, mad men, children’, those ‘long since gone out of the land’ and, worst of all, ‘recusants’.13 Werden was forced to confess that some of this was justified, since he had heard that a servant of Henry Bunbury’s had entered names without consent, presuming that he could obtain this later. He and Aston duly responded by collecting counter-certificates to prove that in most cases the subscription had been entirely genuine.14 These allegations and counter-allegations, certificates and counter-­ certificates, together with the continuing radical puritan efforts at further reformation, exacerbated the already existing political divisions in the shire. Into this volatile mix was inserted a letter from the king addressed to Derby and the other three county-based peers, Kilmorey, Cholmondeley and Brereton, in which he was ‘graciously pleased to approve’ the efforts of those who had supported the petition in defence of episcopacy (Figure 17). Written on 13 March 1641, it injected an even more partisan note into local politics by praising our well affected people in our county palatine of Chester … which we have esteemed in all former times ever loyal and affectionate of their constancy both in the tenderness of the preservation of the honour and dignity of the Protestant church and of the peace and welfare of our people. And as we shall desire the continuance of your good care to suppress all such seditious doctrines and practices as may be spread abroad to withdraw our loyal people from their submission to the ancient and established government of the church, or from their due allegiance to our royal person and obedience to our laws, so we wish you will make known to all our well affected subjects of that county our gracious acceptance of this free and ever pleasing testimony of their loyalty to us and conformity to the doctrine and discipline of the church approved and settled by the laws of this our kingdom.15 274

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17  Geoffrey Shakerley’s copy of the king’s letter of 13 March 1641 commending those who had signed the February petition in defence of episcopacy

Charles was going out of his way here to extend his party-building efforts at Westminster into the localities. In spite of his recognition of the habitual loyalty of the shire, he was drawing a clear distinction here between the ‘well affected’ who had signed the petition and demonstrated their allegiance to the ‘Protestant church’, ‘our person’ and ‘our laws’ and those who ‘spread abroad’ those ‘seditious doctrines and practices’ that threatened to destroy all three. Charles’s determination to push episcopacy as a wedge issue to divide loyalists from enemies was threatening the middle ground of local, as well as national, politics. 275

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This royal-led polarisation of loyalties was enthusiastically embraced by Aston’s associates. The arrival of the king’s letter in the shire was reported by Lady Cholmondeley on 26 March and almost immediately Werden began distributing it far and wide. He reported to Aston on 2 April that ‘I have sent Mr Allen a copy of the king’s letter which was before dispersed into every corner of the country and (as you presage) causes envy enough. There is not one of quality but they have a copy of the letter.’ At least in Aston’s circle, the royal missive was received with rapture. In the same letter Werden described its tonic effects. I have no abilities to express the joy of this most honourable Earl [of Derby]to whom I delivered his Majesty’s grace and from him I have transmitted it to the other Lords of whom I am able to say (particularly of my Lord Cholmondeley) he hath a jubilee of joy … The rest (I dare assure you) … have testified an inexpressible comfort in his Majesty’s resolution and acceptance of their duties and devotions.16

Lady Cholmondeley confirmed that this direct demonstration of royal approval had done wonders for the local standing of her husband and the other peers who had been subjected to considerable disparagement among ‘the adversaries of our good endeavours’.17 Werden made further use of it to bolster the campaign in support of episcopacy. At the beginning of May he showed it to the judges at the Chester assizes, ‘who much applauded it as a prop to their fidelities and orthodox professions of the religion established which was very effectively presented by our chief justice in his charge’. The wide dispersal of the contents of the letter made it impossible to ignore. ‘By it,’ Werden remarked, ‘I can perceive our neutrals and adversaries both awaked.’18 If the king’s letter caused joy among Aston’s allies, it brought consternation and confusion to the godly, who had been busily spreading rumours locally about the hostile response that Sir Thomas’s petitioning efforts had received at the centre. Now the king himself had ‘interposed’, and Werden gleefully related to Aston the story of how on Sunday last one to whom I had given a copy of the king’s letter did read it at Tarvin amongst divers precisians and (very unhappily) said it was directed to Sir William Brereton. They broke into a sudden blessing both of God and the king, which they had no sooner done than he showed them it was directed to the Lords, whereat these credulous men changed cheer and said they would not believe but it was a counterfeit letter.19

This is a wonderful vignette, showing, as it does, the way news of events at the centre spread in the localities through manuscript as well as print, through word of mouth, chance encounter, conversation and argument, as well as through both printed and written texts. It shows the continuing power of the king’s name and authority, even among the godly, who were evidently still desperate for Charles to declare for their side, and the very considerable advantage that accrued to those who could, if not control, then certainly 276

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i­ nfluence or frame the flow of news and forms of authority entering the county from the centre. Aston and his allies were evidently as well aware of all this as were Brereton and the local godly. Insofar as there was a middle ground in all this it continued to be occupied by the ‘Patriots’ of the Booth/Wilbraham/Grosvenor connection. We hear comparatively little about their reactions during this period because most of the missives from Werden and the Cholmondeleys keeping Aston abreast of local affairs concentrated on those at the opposite ends of the spectrum of local opinion: the godly and Aston’s own supporters. But the ‘Patriots’ continued to dominate quarter sessions through 1641, attending far more regularly than the JPs who supported Aston’s petition. In January they drew up the most comprehensive survey of Catholics ever undertaken in the shire, in response to a Commons order of 7 December 1640. This was a cause close to their hearts and, for once, they put concerns for religious security before any sense of collegiality with the leading local Catholic families. Earl Rivers was presented for the first time within the shire, along with numerous members of the Savage family.20 They also oversaw the collection of the parliamentary subsidy in March, which Lady Cholmondeley claimed was resulting in partial assessments against her husband and his allies.21 By the end of March there were also signs that they were reacting to the petition in defence of episcopacy. Werden reported that Mr Hugh Wilbraham [Sir Richard’s half-brother] reports to a good friend of mine that Sir George Booth and Sir Richard Wilbraham meeting with many other gent at Northwich … they all signed some protestation or petition against you which (to use his owne words) was tart and rough.22

Werden was unable to give more details, but what he says suggests that the ‘Patriots’’ doubts of January and February were hardening into a determination to take a stand against Aston and his petition; and the ‘tart and rough’ language that he reported reflected the typically personalised and polarised terms in which both sides were approaching the issues. March and April 1641, then, witnessed a remarkable upsurge of political rumour, gossip, debate and activity as opposing groups among the gentry and the godly of Cheshire mobilised for or against Aston’s petition. The continuing activities of radical puritans, the search for sticks with which to beat Aston and his supporters, the ongoing marshalling of his supporters and the intervention of the king, pushed many into taking sides on this issue in ways which represented a spectacular breakdown of the consensus-seeking and promotion of the ‘public peace’ that had characterised local politics prior to 1640. This was a conflict that was being fought out at the centre as much as locally. On 19 April the local efforts to discredit Aston’s petition culminated in a petition presented to the Commons by Brereton on behalf of ‘Calvin Bruen and divers other inhabitants of the County Palatine of Chester’. This 277

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repeated the charges made in the printed ‘Remonstrance’ to the Lords that many of the names in Aston’s petition were forged or subscribed without consent. There followed a vigorous debate in which Lord Falkland, a leading member of the pro-episcopacy lobby in the Commons, attempted to explain away the inclusion of names that had allegedly been forged and Simonds D’Ewes responded with a direct attack on Aston for directing his petition to the Lords rather than the Commons and including in it ‘imagined names’ and papists.23 The petition was eventually referred to the committee for the ministers’ remonstrance. Four days later this committee was given power to take up the Aston case, and it was packed with hardened puritans and supporters of root and branch, headed, of course, by Sir Thomas’s local rival and the enemy who had been doing so much to undermine him locally, Sir William Brereton.24 In the meantime, on 2 April, Aston had tried to carry the battle to the enemy by once again petitioning the Lords. The grounds for this were the second petition attacking bishops purporting to come from Cheshire, which had been published in March. He complained, ‘in the behalf of the nobility, gentry and inhabitants of the county palatine of Chester’, that after his first petition to their lordships had been approved and sent to committee ‘some seditious person, to put a scandal upon that county, hath caused to be printed a most invective libel, both in contempt of the laws of the land and of this noble assembly, in name of a petition from the inhabitants of the same county’. Not only did this revile the whole order of bishops ‘as an ethnical or diabolical institution’, but ‘vulgar people and many others’, not imagining that any one could be so presumptuous as ‘to father such a bastard upon a county’, ‘it may carry a species of some reality and may reflect a great blemish upon the whole county to pass as to the reputative authors of such a libel’. Accordingly, Aston petitioned the Lords to bring before them those responsible to receive exemplary punishment.25 Sir Thomas thus seized on the spurious printed petition as an instrument with which to discredit the earlier root-and-branch petition and legally to harass his local puritan enemies. The only problem was that he was doing so with an equally spurious petition of his own, which, just like the petition it was denouncing, had never been seen or circulated in Cheshire. The ploy did not entirely work. Unlike the Commons, who, as we have seen, had reacted rather adversely to Aston’s case by stacking the deck in the committee that was to deal with it heavily against him, at least some of the Lords reacted to his efforts with a certain sympathy. But even here complaints about the ‘anti-petition’ proved extraordinarily divisive. In the words of one diarist, Aston asked the Lords to give him leave to make enquiry of the authors of the mock petition and of the printer that so they might receive condign punishment and in case they would not he then would protest against it. Whereupon the zealous party said aloud he must 278

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The search for the centre as partisan enterprise? be brought upon his knees before the house for wronging the honour of it, others contradicting, it came to vote and he carried it by three or four voices. My Lord of Essex, seeing he could not carry it, would have protested their dissenting from the rest but my Lord of Holland told him that those who had voted the contrary were as sensible of the honour of that house as he and that if they went to protest their disagreement they would do the like for their consent.

In the end, Aston was allowed to stand and, ‘having explained himself’, ‘the Lords were pleased to pass the offence’.26 In the Commons, too, things came to a similarly equivocal conclusion. As Aston would later explain to William Moreton, one of those supporting the pro-episcopacy campaign, on the one hand, those complaining against him failed to make their charges stick, but, on the other, the committee had refused him leave to pursue an inquest into their conduct. At this point the committee, ‘being strongly inclined to preserve the complainants from punishment’, tried to bring the matter to a close; but, so Aston claimed, by a ruse Brereton prevented this, hoping thereby to live to fight another day by bringing up more lies and half-truths from the county to defame him before the parliament.27 Frustrated at the centre, as he claimed, by the political connections and dirty tricks of Sir William, Aston’s precipitate submission to the Lords of his second petition also exposed his flank back in Cheshire. There, the Booth/ Wilbraham/Grosvenor connection took the opportunity offered by Aston’s failure to consult gentry opinion in Cheshire to distance themselves from the views expressed in Aston’s original petition and at the same time revive their credentials as the true spokesmen for the county. This was a role that had been (temporarily) usurped during the exchanges described above by the petitioning campaigns of Aston and his adversaries in London and Cheshire. Now the old political establishment, the ‘commonwealthsmen’ of the county, wanted it back. They were also (surely knowingly) giving the campaign to discredit Aston, which was being waged in London by Brereton, ‘the zealous party’ in both houses and the Cheshire godly – a campaign which was, for the moment, in abeyance – a helping, indeed a reviving hand. To these ends they produced the so-called Attestation, yet another ‘anti-petition’, this time addressed to the House of Commons and signed by Booth, Wilbraham and Grosvenor, and around fifty leading gentry and justices, many of whom had sided with the ‘Patriots’ in the parliamentary elections of 1640. These included some with more radically puritan approaches than those of the leaders of the ‘middle group’, such as John Crewe, patron and supporter of Nathaniel Lancaster at Tarporley, and John Bruen’s eldest son and heir, John.28 The Attestation was presented to the Commons on 22 May and was then referred to the committee on the ministers’ remonstrance, which was handling Calvin Bruen’s petition.29 It was delivered by Peter Venables, the knight of the shire, who throughout this period adopted a somewhat ambivalent 279

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stance. He evidently remained close to members of the middle group, reportedly visiting Sir Richard Wilbraham at Woodhey in March when he was back in the county. But in May he was one of the MPs who voted against the attainder of the earl of Strafford, which positioned him alongside Sir Thomas Aston as a crown loyalist.30 For much of 1641 and 1642 he worked hard to keep a foot in both camps. His fellow MP, the burgess for Chester, Francis Gamull, interpreted his behaviour as a rather exasperating lack of reliability: ‘the baron is so unconstant in his resolutions … none can please him he is so touchy’.31 However, it can perhaps better be understood as a response to the difficulties and dilemmas faced by a well-connected local gentleman who, having perhaps sought election in the autumn of 1640 as a mark of local esteem, now found himself thrust into political prominence by his place in parliament, and was discovering that the role was very uncomfortable. The Attestation professed to steer a middle way; but it was one which was clearly hostile to Aston and the things he stood for. Without conceding any shred of legitimacy to the recent root-and-branch petition, to which they referred as ‘the late printed libel in answer to his former petition, which we disclaim as never approved or seen in this county till the press made it common’, the Booth–Wilbraham ‘middle group’ still managed utterly to repudiate Aston’s second petition: ‘We, who, in respect of our interests, hold ourselves to be a considerable part of this shire, do utterly mislike that any one man should take so much power upon himself, without public trust and appointment to use the name of the county.’ Nor did they stop there, but went on, without commenting on either document’s substantive pro-episcopal contents, to use Aston’s in effect fraudulent, second petition to cast doubt upon the legitimacy and representativeness of his first. And though hitherto we have been silent (as unwilling to nourish discontents in our country by excepting against his former petition) yet now, when we see one man assume so much boldness to himself and such confidence to petition their lordships in the name of the gentry and inhabitants of this county, when none of us were held worthy by him to be consulted withal nor to be made acquainted with his intent, it is high time to express our dislike of this, his voluntary act, not holding it safe to refer to any of so forward a disposition the managing of any business in the name of the county nor him fitting to do it without the approbation of those that the country hath instructed as knights for our shire. So that hereby we make bold to disclaim this last petition of his to their honours and to leave him to justify his own undertakings. And for the substance of his former petition, with the managing thereof and the manner of acquiring hands thereto, we think it not fit for us to interpose our censures but in all humility, as becomes us, shall leave it wholly to the discussion of this honourable house when it shall be thither referred by the House of Lords.32

Thus, explicitly denied any claim to speak for the county or the public; his second petition utterly repudiated by some of the most influential of his provincial peers; and with grave doubts having been cast upon the legitimacy and 280

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representativeness of his first, Aston was left to twist in the wind. His fate still depended on the tender mercies not merely of the House of Commons but of the committee on the ministers’ remonstrance, where, of course, the influence of his enemy and chief rival, Sir William Brereton and his allies in ‘the zealous party’, was considerable. Not that Brereton and the ‘puritan’ left were the only people at Westminster alienated by Aston’s antics. In the course of the newsletter to Sir Richard Grosvenor of late May 1641, in which he had commented on Venables’ unreliability, Francis Gamull described how ‘the baron hath profoundly put in your attestation, which was read in the house and referred but all to no purpose. Sir William Brereton is gone into Cheshire we hear to obtain new matter and that committee is not like to remain unless he come with new force out of Cheshire.’33 As Gamull’s emphatic use of the term ‘your’ – as in ‘your attestation’ – shows, the Attestation was Grosvenor and his friends’ instrument in a struggle to put Aston in his place; and Gamull and Venables, as well, of course, as Brereton, were all part, with Grosvenor and others, of a virtual campaign both in the Commons and in the county dedicated to precisely that end. Nor were the authorities in or parliamentary representatives of the city of Chester any more sympathetic to Aston’s cause. Sir Thomas had apparently supplemented his second petition with complaints of ‘tumults and disorders whereby divine service had been disturbed and disquieted’ in Chester. On 22 April the Lords ordered the city authorities to punish the offenders.34 However, this drew from the mayor, aldermen and leading clergy of that city a bland omnia bene, coupled with a counter-complaint against those who had been telling the Lords such scandalous lies about Chester, ‘whom we humbly leave to be ordered according as your honours in prudence and justice think meet’.35 All of this might be taken to imply that many leading gentlemen in both the city and county, none of them radical puritans of the Calvin Bruen or even William Brereton sort, felt able to distinguish, as Aston was not, between different types of puritan activity, refusing to assimilate any and all acts of iconoclasm or nonconformity to a unitary populist, radical puritan threat to all order in church, state and society. Indeed, on this evidence they appear to have found Aston’s own efforts to defend the county from ‘puritanism’ more divisive, more threatening to the unity and order of local society, than anything the puritans were doing. Neither Venables nor Gamull – both eventual royalists – was a puritan firebrand. Indeed, in the same letter to Grosvenor in which he described Venables’ efforts against Aston in the Commons Gamull revealed himself as decidedly lukewarm on the topic of ecclesiastical reform. As for Venables, he was a patron to William Bispham, a cathedral prebend who played a leading role in organising the petition in defence of episcopacy.36 If men of this temper were opposed to him, Aston was not going to get much change out of either the House of Commons or the middle group of Cheshire gentry opinion. 281

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But if that was how some sections of Cheshire opinion responded to Aston’s efforts, another group (of forty-two county gentry) led, predictably enough, by those who had promoted the original petition in defence of episcopacy stood four square behind him. Organised by Viscount Cholmondeley, who was collecting signatures in April, they subscribed a formal letter of support to Sir Thomas and a petition to the earl of Bath, who had presented their original petition in the Lords in February. The gist of this was to ‘testify’ to Aston’s ‘great care and diligence for the country and our approbation thereof’ and to ‘acknowledge your good service here for your country and your merit from the inhabitants thereof, who stand well affected either to his Majesty or the good and peaceable government of this kingdom’. They had, they wrote, recently received printed copies of the fraudulent ‘anti-petition’, ‘which vile and machiavellian petition we perceive was never preferred to neither house but dispersed maliciously and seditiously to stir up discord and tumult’. This, Sir Thomas’s second petition to the Lords had been designed to allay; and although it had indeed never circulated in the county, they remained convinced that, if it had been, all ‘those many thousands who subscribed our remonstrance, preferred by you, which found so gracious acceptation both with his sacred Majesty and the Lords to whom it was preferred’, would have signed it, as would ‘many thousands more of this county whose hands could not, by reason of shortness of time, be gotten’. They encouraged Sir Thomas to continue, in the county’s name, to press the Lords to ‘check the further growth of these seditious insolences and attempts to cast aspersions upon our loyal intentions and disturb the peace of our church and state government’. The situation was urgent; ‘here are daily more innovations by the importunity of the authors of these schisms and factions’, and they could see ‘that much ill is to be feared if a timely prevention be not given to the growth thereof’.37 This praise for Aston from his local supporters echoed, in part, his own justification of his conduct towards the authors of the Attestation. Sir Thomas continued to draw on the notion of an identifiable county community, and the scandal that it might suffer from a counterfeit petition being published and disseminated in its name. In taking action to avert that, Aston claimed, he had not been acting as a private man. ‘For any man to assume the name of the county to advance any private business of his own, or to set on foot any public business for the county without warrant from the county, were a just cause of dislike,’ he conceded. But he had been far from committing such an offence. Not only did he conceive ‘it the duty of every man that is a member of a county to vindicate his country from scandal’, but he also insisted that ‘there was no forwardness in me more than became one so far instructed, as I was, in the delivering of the first petition’. On Sir Thomas’s account, then, through his role in organising the pro-episcopal petition he had taken on a public persona as some sort of representative of the county, a role and a duty intensified and compounded when others directly attacked that petition’s 282

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bona fides, in the process claiming fraudulently to speak in the county’s name. Aston had decided to proceed without further consultation with the gentry of the middle group; but not before consulting three of the county’s MPs: Venables, Sir Francis Gamull and Sir Thomas Smith (the other MP for Chester). On his account, they all approved his second petition, as fit to be done, though they conceived not by them, seeing the first petition was in the Lords’ House and not in theirs and it was questionable whether, being of the lower house, they might join in a petition to the Lords. Therefore, it was thought more proper for me to do it, they professing, if they were called, they would be ready to testify how much they thought the county injured in it.38

Of course, the one person representing the county in Westminster whom Aston had not consulted, indeed the one name conspicuously absent from Aston’s account of the whole affair, was that of Sir William Brereton. It was as though, merely by presenting the freeholders’ root-and-branch petition to the Commons as an accurate representation of Cheshire opinion, Brereton had forfeited his role as a real representative of the county. Moreover, this was now a role to which Aston, on the basis of a mass petitioning campaign that represented the real will of ‘the county’, could now stake a valid claim. But Aston’s eyes were not simply, or mainly, on the shire. His closeness to the court through the spring of 1641 can be gauged by a visit (ostensibly occasioned by a debt) that he paid to Strafford in the Tower in March.39 This was paralleled in June, when Aston appears to have sent a servant to visit Laud in the Tower, probably with a copy of his book A Remonstrance against presbytery, which was hot off the presses.40 A timetable set rather more by events in Westminster and Whitehall than by those in Cheshire, and a political strategy dictated as much by the parliament and court as by the county, would explain Sir Thomas’s haste in pushing his first petition through without first securing Booth and Wilbraham’s support. If the petition was needed for a concerted push on the issue of episcopacy in both houses, then time was of the essence. Such considerations might also explain Aston’s (potentially disastrous) miscalculation in preferring his second petition to the Lords without reference back to county opinion. Seeing an opportunity to further both his own and his royal master’s interests, he wanted desperately to push that advantage home. Taking a few liberties with Cheshire opinion probably seemed a price well worth paying for such a prize. Such considerations also explain the timing and content of his Remonstrance against presbytery of May 1641.

ASTON’S REMONSTRANCE AGAINST PRESBYTERY AND THE CONDUCT OF NATIONAL (AND LOCAL) POLITICS This was the second time that Aston had inserted his pro-episcopal activities and reputation into the narrative of national politics, to make what he 283

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hoped would be a decisive intervention on the side of the king and his view of the church. As Professors Mendle and Ford have pointed out, at the very moment that Aston’s tract hit the book stalls in May 1641 both Ussher’s plan for reduced episcopacy and the deliberations of Bishop Williams’ committee for religion, and, perhaps most importantly, the question of the bishops’ continuing membership of the House of Lords, were all at the centre of the political agenda.41 Not only that, but the recent passage through the parliament of the Protestation Oath, which was, at that very moment, making its way into the localities, was rendering just what it meant to defend the true Protestant religion a newly pressing and controversial question which a wide range of parties were very interested indeed in glossing in their own sense. Aston’s tract was an intervention into all those controversies. As we shall see, it was an attempt to render the preservation of iure divino episcopacy a central strand in the defence of English Protestantism, and essential to the church of England’s identity as a true Protestant church. Similarly, its vision of the episcopate as a central, indeed an essential, part of the ‘ancient constitution’, and thus of the operations of the English monarchical state, was designed to put the expulsion of the bishops from the House of Lords completely beyond the pale. And its depiction of the contemporary ecclesio-political scene as an either/or choice between episcopacy and a Presbyterian/independent, indeed crypto separatist, puritan reformation was designed to stymie any ‘moderate’ settlement of the religious question, of the sort that the Williams’ committee on religion was in the business of producing. More generally still, the tract’s rabid anti-puritanism was designed to build a party for the king against a parliamentarian cause now definitively identified with the worst extremes of puritan radicalism. This, then, was an intensely partisan, parti pris intervention into both local and national politics. But that was decisively not how Aston presented either the tract or himself. He had, he claimed, been virtually forced into action, in his initial petitioning campaign, by seditious puritan attempts to seize control of the county and speak in the name of Cheshire over or against the voice of the gentry; and in his later recourse to print, by the populist polemical efforts of his enemies. Having now entered the lists of polemical print, he described himself as entirely unconcerned with what he termed ‘popular applause’. He had ‘no interest but the love of truth and liberty, save that of loyalty, which, when I consider to how gracious a prince I owe that duty, I confess it appears a great tie’. And was motivated, he claimed, solely by the need to defend ‘king and church’ from the scurrilous and seditious attacks of the puritans.42 Just like Ley, albeit with considerably less insistence, Aston intermittently attempted to reserve his judgement on crucial issues and even (once) to extend the hand of Christian charity to his otherwise consistently reviled and ridiculed Presbyterian opponents. Again just like Ley, at various other points Aston stood back from his argument, ostentatiously reserving his judgement and refusing to enter the fray. Thus, he pronounced himself entirely 284

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­ nwilling to push any particular policies on the nation’s rulers: ‘Far be it from u me to presume to prescribe a remedy, ’tis the easier way to give cautions, to descry inconveniences, to discover rocks, than to assume to steer the ship of State in a safe course; to give counsel, other than what is warranted by good authority.’43 However, even more than Ley’s, these disclaimers were a sham. Hence, that last passage came at the end of a paragraph in which Aston described the dire consequences of allowing the Presbyterian discipline to take a hold – ‘their government incompatible with monarchy, magistracy, laws, destructive to gentry; their calling independent either of king or people; their power above princes, potentates, nobles, people, laws, parliaments; their errors accountable to none but Christ alone’ – and urged ‘In the name of God let us look ere we take this desperate leap, from the inconveniences whereof can be no recovery (if they once get the upper hand)’.44 The tract drew on (and sought to justify) Aston’s former petitioning activities in Cheshire. Its tone and the positions taken therein fitted perfectly both with many of his public former statements and even more with the sort of rabidly anti-puritan and proto-royalist chit-chat that we have found circulating among his associates and supporters in Cheshire. If anything, Aston’s screed intensified his former stance. In marked contrast to the initial remonstrance to the House of Lords, Aston now repeatedly embraced iure divino episcopacy in the clearest possible terms. Thus, the claim that bishops were ‘instituted in the time of the apostles’ was stated as a simple fact. Theirs was ‘a divine institution’, a ‘sacred order’, ‘patterned by the apostles’, ‘an apostolical and therefore not a questionable institution’.45 In the opening sections of part two of the tract, entitled ‘A brief review of episcopacy’, he repeated the standard scriptural and patristic arguments in favour of iure divino episcopacy. Following the basic lineaments of Hall’s case, he stressed the continuity and pervasiveness of episcopal government in the history of the church. The superiority of the bishops over the other clergy consisted in their powers ‘to bind and loose’ and their monopoly over the power to ordain other clergy.46 Quoting Calvin, Melanchthon and, finally, Cyprian to the effect that ‘“if bishops be taken away, it is necessary the church must sue a bill of divorce from God, because it can no more be called a church”’, Aston insisted that such testimony ‘should make us careful how we part with this power of ordination, or these ordainers, if we respect the salvation of our souls, or the existency of the protestant church’.47 Where bishops ‘flourish they must not in any kind be abolished, and wherever the iniquity of the times hath abolished them, they must be restored’.48 All of this allowed Aston the triumphant conclusion that if then this ecclesiastic discipline were deduced from the apostles, built upon the basis of the Old and New Testament, continued ever since, and is now so confined within the limits of our laws that ‘the clergy can enact no canons or constitutions without the king’s royal assent, and that none formerly made shall be in force, but such as by Commissioners of both Houses shall be adjudged worthy to be kept; 285

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Thus was combined a high-flying statement of iure divino episcopacy with a de facto erastianism that effectively subjugated the workings of episcopal authority and jurisdiction to the law of the land and the prerogatives of the prince. On this basis, while Aston might allow himself occasionally – twice, to be precise – to talk the language of a ‘moderated or reserved’ episcopacy being returned ‘to its ancient purity’,50 it was by no means clear just what remained to be reduced, once Aston had set the core spiritual and disciplinary functions of the bishops in apostolic and scriptural stone. Indeed, for the most part, Aston wrote as if the concessions made by the king to this point were quite enough, and further reform was far from necessary. This was an impression greatly strengthened by Aston’s recurrently strategic use of the conditional when discussing the prospects or necessity of further reform. Thus, he observed that ‘if either process of time or discontinuance of parliaments have admitted any superstructures of exorbitant power, doubtless the wisdom of the house (instructed with the steerage of the state) would reduce such without our clamours’.51 Tellingly, the only area in which Aston allowed or implied that change might be necessary involved not the central spiritual or disciplinary functions served by the bishops – most notably their apostolically grounded monopolies over excommunication and ordination – but, rather, their temporal power and secular jurisdiction. Citing the king’s speech of 23 January in which he had conceded that ‘if, upon serious debate, you shall show that bishops have some temporal authority not so necessary for the government of the church and upholding of episcopal jurisdiction’, he would allow a ‘retraction’ of it, Aston left it ‘to the judgement of that great council to regulate the rigour of ecclesiastical courts to suit with the temper of our laws, and the nature of free-men’. For it was far ‘more proper for the debate of this great council to decide the point than befitting the importunity of us, his (much satisfied) subjects’ to ‘make demands’.52 Again, that phrase ‘much satisfied’, just like the parade of ‘ifs’ that preceded it, implied that what needed to be done had already been accomplished. Just as Ley had invoked an array of divines and polemicists to support his version of the church of England, so Aston followed suit. In his original remonstrance to the House of Lords he had invoked a similar (albeit subtly different) line of (exclusively episcopal) Protestant succession, stretching from Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, Hooper to Parkhurst and Jewel, Archbishops 286

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Parker, Grindal and Whitgift and thence to Andrewes, Ussher, Morton, Davenant and ‘our English Seneca’, Joseph Hall. Just as Ley had claimed that his own ‘moderate’ vision of further reformation centred on reduced episcopacy and modified terms of conformity, was the logical product or culmination of the English Protestant tradition, thus constructed, so Aston used his list of names and authorities as the basis for his defence of the status quo and denunciation of all forms of ‘puritan reformation’. Elizabeth’s reign played a central normative, legitimating role in both positions; it was just that the vision of the English church and its immediate future being legitimated thereby was very different. Where Ley’s position would efface the effects of Laudianism and transform the workings of the national church, Aston’s would not. Indeed, where Ley had utterly repudiated Laudianism, Aston did no such thing. Given that by 1641 not even Charles I was attempting to defend every jot and tittle of the Laudian experiment, Aston’s attempts to distance himself from either the Laudian church or the Personal Rule were so exiguous as to be virtually non-existent. So non-existent that the leading proponents of Aston as anti-Laudian moderate have had virtually to make up the evidence of his anti-Laudianism for him. Thus, even Judith Maltby can find only two (in fact three) passages in The Remonstrance that she can construe as being explicitly anti-Laudian. Of these, the first is Aston’s claim that ‘we have had our swarm of flies to destroy our fruits; we have felt the storm of a distempered fate as well as they’. Maltby quotes this passage twice, both times ‘as cited’ in John Morrill’s Revolt of the Provinces, where he too glosses the same passage as showing that Aston had ‘nothing but contempt for Laudians’.53 However, the actual words on the page will not quite bear this weight of interpretation. The quoted passage forms a part of a justification for Aston’s first pro-episcopal petition. Having lamented that ‘this is a time of censures’ and claimed that ‘no action (of so pure intention) hath been more bespattered than the delivery of this remonstrance’, Aston concluded that We, alas, are none of those that live in Goshen, severed from the sorrows of our brethren; we have had our swarm of flies to destroy our fruits; we have felt the storm of a distempered state as well as they. But we had rather, with prayer and patience, wait and hope for the reunion of our distracted peace, than rend the breaches wider by pulling on our heads a greater plague than that we have yet felt …54

The passage clearly works to distance Aston from certain nameless excesses and abuses, but in fact leaves it entirely unclear whether those pertain to the Personal Rule or the recent outbursts of puritan pamphleteering and libelling of which Aston and his petition had been the victims. The marginal note (which is quoted by neither Morrill nor Maltby) identifying the subject of these remarks as ‘the common grievances’ is of no help here. Indeed, it renders them more obscure and general than they otherwise might have 287

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seemed and certainly does not allow these comments to be construed as any sort of critique of expressly Laudian policies. Particularly since the rest of the passage is a piece of standard Astonian, and indeed of Caroline, political anti-puritanism, contrasting those, like himself, who ‘wait for the reunion of our distracted peace’ with others who wanted, through misplaced reform, to plunge the kingdom even further into chaos.55 Maltby’s second supposedly anti-Laudian quotation reads as follows. ‘Is it only our present archbishop hath opened the gap of calumny? … I would draw all the world to my opinion; that is to reverence their calling, preserve their order, yet, with as free a resolution and as respectless of their persons, submit to the exemplar punishment of such as stain the honour of their coat, entrench upon our liberties, negligently starve the flock, covetously engross the means of faithful labourers or with their novelties distract the church, as any man that lives.’ The opening rhetorical question is, in fact, the topic sentence of a paragraph in section 3 of the Remonstrance, the title of which is ‘the Presbyterian censure of the clergy in queen Elizabeth’s time’. The rest of the paragraph reads, ‘they say their then archbishop of Canterbury was more ambitious than Wolsey, prouder than Stephen Gardiner, more bloody than Bonner: Beelzebub of Canterbury, a monstrous Antichristian Pope, a most vile and cursed tyrant’. In other words, far from attacking Laud, the paragraph actually defends him by implicitly associating the disgraced archbishop with the bishops of Elizabeth’s reign, up to and including Archbishop Grindal, whose name is mentioned in the margin next to the passage quoted, all of whom had been just as roughly handled by the Presbyterians of their own day as Laud was being by the puritan firebrands of his. As for the rest of the quotation after the ellipsis, that is to be found over eighty pages later, in section 18, where Aston does indeed make the case that ‘though there be many errors crept into the execution, which prove not to be in the constitution, I hope we shall have it reduced to its ancient purity and not cast away our gold for a little rust’.56 That embrace of the prospect of possible reform to come was matched by an expression of gratitude for concessions already made that was contained in the text of the original remonstrance to the House of Lords. It remarked that ‘we, as others are sensible of the common grievances of the kingdom and have just cause to rejoice and acknowledge with thankfulness the pious care which is already taken for the suppressing of the growth of popery, the better supply of able ministers, and the removing of all innovation, and we doubt not but in your great wisdoms, you will regulate the rigour of ecclesiastical courts to suit with the temper of our laws, and the nature of freemen’.57 We return, then, to the possibility of some reduction in the temporal powers of the bishops, to be worked out in negotiation between the king and the parliament, if, that is, any such exorbitance could be proved on the bishops’ part. Other passages cast real doubt on how far Aston’s rabidly anti-puritan priorities actually differed from those of the Laudians. On the issue of 288

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c­ onformity, Aston praised ‘our laws (still in force) which exact the deprivation of every ecclesiastic, the confiscation of the goods and chattels, and imprisonment, during life, of every laic, that shall willfully deprave the liturgy established by law’.58 He also described a local puritan request that the godly be allowed to meet ‘together to pray for the king and queen without punishment or false calumniation’ as an attempt to create ‘a gap to let out law and take in liberty. Thus may they infuse what doctrine, contrive what stratagems, accumulate what multitudes, they please, not only without punishment, but without enquiry of the laws.’59 In short, in marked contrast to Ley, Aston was constitutionally incapable of producing anything like a specific list of objections to the religious policies of the Personal Rule, or a doctrinally or politically specific critique of Laudianism. More often than not, he used the conditional when referring to the existence of the ‘abuses’ that he then sedulously refused to specify, and espoused a vision of ecclesiastical discipline and a notion of uniformity at the very least entirely congruent with that activated by the Laudians. We are a million miles away here from the extended, detailed, multilayered (and, in its own mealy-mouthed, ‘moderate’ way) scathing, critique of Laudianism produced by Ley. Thus, Aston’s book represented quite another way to wrap yourself in the flag of Elizabethan precedent and Protestant purity than that adopted by Ley. Where Ley had been silent on the subject of English Presbyterianism and the Elizabethan puritan movement, Aston was all over it. With what reverence do we call to mind those precious days we yet style the purity of Queen Elizabeth’s reign? As if then the church were all innocence, had no spot in her infant whiteness. But if we shall as well look back, and consider the spirit of the fathers of these disciples in those days, we shall then find, ’tis not the church’s purity, ’tis not the pastor’s piety, can stop the foul mouths of such traducers; ’tis envy and ambition barks thus in emulation of their order, not in zeal against their doctrine or discipline.60

This theme of puritan ambition, and the pursuit of purely private interests and the will to power under the cover of public reformation, echoed throughout both parts of Aston’s treatise. In the section in the second part entitled ‘titles of honour anciently given to bishops’ he attributed the puritans’ determination to take the so-called ‘lordly prelates’ down a peg or two to ‘ambition’.61 ‘Too many revert to the great Aerian heresy, condemned long since, that all ministers must be equal.’ That, of course, was very close to calling the likes of John Ley, who asserted that bishops and presbyters were members of the same order, heretics. Certainly, it was to impute entirely corrupt motives to all those who wanted, as Ley did, to reduce the power of bishops, while exalting that of ordinary presbyters: ‘I believe their discontent (truly sifted) is the same, they would all be bishops. I am sure they claim more independent power than ever bishops had.’62 289

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Aston went on to cite myriad passages from various Elizabethan Presbyterian tracts defaming the structure and worship of the Elizabethan church. They say the communion book is culled and picked out of that popish dung-hill, the portuise, and mass book. The sacraments are wickedly mangled and profaned. They eat not the Lord’s Supper, but play a pageant of their own. The public baptism is full of childish and superstitious toys, the ceremonies are popish fooleries, Romish relics, and rags of Antichrist.63

The tracts cited in the margin, from which this composite passage was culled, included the first and second Admonitions to the parliament, a tract by Anthony Gilby, and – a favourite of Aston’s – Alexander Leighton’s intemperate screed of 1628, Sion’s Plea Against the Prelacy. Nor, Aston maintained, had the Elizabethan Presbyterians’ bile been confined to the church and churchmen, but had come to encompass the magistracy, the parliament and, indeed, the queen herself, all of whom were condemned in advance if they did not immediately accede to the Presbyterians’ demands.64 Here the crucial sources were the Admonition again, and certain works by Martin Marprelate. As Aston observed, such men had been ‘distempered zealots’ and ‘licentious raylers’ under Elizabeth and James, and remained so still.65 In this way, Aston could make Laudianism slip out of the picture almost entirely, popery recede into the back ground and the real threat to order emerge as a radically egalitarian, but also worryingly tyrannical, puritanism. Here was a bugbear to which the proponents of any brand of further reformation that went beyond Aston’s utterly attenuated version thereof could be assimilated. Just like Joseph Hall, Aston’s condemnation of the discipline started out with an assault on the popularity of the methods and ends of its proponents, which, both Hall and Aston lamented, were all too appropriate to the debased tenor of the times. We live, Aston bitterly observed, in ‘a time of censures’. Certainly ‘the goose quill did never more licentiously, less civilly, bedabble both times and persons’.66 As we have seen, the initial remonstrance to the House of Lords had created an image of such writings as part of a levelling Presbyterian threat to all order, and went on to call on the Lords ‘to suppress the future dispersing of such dangerous discontents amongst the common people’.67 On Aston’s account, this capacity of his Presbyterian opponents to turn ‘the common people’ into ‘their factors for this freedom’ depended on the propensity of ‘the vulgar’ ‘to snatch at every shadow of liberty’ in order ‘to advance their hierarchy’.68 Freedom or, rather, ‘liberty’ was of the essence here, since it was the successful propagation among the people of what Aston termed ‘the false glosses of pretended liberty’ that enabled the puritans to carry the day. It was, Aston claimed, the Presbyterians’ basic plan ‘by such clamours, cherishing in the vulgar a discontented humour (which is the common source of schism and heresy), thereby the better to broach their new invented discipline, built upon no other basis, but the people’s dislike of popery’.69 290

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But, Aston warned, all such talk of liberty and, indeed, of popery was entirely spurious. For the ‘liberty’ to be achieved would belong not to the people but, rather, to those who had, via the Presbyterian discipline, managed to seize control of the church and were thus able to use that control to lord it over the rest of them. For, in the Remonstrance, Aston repeated the warning in his initial petition that moving from episcopacy to presbytery involved giving up the rule of ‘some six and twenty bishops’ and replacing them with what he called more than once ‘9324 potential popes’, one to each parish; or, rather, since ‘every little parish church should have seven such elders at the least, and every great church thirteen’, the real number of ecclesiastical officers to whom the English would have subjected themselves would be ‘thrice twenty six thousand presbyters and elders’.70 Moreover, while the current administration of the church lay in the hands of bishops, whose ‘delegate power is limited by our statute laws’, the rule of the presbyters and elders to be set up by the discipline would constitute a ‘mere arbitrary government’, exerted by what Aston termed ‘a quotidian chancery in every parish’.71 By enacting the discipline, Aston concluded, ‘we should thus expose ourselves to an irrecoverable subjection to a multitude, whose election’ was derived ‘(iure divino) immediately from Christ Jesus, who are the carvers of their own government’, and therefore the self-regulators of their own conduct.72 Crucial here was the power of the keys; that is to say, the means of spiritual discipline, up to and including excommunication, that the implementation of the discipline would wrest from the bishops and their courts and vest in the hands of the presbyters and elders of each and every parish. The devotees of the discipline, Aston claimed, ‘cannot smother their ambition till they get into possession what is the pride of the prelates’, and that was the power of the keys. Their efforts towards that end were thus animated by no ‘thought of the people’s liberty’; their only aim was ‘to assume into their own hands the same power they cry down in the bishops, not to qualify, but to exalt it above all moderation’.73 Nor was the threat represented by the presbytery to English liberty restricted to ecclesiastical or spiritual matters, conventionally defined. On the contrary, Presbyterians expanded the remit of the spiritual discipline so far as to encompass the entire range of human affairs. On Aston’s account, the whole life of the nation, down to the most petty and private of matters, would be subjected to the control of the ‘little bishop [and] absolute pope’ that, Aston maintained, the discipline would erect ‘in every parish’.74 On this basis, Aston conjured the dystopian prospect of ‘the arbitrary government of a numerous presbytery’ regulating relations ‘betwixt lord and tenant’; or, indeed, between man and wife. ‘If we examine the latitude of their commission’, Aston lamented, ‘we shall find it extend to’ a whole range of ‘petty crimes, which fall not (as they say) under the civil sword: as chiding, fighting, brawling, contempt of the order of the Church, sabbath-breaking, wanton and vain words, negligence in hearing the preacher, neglect of receiving 291

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the Sacraments, suspicion of avarice, or of pride, superfluity or riotousness in cheer or raiment.’75 When to all this was added what Aston termed ‘the general heads of suspicion and scandal’, it became clear ‘how far this insinuates into our private families. Who can be secure of the honour or reputation of wife or daughters, longer than he is sure he hath no maligner?’76 The result, Aston triumphantly proclaimed, was a snooper’s charter of heroic proportions. ‘Now let us well weigh what man lives so upright in all his ways, that is not, or may not be a delinquent at the mercy of these dreadful judges, whose least chastisement is banishment (suspension from the food of life, the blessed word and sacraments) whose easiest prison is hell, and whose punishment (Tradatur Satanae) eternal destruction?’ On this basis, Aston felt able triumphantly to ask, ‘where is then the promised liberty of this so much desired change?’ What was in prospect was not ‘liberty’ of any variety but, rather, the exchange of ‘the legal penalties of positive, and regulated laws which awe our persons, and might (perhaps) pinch our purses, whereof we know how to avoid the breach, or satisfy the penalty’ for a reign of terror under which ‘we shall become mere tenants at will of our souls’.77 Thus would the discipline constitute ‘a general prohibition to all courts of judicature, a mere annihilation of all laws’. Since, in their view, ‘Christ as king (not as priest or prophet) prescribed the form of ecclesiastical government’, and ‘every eldership is the tribunal seat of God’, the Presbyterians would, in effect, ‘deduce’ all ‘judicial power to themselves’.78 Such a system would, Aston warned, cancel ‘our ancient laws (the charters of true liberty)’, leaving us bearing ‘the bonds of such boundless disciplinarians, which hold themselves subordinate neither to emperors, kings, princes, magistrates, laws, parliaments, presbyteries, synods, assemblies, nor ­anything they ever mean to reckon with in this world, but only to Jesus Christ their head’.79 In this way, Aston was able to reconcile his two central claims that the discipline was a royal road to both popularity and tyranny, anarchy and authoritarianism. For, in his analysis, the two tendencies were linked; indeed, the one led inexorably to the other, it being axiomatic that the ‘over-much desire of liberty is the original of tyranny, everyone, by being too free, becoming a slave’.80 And yet there remained a central ambivalence, even an instability, inherent not merely in the Presbyterian discipline as Aston presented it to his readers but even within his own analysis of that discipline. As we have seen, a central strand of his case against the discipline was his insistence on the tyrannical tendencies within a system that would hand power in every parish, and hence in the kingdom as a whole, to a new elite of presbyters – that is to say of puritan clergy – who, once they had used the support of the people to sweep them into power, would rule more or less unchecked.81 But if Aston’s account of the workings of the discipline was dominated by an emergent clerical tyranny, elsewhere he invoked the threat of a genuinely inversionary, popular anarchy. He based this dreadful prospect on the fact that 292

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‘the election of ministers was by every congregation respectively’ and that, as he claimed, under the discipline the ‘power of the keys’ belonged neither to the pastor nor the eldership but, rather, ‘to the whole congregation and to every particular member thereof’.82 ‘This dangerous doctrine’ had appalling consequences not merely for ecclesiastical but for secular government, for, ‘once grounded in vulgar apprehensions, those possessed with an opinion of an equal interest in the power of the keys of the church (which they know how to manage), will much more plausibly embrace the suggestions of a parity in the sway of the state, as better suiting with their capacities’. Once the people were persuaded ‘that we are all sprung from the tribe of Levi’, the old seditious argument will be obvious to them, that we are all the sons of Adam, born free, some of them say, the gospel hath made them free. And law once subverted, it will appear good equity to such chancellors, to share the earth equally … And it is no novelty in the stories of this state, that such artificers have levelled the palaces of nobles, and squared out the dimensions of the gentry and law-givers, according to the rule of their reason.83

Such ‘sugared baits of parity and liberty, infused into vulgar apprehensions under the pretext of piety and reformation’, were, Aston warned, so many ‘popular poisons as will soon o’re spread the body of the commonwealth, and corrupt or dissolve the nerves and ligaments of government (conformity to laws), if not early prevented by those precious antidotes against confusion, loyalty and constancy’.84 If it was true that ‘the empty name of liberty, blown into vulgar ears, hath over-turned many states’, Aston asked, ‘how much more prevalent and dangerous must it be, when enforced as a religious duty to disobey authority?’85 Thus, Aston was able to get his opponents coming and going; having convicted them of attempting an ambitious power-grab that would inevitably end in tyranny and arbitrary rule, he was also able to warn them, and anyone else who would listen, that ‘in working upon the vulgar, who are ready to snatch at every shadow of liberty’, the devotees of the discipline had ‘raised a spirit they have not power to lay again’.86 He was able to pull off this admirably slick polemical manoeuvre through what seems to have been a deliberate piece of obfuscation, based on the claim that the Presbyterians did not believe that the power of the keys lay in the hands of either the pastor or the elders but, rather, resided ‘in the whole congregation and every member thereof’. That was a basic tenet not of Presbyterianism but of what was emerging as Independency, and one that Aston knew about and introduced into his argument through the sermon preached by Samuel Eaton in January 1641 at Knutsford, a summary of which prefaced Aston’s tract.87 Merely by placing this quintessentially independent principle at the centre of what he presented as a unitary account of the Presbyterian discipline Aston was able to have his polemical cake, and eat it too.88 293

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Not that Eaton was Aston’s only source for radical puritan opinion. His margins were dense with references to, and his text sprinkled with quotations from, a range of puritan pamphlets, among them texts by that emergent Independent, Henry Burton. As that might suggest, Aston’s image of the puritan threat was promiscuously various in its sources. Not only did he elide Presbyterianism with Independency, he was similarly loose in his usage of the term ‘separatist’, which he applied fully three times to his supposedly Presbyterian opponents.89 According to Aston, the puritans of his own day ‘run into all the desperate schisms that formerly rent the church; in their contempt of our service, rites and ceremonies, being Brownists; in their false pretended liberty, Familists; in their neglect of due calling, and disdain of learning, Anabaptists ( fanatici homines)’.90 The aim here was to produce a composite image of a radical puritanism entirely at odds not merely with the norms and forms of the English national church but with the entire reformed tradition. To be fair to Aston, as David Como, Peter Lake and Michael Winship have all shown, there was a radical puritan underground, half contained within and fully parasitic upon, the puritan community; an underground that was more than tainted with Familism and various sorts of sectarianism and which, by 1641, was more than starting to come out of the closet.91 Moreover, a good many people, like Henry Burton – the probable author of England’s complaint – who had started out objecting (albeit vociferously) to Laudianism on perfectly conventional ‘reformed’ or moderate puritan grounds, were now moving, often quite violently, to the ‘left’. Local examples of this move might be thought to be those erstwhile moderates Lancaster and Holford, whose vigorous activities in favour of further reformation had rendered them bywords and bugbears for the Werden circle. Aston might be thought here to be using all of these developments in order to tar the whole English puritan tradition, and thus the cause of further reformation tout court, with the brush of sectarianism and heterodoxy. This was quite intentionally to disappear the position being mapped out by Ley into what Aston was presenting as an unforgivingly binary choice between a populist, sectarian and heterodox puritan threat, on the one side, and his own (crypto-Laudian) version of the status quo, on the other. Hence, Ley’s efforts to distance himself from England’s complaint.92 Thus, in marked contrast to Bancroft, the major inspiration, and perhaps even source, for much of Aston’s anti-puritanism, Aston made no attempt to assimilate English Presbyterianism to foreign reformers and reformations. Bancroft had tried to present the Elizabethan Presbyterian movement as but the application to England of ideas and political methods perfected first in Geneva and Scotland, where, on Bancroft’s account, the course of reformation had taken a populist, inherently seditious and anti-monarchical course. He did so to tar the English Presbyterians with the brush of political subversion and resistance theory that he discerned animating events in Scotland 294

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and Geneva. Following the example of Joseph Hall, Aston did the opposite, citing the opinions of the likes of Calvin and Beza to demonstrate the high regard in which the Elizabethan church had been universally held, except by ‘such separatists’ who ‘revile all whom all the world else approves’.93 Indeed, whenever he could, Aston wrapped himself in the flag of the reformed tradition, the more effectively to emphasise the isolation and extremism of his current English puritan opponents. There could scarcely be a greater contrast between Aston’s evocation of a univocally subversive and seditiously populist puritan threat and the basic tenor of John Ley’s works of the spring and summer of 1641. As we have seen, in those works Ley sought to lay the ghost of puritan radicalism, emphasise the errors and enormities of Laudianism and play up the popish threat. He did so in order to define his own position as the quintessence of ‘moderation’, and thus further his own ‘moderate puritan’ reform agenda. Aston wanted to do the precise opposite, virtually eliding the errors and exorbitances of Laudianism, equating even the most moderate puritan requests for more lenient enforcement of conformity with Presbyterian or even separatist radicalism and playing down the popish threat, except insofar as it could be assimilated to, indeed equated with, the puritan one. All of which was combined with an assertively iure divino defence of episcopacy, which Aston presented as an institution essential to order and hierarchy in church, state and society. For, perhaps the chief victim of the Presbyterians’ activities, Aston argued, would be monarchy itself. Aston devoted section 10 of the Remonstrance to demonstrating that ‘presbytery’ was ‘inconsistent with monarchy’. Tellingly, it was at this point that the threat of popery entered Aston’s account. As we have seen, in Bancroft’s famous phrase, for Aston the discipline erected ‘an absolute pope in every parish’. It ‘set up a human authority that Christ never instituted’, in order ‘to exercise a tyranny’. This was the ‘popery of the presbytery’. ‘Every pastor in his diocese (his parish) exercising a papal power, and so doth cunningly undermine the royal office and overthrow God’s sacred ordinance, who hath given a power and charge to kings to suppress all such ecclesiastical tyranny over the souls of his people.’94 After all, Aston argued, the Presbyterians held ‘“that princes must be subject unto the church, and submit their sceptres, and throw down their crowns before the church, and lick up the dust of the feet of the Church”’. That was, in effect, to ascribe ‘to every presbyter what the pope only assumes to himself, that all kings ought to kiss his feet’.95 The fact that that first passage, in which Aston claimed that ‘presbyterial government and jurisdiction’ was ‘merely papal’, was a virtual quotation from England’s complaint, with the term presbytery substituted for episcopacy, illustrates perfectly the extent to which Aston was seeking, throughout his tract, to take the case being made in parliament and the press against episcopacy as a clericalist tyranny run out of legal, lay or royal control, and to 295

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use it against presbytery instead.96 In this inverted, ‘hall of mirrors’, polemical universe, Presbyterianism became a form of popery, and thus Aston’s argument turned on a series of parallels established between popish and Presbyterian views of the origins and nature of royal power. Taking the opinions of notorious resistance theorists like Buchanan, Goodman and Knox as typical of all proponents of the Presbyterian discipline, Aston argued that when it came to the origins and nature of princely power the puritans and papists were at one. Both sides – the marginal note identified Gilby, Buchanan and Bellarmine – held that ‘“kings, princes and governors have their authority of the people, and upon occasion they may take it away again”’.97 In another passage Aston asserted that Cartwright and Sanders98 were at one on the role of Christian princes in the calling and  conduct of church councils. While secular rulers might appoint the time and place of such meetings, the resulting decrees were made on the authority of the clergy, and not that of the prince. Indeed, under the Presbyterian dispensation not only must princes ‘have no power, but they must be subordinate to their presbyters’, submitting ‘themselves … to the just and lawful authority of the church, that is the presbytery’.99 On this basis, Aston claimed triumphantly that ‘in the most essential parts of discipline, which concern the sway of church and state, the subjection of prince and people to the tyranny of their discipline, they do not only shake hands again with popery, but, with the strictest of them (the Jesuits), clearly sever themselves from the tenets of the protestant church’.100 In this way Aston was able to repeat Ley’s trick of identifying his own position in terms both of a quintessentially moderate via media and an unstintingly binary opposition between true and false religion. But, quite unlike Ley, the two extremes which defined Aston’s position were provided by popery and a Presbyterian or separatist rendition of puritanism, which extremes, it turned out, were also functionally equivalent, indeed identical – emanations of the same satanic attempt to undermine the true church.101 Over against the Presbyterian dystopia, to the evocation of which nearly all of Aston’s tract was devoted, he proffered an entirely conventional vision of an absolute, divine-right monarch, governing according to law. In section 9 Aston laid out what he took to be the roots of monarchical power in a discussion based on scripture, ‘history’ and what he termed ‘policy’. Through a number of scriptural passages, Aston sought to demonstrate his belief that ‘God himself had an high hand in the institution of kings and princes. Nor doth he seem to subject them to the question of inferiors … his precept “touch not mine anointed” puts a guard upon their sacred persons, which to violate, though in our own defense, is a breach of his command.’ Nor did subjects’ obligations towards their monarchs last only ‘while they rule us after our own desires’. Here Aston cited Ambrose’s response ‘upon receiving imperial command to deliver up the churches’ – ‘“If I be compelled, I may not oppose”’.102 296

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If that was the verdict of scripture and, Aston hastened to add, of the reformed churches, ‘history’, too, taught the same lessons. Here he compared the longevity achieved by Sparta, a polity ‘wherein the king, the nobility and the people all had their just proportions of power’, with the fate of Athens, which, ‘being a popular state, scarce stood out an age’. Aston quoted Tacitus, maintaining that ‘it is necessary the body of one empire should be governed by one head, which must not be barely a titular head, a shadow of power without the weight of it, for laws well-made avail little, unless they be entrusted to a hand that hath power to exact execution of them’. Finally, on the basis of two quotations from Bracton, Aston concluded that ‘these principles of divinity or policy’ did not ‘essentially differ, but rather seem to be the same with the fundamentals of the laws of this kingdom’.103 As we have seen, Aston had asserted that episcopacy was an institution based on divine right. But in an opening epistle directed ‘to the honourable the lord bishops’ he told their lordships that he intended to provide a ‘politic’ as well as a ‘divine’ defence of their order. Thus he told the bishops that not only did he ‘look upon your sacred order as an apostolical, therefore not questionable, institution’, but he also considered your predecessors as the ballast which have poised the barks of monarchy, to sail safely in the sea of vulgar, whose piety and wisdom first prescribed the medium twixt tyranny and anarchy. Till bishops helped to reduce the unbounded wills of princes to the limits of laws, kings were tyrants. And where ever they are not, there ever follows a popular (which is a worse) tyranny.104

Thus, Aston concluded, ‘the archbishops and bishops (the clergy) have ever represented a third part of this monarchic body, being present at and consentient to the making of all those laws which have been constituted for the preservation and government of the whole politic body’.105 This was to identify the bishops as ‘the representative body of the clergy’, in effect, one of the three estates of the realm, ‘who, by former statutes, have had the same privileges granted to them in parliament time as other great men and commons have’.106 Citing Sir Edward Coke, Aston quoted examples from the reigns of Ina, king of the West Saxons, Offa, king of Mercia, Ethelbert, king of Kent, and King Alfred to establish that bishops had always been ‘counselors in the general council’, elsewhere termed ‘parliament’, ‘for the safety of the people’.107 On this basis, Aston argued that the bishops had become inextricably intermixed with the workings of both the common law and statute law, not to mention the royal prerogative. Again citing Coke, Aston asked whether wholly to root up this order, which hath thus been supported by our laws ever since we had laws, to nullify these privileges, which have the same antiquity, authority that we can challenge for ours, to divide this body politick, which hath never been severed since we had a head, to take away these confirmed temporalities, may not be conceived a dangerous breach upon this bulwark of our liberties 297

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Such remarks made in May 1641 represented a strong assertion of the right of the bishops to keep their place in the House of Lords, and of the extreme unwisdom of removing them, since this would represent the first step towards the dissolution of the ancient constitution that had guaranteed English liberties since Saxon times. After all, ‘the bishops’ writs of summons’ were ‘as ancient, and in the same words as those of the temporal barons. Their baronies’ had been ‘created by the conqueror’. After ‘fifteen hundred years royal patronage, near a thousand years prescription to their votes in parliament, the king’s writs of seven hundred years constant practise’, if their ‘rights and liberties’ in this regard could be challenged by the sort of populist, puritan rout which had produced the Cheshire root and branch petition, then whose were safe? Thus, Aston felt able to conclude, since ‘nothing was more dangerous to a state than to admit an alteration of its fundamental institutions’, episcopacy must be retained in pretty much its present form.109 Certainly, Aston argued, to remove the bishops and to replace them with the presbytery would massively reduce the power of the crown. For ‘the supreme power over ecclesiastical persons’, which Aston (once more citing Coke) maintained that the kings of England had enjoyed since time immemorial, ‘is no way more manifested than in the designation or nomination of bishops (the supreme officers in the church)’. ‘Now if this pre-eminence over the state ecclesiastical, this right of election or designation being of fifteen hundred years prescription, allowed and confirmed, both by common and statute law, be not a legal and inseparable prerogative, then certainly the old maxim, nullum tempus occurrit regi, is of little force.’110 Herein lay the essence of Aston’s defence of episcopacy. In the balance of the arguments adduced in his tract, the bishops’ role in staving off the threat of a populist Presbyterian tyranny, and thus in maintaining monarchical order and the rule of law, carried just as much, indeed arguably rather more, weight as their status as the bearers of an apostolic office. Although, as we have seen, Aston could scarcely be accused of underselling that aspect of his case. While the bishops ‘admit the king the supreme head of the church under Christ, receive their designation from him, hold the inferior hath not power over the superior’, the Presbyterians did not.111 The power of the bishops was by definition ‘a delegate power’, ‘limited by our statute laws’, their ‘persons’ ‘easily’ held accountable for any actions that went ‘beyond those bounds the parliament allots them’.112 By contrast, the powers claimed by the presbytery were arbitrary, unlimited by any law and unconstrained by the exercise of any lay authority. Which of these, Aston asked his readers, was more conducive to liberty or true freedom under the law? Aston knew the answer to that question: ‘If law be king, and will a tyrant, sure all that will 298

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preserve law, and will love liberty’ could only ‘unwillingly submit their necks to the tyrannical yoke of such discipline’.113 There was also a remarkable class politics to Aston’s anti-Presbyterianism. Here Aston diverged a second time from the analysis of his mentor Bancroft; for Bancroft had seen the Presbyterian movement as supported by three main constituencies – the ministers, the gentry and the people – and his analysis proceeded forensically to pick apart the divergent ends and purposes that each of those three groups hoped to realise through the process of Presbyterian revolution. On Bancroft’s account, not only were those ends and interests thoroughly self-serving and corrupt, they were also mutually incompatible. This allowed Bancroft to accuse the discipline of constituting simultaneously a clerical power grab, an anti-clerical assault upon the wealth of the church and a populist attempt to overthrow all order in church and state.114 In contrast, Aston’s analysis concentrated almost entirely on the clerical power grab and the populist assault aspects of Bancroft’s case. For, unlike Bancroft, Aston wanted nothing to do with the alleged puritanism of the gentry. The very notion of gentry puritanism was to him an oxymoron. Given the clericalist and populist nature of the threat, the gentry either were, or should become, united in their opposition to Presbyterian revolution and, as such, natural allies of the bishops. One of Aston’s main complaints against the Cheshire root-and-branch petition was that it had been, in Aston’s phrase, ‘smothered up from the knowledge and counsels of the gentry’, and presented to the parliament in the name of ‘the freeholders’ of the county. Since, on his account, ‘the county’ consisted of its ‘civil gentry’, it had become essential to produce a counter-blast from that same gentry, who as ‘for antiquity [we] shall subscribe to none, so I hope shall we ever testify our zeal as great, our resolutions as firm to preserve our ancient liberties, as any country whatsoever’.115 In thus seeking to supplant the nobility and gentry as the personification of the county, and the natural governors of the realm, the Presbyterians were undermining the major bulwark that stood between England and anarchy. ‘I consider the nobility and gentry of this isle (this nursery of honour) situate as the Low Countries in a flat, under the banks and bounds of the laws, secured from the inundations of that ocean, the vulgar, which, by the breach of those bounds, would quickly overwhelm us, and deface all distinctions of degrees or persons.’ And that, Aston left his readers in no doubt, would be the fate visited upon them if the bishops were abolished and replaced by the presbytery. Indeed he marvelled how, ‘Sampson-like in their full strength (but as blind with inconsiderate zeal, as he by treachery)’, the Presbyterians and their popular following should lay hold on those pillars of our state that prop up the regulated fabric of this glorious monarchy, and by cracking them, willfully bury themselves and us in the rubbish of that chaos, which they so pull upon their own heads, seeking to 299

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The crisis, 1641–42 turn our freedom into fetters, by cancelling our ancient laws (the charters of true liberty) and exposing us eternal apprentices to the arbitrary jurisdiction of a new corporation of apron elders, mechanic artisans.116

The combination of (political) fear and (social) loathing so patent in that last sentence sums up perfectly the pitch Aston was trying to make, and indeed the fears that he was trying to exploit in making it. In stating his case in these terms, Aston was playing local, as well as national, politics. After all, the struggle in Cheshire had been about undecided gentry opinion; opinion which had to be won over in order for the resulting coalition to be able to speak as the undivided voice of the county. Having failed in that attempt the first time around, Aston was here coming back for a second try. He was seeking to win over undecided or miffed Cheshire gentlemen by playing up the plebeian support, the subversively populist methods and the inversionary purport of root and branch Presbyterian reform, in the process wrapping himself in the flag of the rule of law and the protection of legitimate royal and episcopal authority. It was, of course, for this reason that Aston, unlike his mentor Bancroft, went so silent on the subject of gentry puritanism. For his current purposes the campaign for puritan reformation had to represent a populist and clericalist threat to, indeed assault upon, the gentry, none of whom, once they realised what they were confronted with, could possibly support, or even continue to connive at, such a thing. If Aston wanted to scare the Cheshire gentry into his anti-puritan, pro-episcopal, proto-royalist camp, then, in effect denouncing some of the very people he was trying persuade as themselves tainted with puritanism would be anything but a winning strategy.

WHO SPEAKS FOR CHESHIRE? OR FOR ‘THE COUNTY’ AND ‘THE CAUSE’? Thus, the publication of Aston’s Remonstrance against presbytery represented a continuation of his essentially bi-polar approach to politics. For, by this point, playing off interests and divisions in the locality against the political needs and requirements of a variety of central authorities, using his clout at the centre to enhance his standing in the locality and his standing there to similarly enhance his status at the centre, had become, for him, an entirely familiar modus operandi, having pursued just such a political strategy over ship money with energy and imagination. After being rebuffed at the county election for the Long Parliament, Aston had seized on the issue of root and branch to intervene both in county and national politics. As we have seen, his petitioning campaign allowed him to claim a public representative role in defending the name of episcopacy from populist/puritan assault, while at the same time to dish his local rival Sir William Brereton and to advance his connections with the court and the political programme of the king. In many 300

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ways, Aston was trying to do here precisely what many members of the Long Parliament were also doing: shuffling, indeed trying to mediate, between the movements of local opinion and events and an even more volatile national political scene. It was just that Aston was trying to perform this trick from outside, rather than from inside, the parliament, basing his claims to be a ‘public’ or ‘representative’ person not on membership of the parliament but on his petitioning activities and his politico-religious contacts and influence in both court and country. He was appealing to, and trying to manipulate, a variety of different points of central authority, in the process playing off the shifting loci of administrative and political power that were constantly coagulating and dissolving, forming and reforming, across Westminster and Whitehall. In short, Aston was operating as a sort of one-man point of contact, a freelance public man and representative person, intervening in events at the centre on the basis of his local support base, his claimed capacity to speak for the county and, in the locality, through the backing of whatever emanations of central authority he could co-opt. The ironies at work here were considerable; for here was the great opponent of puritanism and popularity appealing to ‘the people’ through the press and a mass petitioning campaign conducted with all the skill and commitment of any puritan firebrand. In doing so, just as much as the godly, Sir Thomas was seeking to bend to his purposes the fragmentation both of central authority and of provincial opinion consequent upon a national political crisis. Again, just like the puritans, he was seeking to coordinate and interconnect events at the centre and in the localities, representing the county and the country to the centre and the centre to the county or country, in ways likely to further his particular politico-religious agenda. The greatest paradox here was that, although Aston claimed that the only people who could speak for the county were the gentry, and that, quite unlike his puritan opponents, he was letting them do precisely that, his claim to speak for Cheshire could only actually be established by an exercise in mass petitioning – that is to say, by appealing to ‘the people’, albeit in a deeply anti-popular cause. Clearly, the contradictions of populist ‘conservatism’ are no new thing. Further insights into this agenda and the ideological imperatives that informed it can be gleaned from what Aston and his circle were saying to one another in private. Precisely because Aston seems to have spent much of the crucial period in London, he received a stream of chatty newsletters from his friends, allies and agents in the county. From them we can gain a sense of the mixture of liturgically informed piety and intense political loyalty to the person of the monarch that informed their efforts. Perhaps the star exhibit here is a remarkable letter, dated ‘beatissimi dei’, and written by Werden to Aston upon receipt of the king’s letter of support. The day is the most happy anniversary inauguration of the blessed reign of our gracious sovereign and this the first employment of that day wherein the ­opportunity 301

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The crisis, 1641–42 adds fervency to my prayers, that God would lengthen his days as the days of heaven and protect him with a choir grand of angels that his wisdom may yet more appear as a ray of God’s spirit. You have, Sir, honoured me with an employment whereof my life and fortune cannot be worthy both in showing me so blessed a resolution of his sacred Majesty and making me the messenger of so acceptable an evangelium to my good old lord [the earl of Derby] and those other noble men to whom this divine goodness is directed … For my part I have begged his Majesty’s letter of my Lord that my dying prayer may bless those happy characters and royal hand which gave us assurance of preservation from schisms and innovations … I do not know what could have added more cheerfulness from earth to my nunc dimittis than the promising blessings of his Majesty’s goodness.117

With its liturgical and para-liturgical references, its constant slippage between divine and royal favour, between the word of God and that of the king, with its sense of the charismatic, almost talismanic, relic-like significance conferred on the holder by physical possession of the royal holograph, the letter breathes the language of sacerdotal kingship, of what one might term Laudian absolutism. It exists on a cusp dividing the culture of the Caroline court and that of later church-and-king Cavalier Anglicanism. It is all the more remarkable in a letter of March 1641 coming not from the court to the country but from an obscure provincial lawyer and man-of-business writing to a gentleman of the privy chamber. Aston, too, seems to have collapsed his religious allegiances to the national church and episcopacy into his political allegiance to his monarch. Writing of the motives of the authors of the Attestation, Aston himself casually observed that ‘I know not out of what zeal, whether against me or the cause would needs set this gin a work again’. ‘The cause’, of course, was ‘the preservation of the church government’ – something to which Werden at one point referred simply as ‘God’s own cause’ – now seen as both an end in itself and a token for, or symbol of, a wider sense of political loyalty.118 For, since episcopacy ‘was so consonant with the word of God, the constant practise of all times since Christianity came in and so acceptable to the king, as he hath declared himself, no loyal person should thus maliciously wrestle against it’.119 Aston continued to pursue this line in print, in his Remonstrance. This was dedicated to the king, wore Charles’s epistolary approval of the petition of February as a badge of honour and repeated the argument that, given the king’s express support for episcopacy, no genuinely loyal subject could continue to oppose it. Of course, Aston claimed to be motivated by his loyalty not only to ‘the cause’ but also to ‘the county’ or ‘the country’. He had, he asserted at one point, ‘a real heart for my country’s service’. In his dealings with the authors of the Attestation, he presented himself not so much as an intransigent defender of ‘the cause’ but as the vindicator of both his own and, more importantly, ‘the county’s’ honour from the fraudulent and seditious efforts of Brereton and the local puritans to commandeer it for their own pernicious 302

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purposes. Thus, even as they privately used the language of division and ideological polarisation, of loyalty and disloyalty, of orthodoxy and schism, of good Christians and ‘precisians’, Aston and his allies continued, in public, to deploy the rhetoric of unity and consensus, of honour and shame, in the representation and service of what were traditionally taken as univocal notions of entirely compatible, indeed of almost interchangeable, entities that went variously under the names of ‘the county’, ‘the country’, the ‘public’ and ‘the cause’. His stance before the authors of the Attestation was one of aggrieved innocence. He presented himself as the guardian of the honour, the integrity and the unity of the county. It was those who, for their own private purposes, had refused to support his efforts who were, in fact, failing in their duty towards both Cheshire and ‘the country’. ‘You might have done yourselves more right and more good to the commonwealth,’ Sir Thomas indignantly told them, ‘by joining in [rather] than excepting against that petition.’ ‘Tis the fate of all times,’ he lamented, ‘divisions have been and will be while there are men. But woe and sorrow to them by whom such divisions come.’120 Thus was an entirely traditional, positive language of unity and consensus, of loyalty and service to the county and commonwealth, of public professions and commitments publicly kept, together with an equally traditional negative language of division and faction, created by the preference of private respects to public duties, turned on the middle group. Moreover, this was being done by the very man whom they clearly regarded as guilty of having, for his own private, both personal and political, interests, divided the county by usurping a public representative role to which he had no right. Aston’s wriggling around to try to justify his actions did him little good with the middle group. The Attestation may have run out of steam soon after it was presented in the Commons, but over the summer he continued to face difficulties at the hands of the Commons as the aldermen of Chester revived the vendetta which had begun when he was ship money sheriff in 1636. On 18 June he was summoned to appear before the Commons to answer allegations about his activities as a tax farmer. When he failed to appear he was sent for as a delinquent, and on 20 July the case was referred to the Commons’ ‘committee for customers’. In a letter of 7 August a group of senior aldermen wrote to Sir Thomas Smith, Chester’s MP, thanking him for his continuing efforts ‘in the business of Sir Thomas Aston’. Clearly, his enemies in both the city and the county were not about to leave him alone.121 At the same time, however, Aston’s national reputation was burgeoning. Following his presentation of the February petition and the publication of his Remonstrance against presbytery in late May, he had gained a status well beyond the borders of Cheshire as a leading light in the defence of episcopacy. At his old university of Oxford his efforts elicited a rapturous response. Robert Heywood wrote to him in October to convey ‘the general approbation and applause that in Oxford is given to your book and its author’ and ‘the free offers of divers of our private friends (to assist in anything wherein you 303

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shall have need in your endeavors to advance our common cause)’. Moreover, Heywood offered to oversee the reprinting of the Remonstrance against presbytery at Oxford, ‘where it shall not be in danger of being seized on for a non-licit booke, the hazard it lately ran’.122 Among those who had signed the Attestation, Aston’s emergence as the torch-bearer for the fight-back against Presbyterianism was hardly likely to have commended him. Yet, by October 1641 several of the leading figures behind the Attestation had signed up to a second petition from the shire organised by Aston, this time in defence of the Book of Common Prayer. How did this come about?

CONSENSUS ACHIEVED? OR THE BENEFITS OF STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY In part it was a response to the increasing threat to order posed by puritansponsored disruption of services and outbreaks of iconoclasm. These were encouraged by the Commons’ order of 8 September 1641 that Philip Moreton, writing to his father, summed up as a measure ‘to take away the rails from the communion table in every church and to remove the table from the east end of the church into some convenient place and to level the chancels and that all crucifixes etc. should be taken away and that bowing at the name of Jesus should be foreborne’.123 As Anthony Fletcher, John Walter and others have shown, the order unleashed further local campaigns of iconoclasm and challenges to the hierarchy and discipline of the church of England, and generated a conservative backlash. In county after county petitions were drawn up during November and December 1641 to denounce the religious anarchy and social chaos that these ‘seditious sectaries’ were fomenting, and to defend the prayer book or episcopacy, or both.124 As we have seen, such concerns had loomed large in Cheshire since the start of the year, and they were not about to go away. In August 1641, in a letter to Sir Thomas Smith, Werden returned to his familiar themes: the greatest news we have is that all our country churches are full of exercises for thanksgivings (this is the word of art) but the tenor of all these sermons are against the bishops and their government. Last week there was one at Little Budworth, this week there was one at Barrow and Thornton, the next week at Tarvin etc. The New England Mr Eaton and Mr Holford preached at Barrow this week, but Eaton was modest in comparison to Holford, who railed most damnably against all church government as it is established.125

Alarm at such radical puritan activity was not confined to Werden, Aston and their allies. In an earlier letter, Werden noted that when Sir Thomas Delves, one of the leading members of the Booth–Wilbraham middle group, was asked his opinion of the Wybunbury curate’s refusal to read from the service book, he ‘said dryly that he did not like it’.126 The House of Commons’ 304

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inspired iconoclasm also led to clashes, even though, as James Mawdesley has shown, it was carried out in a relatively orderly fashion by paid workmen. When Calvin Bruen, now sheriff of Chester, attempted to remove a ‘scandalous window’ in the cathedral church he was resisted by William Bispham, one of the Aston-supporting prebends, who insisted that it could be removed only with the consent of the dean and chapter.127 The enhanced visibility of the more seditious and destructive aspects of radical puritan reform during the autumn of 1641 was producing a reaction not just among religious conservatives but also evangelical Calvinists like Grosvenor, who were becoming alarmed at the ‘separatist’ excesses of the likes of Samuel Eaton. This provided one of the contexts for the willingness of the leadership of the middle group to work with Aston to stem the tide of such activity. Another was the continued salience within Cheshire of the ideal of a united county community, and the associated expectations and standards of behaviour. As we have seen, this continued to exert rhetorical and moral force, even amid the bitterness and recriminations which accompanied the presenting of the Attestation. The sense of common traditions and interests and, indeed, class solidarity of the gentry of Cheshire remained a powerful impulse towards consensus. Werden had reported in May that Thomas Cotton was still hoping to persuade Sir Richard Wilbraham to subscribe to a new petition which appears to have related to the declarations of support for Aston’s actions drawn up by Cholmondeley and his allies at this time. The petition was ‘now sent to Sir Richard Wilbraham subscription which if he gain I will hope it may prove a reconciler and gain myriads of more hands unto it’.128 Wilbraham was consistently regarded by Aston and his friends as the most biddable and approachable of the middle group, and, with his wide contacts and emollient reputation, he was crucial to any bridge-building efforts. It did not work on this occasion, but a recognition that it was important to make such approaches and be seen to be working for the unity of the ‘country’ – if only to be able to deflect the charge of factionalism – remained deeply ingrained in the mindset of the Cheshire gentry. Such a process appears to have been considerably advanced at an important meeting of quarter sessions at Knutsford on 5 October 1641. Attendance, as usual, was dominated by leading members of the middle group: Sir George Booth, Sir Richard Wilbraham’s brother Hugh and William Leversage, along with their allies in the parliamentary elections and the Attestation, John Crewe, Thomas Stanley, Richard Brereton of Ashley and William Marbury. Also present were Sir William Brereton and Peter Venables, back in Cheshire for the parliamentary recess, and Earl Rivers and Sir Thomas Aston, home from London for the traditional Michaelmas reckoning of rentals and tenancies. The assembled justices ordered two important inquests into the affairs of the shire: one on the fines imposed by the assize judges over the perennially sensitive issue of bridge and highway repairs; the other into the county’s military affairs, requiring accounts to be provided by the deputy lieutenants 305

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for the previous three years. Significantly, in each case the group of JPs chosen to implement these investigations spanned the divide between Aston’s allies in the February petition and those who signed the Attestation.129 The united action on behalf of the county that Aston had claimed to be promoting by trying to bring ‘both ends’ together earlier in the year was being revived. This provided the second context for discussions about a new, county-wide petition. One can envisage a process of negotiation similar to that taking place in January in which Aston once more approached the members of the old county establishment to find a form of words on which all could agree. Only this time he was successful. Booth, Wilbraham and Grosvenor all signed up to the petition which eventually emerged, along with their perennial allies Hugh Wilbraham and William Leversage, and also Richard Hunt, the minister appointed by Wilbraham at his home parish at Acton, who had been involved in the earlier negotiations.130 This petition eschewed the issue of episcopacy and church government altogether. Its only concern was the Book of Common Prayer, with, as the petition put it, ‘the happy settlement of the distractions both of church and state’ which had been caused by ‘the present disorders of many turbulent and ill disposed spirits’. The faith of the English church was guaranteed, the petition explained, by the orthodoxy of its doctrine. ‘The pure seed of our faith (the doctrine of the true reformed protestant religion) established by so many acts of parliament and so harmoniously concurring with the confessions of all other reformed churches.’ This, however, was now under threat because of ‘the tares of divers sects and schisms lately spring [sic] up amongst us’. The great bulwark against this threat was, the petition claimed, our pious laudable and ancient form of divine service, composed by the holy martyrs, and worthy instruments of reformation, established by the prudent sages of the state (your religious predecessors), honoured by the approbation of many learned foreign divines, subscribed by the ministry of the whole kingdom and, with much general content, received by the whole laity … in the conscionable use whereof many Christian hearts have found unspeakable joy and comfort, wherein the famous church of England, our dear mother, hath just cause to glory.

This was very exalted language indeed, and the petition went on to denounce those who ‘should teach conformity to established laws’ but who, instead, ‘depraved’ ‘so blessed liturgy’: All these daily practised with confidence, without punishment, to the great dejection of many sound protestants and occasioning so great insultation and rejoicing in some separatists, as they not only seem to portend, but menace, some great alteration; and, not containing themselves within the bound of civil government, do commit many tumultuous (if not sacrilegious) violences both day and night upon divers churches.131

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This, then, was not an anti-Presbyterian petition but an anti-sectarian one. Its targets were agents of disorder and illegality, people who refused to use the proper forms for public worship, who were described as the proponents of ‘sects and schisms’, ‘turbulent and ill disposed spirits’, ‘separatists’. These were the people – ‘factious spirits’ who ‘do evidently endanger the peace both of church and state’ – who the petition demanded should be speedily suppressed.132 Such language could be glossed in a number of ways. For someone with Aston’s preconceptions, it seemed to agree that any and all failures to use the full panoply of prayer book piety was tantamount to separation. For someone more sympathetic to at least the more moderate forms of puritan belief and practice, it made the petition the basis for a common front against real sectaries and separatists, as opposed to other sorts of puritan. For all the exalted terms in which the petition described the book of common prayer, in practice, even that was left on the table, available for further reform. For the petition actually asked for an ‘end of innovation of doctrine or liturgy’ because ‘that holy public service being so fast rooted by a long settled continuance in this church … cannot be altered (unless by the advice and consent of some national synod)’, which of course was imminent in the last days of 1641, when the petition was actually presented.133 And here the choice of the word synod rather than convocation is surely of the first significance, for, as Gardiner observed, ‘convocation gave a preponderating voice to the bishops and the chapters … whereas a synod would give expression to the general feeling of the clergy’ or, rather, of those called by parliament to attend such a meeting.134 Moreover, by omitting all mention of church government the petition left the issue of episcopacy wide open either for reform or even for abolition at the hands of just such a synod. This omission was of particular significance; for, as we shall see, in some of the schedules on the basis of which signatures were collected bishops were included, which shows that at least some people in the county intended this to be a statement about the government as well as the liturgy of the church. On the basis of his Remonstrance, which, of course, was obsessed with the issue of church government and with episcopacy as a bastion of order in church, state and society, Aston was himself one such. Elsewhere too, other petitions emerging out of the anti-puritan reaction occasioned by the Commons’ order of 8 September did indeed leap to the defence of bishops as well as of the prayer book.135 This, then, was a very pregnant silence indeed; one which might be thought to represent an implicit acceptance of the Long Parliament’s proposals, worked out over the summer, for an ongoing process of reform under the auspices of the Westminster Assembly, with local power being devolved in the meantime to a combination of gentry and godly ministers – precisely the sort of alliance between minister and magistrate that had animated men like Grosvenor’s moderate puritan image of order in church, state and society in the period before 1640.136 The resulting changes appeared to prevent the second petition from being, 307

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like the first had been, an endorsement of a settlement largely on the king’s terms, and instead made it something altogether more nuanced and open ended. On this view, the process of settlement was not necessarily over yet and the signatories to this petition were not committed (as anyone signing onto Aston’s petition of the previous February had been) to an essentially ‘royalist’, still less an episcopalian, account of where to go from here. In short, the issues and language of this petition enabled a very different sort of coalition to be constructed behind it from that envisaged, or enabled, by Aston’s petition of the previous February. Where that petition had tried to use the issue of church government and episcopacy, and an essentially political anti-puritanism constructed around those issues, to build support for a king in the process of limiting, indeed ultimately of rejecting, the projected settlement being worked out for him at Westminster, the prayer-book petition envisaged, or at least allowed for, an open-ended process of settlement between crown and parliament; a process which might well involve the wholesale reform, if not the removal, of episcopacy and, at the very least, a certain amount of tinkering with the prayer book. That, surely, was why the likes of Wilbraham, Booth and Grosvenor were prepared to sign onto the second petition but not to the first. Perhaps significantly, unlike Aston’s first petition, which had been presented to the Lords alone, this one was addressed to the crown in parliament: ‘to the King’s excellent Majesty, to the right honourable House of Lords and the honourable House of Commons assembled in parliament’.137 These impressions are supported by an examination of the schedules of signatures and forms of words actually presented via the king to the Lords in December. Just like those assembled behind the pro-episcopal petition of February, these encompassed a very wide range of contemporary opinions, preferences and agendas indeed. Thus, some parishes in the Wirral signed onto a far more comprehensively conservative form of words than anything contained in the final version presented to parliament. The ‘inhabitants’ of the parishes of Eastham, Bromborough and Stoke endorsed a paper ‘heartily desiring the happy continuance of the liturgy and government of the church of England our dear mother and the timely suppression of all factious schismatics’. Others merely endorsed ‘the petition we have heard read concerning the book of common prayer’. But what had that petition said, precisely, about the Book of Common Prayer? In some cases the heading simply affirmed that ‘we desire that the book of common prayer may stand as formerly it hath’. Other versions merely mentioned a petition ‘for the settling of the liturgy’. Others still spoke of the ‘settling’, ‘establishing’ or ‘preserving’ of either the liturgy or the Book of Common Prayer.138 Such a wide variety of forms of words left room for a number of distinct constructions of the church or pattern of worship being ‘settled’, ‘established’ or ‘preserved’. On the one hand, they might imply a full defence of the liturgy and government of the national church; on the other, they might imply a ‘settling’ of the liturgy 308

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through a process of piecemeal reform of the existing prayer book. In the middle, under the rubric of the prayer book ‘standing as it hath’, there was room for the preservation of what might well have been a wide spectrum of divergent local patterns of worship, all based (more or less closely) on the norms of the prayer book. Again, therefore, the range of opinions being aligned behind a conservative Cheshire petition about the church was considerable. This too was a coalition-building exercise, and probably precisely because of that the petition in its final form was a document that, for all the severity of its anti-puritanism (or, rather, in its own terms, its anti-separatism), for all the ‘conservatism’ of its language and assumptions, in fact still left the way clear for all sorts of modified or reduced episcopacy, even (if only by virtue of its silence on the subject of church government) for Presbyterianism. It also allowed, at the very least, for some further fine tuning of the prayer book by a national synod (not convocation) called finally to ‘settle’ or ‘establish’ the liturgy. In other words, unlike the earlier pro-episcopal petition, not merely the schedules used to collect signatures but the actual text of the petition as presented to parliament clearly revealed the assembling of a coalition or spectrum of opinion. This ranged from more or less unrepentant Laudians to men like, for instance, Sir Richard Grosvenor, who, on the criteria of the period before 1640, might well have qualified as moderate puritans, people who were, of course, in many ways, the ultimate ‘prayer book protestants’ – that is to say, hot Protestants who used the prayer book. The petition allowed people of Grosvenor’s stripe to make common cause with the likes of Aston and Werden against what they all agreed were unacceptable forms of radical puritan dissent and innovation, but to do so behind a carefully nuanced and rather open-ended account of the status quo to be defended from separatist assault. The breadth of the coalition thus mobilised was demonstrated in the range of support for this petition as compared to the one in February. This time more signatures were collected – nearly nine thousand in all – and it was subscribed in parishes where there was no evidence of support for the earlier petition. These included the area around Grosvenor’s estates, just south of Chester, and parts of Macclesfield hundred that had not been reached by the episcopal petition, including Macclesfield itself and Thomas Stanley’s parish at Alderley, where the vicar, Samuel Shipton, led the signatories. However, by no means all of the middle group’s allies were convinced by the wording or were ready to trust Aston and his associates. Richard Brereton, John Crewe, William Marbury and Stanley, all active justices and signatories to the Attestation, were conspicuous by their absence among the signatories to the petition.139 These were men of a younger generation from Booth, Wilbraham and Grosvenor. Their experiences in local politics had been formed in the late 1620s and 1630s and their attitudes were, perhaps, more polarised. As we have seen, Stanley had emerged in 1640 as a fierce and outspoken opponent of ship money. Of the religious views of these ­individuals, we know 309

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most about John Crewe’s. He was personally close to Sir Richard Wilbraham, whose gifts at his wedding and eldest son’s christening in 1641 he proudly recorded in his commonplace book. But he was also identified as Brereton’s chief agent in the shire in building a case against Aston in March, and he was a staunch puritan and admirer of Nathaniel Lancaster, whose debut sermon in his home parish of Tarporley he also noted in his commonplace book.140 If, as seems likely, Crewe supported the puritan rejection of the prayer book being practised by Lancaster and his curate, this would explain his reluctance to support the petition in its defence. For the others no such evidence survives; but they certainly had good grounds for suspecting the uses to which Aston and his allies were likely to put such a petition. Once again the gathering of signatures was in the hands of Aston supporters, such as Thomas Cholmondeley and Peter Leycester of Tabley; and the final collection of the schedules in Chester was managed by none other than John Werden.141 This was, perhaps, reason enough to distrust the process; but what must really have set alarm bells ringing was a well-publicised episode at Chester cathedral on 1 November which indicated that the process of subscription could be every bit as fraught and divisive as it had been earlier in the year. At the last minute, William Bispham, the prebend prominent in Aston’s earlier campaign, had reassigned the supervision of the morning service where subscriptions were due to be taken to William Clarke, the anti-puritan petty canon whom we encountered denouncing Thomas Holford in 1637. Clarke proceeded to deliver an address which went far beyond the carefully modulated tone of the petition itself, and glossed it as an attack not just on sectaries, but on all who could be described as puritans. He identified them, alongside the papists, as the ‘2 common enemies’ of the ‘church of England’ who, ‘like Samson’s foxes are divided in their heads but tied together by the tails & carry fire brands with them which sets the Christian world in a combustion where ere they come’. Moreover, he claimed that at this moment the puritans presented much the greater threat, since ‘the papists … have left us for a long time (I mean from troubling of the outward peace of the church), nay to my knowledge divers of them of late have conformed themselves to our church’. (Clarke’s timing was, to say the least, unfortunate, since a couple of days earlier news had reached Chester of the Catholic Rebellion in Ireland, which claimed the lives of thousands of Protestants.)142 All their attention, he insisted, must be focused ‘upon the other sect who go about with might and main to overthrow our discipline and to this purpose had pitched upon 2 eminent projects, the one against the hierarchy & the other against the liturgy of our church’. Thanks to the ‘wisdom and prudence of the nobility, gentry and ministers of the county Palatine of Chester, spying into & perceiving the inconveniences which grew thereupon, petitioned his sacred Majesty and high and honorable court of parliament for establishing the episcopacy’; and their efforts had been recognised in the letter from the king, as ‘I doubt not that divers of you have heard & myself seen under his Majesty’s own hand’. 310

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Nonetheless, in spite of being thwarted in their designs against episcopacy, the puritans were now ‘violently fallen upon the liturgy’, which the gentry and nobility of the shire were once again rallying to defend.143 Two aspects of Clarke’s address were picked up on as particularly offensive by members of the congregation who deposed against him. One was the equating of the puritans with the papists; the other was the explicit link established between the puritan challenges to episcopacy and the prayer book, a linkage that the drafters of the second petition had been very careful to avoid, but that some of the signatories evidently recognised. These were seen as sufficiently divisive to persuade the mayor and aldermen to pass on their informations against Clarke to the House of Commons to invite further action. It was the potential for glossing the petition in a way which condemned the activities of all puritans, and presented a defence not just of the liturgy but also of the government of the church, which probably put off erstwhile allies of Booth, Wilbraham and Grosvenor from signing up to it. In the final analysis, a good deal must have depended on how much it mattered to them to go on presenting a united front on behalf of the shire and, of course, how much they trusted Sir Thomas Aston. The older members of the county establishment, with their deeply ingrained habits of prioritising the peace and unity of the county community, were prepared to set aside their previous differences; others, who in many respects shared their political and religious outlook, were not.

ASTON DOES IT AGAIN, OR CHESHIRE PETITIONS AND THE GRAND REMONSTRANCE In the event, the wariness about Aston’s intentions was vindicated. Once the petition had been drawn up, the signatures collected and the schedules packed up for submission, it was sent off to London, where its ultimate impact and meaning would be reframed by the precise timing of its insertion into the central political narrative. And it was Aston who controlled that. The petition arrived in London after the king’s return from Scotland, in the midst of the great debates over the Grand Remonstrance. Very probably through the good offices of Aston and his connections at court, the petition was first ‘presented to the King’s Majesty and from him recommended to the house of peers by the Lord Keeper’. It was introduced in the Lords on 20 December, the very day when Bristol was busily turning a proposal from the Commons to ban toleration for Catholics into an anti-puritan as well as an anti-Catholic measure, by adding the rider that no religion should be tolerated ‘in his Majesty’s dominions of England and Ireland but what is or shall be established by laws of this kingdom’.144 This move by Bristol was in turn predicated upon a proclamation that had been issued by Charles on 10 December, which, in Russell’s words, ‘in effect repeated the Lords’ order of 16 January 1641. He would prevent innovations against law, but he would 311

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not change the law. This Russell describes as the king’s consistent policy since January 1641, one which was now beginning to allow the king ‘to have a party behind him’.145 This stance was to provide a central element in his reply to the Grand Remonstrance, which had been ready since the beginning of December and was published on 23rd of that month in response to the Commons’ decision to go public with the Remonstrance. There Charles claimed that ‘no church can be found upon the earth that professeth the true religion with more purity of doctrine than the church of England doth, nor where the government and discipline are jointly more beautified and free from superstition, than as they are here established by law’.146 Again, therefore, just as in the previous February, a Cheshire petition had been added to the political mix at Westminster at precisely the right moment for the furtherance of the king’s political agenda. For, in many ways, this was a repeat performance of the move initially made on the issue of episcopacy during the previous January and February. Just as then, responding to a major party-building policy statement by Charles, Aston had pushed a local Cheshire petition in a decidedly ‘royalist’ direction, so now, by inserting this second petition into this particular, highly polarised moment at the centre, he was again transforming what had emerged from the county as a rather measured, coalition-building, compromise document into what appeared, in the altogether colder political climate of December, to be a rather more univocally royalist text and an uncompromisingly ‘Anglican’, or anti-puritan, statement of intent. The way in which the charged political atmosphere of December affected the reception of the petition can be gleaned from the Lords’ Journal itself. Despite the fact that the text of the petition was concerned solely with the liturgy, it noted the delivery into the house of a petition ‘of the inhabitants of the county of Chester concerning church government and the book of common prayer’.147 In other words, their lordships saw in the document what the immediate political circumstances and atmosphere were conditioning them to see, rather than reacting to what it actually said.

PETITIONING AND PARTISANSHIP The Cheshire petitions that we have been analysing provide two of the bestdocumented examples to survive of the methods and practices of petitioning in defence of episcopacy and the prayer book during 1641. Not only have the petitions and schedules of signatures survived, but so too have the commentaries on them in Aston’s correspondence and the documentation generated by the fallout. By analysing this material we can discover a good deal about the processes of religious and political mobilisation on the eve of the civil war. What this reveals are the complex mechanisms for constructing political support around particular propositions at this time, and also the wide variety of ideological positions and religious and political languages deployed in the making of the petitions, and the debates and disagreements surrounding them. 312

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Judith Maltby and John Morrill have treated the Cheshire petitions – alongside others in defence of episcopacy and the prayer book in late 1641 – as expressions of a relatively coherent ‘prayer book Protestantism’, finding its voice after the downfall of Laudianism. Their assumption is that signatories were endorsing the traditional, established ‘Anglican’ church of England built on the Elizabethan settlement’s rejection of the extremes of puritanism and high church Laudianism.148 However, the analysis presented here suggests that, on the contrary, the signatories represented a much wider variety of religious opinions. In the case of the prayer-book petition, the carefully open-ended wording allowed it to encompass those across a broad spectrum from committed Laudians to moderate puritans. The petition in defence of episcopacy was rather narrower, but, as the varieties of wording in the headings to the schedules of signatures suggest, it again brought together a variety of religious positions among those alarmed at the implications of puritan radicalism. The petitions were essentially coalition-building exercises designed to mobilise as much support as possible behind a series of propositions about the dangers of radical puritanism and the threat to the order and hierarchy represented by the established church. This accords with the argument presented by John Walter and Mike Braddick in their work on anti-puritan petitions, which emphasises their opportunistic and situationally determined character. They were not, by and large, grand statements of allegiance which could be mapped onto support for the ‘Anglican church’ or the royalist cause, but short-term exercises in mobilising local opinion when fear of radical sectaries loomed large in the minds of many.149 One of the striking features of this material is the degree of engagement with the petitioning processes that emerges among the different levels of local society. As was the norm in petitions presented in the name of the shire, the gentry and, in particular, the county magistrates were those who took the initiative. From the first meetings of Aston and his allies, and the letters sent out to selected gentry in each hundred in January to start the collection of signatures, through to the subscription lists themselves – which were almost invariably headed by the leading gentry of the parish – and the pains taken by some, like Henry Bunbury, to gather and attach names even before consent had been secured, the local gentry were generally driving the process. Cholmondeley’s endorsement at the head of the Rowton schedule demonstrates a presumption that the leadership of those exercising lordship within a neighbourhood would carry considerable weight with potential subscribers. In getting subscriptions, the gentry often worked in tandem with the local minister or curate, meeting at the end of the Sunday service at which the petition had been published and then signing their names alongside each other’s at the head of the list. The very patchiness of subscription, which, as we have seen in the case of the February petition, was largely confined to those areas of the county where leading gentry openly supported episcopacy, was also indicative of their influence. 313

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This is not to suggest, however, that non-gentry subscribers lacked agency in the whole process. Judith Maltby’s careful analysis of the lists of signatories to the prayer-book petition in five parishes (Frodsham, Marbury, Middlewich, Tilston and Wilmslow) suggests that the numbers of the adult male population signing up to the petition varied between 27 per cent and 69 per cent, and that signatories were drawn from every level of parish society, down to and including those on poor relief. This she takes as evidence that ordinary parishioners were making their own choices about whether or not to sign up – although variations might also reflect the efficiency of the processes for collecting signatures, or simply attendance at church on a particular Sunday.150 Further evidence that those signing were exercising choice and making a self-conscious pledge of support is provided by the furore created when Aston’s allies appeared to be adding names to the February petition. Calvin Bruen was able to assemble quite large numbers of complainants who felt that they had been deceived about what they were signing up for. They were reported to be particularly concerned that it might be thought ‘that they for fear or favour of men did subscribe unto it’.151 This implied that they were anxious to preserve their reputations as the sort of sturdy-minded, independent freeholders that Grosvenor had extolled in his election address, and that in a religious petition such as this they should be seen to be following their consciences. The petitions, then, provide further evidence of the social depth of local engagement with the religious and political divisions of 1641.152 But, to return to the leading gentry, what can we learn of their attitudes from the rhetorical stances that they adopted and the ideological disagreements that emerged, in particular out of the exchanges at the time of the February petition and the Attestation? One of the most prominent themes is the importance attached to the notion of county community. The county community is a palpable presence in these exchanges, but most often as a sort of ‘imagined community’, a bundle of moral and social norms and constraints, of tacit assumptions and expectations about one’s own and other’s conduct. On both sides this traditional notion of how things should be done was now being honoured at least as much in the breach as in the observance. But, even as it was breaking down, the ideal of a county community of publicly engaged and honourable gentlemen, united in the representation and service of the county and the commonwealth, retained considerable rhetorical and moral force. The efforts made to build bridges in the initial negotiations in January 1641, and again at quarter sessions and in the prayer-book petition in October–November, were testimony to this. So too was the way in which the expectations and standards attached to this ideal were available as sticks with which to beat and berate one’s opponents as both Aston and the signatories of the Attestation fought it out as representatives of ‘the country’. But the existence of such incipiently political, partly personal, partly ideological and partly structural divisions among the county’s ‘representatives’ could not but have an effect on the ways in which core terms like ‘county’, 314

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‘country’ and ‘commonwealth’ were construed and deployed. Thus, when large sections of the gentry county community made it quite clear that they did not care for Aston’s style of vindication, indeed that they did not wish to sign up for his version of what ‘the county’ was or stood for, his supporters responded by adjusting their definition of ‘the county’ accordingly. Thus, on 1 May 1641 Viscount Cholmondeley wrote Aston a brief note of praise and encouragement: ‘noble Sir Thomas your faithful service, and exquisite pains and care for your country hath been such and so great that you have truly deserved the love of all good men in the county, for the rest they are neither worth wishing nor having, and a great number that I know do acknowledge it’.153 The more general and formal letter in support of Aston’s second petition – the counter-Attestation as it were – made much the same point in picking up on the phrasing in the king’s congratulatory letter of 13 March 1641 and speaking of the support Aston enjoyed as coming not so much from ‘the county’ or ‘country’ as from ‘the inhabitants thereof who stand well affected either to his majesty or the good and peaceable government of this kingdom’.154 The real object of loyalty, the true subject of vindication, here was now no longer simply ‘the county’ or ‘the country’ so much as ‘the good men in the county’, those ‘well affected to his Majesty’. On this evidence, that which was being represented and vindicated had become, for Aston and his associates, just as it surely had for Brereton and the puritan godly, not merely a function of what persons, even persons of substance, in the county wanted, but an amalgam of that and the demands of ‘the cause’, an ideologically defined version of what all true and loyal and orthodox English persons and Cheshire men would or should naturally want. Only thus could the complete compatibility of ideological rectitude, orthodoxy and loyalty, on the one hand, and an open-handed public canvassing and representation of the sense of ‘the county’ or ‘country’, on the other, be maintained. That they were compatible remained, of course, axiomatic for Aston, just as it did, at the other politico-religious extreme, for Brereton. But in the presence of an ongoing political crisis at the centre, and of what were rapidly becoming recognised as non-negotiable religio-political disputes about the nature of orthodoxy and loyalty, conducted across the country and the social order, it was becoming increasingly difficult both to further ‘the cause’ (whatever it was) and to represent the interests and opinions of ‘the county’ or ‘the country’. Are we, then, dealing here with the origins of an essentially ‘religious’ conflict, what John Morrill, in a famously resonant phrase, has called ‘England’s Wars of Religion’?155 To some extent we are. But precisely because religious divisions and disagreements could never be kept tidily in a box marked ‘religious’, or even ‘ecclesiastical’, causes, what might have started out as largely or wholly ‘religious’ disagreements swiftly became something else as well. This was a tendency compounded by the political circumstances in Cheshire, where, while the religious engagés Brereton and Aston might have been making much of the running, there remained the middle group led 315

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by the old members of the county establishment whose support was vital to anyone wanting convincingly or consistently to claim to represent ‘county opinion’. As each side made a number of pitches for the middle group’s support the crucial issues very quickly became what we might want to call more ‘political’. After all, in many of the exchanges between the middle group and Aston and Brereton what were at stake were issues not only about church government and Christian worship but about the very nature of the political process itself: about who could claim legitimately to ‘represent’ the county; about whose opinions should be represented, and how and to whom; about, indeed, the very nature of the thing – the ‘county’ or the ‘country’ or the ‘cause’ – to be represented, as well, of course, as the nature of the central institutions or persons through whom the processes of representation and counsel giving might best be effected. The intensity of Aston and Werden and their friends’ religious commitments to the prayer book and episcopacy and their loathing for ‘puritanism’ is scarcely to be doubted (although there perhaps remains a question of how best to characterise those commitments). But even Aston chose to couch his assault on Presbyterianism and defence of episcopacy in terms of very wide, in part at least ‘secular’, notions of social and political order. Moreover, his petitioning activities are best seen not as simple statements of a preexistingly coherent religious position – ‘prayer book protestantism’ coming, under the impact of political crisis and of puritan and Laudian attack, to full self-awareness – but as elaborate coalition-building exercises in which a variety of strands of opinion were being aligned behind forms of words that could mean subtly different things to different people. This, of course, was an inherently political enterprise, as too were the nature and timing of Aston’s subsequent deployment of the resulting statements of ‘Cheshire opinion’ into the central political narrative. Thus, did the language of division, of ‘the good men of the county’, of the ‘well affected’ and their opposites, invade a political rhetoric still ostensibly dominated by the need for agreement, consensus and service to an entirely transparent and univocal public or common good. We can watch in these exchanges the fabric of the county community – the mutual bonds of trust, respect and restraint that kept the ‘community’ together – breaking down under the pressure exerted by ideological disagreement, personal and political competition and the exigencies of a rapidly changing national political scene. Thus, too, did national political issues and stances come to frame and colour what might appear at first sight to have been quintessentially local focuses of loyalty, identity and concern. Certainly, many of the forms, interests and causes being appealed to and defended throughout these transactions were intensely local – centred on the county of Cheshire, both name and thing. However, almost none of the succeeding political moves, manoeuvres and appeals took a straightforwardly ‘localist’ form. On the contrary, they involved the appeal to and manipulation (by a variety of local interests and 316

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connections), of a number of nodes of central authority, and the further massaging and manipulation of opinion in the county, through partisan attempts to control the (often contradictory) waves of information, instruction and authority entering the county from the centre.

NOTES

1 This version of the petition has not been included in the BL English Short Title Catalogue (hereafter ESTC); but publication was mentioned by D’Ewes on 19 April: Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament, ed. M. Jansson, 7 vols (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2000–7), iv.7. 2 Cressy, England on Edge, ch. 12. 3 Peacey, Print and Public Politics, pp. 61, 63; W. H. Rylands, ‘Booksellers and stationers in Warrington 1639–1657’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 37 (1885), 67–115, at 91, 107. 4 BL Additional MS 33936, fos 228, 238, 249–52, 253–4, 264. 5 Catalogue of the Eaton Library (Chester, 1897); CALS ‘List of books in the muniment room at Eaton, c.1966’, typed catalogue. For the works on episcopacy, see Catalogue, p. 408. 6 Maltby, ‘Petitions’, pp. 113–14. 7 BL Additional MS 36914, fo. 217. The dating on the letter refers only to the anniversary of the king’s inauguration, which fell on 27 March. 8 Ibid., fo. 210. 9 Ibid., fos 210–11. 10 Proceedings in the Long Parliament, iv.6–7. 11 The humble petition of sundry of the nobles, knights, gentry, ministers and freeholders and divers thousands of the inhabitants of the county Palatine of Chester … In answer to a petition delivered to the Lords spiritual and temporal by Sir Thomas Aston … concerning episcopacie (London, 1641). 12 Aston, Remonstrance, ‘To the reader’. LJ, iv.204–5. For Walker, see Como, Radical Parliamentarians, pp. 80, 112–14. Judith Maltby attributed this petition to Sir William Brereton: Maltby, Prayer Book and People, p. 148; but, as James Mawdesley has pointed out, neither Aston nor the authors of the Attestation, both of whom denounced the petition, mentioned any involvement on Brereton’s part: Mawdesley, ‘Clerical politics in Lancashire and Cheshire’, p. 174n. 13 An Humble Remonstrance to the Right Honourable the Lords in the High Court of Parliament (London, 1641). 14 For one such certificate, dated 5 May from West Kirby in the Wirral, see BL Additional MS 36913, fo. 132. 15 CALS DSS 1/4/36A/12. This copy of the letter belonged to Geoffrey Shakerley of Hulme, an Aston ally. 16 BL Additional MS 39914, fos 201, 216–17. 17 Ibid., fo. 201. 18 Ibid., fo. 220. 19 Ibid., fos 210–11. 20 Proceedings in the Long Parliament, i.462; CALS CR63/2/7/1; QJB 2/6, fos 7–20. The parish returns certified by local justices are QSF 69/4, nos 15–70. 317

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The crisis, 1641–42 21 BL Additional MS 36914, fos 202, 206. 22 Ibid., fo. 215. 23 Proceedings in the Long Parliament, iv.6–7. On Falkland, see Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, pp. 181, 192–3. 24 CJ, ii.123, 126. 25 BL Additional MS 36913, fo. 62. 26 BL Sloane MS 1467, fo. 26; LJ, iv.205. 27 BL Additional MS 33936, fo. 232. 28 BL Additional MS 36913, fos 78–80. For Crewe’s support for Lancaster, see below, pp. 000–00. The ever-compliant William Leversage was the only justice who signed both petitions. 29 Proceedings in the Long Parliament, iv.525. 30 BL Additional MS 36914, fo. 197; Proceedings in the Long Parliament, iv.42, 51. 31 BL Harleian MS 2081, fo. 93 (in the context of the letter, Gamull’s comment appears to refer to a family dispute. But the comment could equally be applied to Venables’ conduct more generally.) For further comment on Venables’ hesitancy over committing himself, see Newton, House of Lyme, pp. 166–7. We are grateful to David Scott for discussions about Venables’ political stance at this time. See his History of Parliament biography, ‘Venables, Peter (1604–69)’. 32 BL Additional MS 36913, fos 63–4. Tellingly, one of the diarists who recorded the reading of the petition in the Commons described it as ‘a protestation by the gentlemen of Cheshire against a petition preferred by Sir Thomas Aston in behalf of episcopacy wherein he had used their names without their consent’. Evidently it was read by at least some as a clear repudiation of Aston’s original petition: Proceedings in the Long Parliament, iv.533. 33 BL Harleian MS 2081, fo. 93. 34 LJ, iv.225. 35 PA House of Lords, main papers, 20 April 1641, 31 May 1641. 36 Scott, ‘Venables, Peter’. 37 BL Additional MS 36914, fo. 222. 38 BL Additional MS 36913, fos 63–4, 71–2, 73. 39 CJ, ii.76. 40 Thomason’s copy is dated 28 May: G. K. Fortescue (ed.), Catalogue of the Pamphlets, Books, Newspapers and Manuscripts Relating to the Civil War … Collected by George Thomason, 2 vols (London: British Library, 1908), i.12. Laud’s account book records a meeting with ‘Sir Thomas Aston’s man with a book’ in the week of 25 June 1641: TNA E101/547/5, fo. 154, a reference which we owe to Ken Fincham. 41 M. Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Answer to the xix Proposition (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1985), pp. 140–7; Ford, James Ussher, ch. 10; on Williams’ committee, see Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, pp. 249–52. 42 Aston, Remonstrance, dedicatory epistle to the king, sigs A2r–A3r. 43 Ibid., sig. Nv; see also sig. Gr; see also pt II, p. 54. 44 Ibid., sig Nr–v. In another passage Aston refused definitively to come down on the side of divine right monarchy; but this was placed at the end of pages of argumentation and quote-stitching that took precisely that view of the matter, 318

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45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53



54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

and was succeeded by a long passage from Pierre du Moulin making the very same point: ibid., sig. Gr. Du Moulin was living in Chester at the time, was well known to Aston and was a signatory to his first petition: Mawdesley, ‘Clerical politics in Lancashire and Cheshire’, pp. 54–5. Aston, Remonstrance, ‘To the honourable the Lord Bishops’, pp. 1–3. See sigs C4v–Dv on Titus and Timothy as the first bishops. Ibid., pt II, pp. 12, 23, 24–30. Ibid., pt II, pp. 29–30. Ibid., pt II, 47–8. Ibid., sig. D2v; the marginal note identifies the passage in inverted commas as a quotation from Stat.25.H.8.c19. Ibid., sigs G2r, N2r. Ibid., sig. B2v. Ibid., sig. B2v. Maltby, Prayer Book and People, pp. 108, 162; Morrill, Revolt of the Provinces, pp. 48–9. Aston, Remonstrance, preface, sig. Bv. Ibid., preface, sigs Br–v. Ibid., sigs Cr, N2r. From the text of the original petition or remonstrance printed: ibid., sigs a3r– a4r, quotation at a3r–v. Also see sig. B2r for almost exactly the same point. Ibid., sig. Kr. Ibid., sig. Ev. Ibid., sig. B4v. Ibid., pt II, p. 33. Ibid., pt II, p. 52. Ibid., sig. C2v. Ibid., sig, Cv. Ibid., sig. B3v. Ibid., preface, sig. Br. Ibid., sig. B4r. Ibid., sigs K2r, K3r. Ibid., sigs E2v, G2r. Ibid., sigs E3r, C4r, Mv. Ibid., sig. E3r, ‘To the honourable the Lord Bishops’, p. 2. Ibid., sigs Mv–2r. Ibid., sigs Fr, E3v. Ibid., sig. K2v. Ibid., sigs b4r (from the original Remonstrance to the House of Lords), E2v, K3v. Ibid., sigs Lr–v. Ibid., sigs K4r–v. Ibid., sigs L2r, H3v. Ibid., sigs Kv, L4v–Mr. Ibid., sig. E3r. Ibid., sigs Mv, M2r–v. Ibid., sigs K3r, L4v. Ibid., sigs I4v–Kr. 319

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89 90 91

92 93 94 95 96 97 98

99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

Ibid., sigs C3v–C4r. Ibid., sig. Kr. Ibid., sig. K3r. Ibid., front material, p. 6. Nor was this sleight of hand lost on the objects of Aston’s obloquy. A reply to Aston’s Remonstrance appended to Paget’s A defence of church government exercised noted that neither the ‘petition nor positions annexed to the Remonstrance do seek for presbytery but seem rather to affect a popular government’, and since ‘the patrons of popular government (contended for in the positions) are, for the most part, either separatists or semi-separatist, who are as opposite to Presbyterian government as they are to prelacy’, all of this material was entirely beside the point: ‘An humble advertisement to the high court of Parliament’ by Thomas Paget. The response to Aston’s Remonstrance is at sigs **4r–***4v; quotations at sigs **4v. and ***2v. Aston, Remonstrance, sigs C3v, E4v, G2v. Ibid., sig. D4v, in margin: ‘The familists say they are a free people in bondage to no creature. H. N. Sperlaud c. 3, sect. 6 C. 40, set. 7’. D. R. Como, Blown by the Spirit. Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antonomian Underground in pre-Civil War England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); P. G. Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); M. Winship, Making Heretics. Militant Protestants and Free Grace in Massachusetts 1636–1641 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Cressy, England on Edge, ch. 11. Aston, Remonstrance, pt II, sect. 12, ‘bishops approved by reformed churches’. Ibid., sig. C3r–v; see also pt II, pp. 48–51. Ibid., sigs Gv, K2v, L3r–v, M2r. Ibid., sig. Fr. Ibid., sig. M2r; England’s complaint, B3r. Aston, Remonstrance, sig. G3r. Thomas Cartwright was a famous Elizabethan puritan ideologue and Nicholas Sanders an equally notorious Catholic writer of the same period. In asserting their agreement Aston was also asserting the equivalence of the puritan and Catholic threats. Ibid., sigs H2v–H4r; quote at sig. H3r. Ibid., sig. G2v; also see sig. G4r–v. Ibid., sig. G2r–v. Ibid., sigs Fr, F2r, F2v. Ibid., sigs F4r–v. Ibid., ‘To the honourable the lord bishops’, pp. 2–3. Ibid., pt II, p. 56. Ibid., pt II, p. 72. Ibid., pt II, p. 56. Ibid., pt II, pp. 61–2. Ibid., pt II, pp. 72–3. Ibid., pt II, pp. 68–9. Ibid., sig. Fr. Ibid., sig. E3r.

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The search for the centre as partisan enterprise? 113 Ibid., sig. L2v. 114 P. G. Lake, ‘Conformist clericalism? Richard Bancroft’s analysis of the socioeconomic roots of Presbyterianism’, in W. J. Sheils and D. Wood (eds), The Church and Wealth (Studies in Church History, 24, Oxford, 1987), pp. 219–29. 115 Aston, Remonstrance, sig. B3r–v. 116 Ibid., sigs Kv–K2r. 117 BL Additional MS 36914, fo. 216. The anniversary of Charles’s inauguration fell on 27 March. 118 BL, Additional MS 33936, fo. 232; Additional MS 36914, fo. 197. 119 BL Additional MS 33936, fo. 232. 120 BL Additional MS 36913, fos 71, 76, 77. 121 CJ, ii.179, 189, 218; TNA SP 16/483/25. 122 Cited in Maltby, Prayer Book and People, p. 175. 123 BL Additional Mss 33936, fo. 246. 124 Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 120–4; J. Walter, ‘Confessional politics in pre-civil war Essex: prayer books, profanations and petitions’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 677–701; Walter, ‘“Abolishing superstition with sedition”?’; R. P. Cust, ‘The defence of episcopacy on the eve of civil war: Jeremy Taylor and the Rutland petition of 1641’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 68 (2017), 59–80; Cressy, England on Edge, chs 9–11. 125 TNA SP 16/483/20. 126 BL Additional MS 36914, fo. 211. 127 Mawdesley, ‘Clerical politics in Lancashire and Cheshire’, pp. 188–90; CALS DCC 14/68. 128 BL Additional MS 36914, fo. 221. 129 CALS QJB 2/6, fos 46–50. 130 BL Additional MS 36913, fo. 66. 131 Maltby, ‘Petitions’, pp. 133–4. 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid. 134 Gardiner, History, ix.101. 135 Maltby, Prayer Book and People, ch. 3. 136 Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 102–7; A. Fletcher, ‘Concern for renewal in the Root and Branch debates of 1641’, in D. Baker (ed.), Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History (Studies in Church History, 14, 1977), pp. 279–86. 137 PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/74, unfoliated. 138 Ibid. 139 Ibid. 140 CALS ZCR 63/2/695. For Crewe’s religious commonplace book, see CR 63/2/696; and for the puritan piety of his wife and sister-in-law, who had inherited Utkinton on the death of their elder brother in 1630, see Samuel Torshell, A helpe to Christian fellowship (London, 1644), dedicatory epistle to Jane Done. 141 PA HL/PO/JO/10/1/74, unfoliated. 142 HMC, 5th Report, MSS of R. Cholmondeley esq (London, 1876), p. 351. 143 Bodleian Nalson MS 13, fos 66–71. 144 Gardiner, History, ix.100. 321

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The crisis, 1641–42 145 Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, p. 437. See also Adamson, Noble Revolt, ch. 16. 146 S. R. Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625– 1660, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), pp. 233–6. 147 LJ, iv, 482. 148 Maltby, Prayer Book and People, chs 3–4; Morrill, Cheshire, pp. 45–51; see also, on the petitions of this period more generally, Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 288–9. 149 Walter, ‘Confessional politics in pre-civil war Essex’; Braddick, ‘Prayer book and protestation: anti-popery and anti-puritanism and the outbreak of the English Civil War’, in C. Prior and G. Burgess (eds), England’s Wars of Religion revisited (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 125–46. 150 Maltby, Prayer Book and People, ch. 5. 151 BL Harleian MS 4931, fos 118–19. 152 For a broad and nuanced account of this phenomenon, see John Walter’s superb study of the 1641 and 1642 Protestations: Covenanting Citizens. The Protestation Oath and Popular Political Culture in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 153 BL Additional MS 36914, fo. 218. 154 Ibid., fos 222–3. 155 J. S. Morrill, ‘Introduction: England’s Wars of Religion’ and ‘The religious context of the English Civil War’, in his The Nature of the English Revolution (Harlow: Longman, 1993), pp. 33–51 and 52–68; J. S. Morrill, ‘Sir William Brereton and England’s Wars of Religion’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 311–32.

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Cheshire and the outbreak of civil war

THE IRISH REBELLION AND BILLETING

T

he outbreak of the Irish rebellion in October 1641 transformed the political atmosphere in Cheshire. Chester was the great entrepôt for Ireland, the point at which fleeing refugees and news of the rebellion arrived in England and from which troops were dispatched to suppress the rebellion. Because of this the city and the county became preoccupied with the Catholic threat and the fallout from the billeting of soldiers. In the process the political initiative in the shire, which for much of 1641 lay with Sir Thomas Aston and his allies, now passed back to the senior, active JPs of the middle group, on whom fell the task of maintaining local order and security, and the county’s MPs, who offered the best prospect of securing aid from the centre. Sir William Brereton in particular – who spent the months between November 1641 and April 1642 shuttling back and forth between Westminster and the shire – emerged as the main conduit between the county and the centre, in the process strengthening his connections with the middle-group gentry. News of the rebellion reached Chester by 30 October and immediately stoked up fears of plots and insurrections in the shire. Within a few days Protestant refugees were arriving in the port, then fanning out along the roads towards London, begging for relief and bringing with them accounts of the barbarities they had suffered at the hands of the rebels. Edward Burghall in Bunbury picked up reports of the ‘unparallelled’ ‘cruelties and outrages of the rebels, in burning houses, killing, robbing, stripping naked, drowning & destroying the poor Protestants’. The mayor and authorities in Chester were quick to seize on suspicious persons, like the Catholic soldier-of-fortune Arthur Magennes who appeared to be on his way to joining the rebels.1 On 20 November the Commons identified Cheshire, along with Lancashire and Staffordshire, as among the counties ‘most stocked with papists and in this 323

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respect most dangerous’. They gave orders for the local justices to round up three leading Catholics (John Poole of Poole, Henry Starkey of Darley and a Mr Stanley) and send them down to London for safe keeping.2 Fears of invasion and a Catholic uprising became a major preoccupation of the local populace and those in authority. The alarm at the county’s vulnerability to invasion from Ireland, which had caused the deputy lieutenants to petition against the removal of the trained bands from the shire in 1640, now prompted the city aldermen to draw up a petition to the king to supply them with ordnance and fortifications, lest they remain ‘open and naked to the assaults and depredations of those wicked and barbarous rebels’. The middle-group justices who assembled for the quarter sessions at Chester in January 1642 stepped up their vigilance against Catholics and arrested Francis Foster, who had been caught travelling between recusants’ houses with beads and crucifixes. In February middle-group supporter Henry Delves, son of Sir Thomas, purchased a large consignment of horse arms at Hull – as he explained, ‘for himself and his friends in Cheshire to defend themselves against the popish faction and league’.3 The atmosphere became even more frenetic with news of threatened Catholic uprisings in Lancashire and Staffordshire, and the atrocity stories that poured from the London presses. There was the ‘Beale plot’ in Staffordshire in November 1641; the ‘fireball plot’ in Lancashire in February 1642 and the ‘gunpowder plot’ again in Staffordshire.4 There was even a pamphlet describing how Chester Catholics had tried to pull down the city walls and killed twenty-five Protestants in a gun battle on 20 November. This was completely fictitious, but it was given some credibility by the circumstantial detail that identified the leading conspirators as ‘Lord Chomes and Henry Starkey of Darley, his steward’. Starkey was probably the son of one of those Catholics due to be arrested and sent to London; while the identification of Cholmondeley says much about his reputation after his high-profile petitioning in defence of episcopacy.5 In seeking remedies against such threats the local magistracy turned mainly to parliament, because trust in the king had been tarnished by rebel claims that they were acting with his support. Brereton, in particular, was quick to offer assistance. On 3 November he was appointed to the Commons’ newly established committee on Irish affairs and thereafter liaised regularly with the House on local measures to deal with Catholics. In February, he was commissioned to attend on the lord keeper and secure permission for the Chester authorities to administer the oaths of supremacy and allegiance to ‘all Irishmen or other persons suspected to be popishly affected’; and in March he wrote on behalf of the Commons with an order for the county justices to search the houses of local recusants.6 Sir William was also very much to the fore in handling the organisation of recruitment and billeting in the shire. He was in Chester from midNovember 1641 to mid-January 1642, then again in April 1642, during which 324

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time he acted as the main link between the House of Commons, the army being assembled in Cheshire for transportation to Ireland and the city and county authorities. He carried up money and gunpowder from London and solicited aid on behalf of the shire. By 21 December 1641 there were around five hundred volunteers in Chester, many of them recruited within the shire. A month later the numbers had swelled to six troops of cavalry and ‘divers companies of foot’, and these were causing serious problems. Lack of pay for the troops persuaded the city authorities to start refusing them credit for meals and accommodation, which led to the soldiers taking matters into their own hands, and stealing and breaking into houses. Most of the cavalry troops were billeted in Wirral hundred, which had recently suffered an outbreak of plague; and by March it was being reported that food there was so scarce that it was becoming impossible to find fodder for horses.7 Following Brereton’s visit in April, the middle-group gentry and justices, headed by Booth, Wilbraham and Grosvenor, drew up a petition describing in lurid detail the ‘oppressions suffered by the billeting of soldiers without paying’ and begging for assistance. Brereton presented this to the Commons on 17 May, and three days later the speaker responded by issuing instructions that the soldiers were to be embarked on the first favourable wind, that officers were to ‘ease the country’ of billeting and that no soldiers were to be given their arms until they embarked. Thereafter the level of complaint from the shire diminished.8 In this respect, the whole episode was a model of the cooperation between the county and parliament envisaged by Grosvenor in 1624. Brereton, as knight of the shire, had alerted the Commons to the county’s grievances and remedy had been promptly provided by the centre. This reinforced the middle group’s appreciation that local order and security could best be ensured by working closely with parliament; and at the same time enhanced Brereton’s reputation as the most effective representative of the county’s interests and the man they could trust. Significantly, the king – who during this period abandoned London and largely abdicated responsibility for the day-to-day government of the shires – was almost entirely shut out of the process.

THE MIDDLE GROUP ALIGNS WITH PARLIAMENT During April and May 1642 the link with Brereton and this leaning towards parliament was to have important political consequences for the shire. This became evident at the Chester assizes from 18 to 21 April, which Brereton probably attended.9 The lead was taken by the grand jurors, including Thomas Hicock, Thomas Bennet and John Beaven, all of whom were to be arrested in July for obstructing the execution of the royalist Commission of Array. Their main preoccupations were the Catholic threat and the continuing drive for ecclesiastical reform in the face of anti-puritan challenges. Bennet and Beaven drew up a list of Catholics, to be presented to the assizes either 325

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for recusancy or for grinding corn on Sunday. These included the JP and friend of the Savages and Aston, William Whitmore. Beaven also presented one of the Chester aldermen, Nicholas Ince, for allegedly threatening him with assault after Beaven had petitioned parliament against Mr Green of Neston, a non-preaching minister who was Ince’s uncle. And Hicock and Bennet were signatories to the indictment of a group of ‘fidlers and rogues’ who had burst in on the jurors’ dinner at Chester castle singing ‘scurrilous songs to this purpose, vizt. that whereas the parliament hath cleared divers persons from their banishment as Dr Bastwick and Prynne and they must be canonised saints; and jeered at the parliament for that pious deed.’ They also complained, in between songs, that ‘they had no cross in baptism nor prayers in the congregation, and scoffed further at the parliament and said reformation would be perfected with us when the devil is blind’.10 The antagonism between the godly and the anti-puritans that Werden had documented so assiduously during 1641 showed no sign of subsiding. However, the most significant event during the April assizes was the drawing up of two petitions by the grand jurors and the second inquest, which were trenchant restatements of the priorities of those who looked to parliament for reform. The first of these, addressed to the Commons, was presented by Brereton on 24 May. It focused on two principal themes: the abuses of bishops, together with continuing reform in the church; and the threat presented by Catholics. The petitioners expressed gratitude to parliament for their indefatigable labours for the public good … and your deep wisdoms in discovering to the whole kingdom the destructive diseases thereof, with their original progress and cure, in the late Remonstrance [the Grand Remonstrance] (a looking glass for this age and a full justification of your proceedings, in all succeeding generations).

They went out of their way to denounce the February 1641 petition in ‘our country’s name in defence of bishops’ authority and their votes, presented by a too officious member thereof to the house of peers to our great grief, which petition we utterly disclaim and protest against’. Then they pressed the case for further – although not for root and branch – reformation of church government, or, as they termed it, ‘the perfecting of the reformation of our church already begun’. This involved the abandoning of the abominable idol of the mass out of court and country, the maintaining and vindicating the privileges of parliament, the removal of the papist lords out of the house of peers … the diminishing of the vast revenues and power of the bishops … the removing of improfitable deans and chapters, scandalous and insufficent ministers, pluralities and non-residents, placing of godly ministers in every congregation throughout the realm … stricter laws may be enacted for the sanctification of the sabbath … that nothing needless or justly offensive in the liturgy may be urged …

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Finally, they congratulated parliament on their ‘tender care for the kingdom of Ireland and vigilant providence for this nation by ordering the militia thereof that we fall not into the same ruin by papists and their party as Ireland hath done’; and they requested that ‘papists may be put out of commission and duly disarmed who are potent and eminent in this and neighbouring counties … and a magazine and block house may be erected at Helbry [the island just off the Wirral] which may command the mouth of the passage both of Chester and Liverpool-water’.11 There are, of course, echoes here of the freeholders’ petition that had started off the whole round of petitioning in January 1641, with issues arising out of the obsessions with popish plots and Ireland added in. However, the pitch being made for further reformation was significantly reduced from the high-water mark of root and branch, and in this regard one might argue that this petition represented the most puritan possible reading allowed by the prayer-book petition of December, which notably this petition did not seek to challenge. It also chimed in with the plethora of county petitions being presented to the Commons from January 1642 onwards, praising parliament for its reforming activity, expressing approval for the Grand Remonstrance, urging parliament to continue with its godly reformation – although in most cases falling short of advocating root-and-branch reform – and calling for further measures to meet the threat of popish plots and uprisings. Many of these petitions, while clear manifestations of loyalty to parliament, were also, as Anthony Fletcher has pointed out, suffused with expressions of loyalty to Charles.12 These were more muted in the Cheshire petition than in most, and this, perhaps, explains why the knights leading the middle group – Booth, Wilbraham, Grosvenor and Delves – held aloof from subscribing to it. It went forward in the name of the ‘esquires, gentlemen, freeholders and other inhabitants within the county Palatine’, and appears to have been the work of the more committed supporters of parliament on the county bench and grand jury, working in collaboration with Brereton. Although they had previously expressed support for many of the sentiments contained in this petition, the middle-group leaders were conscious of the need to calibrate their public pronouncements very carefully if they were not to accelerate the conflict at the centre, which they were intent on defusing. The fine line that they were seeking to tread was revealed with the second petition that emerged from the assize juries, which was directed to the king in the name of the ‘gentry, ministers and freeholders of the countie Palatine’. It was prompted by news in early April that the king was intending to travel to Ireland to take command of the army to suppress the Irish rebels, and that he was to be accompanied by 200 horse and 2,000 foot levied in Cheshire.13 The petition set out, unequivocally, the case for Charles refraining from his journey. It lamented that ‘our woeful distractions … have of late much increased by this long night of your absence from your great council’, and urged him ‘to embrace again with all tenderness your whole kingdom as 327

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it is at this present represented in parliament’. Travelling to Ireland would jeopardise all such hopes, placing his royal person in danger not only from the elements of wind and water but from many ‘popish, cruel and barbarous rebels who having banished the sense of all religion, piety and even humanity and rejecting God and you the king from reigning over them do continue to murder daily your innocent Protestant subjects’. Moreover, the king’s absence from England would leave his subjects at the mercy of ‘the popish faction’, ‘the enemies of our religion’, who ‘wait for an opportunity to bring to birth their cruel conceptions’. Just as David had bowed to the appeals of ‘his people’ not to go ‘in person against his rebels’, so the Cheshire jurors begged Charles to forego his Irish journey and ‘reside where you may with best convenience and security consult with your great council’.14 Although this was one of a number of county petitions entreating Charles to return to Westminster and, in effect, settle on terms laid down by parliament, this time the middle-group leaders were happy to embrace it. After meeting at the Northwich quarter sessions on 26 April they took ownership and explained to their knights of the shire that they hoped thereby to ‘obtain grace with his Majesty’ and ‘conduce to the public welfare …’. To this end they softened the wording of the original, removing a potentially offensive reference to the Irish rebels’ claim that they were acting with Charles’s authority and altering the description of the petitioners to refer to ‘85 gentlemen and freeholders and 15 ministers’ because, as they explained, they ‘forbear to press your Majesty with number of persons or multitudes of hands (though plentifully enabled to either) knowing your Majesty’s disaffection to both’. The core message, however, remained unchanged.15 The petition was taken to York by a deputation of gentry and presented to the king on 7 May by young George Booth, with a suitably deferential preamble in which he emphasised the historic loyalty of the Cheshire elite, ‘whom we doe justly brag to have ever been constant, true and loyal to their natural and liege lord’. It was signed by all the middle-group leaders, as well as the assize jurors. Significantly, a broad spectrum of the puritan clergy also signed, from moderates like John Ley and Wilbraham’s clerical confidant Richard Hunt, to Werden’s bêtes noires, Nathaniel Lancaster and Thomas Holford. However, none of the leading supporters of Aston in 1641 subscribed.16 Support for this petition, then, represented another coming together of those among the county’s magisterial and ministerial elites who had opposed Aston’s February petition in 1641 and were now seeking to persuade their king to work with parliament for a settlement. Charles responded two days later in a reply possibly drafted by Aston, who was attending the king at York through May and June and had a copy of the petition among his papers. Sir Thomas appears to have harboured hopes until well into August and September of driving a wedge between the middle-group leadership and irreconcilable parliamentarians like Brereton. The royal response reflected this. The king commended the deferential tone 328

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of the Cheshire men’s petition, noting that it ‘is not like others which, by an untimely zeal, have desired him to return to his parliament’. But their request that instead of going into Ireland he ‘reside where, with more convenience and security, he may consult with his great council’, he described as ‘ill-grounded’. It must, he assured them, have proceeded from a failure to take on board his earlier reply to parliament on that very subject. For he cannot think that that country (from whence he hath received formerly so good expressions of their loyal intentions by two former petitions presented long since to him and the parliament) would have been so much mistaken as to have made this petition, after they had seen and well considered his Majesty’s said answer.

Then, having referred them to a number of his other recently printed justifications of his actions and intentions, in particular over ‘the affront offered to him at Hull’, Charles bade them turn their petitioning attentions to the parliament, which body they should instruct ‘to apply themselves to a right understanding of his Majesty’s way and intentions’.17 In other words, the petitioners’ coded plea to settle with parliament on terms that he had already made clear were unacceptable to him was given a very polite brush-off. Charles proceeded to equate the loyal Cheshire of tradition, the version of the county that he would deal with, with the two Aston-sponsored petitions of 1641. As for the version of the county represented by the Attestation, the more moderate reading of the prayer-book petition and the moderate parliamentarian plea for accommodation sent to York, that was being told, very politely, to shape up or ship out. The space left for this sort of middle-of-theroad tacking between crown and parliament, the natural habitat for patriots and commonwealthsmen like Booth, Wilbraham and Grosvenor, was rapidly closing. But this did not prevent them from continuing to manoeuvre and build coalitions in the hopes of averting civil war.

THE PURSUIT OF ACCOMMODATION One of the greatest political assets of the middle group was the Protestation Oath, to which the inhabitants of Cheshire subscribed in the spring of 1642. Unfortunately none of the subscription lists from the county has survived, but elements of the process can be reconstructed from references in churchwardens’ accounts.18 The Protestation was an oath of association which constituted both an individual and a collective act. The first stage was for the sheriff, having received printed copies and a letter of authorisation from the speaker of the Commons, to swear the local justices, who would then meet with the parish officers in their divisions and swear them likewise. At the next Sunday service, usually after an address from the minister, the parish officers would proceed to tender the oath to every parishioner over the age of eighteen, who, each in turn, would publicly recite or place their 329

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hand on the text of the Protestation and take an oath to uphold it. Finally, as an affirmation of the community’s unanimous and collective consent, they would subscribe their names to a register.19 The oath had been taken in the city of Chester in May 1641, in response to parliament’s initial request for a voluntary subscription. But in the county it was delayed until the second, compulsory swearing in February–April 1642. Because of the size of some Cheshire parishes the collective oath-taking envisaged by parliament was not always possible; so, for example, at Tilston, with its five chapelries, it appears that the churchwardens had to travel round the parish collecting subscriptions. But, however it was administered, it was recognised that this was a ‘commissive’ oath, binding the taker to perform their words as a sacred obligation, failure to fulfil which would lead to divine punishment. The content of the oath committed individuals to defend ‘the true reformed Protestant religion, expressed in the doctrine of the Church of England, against all popery and popish innovation’; to uphold ‘according to the duty of my allegiance, his Majesty’s sacred person and estate’, together with ‘the power and privileges of parliament’ and the ‘lawful rights and liberties of the subject’; and to resist and punish ‘all such as shall, either by force, practices, counsel, plots, conspiracies’ or otherwise, oppose the terms of the Protestation.20 There was little here that most Englishmen could disagree with, and herein lay the reason for its near-universal acceptance. In its even-handed expressions of loyalty to king, parliament, the laws and the Protestant religion the Protestation could be read as a non-partisan statement of what virtually everyone, with the exception of Catholics, believed in. However, as John Walter has demonstrated, the sponsorship and management of the whole process by parliament had critical implications for its impact. The performative elements that surrounded the oath-taking helped to bring into being ‘a broad and inclusive notion of the people as God’s Englishmen’, and this had the effect of creating an obligation to active citizenry, a sense that ‘in an emergency … every man became a public officer and had a duty to come to the aid of his country’. The consequences of this were to invite the populace ‘to participate in the work of protecting and promoting the programme of reformation in church and state’ that parliament had begun; and, beyond this, offering ‘agency to an active citizenry and authority to the parliament which made it possible to fight and win a civil war’.21 This reading was exemplified in a commentary on the taking of the Protestation in Cheshire which was published on 6 June, entitled The Resolution of the Protestant gentry and commonalty of Cheshire Concerning their petition lately presented to the King’s Majesty at York. This was not a signed petition or attestation so much as a glossing of the Protestation Oath in the light of the middle group’s May petition. It was drawn up, it was claimed, ‘by one that was a spectator when the oath was taken and the resolution declared’ by the justices before the sheriff. The Resolution began by interpreting the 330

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oath as an impartial commitment to be ‘loyal to his Majesty’ and ‘obedient to the parliament’ (although the original oath specified allegiance rather obedience); but then made some significant additions which had the effect of turning it into an unequivocal declaration of support for the line that the Commons was pursuing in June 1642. Firstly, it included a statement of gratitude for what parliament had achieved and of trust in its future actions which went well beyond the Protestation. Secondly, it expanded on the oath to defend the ‘true reformed Protestant religion’ by specifying that this meant ‘against all sects and schisms, against all papists, donatists, Arminians and all other hypocritical doctrines’, which was a far more specific condemnation of Laudianism than the original reference to ‘popery and popish innovation’. Then thirdly, and most strikingly, it glossed the oath’s statement of obedience to parliament as an undertaking to obey ‘those appointed by them to have command and to be governors of the Militia’.22 The reading of the Protestation presented here accorded closely with the views of committed parliamentarians in the shire. But, equally, except for the undertaking to obey the Militia Ordinance, there was little that the middle-group leadership would have disagreed with. The religious sentiments expressed by the anonymous author chimed in closely with their antiLaudian stance; and the months spent working with Brereton to counteract the Catholic threat and handle the fallout from billeting – not to mention Charles’s frosty response to their May petition – had encouraged them to trust parliament rather more than a king. However, this did not mean that they had given up on the possibility of preserving peace. In this context, the Protestation – with its even-handed expression of loyalty to both king and parliament – provided the ideal touchstone for those determined to resist side-taking and civil war. While the middle-group gentry and many of the county freeholders were moving into a closer alignment with parliament, Aston and his allies were keeping a relatively low profile within the shire. Sir Edward Fitton and Sir Thomas Brereton carried on with their day-to-day activities as justices, continuing to sign recognisances; but neither was recorded as putting in an appearance at quarter sessions.23 Aston himself probably spent the first part of the year in London and then joined the king at York, perhaps as early as the end of March. If the king did, indeed, consider going to Ireland at the start of April with a royal guard drawn from Cheshire, it seems likely that Aston and Rivers would have been the ones to provide assurances that such a force could be raised. It is also probable that the king’s authorisation to appoint John Werden as a JP in Cheshire on 18 April would have had something to do with Aston.24 However, Sir Thomas’s main preoccupation in the early months of 1642 remained the defence of the church against puritan assaults. In January he drew up another petition to the Lords which asked them to take into detailed consideration the prayer-book petition that he had presented a month earlier, and also urged them to refer the activities of Samuel Eaton 331

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to the attorney general and investigate Mr Jones, the curate at Tarporley. In a typical warning about the dangers of puritan demagoguery, he cautioned them that the lack of action against Eaton had enabled him ‘to sow the seeds of his pernicious doctrines publicly, and they have spread dangerously, being such as tend to the seducing of the common people from their allegiance to his Majesty and conformity to the laws’.25 Aston’s main project in early 1642, however, was the publication of a follow-up to his Remonstrance against presbytery, in the form of a Collection of Sundry Petitions. This contained more than twenty petitions in defence of episcopacy and the liturgy, including the two from Cheshire. The reputation that Aston had gained from his Remonstrance had made him the natural conduit for receiving like-minded petitions from other parts of the country, a number of which survive among his papers.26 In the preface to the Collection Aston set out to fashion these into a collective statement of the views of what he described as the ‘silent’ majority in the provinces. In characteristically vivid style he presented a nightmarish vision of a political nation overawed by the forces of popular conspiracy and ‘tumultuary petitioning’: ‘A few innovators shall be able to summon to Blackheath, Southwark and St George his fields thousands of credulous people with implicit faiths to go along with petitions shall be shewed them when they come there for the alteration of laws and government.’ Exploiting the groundswell of rumour and innuendo, these ringleaders had deluded a gullible populace into rejecting all reason and moderation. Against this upsurge of the ‘multitude’ stood the unheard majority of the honest and the respectable, upholders of the established order who had been cowed by their sense of isolation and lack of leadership. ‘It falls out often so when single-hearted men are encountered by a faction each man thinks he stands alone, unassured of a second when ten of the other confederated make more noise than the 10000 silent men.’ In the face of such intimidation, even the established methods of mobilising and expressing the opinion of ‘the country’ – the methods that Aston himself had deployed in 1641 – were rendered redundant: ‘The resolutions of an assize or sessions of justices, published in all parishes, signed by all the freeholders of a county for the supportation of laws and government shall not produce one Patriot to present the unanimous desires of a county.’ So, in default of anyone else, Aston was once more putting himself forward as this ‘Patriot’. His hope was that through publishing his collection of petitions the ‘silent’ majority would be encouraged to mobilise in defence of the established order. ’Tis a hard time; every man’s afraid to break his shins by being foremost. But the ice is broken already. This collection of these many sleeping petitions will show every county that the way is open … [and] oversway the opponents, as their arguments drawn from the laws of God and man will outweigh the motives of those who only will because they will, as if it were cause enough to overthrow established laws that they have desired it, though they show no reason for it.27 332

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The publication of this collection was once again timed to achieve maximum impact in support of the king’s cause. Its printing was authorised by royal warrant from Charles at York on 20 May, and it coincided with the stepping-up of the ‘paper-war’ against parliament, managed by Edward Hyde.28 But, whereas most of the output managed by Hyde focused on the secular challenges to the king’s authority, Aston’s Collection was a powerful reminder of the dangers to the church and Charles’s role as the defender of the religious status quo. Sir Thomas had become, in Judith Maltby’s words, ‘the central figure in transforming parochial anxieties into a national movement’.29 During June, however, as the king geared up for war, Aston’s focus shifted and he became chief adviser and point-man for all matters relating to Cheshire. He introduced his old ally, Sir Edward Fitton, to the king, for which Fitton thanked him in positively Werdenesque tones, once he was back at Gawsworth: Noble sir, I shall ever acknowledge it as an honour done unto me, your poor kinsman and servant, as you did own me in being so noble and friendly unto me while I continued at York. As also the favour you did me in bringing me to kiss the hand of him to whom my life, my fortunes and all that hath dependency upon me hath been ever and ever shall be laid at his Majesty’s feet to do him what service I am able.30

Just as with Charles’s thank-you letter of March 1641, Aston was using his access to the king, as a gentleman of the privy chamber, to manipulate and distribute the royal presence to firm up his and the king’s support base in the county. It was also, in all probability, Sir Thomas who was instrumental in nominating the commissioners of array for the shire and remodelling the commission of the peace. Charles began issuing Commissions of Array on 11 June, and Cheshire was one of the earlier counties to receive one, on the twentieth. Those named comprised the core of Aston’s supporters in the first petitioning campaign of 1641 (Derby, Rivers, Kilmorey, Cholmondeley, Lord Brereton, Thomas Savage, Sir Edward Fitton, Sir Thomas Brereton, Sir Thomas Powell, Thomas Leigh of Adlington, Thomas Cholmondeley, Geoffrey Shakerley, Thomas Cotton and William Whitmore), alongside Lord Strange, who had now thrown in his lot with the king, and three men who proved to be staunch royalists (the sheriff, Hugh Calverley, the Chester MP, Francis Gamull, and Grosvenor’s son, Richard). But he also included Sir George Booth and Sir Richard Wilbraham, whom he was still hopeful of winning over, and Peter Venables and Sir Thomas Smith, who wavered back and forth over the summer.31 The following day authorisation was given for a remodelling of the county’s commission of the peace in which Aston sought to exclude his irreconcilable enemies, but again keep on side the middle-group leaders. Sir William 333

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Brereton was removed, along with Henry Mainwaring of Kermincham, who had supported Aston’s petition of February 1641 but by July 1642 was recruiting soldiers for parliament. But Booth, Wilbraham, Delves and other signatories to the May petition to the king kept their places. Cholmondeley, Kilmorey and Lord Brereton were all restored after their exclusion in the early 1630s and other commissioners of array (Thomas Leigh, Thomas Cotton and young Richard Grosvenor) were put on, alongside William Moreton and Jonathan Woodnoth, who had shown themselves to be dependable allies during the petitioning campaigns of 1641. From his experience in local government, Aston fully understood the importance of controlling the assizes and quarter sessions, and the new JPs were well chosen. Led by Kilmorey and Cholmondeley, they were quickly in action, attending sessions and signing recognisances.32 The core of the royalist party in the summer of 1642, then, consisted of those who had stood by Aston through the petitioning campaigns, and, indeed, back to the Short Parliament election. They were formed out of a combination of those with close ties to London and the royal court, those who had reacted most strongly against the puritan threat manifest in 1641, and those who were inspired by the prospect of serving their king and the charisma of the royal personage. Because of this, and because of the assertive leadership of Rivers and Aston, the brand of royalism that emerged in the shire was unusually aggressive and uncompromising. The two men set off from York with their commission on 20 June. They were empowered to muster and train the county militia, assess contributions, appoint officers and, if necessary, lead the county’s trained bands out of the shire to encounter the king’s enemies. They were also given the authority to arrest any who opposed them or who tried to execute parliament’s Militia Ordinance.33 The commissioners were quick to act, sending out orders on 27 June to summon the trained bands of Chester to a muster on the Roo Dee. According to a report from Sir William Brereton they had held four such musters by 5 July, presumably in the western hundreds of Edisbury, Broxton and Wirral, where their main strength lay. These appear to have met with limited success. The meeting at the Roo Dee which took place on 1 July provoked considerable opposition and led to a petition for peace; and Brereton claimed that his single muster, at Knutsford on 30 June, had ‘more appearance … than the commissioners of array had in four and they had more volunteers three to one then the commissioners of array had’.34 However, the commissioners were undeterred. From the start they pursued a forceful line, interpreting their instructions in the most aggressive manner open to them. The letter for the muster at Roo Dee warned that any trained bandsman who failed to appear would be regarded as ‘making opposition’ and ‘imprisoned for such contempt’; and Rivers and Aston issued a warrant to arrest the high constable of Bucklow hundred for sending out a summons to Brereton’s muster at Knutsford. A few days later they wrote to the king requesting that he send a messenger down from York to take into custody the 334

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ringleaders among parliament’s deputy lieutenants and asking for a direct order to firm up support for another muster at Chester.35 Endymion Porter, a gentleman of the king’s bedchamber, replied on Charles’s behalf on 10 July, urging them to ease off. He passed on assurances that the king ‘is very sensible of your love and affection to his service and hath sent you such a letter to the commissioners as may assure them of the acceptance of their duty to his Majesty’; but he then emphasised that the king’s wish was that they should work through established local channels. This meant preparing indictments against those executing the Militia Ordinance to prosecute them at the next assizes and using their own ‘persuasions’ to deal with Chester, lest any intervention by the king be seen as undermining the powers of the commissioners of array. Porter also urged them to pay particular attention to ‘preachers’ and other ‘loose persons’ against whom ‘most exception can be taken’, and bind them over to the next sessions or assizes.36 Gratified by the king’s recognition of their service, and emboldened by persistent rumours that he would soon be visiting the shire in person, Rivers and Aston set out to execute the instructions to the letter. At the quarter sessions at Nantwich on 12 July those recently appointed to the commission of the peace turned out in force – with Rivers, Kilmorey, Cholmondeley and Aston at their head. For the first time they outnumbered the middle-group justices. However, if they hoped to use the occasion to bring indictments against their opponents they were to be sadly disappointed. There is no trace in the order book or sessions file of any proceedings against parliamentarians and, as we shall see the jurors sided with the middle-group justices in adopting a peace petition.37 Nonetheless, the commissioners pressed on. Hicock, Bennet and Beaven, the grand jurors active at the April assizes, were arrested and imprisoned for resisting the execution of the commission of array. They also sought to make an example of four of the county’s leading puritan ministers. John Ley, Thomas Holford, Sabbath Clark and Richard Ouseley were all bound over to appear at the next assizes for refusing to publish the king’s declarations in their parish churches. The move was interpreted by Brereton as an attempt ‘to enaw and expel our best minsters’. Moreover, it was reported that a troop of horse commanded by Aston were marauding across the shire, threatening parliamentarian supporters. Beaven and Richard Worral, head constable of Bucklow hundred, were forced to flee their homes, and Richard Ouseley had to fight off the horse troop when they surrounded his house at Weaverham in Broxton.38 The aggressive stance adopted by the commissioners of array during June and July was in stark contrast to the more emollient tactics of Sir William Brereton and the other deputy lieutenants appointed under the Militia Ordinance. Sir William set off for the shire on 14 June after reports had reached him that Captain Gerard, ‘a papist’, was trying to raise troops for the king’s guard near Nantwich. His instructions were to muster the trained bands in the shire, take control of the county magazine and prevent 335

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any attempt by the king ‘to make war against the parliament’. He was also empowered to arrest anyone who tried to execute the Commission of Array, and to ensure that the sheriff publicised the various declarations in which parliament set out its case for ‘preserving his Majesty’s safety’ and ‘preventing disaffected and malignant persons’ from raising ‘faction and party against the parliament, which may at last break into open rebellion and civil war’. Their instructions were similar in content – if a little more defensive in tone – to those issued to the commissioners of array.39 However, Brereton faced a much more difficult task in executing them; and it was largely this that persuaded him to adopt a more accommodating stance. When he reached the residence of his former father-in-law, Sir George Booth, at Dunham Massey on 18 June, his first task was to try to organise the defence of Manchester, just over the county border. Lord Strange had already made considerable progress in executing the Commission of Array in Lancashire and was threatening to take the town by force.40 At a meeting with the Lancashire deputies, Brereton urged them to execute the Militia Ordinance immediately in order to prevent Manchester from ‘being plundered by papists or malignant spirits’. But he found them very reluctant, fearing that ‘if they should enter upon the ordinance for the militia they were not able to go through with the execution thereof’. This sense of the weakness of the parliamentarians’ position was evidently shared by the Cheshire deputies and, indeed, by Brereton himself. On 24 June he reported to the Commons’ speaker that they simply did not have enough strength to prevent meetings of the commissioners of array, nor to arrest the ringleaders, without resorting to ‘force or violence which being once entered into may not be suddenly composed and allayed, nor perhaps made good’. Four days later, after meeting with the Cheshire deputies, he was gloomily reporting that several of them ‘refuseth to join in the service’.41 Sir William was in a difficult position. His sympathies clearly lay with those in Manchester and thereabouts whom he described as the ‘best affected’. They were determined to execute the Militia Ordinance to provide the show of force needed to counter the commissioners of array and rally parliamentarian support for a cause which at least some of them regarded as a godly crusade. This was the approach advocated in a remarkable letter on 1 July written by the Manchester puritan Richard Radcliffe, recently appointed captain of one of the trained bands. It breathed defiance and godly zeal. Radcliffe interpreted Strange’s threat and the rapid appearance of volunteers to defend the town as ‘merely digitus dei, to move men’s hearts to stand to so good a cause, protesting to spend the last drop of blood before the town should suffer or my lord take away their goods’. He was confident that only ‘papists’ would fight against them, because the rest would be deterred by ‘fear of extirpation’. And he dismissed any talk of peace negotiations, ‘thinking them to be a breach of our protestation if consented unto and a dissenting of our cause which we intend by God’s assistance to stand or perish rather 336

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then prove treacherous to the king and parliament’.42 This was a model of the sort of puritan commitment to parliament’s cause that John Walter has seen as being conjured up and brought into play by the Protestation; and it was an attitude with which Brereton had considerable sympathy. But he was a political realist, and at the same time he had to acknowledge that among the deputy lieutenants on both sides of the county border there were a majority, including his hosts at Dunham, who were unwilling to stick their necks out, or risk escalating the conflict by firing the first shot. He had to strike just the right balance if he was not to lose control of the situation. Sir William appears to have accomplished this in extended negotiations with the Booths and others of the deputy lieutenants at the end of June. Sir George and his grandson agreed to support him in issuing warrants to summon a muster for their home hundred of Bucklow to take place at Knutsford on the thirtieth.43 As a quid pro quo Brereton appears to have agreed to refrain from aggressive or provocative action, to let it be understood that they were acting essentially in self-defence and to support the efforts of the Booths and others to try to wind down the conflict and pacify the county. The execution of the Militia Ordinance at Knutsford was a carefully choreographed step in this direction. According to Brereton’s account to the Commons speaker there was an impressive display of voluntary support for parliament. But the central event was a collective reaffirmation of the key principles of the Protestation. All those present, including the trained bandsmen, declared that they were putting themselves into a posture of arms for none other end and purpose but for the joint defense of his Majesty and the parliament together, according to their protestation, and to confirm their fidelity and affections to both, that they may not be drawn away to any seditious course which tendeth to make a division betwixt them; and hereto profess their assents by holding up their hands which was done with great shout and acclamation.44

This approach enabled the parliamentarians to turn a position of military weakness into one of potential political strength. By emphasising that they were aiming to defend both the king and parliament against ‘any seditious course’ they aligned themselves with the majority of local inhabitants who were intent on avoiding war; by refraining from any overt aggression in arresting opponents they were able to point up the contrast between the belligerence of the commissioners of array and their own essentially placatory approach; and by reaffirming their faith in the Protestation, and relating it to an explicit commitment to remain loyal to both king and parliament, they were associating the Militia Ordinance with the most familiar and widely accepted expression of allegiance to the things most Englishmen held most dear. Over the following weeks this reading of the Protestation took centre stage in Cheshire as the middle group once more made the running in a final 337

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bid to secure peace. What became known as the Cheshire Remonstrance was signed by all the prominent supporters of the middle group, as well as Brereton and several of the active deputy lieutenants, and over eight thousand local inhabitants. Its genesis can be traced back to a declaration in favour of peace by the citizens of Chester on 1 July. This was very evidently a tactical move to stymie the execution of the Commission of Array at the Roo Dee. The organisers were Calvin Bruen and two other leading puritan magistrates in Chester, William Edwards and Henry Harper. Their initial response was to draw up a petition opposing the execution of the commission on the grounds that parliament had condemned it as illegal and ‘of dangerous consequence’, and citing the Protestation as an expression of their unwillingness to oppose parliament. But after further consultation they produced a more comprehensive declaration of their joint loyalties to both king and parliament: as God and the fundamental laws of this kingdom have joined his Majesty and the parliament together, they cannot agree with a disjointed obedience, but do declare themselves enemies to all such as shall go about to put his Majesty and the parliament asunder … [and] heartily wish that they may be accursed as Corah and his accomplices [who rebelled against Moses and had been consumed by divine fire] that do or shall occasion or foment any difference betwixt his Majesty and this parliament.

Then, citing Charles’s own Declaration of 13 June, they noted that the king had assured them that ‘he hath no more thoughts of making war against parliament than his own children’, and that he had pledged to maintain the ‘just privileges’ and ‘acts’ of ‘this present parliament’, and ‘the Protestant religion and the laws of the land’, in line with their own ‘free and just Protestation’. A manuscript version of this was then subscribed by Edwards, Harper and Bruen, ‘cum multis aliis’.45 The county’s Remonstrance, drawn up a few days later, took this theme of joint allegiance to the king and parliament a stage further. The Chester Declaration was a rather obvious attempt to obstruct royalist mobilisation; and the majority of petitions for accommodation at this time were, as Anthony Fletcher demonstrates, calls for peace on parliament’s terms.46 The Remonstrance, by comparison, was a remarkably even-handed attempt to prevent both sides from mobilising and to promote a settlement. Drawing on the language and models of cooperation that were universally acknowledged to sustain the commonwealth, those who drafted it expressed their gratitude to both king and parliament for working together to remedy their grievances: We owe our laws, liberties, ourselves and which else we can yet style ours … to the goodness of his Majesty and to the great care and indefatigable pains of the honourable parliament, to the one for discovering the oppressions that had almost overwhelmed us and preparing and advising apt remedies, to the other for crowning their wholesome counsels with a blessed fiat wherein the joint acts of a good king and faithful council have so apparently concurred to the general good … 338

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They then expressed their unconditional loyalty to a united body politic: Our loyal affections and judgements will not permit us to style them true patriots and lovers of their country that are not cordially affected to our gracious sovereign, nor them good subjects that disaffect parliament. The king and parliament being like Hippocrates’ twins, they must laugh and cry, live and die together, and both of them are so rooted in our loyal hearts that we cannot disjoint them.

To underline this they again cited the Protestation as the defining statement of their beliefs: (according to our allegiance and our solemn protestation) our crown being in heaven, wee are resolved to spend our lives and fortunes … in maintenance of his Majesty’s royal and sacred person, honour and prerogative and in the preservation of the parliament & just privileges thereof … [and to preserve] our true undoubted religion, laws, proprieties and liberties which are deposited for our use and avail in that great and wise council, we being confident that neither king nor subject nor religion nor liberty can survive the ruin and destruction of that great body.

Finally, they pledged their determination, as active citizens, to oppose the ‘plots’ and ‘conspiracies’ condemned in the Protestation.47 The Cheshire Remonstrance has been described by John Morrill as an expression of neutralism that encapsulated the views of a majority in the country who, faced by political breakdown and the threat of social disorder in the summer of 1642, ‘closed ranks behind county boundaries’.48 But, if this was neutralism, it was not a neutralism of a particularly localist hue. Rather, it was a drive towards accommodation between king and parliament articulated in terms of a series of ‘commonwealth’ assumptions about the nature of the English polity that were almost entirely focused on central institutions and ideological nostrums. Indeed, neutralism may not be the mot juste to describe this particular political impulse or moment. The central institution through which the king could be reunited to his subjects and the nation brought together remained parliament. The animating spirit behind these proposals remained that of patriots and commonwealthsmen like Grosvenor. Throughout the summer the message had been clear; the middle group wanted the king to return to his parliament and agree to terms far more congenial to them and the junto than to Charles himself. The resulting position might best be termed a moderately parliamentarian accommodationism. It was a position based on experiences, expectations and beliefs acquired over the preceding decades by a large section of the English political nation. Such a response to national crisis was almost a natural reflex for men like Grosvenor, Booth and Wilbraham; but in the summer of 1642 it was to prove inadequate as a solution to the problems confronting the nation. It would be tempting to see the cognitive dissonance, the gap between ideology and reality being experienced by the middle group, as a function of the gap between centre and localities, with those active at the centre aware of the extent and nature of the political polarisation and personal loathing 339

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and distrust that was forcing the nation towards civil war, and those in the provinces blissfully unaware of the same process and thus more credulous in taking literally the moderate-sounding professions of almost identical principle emanating from the two sides. No doubt there is some truth in such a view. But at the centre there were those who, even at this late stage, still believed that accommodation was not only possible but even likely. Here let us turn to two future royalists, the county MP, Peter Venables and the MP for Chester, Sir Thomas Smith. Both stayed in parliament well into the summer. Smith was still conferring with Pym over the removal of images in Chester in April and was sufficiently trusted to be named to the Militia Commission in June;49 and as late as 26 June, in a letter from Elias Ashmole to Francis Leigh of Lyme, Venables was reported as having high hopes for a settlement. The baron … is now joyful to perceive some dawning of a clear understanding betwixt king and parliament, for yesterday the house fell into debate about the king’s answer to the nineteen propositions made by both houses (which is amongst the other books that he commanded me to enclose). In which debate it appeared that there were many against the other side, much affected to accommodation and moderation, being infinitely troubled that such things which were propounded (and which is by all confessed to have been heretofore sometimes denied as well as yielded unto) should by the overpressing of them and standing too much upon them, be the occasion of any civil war, and therefore were thought fitter to be declined.50

With intelligence like this coming back from the centre, the middle group had every reason to continue to work very hard indeed to provide local support for the sort of settlement that Venables saw emerging at the centre. The text of the Remonstrance had been drawn up by 12 July, when it was approved by jurors at the Northwich sessions.51 Thereafter the collection of signatures proceeded on a parish-by-parish basis as it had with previous petitions, with the earliest dated return being from Sandbach on 17 July and the latest from Macclesfield on 1 August. In each case signatories subscribed to the full text of the petition, so that there was no ambiguity about what they were signing up to. At the head of the list of gentlemen signatories were Booth, Wilbraham and Grosvenor; and the annotations on the subscription lists indicate that each was taking responsibility for collecting and collating the lists in their parts of the county. Grosvenor was in overall charge of pulling the lists together into a single document and then totting up the schedules of signatures.52 The Remonstrance was very much a middle-group initiative, with most of those who had signed the Attestation and the May 1642 petition to the king appending their signatures – the likes of Sir Thomas Delves and his son, Thomas Stanley, William Marbury, Richard Brereton, John Crewe, Henry Birkenhead, Hugh Wilbraham, Roger Wilbraham, Thomas Wilbraham and William Leversage. However, it was also signed by most of those identified by Rivers and Aston as active in executing the Militia Ordinance. Sir William Brereton signed the return for 340

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Gloverstone, where he had his Chester residence, and Ralph Arderne, John Baskerville, Henry Brooke, John Domville and Gilbert Gerard of Crewood all signed, with Brooke coordinating the collection of names for his home parish of Norton There was ministerial support from those who had subscribed to the May petition (Ley, Hunt, Lancaster and Holford), and also from other puritans such as Edward Burghall and Samuel Torshell at Bunbury.53 However, those gentry who had come out in support of the royalist cause were conspicuous by their absence from the schedules of signatures.54 Support for the Remonstrance, then, represented a broad coalition across the spectrum of moderate and parliamentarian-leaning gentry and local inhabitants. Motives for subscribing to it were no doubt varied, ranging from a tactical recognition that the strength of the commissioners of array made this the most effective means of obstructing royalist mobilisation to a more even-handed determination to prevent either side plunging the county and the nation into civil war. The surge of local support for peace expressed through the Remonstrance, as well as their weak military position, appears to have persuaded Brereton and the deputy lieutenants to adopt a relatively low profile in executing the Militia Ordinance during July. They held several musters, culminating in a meeting at Northwich on 26 July. But, although Brereton tried to put a brave face on it, this was clearly an uphill struggle. In a letter to Lenthall, the speaker of the Commons, at the end of the month, he lamented that many potential supporters were absenting themselves because they were intimidated by the levels of support for the Commission of Array and by their remoteness from any prospect of military assistance from Westminster. When Sir William tried to execute the ordinance in Chester on 8 August it was a disaster. With the assistance of Alderman Edwards he organised the beating of a drum and a stand of halberds at the cathedral cross; but he had to beat a hasty retreat when Mayor Cowper and Recorder Brerewood, both active commissioners of array, roused the citizens by ringing the common bell. They arrested some of the ‘puritanicall guard’ around Brereton, then forced him to take shelter in Edwards’s house.55 The moment of truth for executing the Militia Ordinance came on 12 August at a long-planned muster on Beam Heath, just outside Nantwich. The commissioners of array got wind of this, and at short notice assembled a much larger force on Ravensmoor Heath on the opposite side of the town. There was every prospect of a battle until Sir Richard Wilbraham and Roger Wilbraham of Dorfold, acting on behalf of the deputy lieutenants, and John Werden, on behalf of the commissioners of array, negotiated a truce whereby the two sides and the assembled volunteers would disperse peacefully, with neither side trying to enter the town. Brereton later claimed that this had been done without his agreement, before he had arrived on the scene; but it was evident that the commissioners commanded a much stronger force. Sir William acknowledged that his lack of cavalry made it impossible to take on the royalists on anything like equal terms; and, in spite of the agreement, the 341

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royalists were able to enter the town ‘in a bravado with great shouting and rejoicing’. What alarmed Brereton most was the loss of nerve by some of the deputy lieutenants, who were ‘so apprehensive of the disadvantage and danger to encounter the commissioners’ that they had readily agreed to the withdrawal.56 Soon after the Nantwich musters he left the shire to return to Westminster, where he began securing orders to bolster the local war effort.57 But, with his departure, efforts to mobilise military support for parliament largely collapsed.58 The initiative in combating the aggression of the commissioners of array was ceded to the middle group, who, emboldened by their success in securing subscriptions to the Remonstrance, stepped up their efforts to pacify the county. Thus, when Lord Strange proposed a contribution from Cheshire to assist the king’s forces on 25 August, following the raising of his standard at Nottingham, they responded by presenting him with a copy of the Remonstrance and supported it with a call for a peace settlement. They could see all around them, they declared, ‘the fearful symptoms of … a civil war’ as both sides continued to arm themselves under the authority of the Commission of Array and the Militia Ordinance. To try to settle things down, they explained that ‘many of us being formerly required to assist the said houses of parliament and the undertakings under the Militia Ordinance refused to contribute to their aid therein lest we should any way occasion the effusion of Christian blood’. They then went on to broaden their appeal with an eleventh-hour plea ‘that there be a cessation of arms upon both sides and that some moderate persons may be employed between his Majesty and the said houses of parliament for the state of the question and the clearing of the points of difference’.59 By this point, of course, there was little prospect of this being achieved. On 22 August the king had raised his standard, and Essex’s army had already set out from London to do battle with him. The moderates in the Commons referred to by Venables had lost their struggle for accommodation, and the peace party among Charles’s entourage had been eclipsed. As a result, there was no central focus of power or authority to which protagonists of a settlement could effectively appeal. With the centre simply not holding, there was nowhere for the middle group to turn. Now that hopes of progress at the centre were blocked off, the middle group made a final effort to limit the damage locally. In early September Richard Brereton of Ashley and Sir Richard Wilbraham’s half-brother Hugh, two of their most persistent spokesmen, approached Strange again, to complain about threats from the commissioners of array that ‘they would plunder, batter doors, burn the houses and disarm the persons of all such as comply not with them in their way’. Strange was quick to reassure them that neither he nor the king would countenance such action, and that he would issue a warning to this effect. This was reported back to a meeting of the middle-group gentry at Knutsford on 6 September and prompted a confident 342

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announcement of their determination ‘to keep the happy peace we have so long enjoyed’ and ‘suppress all tumults and stirs in his lordship’s absence’. They expressed themselves most ready to join together to suppress all within the county that shall go about or endeavour to disarm, pillage or otherwise terrify the county or to make division betwixt his sacred Majesty and his high and great court of parliament.60

The problem was that they lacked any military force of their own, and, because of this, the resolution remained a dead letter. Two weeks later, when a posse of royalist horse, commanded by Lord Cholmondeley and Lord Grandison, occupied Nantwich and then proceeded to plunder Crewe Hall and the houses of Sir Richard Wilbraham and Sir Thomas Delves, the middle group were powerless to resist. By this stage even Sir George Booth, the most forceful and authoritative of the middle-group leadership, was losing heart. He had performed a balancing act during July and August, organising the collection of signatures for the Remonstrance but maintaining his influence among the deputy lieutenants by organising his tenants to assist in the defence of Manchester. However, Aston informed the king of this, and on 16 August Charles wrote to Booth expressing his dismay that such a long-standing and loyal servant of the crown ‘should so forget himself’ as to arm against him. He issued what in effect was an ultimatum: unless Aston was able to assure him that Booth was cooperating with the commissioners of array, he and his grandson would face the consequences.61 It was probably at this point, as was later reported, that Booth dispatched his tenants with his grandson – who received a commission from Essex as a captain of horse on 30 July – to assist in the defence of Manchester, while he himself withdrew to his residence at Staley Hall in the remote hill region up by the Derbyshire border.62

TAKING SIDES In the meantime, the commissioners of array continued to make most of the running. Aston later claimed that, thanks largely to the efforts of Rivers and himself, ‘the commissioners did daily meet in some parts of the county maintaining among them many hundreds of horse and foot and kept down the militia men that they could never draw their body together nor make any reasonable appearance’. He also claimed that they had gathered ‘10,000 people’ at Ravensmoor Heath on 12 August.63 No doubt he was exaggerating; but the commissioners certainly held a strong military advantage, with control of Chester and its magazine, companies of horse able to maraud across the county and the capacity to imprison and harass those who declared for parliament. They were also able to mobilise considerable political support, at least in the shire’s western hundreds. While the middle group were gathering subscriptions to the Remonstrance in July and early August, Aston and 343

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Rivers were promoting a declaration of loyalty in the form of an ‘Attestation of the commissioners of array, and trained bands, gentry, ministers and other inhabitants of the county Palatine’.64 This ‘Attestation’ was presented to Charles in Nottingham at the raising of the royal standard. It combined a royalist gloss on the Protestation with an engagement to fight for the king. Beginning with a rehearsal of their own and the king’s readiness to observe the Protestation Oath, it then cited his intent, expressed in numerous royal declarations, for the ‘preservation and establishment of the true Protestant religion, of the laws of the land, of the liberty of your subjects and of the ancient, just and lawful rights and privileges of parliament’. But it then made clear where its allegiances lay by declaring the ‘king’s undoubted right and legal proceedings in disposing the militia of the kingdom by your commissioners of array’ and expressing satisfaction that this was ‘the only way to our safety and prosperity’. Finally, the signatories ‘engaged themselves and the country’ to serve and assist him ‘with our lives, fortunes and utmost power against all oppugners of your just legal rights, our liberties and enemies of the Protestant religion under what pretext soever taking up arms against your royal commands’.65 Aston claimed that this ‘Attestation’ was circulated round the shire and attracted 15,000 signatures.66 This was, again, almost certainly an exaggeration, but it is not implausible that it was backed by large numbers of local inhabitants. If so, this would demonstrate that, in spite of their aggressive tactics, the commissioners of array were able to mobilise considerable political, as well as military, support in the areas of the county under their control. Because of the national geo-politics of the outbreak of the civil war the final, decisive impetus in securing the western side of the county was provided by Charles himself. A personal visitation to the shire had been spoken about with trepidation by the likes of Brereton, and with jubilation by the likes of Rivers and Aston, since April. It finally happened in September. On the twenty-third the king marched from Shrewsbury to Chester attended by a small bodyguard. At Milton Green, on the outskirts of the county, he was met by Richard Egerton of Ridley with 600 musketeers; at Hatton Heath he was greeted by Earl Rivers and Viscount Cholmondeley with their tenants and volunteers; then at Rowton Heath, just outside Chester, by Sir Thomas Aston with his forces. Here we have the Aston/Rivers/Cholmondeley connection from the Short Parliament elections and the anti-puritan petitioning campaigns of 1641 in arms, their loyalty to central authority in the shape of the king now (albeit briefly) translated, through the authority and power vested in them by the Commission of Array, into local dominance.67 On the march to Chester Charles presented his more accommodating face. He sent ahead a copy of his recent Wellington manifesto, with instructions that it be read out in all the city churches on the following Sunday. In this he delivered his own ‘Protestation’ in the form of a royal oath to defend ‘the true reformed protestant religion established in the Church of England’, 344

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‘to govern by the known laws of the land’, ‘to maintain the just privileges and freedom of parliament’ and ‘to observe inviolably the laws consented to me by this parliament’.68 However, once he reached Chester, the bullishness of his reception encouraged him to adopt a more aggressive and partisan stance. As he entered the city he was enthusiastically greeted by the mayor and recorder and by the city’s trained bands, who lined the streets. The following day he witnessed an impressive demonstration of loyalty as trained bands from all over the shire paraded before him on Hoole Heath. Each had a petition displayed with their company’s colours in which they pledged their readiness to spend their ‘lives, fortunes and utmost power’ to defend his royal person against any ‘conspiracies’ or ‘attempts’ by ‘malignant persons’ in arms against him. Buoyed by this, Charles requested that the trained bands and the county magazine be allowed to accompany him back to Shrewsbury. This was a step too far for the Cheshire loyalists, and they insisted that the bandsmen and magazine remain in the shire to protect against ‘what dangers might befall in these troublesome times’.69 Nevertheless, there was a remarkable response to his call from volunteers. Within a few days of his departure on 26 September he was being joined in Shrewsbury by two regiments of foot under Rivers and Sir Edward Fitton, by Lord Cholmondeley’s cavalry, who had joined with Lord Grandison’s regiment, by another contingent of horse under Sir Thomas Aston, and also by three companies of Colonel Feilding’s royal life guard recruited by Captain Gerard and serving under Major Walthall of Wistaston. Malcolm Wanklyn has estimated that this amounted to nearly two thousand soldiers, many of whom went on to fight at Edgehill.70 By the time of his departure from Chester Charles was ready to come down hard on his enemies. He issued warrants for searching the houses and seizing the arms of those who he had been informed were supporters of the Militia Ordinance. Sir Richard Wilbraham was humiliated when he tried to kneel before the king and was ignored. Then, at the end of the visit, Charles had Wilbraham, Sir Thomas Delves, Philip Mainwaring, Henry Birkenhead and Roger Wilbraham committed to the custody of the sheriff and carried back to Shrewsbury. Finally, in a speech at Wrexham on the day of his departure, he reverted to the rhetoric of popular conspiracy, treachery and rebellion, which indicated that he had given up on overtures for peace and was readying himself for the fight.71 Meanwhile, on the eastern side of the shire the realities of a civil war were being brought home to the citizens of Nantwich. On 19 September the commissioners of array, emboldened by news of Charles’s impending arrival, decided to launch a strike on the county’s second town. News reached Nantwich the following day and the town’s leaders immediately ordered the erection of fortifications and sent to the neighbouring gentry for assistance. According to a local correspondent, Sir Richard Wilbraham was ‘forward for our help in sending us arms and his men abroad to bring in the country’ and Henry Vernon of Haslington also pledged his support in fighting for the 345

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parliament; but Sir Thomas Delves, of whom much was expected, answered that ‘he could not spare one man’ and promptly rode off to seek shelter in Chester. As the commissioners’ forces, amounting to around a thousand cavalry, approached there was feverish debate over how to respond. James Croxton, later one of Brereton’s chief lieutenants on the parliamentary side, and Richard Clutton, captain of the local trained bands, were all for fighting and had ordered their men ‘to give fire as soon as the cavaliers came within shot’. But they were overruled by a majority of the town’s leaders, who opted for parley, fearing that, with the king’s forces in the area, it would be impossible to hold out and the town would be ‘fired’. Once Cholmondeley and Lord Grandison, commander of the royalist force, had ‘engaged their honour that no man should be hurt, nor any arms or goods be taken from any man’, it was agreed to allow them into the town.72 This was a mistake. As soon as the soldiers entered, on the evening of 21 September, they began disarming local inhabitants and threatening that any who resisted would have their houses pillaged. The cavalry then began riding up and down the streets, breaking into dwellings and seizing the goods of those suspected to be parliamentarian sympathisers. The following day they rode out to the great houses of the neighbouring gentry at Crewe, Woodhey, Doddington, Haslington and Baddeley and seized arms and plunder. One local parliamentarian compared the intimidation and pillaging to the barbarities suffered by Protestants in Ireland. This was an exaggeration; but the activities of the royalist troops were sufficiently alarming to drive many of those who could afford it to abandon their homes and seek sanctuary in Chester.73 By 26 September the troops had departed; but in the meantime Nantwich had experienced what large numbers of soldiers could do to a civilian population. Along with the king’s visit to Chester, this displayed the futility of trying to pacify the contending parties and promote the sort of settlement that the middle group had been pursuing during the summer months. The only salvation in the face of a rampant soldiery was to flee or fight. This was the decisive moment for the collapse of the middle group as a political force. Their strategy had been shown not to work and their leaders were forced off the fence and had either to take sides or to withdraw. Sir George Booth and his grandson, William Marbury, Philip Mainwaring, Henry Mainwaring of Kermincham and Roger Wilbraham came out openly in support of parliament, joining the likes of Thomas Stanley and Henry Birkenhead, who were already active as deputy lieutenants. Sir Thomas Delves, Hugh Wilbraham and Richard Brereton of Ashley threw in their lot with the commissioners of array. John Crewe left for London. As for Grosvenor, he appears to have gone on collecting signatures for the Remonstrance well into September, but then retired to Eaton Hall and did his best to keep out of the war.74 Perhaps the most poignant response was that of Sir Richard Wilbraham. 346

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Having finally come off the fence and apparently thrown in his lot with parliament at Nantwich, within a day or two he was in Chester begging the king’s forgiveness and was then carried off to Shrewsbury under arrest. By early October, however, he was back in the shire, and in December he was at the forefront of a final attempt to pacify the county with the abortive Treaty of Bunbury.75 He is last sighted in the public record sitting on the royalist bench which met at Chester in January 1643. He died at Shrewsbury in April, having once again been imprisoned for supporting parliament.76 It was, all in all, an appropriately disparate, diffuse and, in many ways sadly, anti-climactic end for a connection or politico-social grouping whose time was up. They had been broken by non-negotiable political and religious conflicts in three kingdoms that could simply no longer be readily explained by or contained within their view of the world.

NOTES 1 HMC, 5th report, pp. 349, 353; Fletcher, Outbreak, p. 202; M. Cooksley and I. Atherton,, ‘Staffordshire and the Irish Rebellion of 1641’, Staffordshire Studies, 13 (2001), 57–64; Burghall, ‘Providence Improved’, pp. 20–1. 2 The Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, ed. W. H. Coates (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942) (hereafter D’Ewes 2), p. 172; LJ, iv.449. 3 CALS DCC 14/89; QJB, 1/6, fo. 62; The Private Journals of the Long Parliament, 5 January–17 September 1642, ed. W. H. Coates, V. F. Snow and A. S. Young, 3 vols (New Haven, CT, 1982–92) (hereafter PJ), i.189. 4 Cooksley and Atherton, ‘Staffordshire and the Irish Rebellion’, 69–71; Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 202, 206. 5 The True Relation of a Bloody Conspiracy by the papists in Cheshire…, in J. A. Atkinson (ed.), Tracts Relating to the Civil War in Cheshire 1641–1659 (Chetham Society, series 2, 65, 1909) (hereafter Civil War Tracts), pp. 2–4. 6 PJ, i.187,192; CJ, ii.490. 7 CJ, ii.351, 525; D’Ewes 2, pp. 276–7; HMC, 5th report, pp. 349–50; PJ, i.94, 144; ii.2, 14; CALS QJF, 70/1, 26, 38; 70/4, 26; Cheshire Quarter Sessions Records, p. 112; HMC, MSS of the Duke of Portland (London: HMSO, 1891), i.32–3; The Letter Books of Sir William Brereton, ed. R. N. Dore, 2 vols (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 123, 128, 1984–90) (hereafter Brereton), ii.539. 8 BL Additional MS 11333, fos 130–1. 9 Brereton was certainly in Chester around this time: Brereton, ii.539. 10 TNA CHES 24/126/3. 11 Civil War Tracts, pp. 40–2. 12 Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 191–227. 13 Ibid., pp. 231–2; Gardiner, History, x.186–8. 14 Civil War Tracts, pp. 42–4. 15 CALS QJB 1/6, fos 64–8; BL Additional MS 11333, fo. 130; Additional MS 36913, fo. 60; Civil War Tracts, pp. 36–8. 16 BL Harleian MS 2135, fos 104–5; Additional MS 36913, fo. 60. 347

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The crisis, 1641–42 17 Civil War Tracts, pp. 38–40. 18 Three sets of churchwardens’ accounts refer to meetings about the taking of the Protestation: two, from Frodsham and Tilston, in the churchwardens’ year 1641–42, which ran from Easter (in 1641 on 31 March) to Easter (in 1642 on 20 April); and a third, from Marbury in 1642–43: CALS P8/13/2; P18/3608; P39/8/1. 19 Walter, Covenanting Citizens, pp. 154–5, 189–94. 20 Ibid., pp. 40–1, 124–5, 156, 197–9; CALS P18/3608. 21 Walter, Covenanting Citizens, pp. 250–1. 22 Civil War Tracts, pp. 45–7. 23 CALS QJB 1/6. 24 TNA C 231/5, fo. 518. 25 BL Additional MS 36913, fo. 136. 26 Maltby, Prayer Book and People, pp. 175–7; Maltby, ‘Petitions’, pp. 118n, 126n, 127n, 135n. 27 Maltby, ‘Petitions’, pp. 113–15. 28 Cust, Charles I and the Aristocracy, pp. 338–42. Aston’s Collection was printed in London and quickly ran into several editions: ESTC Wing A4072; 4073; 4075. 29 Maltby, Prayer Book and People, p. 177. The impact of the petition was sufficient to encourage a counter-proposal to publish a collection of pro-parliamentarian petitions: An appeale to the world in these times of extreame danger (1642 [12 July]), ESTC Thomason E 107[26], p. 3. 30 PA House of Lords main papers, 25 June 1642. 31 There are two lists of commissioners of array at this time, which probably reflect different versions of the regularly revised county commissions: Northamptonshire Record Office Finch Hatton MS, 133, fo. 5; BL Additional MS 36913, fo. 122. Rivers, the other main source of counsel on Cheshire, was shuttling back and forth between the county and York in June 1642, signing a recognisance at Frodsham on 7 June, then subscribing to the royalist ‘Engagement’ at York on 13 June: CALS QJF71/2, 101; Cust, Charles I and the Aristocracy, pp. 289–91, appendix 2. 32 TNA C 231/5, fo. 240; CHES 24/126/3, 4; CALS QJF 71/2, 3. 33 Stuart Royal Proclamations, ed. J. F. Larkin and P. L. Hughes, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973–83, ii.767–75,777–81; Rushworth, iii, pt. i.657–8; Fletcher, Outbreak, p. 323. 34 CALS DCC 14/79; PJ, ii.199; LJ, v.204. There also appears to have been a meeting for Bucklow hundred at Knutsford on 5 July: G. Ormerod (ed.), Tracts Relating to Military Proceedings in Lancashire during the Civil War (Chetham Society, 2, 1844), p. 21. 35 CALS DCC 14/79; BL Additional MS 11332, fo. 122. 36 BL Additional MS 11332, fo. 122. 37 CALS QJB 1/6 fo. 73: QJF, 71/2. 38 HMC, Portland MSS, i.44–6, 47, 52. 39 PJ, iii.38; CJ, ii.611; LJ, v.134–5. 40 R. N. Dore, The Great Civil War in the Manchester Area (Manchester: University of Mancheester Department of Extra Mural Studies, 1972), p. 10. 41 PA House of Lords main papers, 24 June 1642; LJ, v.174; PJ, iii.159. 42 Derbyshire Record Office, Gell MSS, D258/34/69; Dore, Manchester, p. 10. 348

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Cheshire and the outbreak of civil war 43 CJ, ii.653. 44 PJ, iii.199; BL Harleian MS 2135, fo. 65. 45 The Declaration was printed on 20 July (ESTC Thomason, 669.f.6[55]), and both versions on 20 August: J. R. S. Phillips, Memoirs of the Civil War in Wales and the Marches, 2 vols (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1874), ii.8–9. The MS copy is HL Ellesmere MSS, EL 7764. 46 Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 268–72. 47 BL Harleian MS 2017. Those who drafted the Remonstrance cannot be identified with certainty, but, given the similarity of the Remonstrance’s rhetoric and assumptions to those expressed by Grosvenor – and the fact that he took the lead role in collecting and collating signatures – it is probable that he played a central part in this. 48 Morrill, Revolt of the Provinces, pp. 36, 159–60. It should be noted that Morrill’s reading of this document is skewed by his conflating of it with the articles for pacifying the West Riding, drawn up in September, after the two documents were bound alongside each other in Bodleian Ashmole MS 830, fos 280–4: Morrill, Cheshire, pp. 57–9; Fletcher, Outbreak, p. 385n. 49 HMC, 5th Report, p. 350; CJ, ii.615, 642. 50 JRL Leigh of Lyme correspondence, Elias Ashmole to Francis Leigh, 26 June 1642. 51 BL Harleian MS 2017, fos 25, 46. 52 Ibid., fos 60, 99–100. The Remonstrance and the subscription lists survive among a volume of Grosvenor’s papers later acquired by the Chester antiquarian Randle Holme II; Sir Richard’s annotations and calculations appear on fos 15, 45, 59, 60, 120, 122, 132, 142, 146, 148. 53 Ibid., fos 6–7, 17, 25, 70, 83–6, 114, 118, 120. Lancaster was acting as scribe and coordinator for the collection of signatures in Tarporley: fo. 28. 54 The one apparent exception was the Thomas Savage esq. who signed at Barrow, although this may not have been Rivers’s brother but the head of another branch of the family: Bootham and Parker, Savage Fortune, pp. 187–8. The Thomas Cotton who signed was probably the head of the branch of the family that lived at Cotton: BL Harleian MS 2017, fos 39–40. 55 HMC, Portland MSS, i.46; BL Harleian MS 2125, fo. 65; R. Morris, The Siege of Chester 1643–6 (Chester, 1924), p. 28. 56 Malbon, ‘Memorial’, pp. 23–5; Civil War Tracts, p. 91; HMC, Portland MSS, i. 51–2. 57 Civil War Tracts, pp. 53–5. Brereton was probably back in the Commons by 22 August, when the house ordered an inquest on his behalf into allegations published against him: CJ, ii.732. 58 The one area where parliamentarian activity and recruiting continued was in the north-eastern corner of the shire around Stockport, where Robert Duckenfield (who was the first deputy lieutenant to become engaged in military action in late June), Ralph Arderne of Harden and Edward Hyde of Norbury were active: Wanklyn, ‘Landed society and allegiance’, pp. 234–5. 59 Bodleian Ashmole MS 830, fo. 282. 60 BL Harleian MS 2095, fos 254–5. 61 BL, Additional MS 36914, fos 94–6. 349

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The crisis, 1641–42 62 Wanklyn, ‘Landed society and allegiance’, p. 200; TNA SP 28/261, fo. 2. We are grateful to David Scott for this reference. 63 BL Additional MS 36913, fos 122–3. 64 BL Additional MS 36914, fos 98–9. 65 Ibid. 66 BL Additional MS 36913, fos 122–3. 67 Civil War Tracts, p. 68. 68 Cust, Charles I and the Aristocracy, pp. 363–4. 69 Civil War Tracts, pp. 64, 69, 71–2. 70 P. Young, Edgehill: The Campaign and the Battle (Kineton: Roundwood Press, 1967), pp. 212–13, 222–3; M. Wanklyn and P. Young, ‘A king in search of soldiers: Charles I in 1642: a rejoinder’, Historical Journal, 24 (1981), 147–54, at 152; BL Additional MS 36913, fo. 123; Wanklyn, ‘Landed society and allegiance’, pp. 227–8. 71 Phillips, Civil War in Wales, i.17–22. 72 The Latest Remarkable Truths… (London, 1642), pp. 3–4; Malbon, ‘Memorial’, pp. 25–6; Civil War Tracts, p. 62. 73 Civil War Tracts, pp. 63–4; Phillips, Civil War in Wales, i.17. 74 Grosvenor papers, p. xxiii. 75 Malbon, ‘Memorial’, pp. 31–4; Civil War Tracts, pp. 91–2; Morrill, Cheshire, pp. 66–9. 76 CALS QJB 1/6, fo. 85; Malbon, ‘Memorial’, 48.

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W

hat, then, are we to make of this account of the coming of the civil war to Cheshire? On the one hand, both the continuing salience and eventual dissolution of the patriot world-view and connection can be taken as proof positive, first, of the continuities linking the run-in to the civil war with the political culture of the 1620s and, second, of the discontinuities that ultimately separated the one period from the other. To deal with the continuities first, clearly the Wilbraham/Booth/Grosvenor group maintained its coherence – both ideological and social – until the very last moment. Throughout the crisis these men applied essentially the same assumptions about the nature of the polity – about how, ideally, it should work and what might be going wrong if it did not – that had guided their conduct and made their political reputations as patriots and fathers of the country during the 1620s. While those attitudes ensured that they did not like the policies of the Personal Rule, they did not, however, lead anything like directly to what we might term parliamentarian activism or partisanship. They led instead to a form of neutralism. But this was not a localist neutralism; indeed it was not properly neutralism at all but, rather, accommodationism, a desire for a settlement between moderate men on both sides, to be wrought on the basis of the Patriots’ vision of how the polity should function. And that vision was anything but a localist one; its basic unit was not the county community and its basic expression was not the move to exclude conflict from an always already united county. Rather, the political world-view of the middle group was organised around the interaction between local and central interests, groups and institutions, in particular parliament, and centred on the restoration of good relations between crown and subject, to be brought about through the representation of local opinions and grievances in parliament. Throughout, their actions were concentrated on influencing both the crown 351

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and the parliament through the expression, through a variety of different mediating conduits and genres, of the opinion of the county. ‘Politics’ for these men was something that was nearly always to be conducted through a series of transactions between the localities and a variety of sources of power and authority at the centre. In terms of the incipient polarisation and party building of the early 1640s, the result was a position that we might perhaps, without too great anachronism, call a moderately parliamentarian accommodationism. Not, when push finally came to shove, that such a position led inevitably to support for the parliament. As the letter describing Venables’ hopes for a settlement in June shows, which side one ultimately chose was as much a function of who one blamed for the final failure to settle as it was of the nature of the settlement one preferred – and by June it seems clear that Venables was blaming the junto rather more than the king. All the other parties to the political exchanges in the county described above were just as concerned with the manipulation of a variety of links between the county and the centre, trying to bolster their position by representing the centre to the locality and the locality to the centre. What the political crisis of 1640–42 did, of course, was to fracture central authority, distributing bits of it across the committee structure of both houses of parliament as well, of course, as leaving a considerable residue with the king and the court. All the political groupings in Cheshire seem to have realised this relatively quickly, and the political contests between them almost immediately took the form of competing attempts to mobilise and manipulate this novel and unstable constellation of central authorities for their own advantage. Clearly, in part what was at stake in the complex manoeuvres described above was a struggle for local status and power. The virtual monopoly of the ‘popular patriots’ having been broken in the Short Parliament election by two younger men with reputations for opposing the policies of the Personal Rule, the subsequent struggles during the Long Parliament election, and then over Aston’s first and second petitions and the Attestation, could be seen as a function of the efforts of the middle group to re-establish control and, in particular, to put the upstart Aston in his place. That certainly seems to be how both Werden and Aston interpreted their actions. Again, insofar as these were local and personal disputes, it is remarkable the extent to which they were conducted with reference to national issues and institutions. The point being, of course, that in the polity of early Stuart England in general, and in the political situation of the early 1640s in particular, purely localist action would have been, if not impossible, then certainly largely self-defeating; and everybody involved in these disputes appears to have known it. We are dealing here with a complex, integrated, relatively centralised polity and political culture, and with men remarkably skilled in trying to make that system and that culture work to their own advantage. But, obviously, there was a good deal more going on here than a struggle for local prestige and precedence. From the outset there was an ideological 352

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element to the composition of the various connections or groups. Aston, like Rivers, had court connections, and had from the first put his anti-puritan cards on the table during the Short Parliament election, just as Brereton had mobilised his support among the godly. The ideological element in the reputation of the ‘popular patriots’ was clear in the name itself, just as Werden’s loathing for what he took it to stand for was clear from the way he used the term as an insult. Of course, the ideological identities of the different individuals and groups shifted and mutated as the crisis developed. At the outset, while Brereton, the puritan, appears to have followed the drift of national events by moving ‘left’, Aston, the courtier with Laudian proclivities, seems to have moved towards the centre, posing as an opponent of the policies of the Personal Rule, which at the time he had been more than happy vigorously to support and administer. This move was only partially successful and Aston, it seems reasonable to surmise, lost his seat in the Long Parliament election because it became clear that he was not in fact as opposed to ship money, or indeed to the policies of the Personal Rule in general, as his vigorous conduct of the county’s dispute with the city had led people to believe. As for Brereton, his patronage of the first root-and-branch petition made the nature and extent of his puritanism clear and gave Aston his opportunity to rebuild his position both in the county and at the centre. Religion here was the wedge issue – Brereton’s puritanism against Aston’s anti-puritanism – with the middle group left suspended in a sort of moderate puritan/Calvinist conformist limbo between the two extremes. But the consequent disputes soon became involved with questions that were not simply or straightforwardly religious or ecclesiological. The issue of church government was, of course, also an issue about law, degree, hierarchy; about the nature of order and how best to preserve it. That certainly was how Aston habitually cast it. So, too, was the issue of liturgy about order and obedience to what the law enjoined, as well as about the nature and texture of public worship and sacred space. Not only that, but, because in Cheshire these arguments were conducted through the raising and presenting of rival petitions, and because the gentry could not, until very late in the day, agree on appropriate forms of words behind which to unite, the resulting disputes came to be as much about the nature of the petitioning, indeed of the political process itself, as they were about religion. Who could speak for or represent ‘the county’? What did it mean to do that? What indeed precisely was it that was being represented in that process? And to which locus of central authority should such representations most appropriately, legitimately, or indeed effectively, be made? In the resulting altercations the notion of a unified, consensual gentry county community was always present. As we have seen, because of the make-up of Cheshire gentry society – the extent of long settlement and intermarriage; the powerful myths and the institutional arrangements which sustained its identity as a county palatine; and the habits of public service 353

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ingrained in local government – this notion was particularly influential within the shire. Out of this came the impetus towards developing consensual, and largely cooperative, responses to the demands from the centre; traditions of collective gentry petitioning which were adapted to enable the mass petitioning of 1641; and a readiness to bury differences in the pursuit of unity, which made possible the negotiations in January 1641 and widespread support for the prayer-book petition of December. The county community was there throughout as an ideal of honourable, unifying and consensus-seeking public behaviour; but it was one to which, in the eyes of all the participants, their opponents or rivals were singularly failing to live up. In the consequent outbreaks of self-righteous self-justification and vitriol, we can watch the consensual norms of pre-war provincial gentry politics falling apart before our very eyes. Nor was this only a function of the fallings-out – both personal and ideological – among the gentry. For, as agreement failed to be achieved, the locus of the thing to be represented or spoken for – the source, that is, of the public authority being claimed by the rival representatives of the county – shifted from the gentry to a much wider notion of the political nation. That, after all, was what the move to mass petitioning and counter-petitioning surely meant. What Cheshire opinion was had now to be established, at least in part, by getting as many of the inhabitants as possible to sign up behind this or that statement of principle. This placed the county at the forefront of the mass petitioning campaigns of 1641–42. The ease or naturalness with which this move was made, not only by the godly but by their enemies, was remarkable. It was a function of the logic of the sort of appeals to the political judgement of the freeholders that the likes of Sir Richard Grosvenor had been making even at uncontested county elections since the 1620s. This was combined with the enlargement of a public sphere of debate, pitch making and appeals to bodies of public opinion brought about by the massive expansion in the printing of topical political and religious material following the collapse of censorship. The increasing size of a politically informed ‘public’ both legitimised and required mass petitioning. In Cheshire this impulse was reinforced by the vigorous canvassing of support and opinion in the intensely contested run-ins to both the Short and Long Parliament elections. These drew even the great opponent of puritanism and popularity, Sir Thomas Aston, into appealing to the ‘people’, in part because the rules of the political game now being played demanded it, and in part to re-establish his status as the shire’s ‘representative’. Added to all this, of course, was the burgeoning cult of parliament as ‘the Representative of the People’, the clearing house for the grievances of the subject and the source of a renewed agreement or compact between an aggrieved ‘public’ and a monarch newly sensitised to the real condition of his kingdoms. Thus was the political nation widened, and appeals to ‘the people’ were established as a legitimate means to validate a cause or a claim to speak for the ‘county’, ‘country’ or ‘commonwealth’. 354

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Inviting ‘the people’ to participate in politics in this way of course carried considerable risk. The choices they were being asked to make were extremely fraught and often involved very high stakes, and there was no guarantee that they would come down on the right side. So, how confident could the gentry leadership of the county be that they would follow their lead and respond in the ways that they wanted? Or, to put it another way, how much influence could they exercise over tenants and neighbours, and what means of leverage lay at their disposal? This is a question that has been hovering around the discussion throughout this book – not least because the whole notion of a gentry-based county community rests on the presumption of gentry influence and leadership – and it is thrown into sharp relief by the petitioning campaigns and efforts at political mobilisation in Cheshire during 1640–42. One of the most perceptive discussions of this issue is provided by Derek Hirst in his study of voting behaviour in early Stuart elections. Hirst demonstrates that the landlord–tenant relationship which many contemporaries presumed would be the key consideration in such matters was in practice relatively weak.1 One of those who discovered this was Bishop Bridgeman, when he tried to mobilise his tenants in Wigan, Lancashire to support his brother Edward in the election of 1628. Hirst shows that barely half of his forty tenants voted the way he wanted, which moved him to complain that ‘my tenants began to rebel against me and would do nothing at my motion … and therefore I will take all these tenants at will into my own hand’.2 Similar complaints were not infrequent, and Hirst takes these, together with the care with which candidates canvassed freeholders and made arrangements for their entertainment on election day, as evidence that the tenurial connection alone could rarely be relied on to ensure electoral support. At the same time, however, Hirst acknowledges that the influence exercised by landowners in their neighbourhoods was often a decisive factor in contested elections. This is borne out by his discussion of the poll book prepared by Sir Edward Dering for his contest with Sir Roger Twysden in the Short Parliament election for Kent, and the more detailed analysis of this by Jason Peacey. Peacey demonstrates that, prior to the election, Dering embarked on an exhaustive canvassing campaign to identify and firm up his local support, predicated on the assumption that this would be strongest in the neighbourhoods where he and his gentry backers resided. The poll book suggests that in this he was correct. Hence, the bulk of the support that he identifies was in the parishes and townships surrounding his home parish of Pluckely. When he ventured into Twysden’s neighbourhood – by canvassing Nettlestead and Yalding – he found no likely votes. Otherwise he was confident that gentry supporters like Sir Thomas Culpepper would be able to control the votes of ‘his dependedness’.3 Peacey’s work supports Hirst’s conclusion that ‘Influence did obviously count generally, but its effect was probably more the creation of an intangible relationship of subordination rather than of the enforcing of loyalty along directly tenurial lines.’4 355

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This analysis ties in with the situation we encounter in Cheshire. Unfortunately, aside from the leading gentry we have little evidence of voter behaviour in the two fiercely contested county elections of 1640. But we do have the lists of signatories for the mass petitions, and also the evidence of royalist recruiting in the summer of 1642 provided by the post-Restoration petitions from maimed soldiers. As we have seen, there is a general correlation between those parishes that subscribed to the 1641 petitions and the territorial associations of those gentry who sponsored them. Similarly, the petitions from royalist recruits demonstrate that these were drawn from the neighbourhoods of the regimental commanders. Aston’s troop of horse came from Aston itself and the area around his estates in the south-west of Bucklow hundred and the north-east of Edisbury. Sir Edward Fitton’s regiment of 500 foot was drawn predominantly from the southern part of Macclesfield hundred, where his estates and those of the family of his deputy, Major Urian Leigh, younger brother of Thomas of Adlington, were located.5 The sort of inducements that landlords might offer to those who were prepared to enlist were illustrated by the assurances that Sir George Booth was said to have given to his tenants. Those who were prepared to join in the defence of Manchester were promised that if they suffered any losses in the service he would recompense them, and if they died he could arrange beneficial leases for their family.6 However, when we look in more detail it becomes evident that the middling sorts and property holders within these parishes were not mere ciphers. They were quite capable of organising themselves and making independent choices. The most impressive demonstration of this was the root-and-branch petition of January 1641, organised by Calvin Bruen. This gathered an estimated 1,100 signatures, collected, it would appear, through the puritan networks that Werden complained about in March as seeking to discredit Sir Thomas Aston. Even if this campaign was not quite so devoid of gentry involvement as Aston asserted, it was still an impressive demonstration of the capacity of ‘the people’ to take the initiative. Those outside the networks of the godly were also quite capable of organising themselves, as was demonstrated by the forty-five parishioners of Tarporley who conducted a running battle with Nathaniel Lancaster, in spite of the backing he received from the leading local gentleman, John Crewe; and in Alderley nine parishioners, led by the local minister, Samuel Shipton, signed the December 1641 petition in spite of their landlord Thomas Stanley distancing himself from it.7 When it came to recruiting, again tenants were quite prepared to defy their landlord. A striking example was provided in September 1642 by the tenants of the royalist William Davenport of Bramhall. They presented him with a remarkable ultimatum, explaining the reasons why they could not follow his lead and urging him to change his allegiance. We your worship’s tenants here present having these many days with sad spirits weighed not only the woeful distractions of our kingdom but also the present 356

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Part III conclusion standing that is betwixt your worship and ourselves have thought it our duty … to present your worship with these few lines of our humble request. Wherein we do most humbly entreat your worship that either you would be pleased to bend your intentions that way that we might with upright hearts and safe consciences cleave to you both in life and death (which in so doing we shall ever be most willing to do) or else that your worship will not repute us ill-affected or false-hearted tenants in refusing to venture our lives in causes that our hearts and consciences do persuade us are not good or lawful, nor such as we dare safely and with good consciences maintain and defend you in. For, howsoever, we would not for the world harbour a disloyal thought against his Majesty yet we dare not lift up our hands against that honourable assembly of parliament whom we are confidently assured doe labour both for the happiness of his Majesty and all his kingdom.8

This demonstrated a remarkably thoughtful engagement with the issues at stake when it came to taking sides in the autumn of 1642. Here we have a group of tenants, fully conscious of the obligations to their landlord – and, no doubt, painfully aware of the sanctions that he might impose on them – who have carefully considered the competing claims on their allegiance and, in the final analysis, expressed a determination to be guided by their conscience. Before Davenport had a chance to reply, they volunteered for the parliamentarian company being raised by Captain Edward Hyde of Norbury. This response indicates that John Walter is surely correct in arguing that local inhabitants from the ‘middling sort’ and lower orders were newly sensitised to their responsibilities to act as ‘God’s Englishmen’ by the solemn processes of the Protestation Oath. This sense of their obligations was not, of course, something new. Godly ministers had been urging action in pursuit of conscience for generations.9 Moreover, as we have seen, Whitelocke’s charges and Grosvenor’s election address called on those below the level of the elite to take on the mantle of ‘public men’ and discharge their responsibilities in the government of the shire and the safeguarding of the ‘country’ in a sturdily independent-minded fashion. The sense of affront manifested by those whose names were added to Aston’s February petition without their consent – as if ‘they for fear or favour of men did subscribe to it’ – was a measure of how keenly they felt the force of such obligations. However, it was the Protestation taken by the inhabitants of Cheshire in the spring of 1642 – and referred to in all the subsequent public declarations – that probably had the greatest impact in enhancing their recognition of the demands of conscience and active citizenry. All this did not mean that ‘the people’ were unresponsive to gentry leadership and authority. The Cheshire evidence demonstrates time and again that the influence of the shire’s gentry counted for a good deal. But this did not rest simply on the formal ties of tenure. It was invariably combined with a mix of relatively subtle and intangible types of leverage, such as credit, trust and personal fidelity. These can be traced back to the complex amalgam 357

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of expectations and obligations associated with what William Webb still described as ‘lordship’. There was the identification of a gentry family, often built up over generations, with the interests of the particular neighbourhood where their patrimonial estates were located and their ancestors were commemorated. There were also the duties and responsibilities defined by the commonwealth ideals extolled in sermons, jury charges and advices: responsibilities to nurture and protect tenants, to provide open-house hospitality, to settle disputes and represent the interests of their neighbourhood. On the part of tenants, neighbours and the ‘meaner sort’, there were the reciprocal obligations of loyalty, fidelity, respect and the performance of the role allotted by their degree. And all these interactions were expected to take place within a context of ‘downward deference’, with gentry engaging in demonstrations of sociability and bonhomie, often organised around country recreations such as horse racing. Where the gentleman was also a JP this added a further layer of responsibility and interaction. He worked to maintain local order, supervised road and bridge repairs; did his best to protect local parishes from the burdens of poor relief and taxation; and lobbied higher authority on his neighbours’ behalf. In return he expected deference, obedience and respect for his authority. These forms of social leadership were reinforced during 1641–42 by the ideological stance of leading gentry. Given the findings of Conrad Russell and others on the importance of the pre-existing networks of the godly in party building and propagandising, both at the centre and in the localities, the prominence of Brereton and, indeed, of lesser lights like Calvin Bruen should not surprise us. What is more striking is the early emergence, continuing coherence and consistent activism of the Aston/Cholmondeley/Rivers/ Kilmorey connection. Central here was the figure of Sir Thomas Aston, who emerges from these events as man of very considerable political energy, skill and ambition. Both John Morrill and Judith Maltby have sought to characterise him as a ‘moderate’, to assimilate his political and ideological trajectory to that of, say, Hyde or Falkland and to present him as the natural representative of, or spokesman for, what Maltby calls ‘prayer book protestantism’ – a substantial body of popular provincial opinion that was as opposed to the Laudian culture of the court as it was to that of the root-and-branch ravings of the puritans.10 This book has essayed a somewhat different portrait of Aston as yet another rather perfectly formed, if hitherto unnoticed, example of what had emerged through the early Stuart period as a recognisable type of political operator. He was the man on the move and on the make, anxious to establish and play off connections and reputations made at the centre against others made in the localities; able to both play to and mobilise a variety of (sometimes popular) constituencies, while at the same time seeking out patronage and, indeed, office in the service of the crown or at court. These were educated, selffashioned men of affairs who spent many a long hour acquiring the rhetori358

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cal, political and intellectual skills and attributes, the knowledge and cultural capital, necessary to present themselves to a variety of audiences as men of consequence and clout. Other examples of the type might include Sir Edwin Sandys, Sir Robert Phelips, Sir Thomas Wentworth and Sir Edward Dering. Grosvenor represents a provincial analogue, someone anxious to cut a dash, to make a career in the service of ‘the country’ or ‘commonwealth’ through the public display of many of the same attributes, except that he was content to do it (trips to parliament aside) in an almost wholly local context. Aston, however, was a courtier as well as a country gentleman, and throughout it is evident that his sights were set on the court and the national political scene just as much as they were on the county. To characterise his career in these terms is not, however, to argue that Sir Thomas was simply a careerist, a creature of ambition, more or less devoid of principle. Far from it; for he emerges from these events as something of a ‘conviction politician’, a man, indeed, of remarkably strong and stable principles and opinions. It was just that the form that those opinions took and the political actions they prompted were modulated through Sir Thomas’s very acute sense of what the political circumstances would allow. From the outset, Aston was a convinced royalist and anti-puritan. Here was a man very likely entirely at ease with Laudianism and, indeed, with many of the other policies of the Personal Rule, some of which he appears to have happily prosecuted as a ship money sheriff and in his own refurbished church at Aston chapel. Confronted with the breakdown of the Personal Rule, because of the energy with which he had pursued the county’s dispute with the city Aston seems to have been able to present himself as a defender of local interests against the oppressions associated with it. By the Long Parliament election that reputation appears to have been collapsing under closer scrutiny of his record and, very likely, of his religious opinions, which may even have led to rumours that he was a papist.11 Thrust to the margins in county politics, Aston seized on the issue of root-and-branch as a way to build a local following and advance his connections with the court. For root-and-branch reform was not popular, and Aston evidently felt that he could mobilise a clear majority of county opinion (both elite and popular) against it. Here, therefore, was an ideal opportunity to reverse his defeat at the polls, challenge the right of the godly to speak for the county, displace his rival Brereton as the true representative of Cheshire opinion and curry favour with the king. It was no doubt such considerations that produced the delightful irony that it was the virulently anti-puritan, the stridently anti-populist Sir Thomas Aston who was the first Cheshire politician – indeed one of the first politicians nationally – to make the move to genuinely mass petitioning. For Aston, of course, the issue of root-and-branch was a point where principle and pragmatism, idealism and ambition met in an entirely virtuous and synergistic circle. Sir Thomas clearly did believe passionately in the norms and forms of the national episcopal church. Moreover, he hated 359

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puritanism with an equal passion as a threat to all order in church, state and society; and, as befitted a body servant of the king, loyalty to the person and authority of the monarch was his guiding light. Presbyterian reform offered a wedge issue in terms of which he could construct an anti-puritan alliance encompassing a range of opinions from hardened Laudians, on the ‘right’, to advocates of moderated episcopacy, indeed to certain sorts of erstwhile moderate puritans, on the ‘left’. In seeking to produce such a coalition – to maximise support for the status quo and for the king and to isolate and discredit the radical puritans and Sir William Brereton – Aston, as we have seen, based both his petition and his Remonstrance on a studiedly moderate (and decidedly un-Laudian) account of episcopacy. There is a good presumptive case to be made that this was a tactical decision. It was, after all, no more than Charles I and, indeed, even Laud himself were doing at precisely the same time, at least for purposes of public consumption. In the political and polemical circumstances of 1640–42 anyone hoping to maximise the available support for some sort of episcopal national church had, whatever their private opinions or preferences, to repudiate Laudianism. Moreover, given the fractured and fragmented nature of the politico-religious scene, any and every such attempt had to be a coalition-building exercise, based on phrases and locutions that, by fudging many of the central issues, allowed as many schools or gradations of opinion as possible to align themselves against a common enemy – in Aston’s case a levelling, puritan drive towards further reformation in church, state and society. It is as precisely such coalition-building exercises that we should view both of Aston’s mass petitions on ecclesiastical affairs. Rather than a simple front man or conduit for a long-standing and stable school of provincial ‘prayer book protestant’ sentiment, Aston – who, let us remember, was throughout a gentleman of the privy chamber and seems to have spent most of the crucial period in London – is best seen as playing a more complicated political game. He was mediating between the centre and the localities, massaging local opinion in order the better to be able to insert carefully crafted expressions of that opinion into a central political narrative in which he himself was coming to play an increasingly overt ‘royalist’ part; then, on that basis, re-entering the local scene with the renewed backing of the king. But, for all the political skill that underlay these manoeuvres, there remained beneath them a bedrock of unchanging belief. What Aston was doing in relation to the House of Lords, the court and the king, Sir William Brereton was doing in relation to the House of Commons. In terms of county politics, both men had their local contacts, allies and men of business. If Aston had his Werden, Brereton had his Calvin Bruen and John Crewe. But, if either one were to make good his claim to ‘speak for Cheshire’, both stood in need of the support of the middle group, and neither one could consistently rely on securing it. Depending on the immediate political context, on the issue or problem of the moment, either might be 360

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able to forge some sort of temporary alliance; but that was often all it was. Sir Thomas’s relations with this group had always been fraught; and the failed negotiations over the pro-episcopacy petition, followed by the fuss over his second petition to the Lords and the debacle of the Attestation, can have done nothing to improve matters. But, as their collaboration over the prayer-book petition shows, under the right circumstances deals could still be done; and relations between the two groups do not seem entirely to have broken down until 1642. As for Brereton, while he could never get the middle group to embrace root-and-branch, when they were faced, in Aston’s second pro-episcopal petition to the Lords, with something like a clear choice between backing Sir Thomas or Sir William, they chose to go with Brereton. Together with leading elements in the city of Chester and, indeed, with the other county MP, Peter Venables, they continued to support Brereton’s campaign at Westminster against Aston; and, in the period after the Irish rebellion, worked very closely indeed with him in securing the means to deal with what seemed like the very real threat of a Catholic invasion and the more immediate problem of the billeted soldiers. Indeed, through the summer of 1642 leading members of the middle group remained in close contact with Brereton and engaged in a continuing series of negotiations over how to execute the Militia Ordinance in such a way as not to jeopardise a peace settlement. Moreover, for all that they might not agree about root-and-branch or the liturgy, relations between even quite radical Cheshire puritans and the middle group held late into 1642 as the involvement of the likes of Ley, Holford, Torshell and, particularly, Nathaniel Lancaster in both the petition to the king in May and the Cheshire Remonstrance of the late summer show. During the latter period, Aston was in increasingly close attendance on the king in the dramatically reduced royal court at York, where he appears to have taken on the role of one of those shadowy ‘evil counsellors’ repeatedly being denounced in parliament. The possibility that he encouraged Charles to cross to Ireland with a force drawn from Cheshire in April; his efforts to once more mobilise anti-puritan opinion with his Collection in May; his likely role in advising Charles on how to respond to the middle-group petition; and his part in nominating highly partisan groups of justices and commissioners of array in June all testify to his alignment with the more hawkish of the king’s advisers. When he did finally return to Cheshire, armed with the delegated authority of the king in the form of the Commission of Array, he acted with an energy and aggression which identified him as one of the most hard-line of the king’s local agents. Rather, therefore, than a series of conflicts between stable puritan, Laudian and ‘prayer book protestant’ blocks or identities, the political and polemical logic of the national political crisis, combined with the struggle between the Aston and Brereton groupings for the support of the Booth/ Wilbraham/Grosvenor connection and wider bodies of freeholders, produced 361

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a much more fluid and unstable political situation in which, according to the attendant political circumstances and the issue of the moment, all sorts of differently constituted coalitions could be constructed. In consequence, a variety of political actors could start behaving in ways that, in more normal times, would have seemed wildly out of character. Laudians could produce eminently un-Laudian arguments for episcopacy in order to make common cause with certain sorts of erstwhile moderate puritan against the spectre of a puritan-sponsored anarchy; and militant anti-puritan opponents of popularity, like Aston, could resort to populist mass-petitioning campaigns. Political circumstances altered seemingly stable discursive or ideological cases. If the dominant threat to order was perceived to be radical puritan further reformation, one set of alliances and collaborations might seem to be in order; but if the more urgent menace became popish plotting and Irish rebellion, altogether different solidarities and coalitions would be called for. Having rebuffed Aston over episcopacy (when too hard a line might seem to threaten the chances of a settlement), the middle group embraced him over the liturgy (when populist puritan extremism seemed the great threat to order and settlement), only to edge closer to Brereton again when the king turned nasty over the five members and popery, and Ireland came to dominate the scene. Radical and moderate puritans might fall out over the nature and pace of religious change, but come together again in a desperate search for political settlement as civil war approached. In these circumstances a consensual, unitive language about the need to represent or defend the good name of ‘the county’ or ‘the country’ might be appropriated for all sorts of partisan purposes. Inherently ambiguous forms of words (like ‘the purest times of queen Elizabeth’s reign’ or ‘the settling of the liturgy’), to which a range of parties could in principle accede, could become altogether more contentious, indeed frankly divisive, when they were actually applied to (and hence glossed by) particular political conjunctures – in the process taking on far more overtly or at least differently partisan meanings than had at first seemed likely. All this accords with the work of Michael Braddick and John Walter, which has argued that the various mobilisations that took place in support of mass petitioning and appeals to the populace cannot be straightforwardly mapped onto conventional notions of a fixed or static allegiance to king or parliament. These mobilisations were, in Braddick’s words, ‘plural and overlapping, conflicting campaigns which evidently succeeded among the same local populations’.12 Shared languages were deployed to galvanise support for very different positions. Much depended on local circumstances: whose support was being sought by whom; the moment at which this was happening; and the precise issue on which support was being solicited. Allegiance was far more fluid and contingent than has traditionally been supposed. However, there is something of a paradox here. Because, for all the stress placed in the preceding paragraphs (and indeed throughout this account) on the political and discursive instability and indeterminacy created as the 362

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multiple three-kingdom crises of 1640–42 disrupted established congeries of meaning and interpretation – shifting, displacing and radically destabilising nearly all the old fixed points in the ideological firmament – what is perhaps most striking about the Cheshire experience is the relative stability of the political line-up in the county from the Short Parliament elections to the outbreak of the war. On the ‘left’ we have Brereton and the godly (the vanguard of the parliamentary cause), on the ‘right’, Aston and his allies (the core of active royalism in the county), and in the ‘middle’, wanting neither of the above, but allying with both when circumstances seemed propitious, the ‘popular patriots’ of the middle group. This, together with the re-evaluation of the ideological and political valence of the Aston/Rivers/Cholmondeley group, assayed above, perhaps casts some doubt on traditional interpretations which see the political nation as, in effect, united in its opposition to the policies of the Personal Rule in 1640, with the main event in the period thereafter being the emergence of a royalist party. This certainly seems not to have been the case in Cheshire, where – in spite of the county’s general willingness to cooperate with royal demands – the impact of the Personal Rule seems to have been refracted through and, indeed, perhaps to have heightened, existing divisions within the political society of the county. Most of the existing studies of the emergence of royalism concentrate on that process within the Long Parliament, but, as Gardiner long ago observed, the peculiar circumstances under which that body was chosen ensured that its composition was skewed in certain ideological and religious directions. Out in the country, might there not have been a good many more Sir Thomas Astons – from early on something like conviction royalists, seeking wedge issues upon which to build support for a recognisably royalist and authoritarianly ‘Anglican’ settlement of the kingdom’s affairs? Other candidates for this role in Cheshire might include Thomas Cholmondeley, a relatively authoritarian ship money sheriff whose religious commonplace book demonstrates a leaning towards the Laudian wing of the church;13 Thomas Powell, even more autocratic than Cholmondeley and someone who detested the godly and was eager to get an ‘in’ at court;14 and Aston’s trusted lieutenant in the shire, the ever-ingratiating John Werden. The story in Cheshire turns out, then, to be not so much where royalism came from, as what happened to the middle group. The agony and fate of this group – once predominant in county affairs, but in disarray by the outbreak of civil war – shows just how far the world had been turned upside down since the 1620s as, under the impact of division at the centre and the local activities of Brereton, on the one hand, and of Aston, on the other, the old formulae for thought, speech and action all lost their purchase on events. The result was retirement (Grosvenor), disillusionment and death (Wilbraham) or more or less reluctant partisanship (the Booths, father and grandson, on one side, and Richard Brereton of Ashley and Hugh Wilbraham on the other). This was a civil war that their political attitudes and world-view had done much to shape, 363

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perhaps even, in some sense, to ‘cause’, but which none of them had wanted and all of them tried desperately, up until the very last, to avoid.

NOTES 1 D. Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 112–31. 2 Ibid., pp. 114–15. 3 Ibid., pp. 122–3; J. Peacey, ‘Tactical organisation in a contested election: Sir Edward Dering and the spring elections in Kent, 1640’, in C. R. Kyle (ed.), Parliament, Politics and Elections, 1604–1648 (Camden Society, 5th series, 17, 2001), pp. 237–51. 4 Hirst, Representative of the People, p. 131. 5 Young, Edgehill, pp. 212–13, 222–3 Wanklyn and Young, ‘A king in search of soldiers’, 152; Wanklyn, ‘Landed society and allegiance’, p. 228. 6 Ormerod, i.531. For similar incentives given by the royalist Sir Vincent Corbett to his tenants in Shropshire, see Flintshire Record Office, CR 2017/TP97. 7 Maltby, Prayer Book and People, pp. 49–50, 56–7, 73–5; PA HL/PO/JO/10/1/74. 8 Morrill, ‘William Davenport’, 128–9. 9 M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (New York: Atheneum, 1976), ch. 7. 10 Morrill, Cheshire, pp. 45–52; Maltby, Prayer Book and People, ch. 4. 11 Lake, ‘Puritans, popularity and petitions’, p. 261. 12 M. J. Braddick, ‘Mobilisation, anxiety and creativity in England during the 1640s’, in J. Morrow and J. Scott (eds), Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008), pp. 175–94, at pp. 175–7; Braddick, ‘Prayer book and protestation’, pp. 145–6; M. J. Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London: Penguin, 2009) pp. 225–38; Walter, ‘Confessional politics’, 677–701. 13 Beinecke Osborn MS b103; b426. 14 TNA SP 16/446/58; 16/459/21.

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BEINECKE LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY Osborn MS b103, b426 Religious commonplace books of the Cholmondeleys of Vale Royal Osborn MS b143 Classical commonplace book of Sir Thomas Aston Osborn MS b203 Thomas Lytler’s life of Lady Mary Cholmondeley Osborn MS fb60, fb178 Separate collections belonging to Sir Richard Grosvenor

BODLEIAN LIBRARY, OXFORD Ashmole MS 854 Miscellaneous political papers Bankes MS 14/26, 38/29, 62/1, 62/34 Returns of gentleman who remained in London in the 1630s Nalson MS, vol. 13 Miscellaneous political papers

BRITISH LIBRARY, LONDON Additional MS 11332, 11333 Miscellaneous political papers Additional MS 33935, 33936 Moreton correspondence Additional MS 36913, 36914, 36918 Aston correspondence Additional MS 70001 Harley correspondence Harleian MS 583 Legal case reports Harleian MS 1988, 2078, 2079, 2090, 2095, 2173 Randle Holmes I and II’s collections of papers relating to the history of Cheshire Harleian MS 2017 Grosvenor papers, including the August 1642 Cheshire Remonstrance Harleian MS 2125 Randle Holmes II’s Chester Annals Harleian MS 2129 Funeral certificates of Randle Holmes I and II Harleian MS 2135 Civil War papers relating to Cheshire 1643–45 365

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Bibliography of manuscript sources Harleian MS 6424 Bishop Warner’s diary of the House of Lords, 1641–42 Harleian MS 6607 Commonplace book of John Bruen Sloane MS 1467 Miscellaneous political papers

CHESHIRE ARCHIVES AND LOCAL STUDIES, CHESTER DBW P/J/6, 7, 8 Thomas Wilbraham’s household and farm accounts, 1613–42 DCC 14 Letter book of Mayor Cowper of Chester, 1641–42 DCH/L Cholmondeley papers DDX 210/1 Wilbraham Family diary DDX 384 Thomas Mainwaring’s diary, 1649–59 DDX 69/9 Henry Bradshawe’s account book, 1637–45 DLT B1 Epic poem on the history of Cheshire by Richard Bostock DLT B44 Antiquarian notes by Sir Thomas Aston and others DNE 7 Needham of Shavington accounts DSS 1/1, 4 Shakerley of Hulme correspondence EDA 3/1 Register of Bishop Bridgeman EDC 1 Chester consistory court case book EDC 5 Chester consistory court case files EDV 1/33 Chester diocese correction book, 1634 ML Chester Mayor’s letters P8/13/2 Frodsham churchwardens’ accounts P18/3608 Tilston churchwardens’ accounts P39/8/1 Marbury churchwardens’ accounts QJB 1/5, 1/6 Cheshire Quarter sessions order books, 1619–40, 1640–50 QJB 2/5 Cheshire petty sessions book QJF Cheshire quarter sessions files WS Cheshire Wills series ZCR 63/2/6 Lieutenancy book of Thomas Leigh of Adlington, c.1625–42 ZCR 63/2/19 Commonplace book of William Davenport of Bramhall ZCR 63/2/34 Notes of Adlington display ZCR 63/2/35 Cheshire church notes c.1633 ZCR 63/2/691/1 Grosvenor correspondence ZCR 63/2/692/25 Petition in defence of the Chester Exchequer court, c.1650 ZCR 63/2/694/20, 23–5 Inventories of Crewe family paintings at Utkinton Hall ZCR 63/2/695 Crewe family commonplace book ZCR 63/2/696 Religious commonplace book of John Crewe ZCR 72 Cotton family papers

CHESTER PUBLIC LIBRARY MS 94/3 Edward Whitby’s list of mayors, 1300–1620

CHETHAM’S LIBRARY, MANCHESTER MS A.6.8 Separate collection and notes on the Adlington display Mun.E.8.22 Cheshire pedigree roll belonging to the Leighs of Adlington 366

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DERBYSHIRE RECORD OFFICE, MATLOCK D258/34/69 Gell family papers

EAST SUSSEX RECORD OFFICE, LEWES Glynde Place MS 556 Fitton family letters

EATON HALL, CHESHIRE Grosvenor MS 24, 29 Papers relating to Cheshire local government Grosvenor MS, Misc. 6 Grosvenor family commonplace book

FLINTSHIRE RECORD OFFICE, HAWARDEN CR 2017/TP97 Letters of David Pennant, sheriff of Flintshire, 1642

HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY MS Eng 1266, vols 1 and 2 Separate collections belonging to Sir Richard Grosvenor

HUNTINGTON LIBRARY, SAN MARINO, CALIFORNIA Ellesmere MS, EL 1114 Cheshire armorial, late sixteenth century Ellesmere MS, EL 7764 Manuscript copy of the Chester neutralist petition, July 1642

JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY, MANCHESTER EGR1/8/3/6, 3/3/3/2 Booth family papers in the Grey of Stamford collection English MS 1091 Letter book of Thomas Cholmondeley, ship money sheriff, 1637–38 Leigh of Lyme Correspondence of the Leigh family of Lyme Park Tatton of Wythenshawe Booth family letters MSS 251–6

LONGLEAT HOUSE, WILTSHIRE Whitelocke papers, vol. 21 Sir James Whitelocke’s assize charges

NORTHAMPTONSHIRE RECORD OFFICE, NORTHAMPTON Finch Hatton MS 133 William Dugdale’s lists of commissioners of array

PARLIAMENTARY ARCHIVES, LONDON HL/PO/JO/1/53 Cheshire Petition in defence of episcopacy, February 1641 HL/PO/JO/10/1/74 Cheshire petition in defence of the prayer book, December 1641 House of Lords main papers Letters, papers and petitions to the House of Lords

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Bibliography of manuscript sources

SENATE HOUSE LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON MS 285 Separate collection belonging to Sir Richard Grosvenor

STAFFORDSHIRE RECORD OFFICE, STAFFORD D1287/9/8, 18/2 Bishop John Bridgeman’s papers and correspondence

THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, LONDON C 193/12/2 List of commissioners for the forced loan, 1626–27 C 193/13/1 Liber pacis, c.1621–22 C 219 Parliamentary election indentures C 231/5 Crown office docquet book CHES 21/3 Chester Great Sessions order book CHES 24 Chester Great Sessions files E 101/547/5 Archbishop Laud’s account book E 163/18/12 Liber pacis, 1626 PC 2 Privy Council registers PROB 11 Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills SP 16 State Papers Domestic, Charles I SP 28 Commonwealth Exchequer papers STAC 8 Star Chamber cases of James I’s reign

TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN MS 417 Latin notebook of Sir Richard Grosvenor

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF NORTH WALES, BANGOR Mostyn MSS, 2691, 4271–2, 9082 Papers and correspondence of the Whitmore family

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Index

-

Adlington Hall display 30, 31, 49, 53, 56–8, 64, 66n, 67n, 74, 100, 124–5, 147n, 153, 156 Aldersey, John 206–13 anti-popery 2, 10, 84, 110, 133, 138–40, 145, 154, 158, 175, 186–7, 201–3, 205, 219, 235, 239, 240–5, 263, 288, 295–6, 310, 323–4, 328, 330–1, 335, 336, 362 anti-puritanism 12, 136–8, 141–5, 173, 180–1, 230–2, 235–6, 240, 273–4, 276, 278, 288–96, 301, 305–7, 310, 316, 331–2, 335, 353, 362 antiquarianism 14, 34–5, 37–8, 60–5, 76 Arderne, Ralph, of Harden 341, 349 Arminianism 110, 241–3 Ashton, Robert 1 assizes, Cheshire 6, 10, 53, 55, 60, 88, 119, 125, 127, 130, 136, 142, 143, 166, 276, 325, 326, 334, 335 Aston of Aston family 13, 40 John (d. 1615) 48 John (d. 1648) 254 Sir Thomas (d. 1613) 70n Sir Thomas (d. 1645) 12–13, 31, 41–2, 48, 60, 70n, 86–7, 97, 98, 102–5, 114n, 266 anti-puritanism 141, 229–37, 240, 263, 284, 290–304, 316, 321–2, 353, 359–61 commission of array 333–5, 343–5 ‘country’ 299–303, 352, 359

court, royal 145, 153–5, 172–3, 224, 232–3, 252–4, 255, 311–12, 318n, 328–9, 331, 333–5, 356, 358–61, 363 episcopacy 232–6, 246, 257, 260–1, 284–5, 301, 359–60 parliament 178–80, 182, 233, 280–3, 299–303, 352, 359 petitioning 232–6, 246–52, 252–4, 272–4, 280–3, 305–12, 318n, 323, 331–3 popularity 283–300, 352–3 royal authority 295–303, 318–19n, 333 ship money 166–9, 224–5, 350–1 Aston Hall 42, 98 Atherton, Ian 107–8 Audlem 100 Baddeley 43, 53, 345–6 Banbury, Oxfordshire 141 Bancroft, Richard 294–6, 299–300 Baskerville, John 341 bastardy cases 127, 130, 148n, 157 Bastwick, Dr John 206–14, 326 Bate, Martha 213 Bavand, Thomas 54, 97 Beaven, John 325–6, 335 Beaver, Dan 91 Beeston of Beeston family 32 Sir George 62 Sir Hugh 62, 84, 138, 173 369

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Index Bennet, Thomas 325–6, 335 Berkshire 67n Birkenhead, Henry, of Backford 126, 250, 340, 345–6 Bispham, William 281, 305, 310 Book of Orders 11, 129, 132 Booth of Dunham Massey family 30, 34, 48, 83 Sir George (d.1652) 34, 48, 55, 60, 85, 94, 126, 170, 184–5n, 333–4, 343, 356, 363 local governor 126–7, 130–1, 157, 164–5, 169, 172, 176–8, 181 ‘Patriot’/middle group 170, 172–3, 178–80, 277, 279–83, 305–6, 308, 311 puritanism 234–6, 246–50, 252, 353 George 48, 184–5n, 328, 337, 343, 363 John 178, 184–5n William 48, 184n Bradshawe of Marple family Henry (d.1654) 53 Henry, Colonel (d.1662) 53–4, 94, 231 John 48, 54, 78, 94, 97 Bramall Hall 74 Bostock, George, of Churton 125 Bostock, Mr 209–10 Bostock, Richard, of Tattenhall 100, 125 Braddick, Michael 10, 311, 363 Brereton of Ashley family Richard 305, 309, 340, 342, 346, 363 William 55, 85 Brereton of Brereton family 30, 35, 40, 72n Sir John 126 Sir William (d. 1631), cr. 1st Lord of Leighlin, Ireland 38, 60, 61, 70n, 126, 131, 171 William, Lord 170–1, 250, 274, 333–4 Brereton of Handforth family Cicley, Lady Brereton 230–1 Sir William 56, 60, 94 local governor 126–8, 130, 143–4, 305 middle group, relations with 334–8, 341–2, 361–2 Militia Ordinance 334–7, 341–2, 361 opposition to crown 177, 315 parliament 178–80, 181–2, 273, 277–8, 283, 323–5, 326, 349n

petitioning 231–2, 277–8, 317n puritanism 143–4, 229–31, 252, 276–7, 315, 353, 357 Sir Urian (d. 1577) 42 Urian 94 Brereton, Richard, of Oulton 143, 156, 181–2 Brereton, Sir Thomas, of Shocklach 180, 233, 250, 331, 333 Brereton Hall 35, 37, 74, 100 Bridgeman, John, bishop of Chester 13, 15, 143, 155 Laudianism of 200–14 puritanism, and 187–90, 197–200, 206–14, 225, 236–9, 266 troubles of 190–4, 226, 229–31 Bridgeman, Orlando 206 bridge repair 125, 127, 129–30, 358 Brooke of Norton family Henry 341 Sir Richard 85 Broxton Hundred 60, 91, 127, 142, 247, 334–5 Bruen of Stapleford family Calvin 16, 206–13, 215, 219–20, 229–31, 237, 273–4, 277–9, 281, 338, 356, 358, 360 John (d.1626) 15, 88, 133–8, 140–2, 157, 206, 217–20, 225–6 John (d.1647) 125, 279 Bryson, Anna 93 Bucklow Hundred 127, 338, 348n, 356 Bulkeley of Bulkeley family 32, 124 Sir Richard 40 Bunbury 62, 64, 97, 137, 143–4, 218, 323, 341 Bunbury of Stanney family Sir Henry (d. 1636) 13, 137, 140, 143, 144, 149n Henry (d. 1664) 250, 274, 311 Burghall, Edward 144, 323, 341 Burton, Henry 206–14, 268n, 294 Burton-on-Trent 99 Burton, William 64 Byfield, Nicholas 140, 217 Calverley of Lea family 62 Sir George 39, 62 Hugh 180, 333 Cambridge University 6, 48, 95, 105, 112 Christ’s College 99 King’s College 105

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Index Camden, William 63, 73n, 76–7, 83 Capp, Bernard 141 Cartwright, Thomas 256, 296 Case, William 188–9, 201, 255–6 Catholicism 83–4, 92, 97–8, 104, 110, 138–40, 143–4, 145, 158, 171, 173, 176, 181, 187, 191, 201–2, 203, 230, 235, 277, 288, 290–1, 311, 323–6 centre/localities, interaction between 6–7, 75–6, 153–5, 163–82, 224–5, 232, 277–9, 283–4, 300–1, 303–4, 311–16, 328–35, 339–40, 351–3, 358–61 Chamberlain, Sir Thomas, Chief Justice, Chester 141–2 Charles I, King 2, 16, 25, 78, 167–8, 170, 189–90, 193–6, 203, 233, 252–4, 261, 265, 274–6, 287, 325, 327–9, 333, 342, 343–4 Cheshireness, sense of 74–86, 151–9 dispute over right to speak for 233–4, 246–52, 273–83, 299–303, 312–17, 318n, 327–9, 333–4, 338–41, 353–5 Chester 12, 15, 18, 41, 45–7, 53, 54, 76, 77, 81, 82, 119, 123, 125, 126, 127, 133, 134, 135, 139, 159, 166–8, 171, 192–3, 206–14, 217, 224, 226, 237, 303, 323–5, 341, 343–5 castle 60, 78–9, 81 cathedral 188, 201–4, 211, 214–15, 223n, 310–11 diocese of 142, 186–7, 195–220 Gloverstone 166–7 Guildhall 212–13 St Johns 82, 89, 230 St Oswalds 214 St Peters 187, 188, 197, 199, 201, 214, 217 Chester, earls of 77, 78–9, 80 Hugh Lupus, 1st earl 60, 79–80 Ranulph, 6th earl 81–2 Cholmondeley of Cholmondeley family 30, 54, 61, 125 Frances 55 Hatton 52 Sir Hugh (d. 1597) 40, 58–9, 61 Sir Hugh (d. 1601) 90 Lady Katherine 90, 173, 276–7 Lettice 52

Lady Mary 52, 62–3, 85, 89 Sir Robert, Viscount Cholmondeley of Kells 52, 55, 60, 61, 88, 90, 91–2, 132, 136, 141, 145, 170–1, 173, 178, 233–4, 247–8, 250, 254, 269n, 274, 276–7, 282, 305, 311, 315, 324, 333–4, 335, 343, 344–7, 358, 363 Thomas 168–9, 172–3, 177, 180, 250, 310, 333, 363 Cholmondeley Castle 90 Clark, Samuel 189 Clarke, Sabbath 335 Clarke, William 216, 310–11 Cogswell, Thomas 8, 11 Coke, Sir Edward 28, 297 Coke, Sir John 194 Colley, William, of Eccleston 54 Collinson, Patrick 9, 119, 141 Commission of Array 325, 333, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 348n, 361, 363 Como, David 294 Congleton 45, 54, 77 Conney, John 214–16, 219, 226 Cooper, Nicholas 99–100 Cottington, Sir Francis 194 Cotton of Combermere family 31, 250 Andrew 88, 114n Dorothy 114n George 31, 55, 56, 58–9, 107, 126, 127, 130, 269n Richard 31, 88 Thomas 31, 180, 233, 250, 269n, 305, 333–4 Cotton, Sir Robert 109 Cotton, Thomas, of Cotton 250 Cornwall 177 conformity, different versions of, 187–8, 192–3, 194–200, 203–4, 225–6, 289, 306, 307–9 county community, historiography of 1–18, 93, 153–4 as honour community 56–65 as kinship community 44–56 as imagined community 74–86, 123–4 cartographic image of 76–8 strength of in Cheshire 31–3 country/county, relation between 6, 55–6, 126–30, 152, 354 371

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Index court, royal animosity towards 109, 111, 145, 172, 174 relations with 98, 190–2, 244, 328, 331, 334, 359 Coventry, Thomas, lord keeper 28, 116n, 167–8 Crewe of Crewe Hall family 25–8 Sir Cippesby 27–8, 39 John 28, 39, 51, 72n, 78, 101–2, 130, 181–2, 273, 279, 305, 309, 310, 318n, 321n, 340, 346, 356, 360 Sir Ranulph 25–8, 31, 50, 56, 58, 66n, 84, 97, 98, 101–2, 153–5, 165 Crewe Hall 25–6, 28, 32, 50, 100, 343, 346 Cust, Richard 7, 10 Daniell of Tabley family 53, 54 Peter 53, 55, 85, 93, 97, 170 Davenport of Bramall family 37 Sir William 37, 55, 74, 100 William 66n, 93, 107, 174, 356–7 Davenport of Davenport family 32, 40, 72n Davenport, Humphrey, of Sutton Hall 97, 126, 147n Davenport, William, of Henbury 62 Davis, Sir John 120–1 Davis, Natalie Zemon 26 Delves of Doddington family 35–6 Henry 96, 182, 324, 340 Sir Thomas 35–6, 38, 51, 55, 127, 140, 170, 182, 304, 324, 334, 340, 345–6 Derbyshire 45, 54 Dering, Sir Edward 355, 359 D’Ewes, Sir Simonds 231 distraint of knighthood, 163, 174, 176 Dobson, William 102 Doddington Hall 35, 346 Done of Utkinton family 72n, 83, 101–2 Jane 321n Sir John 39, 55, 62, 97, 98, 102, 116–17, 139, 143, 144 Lady Mary 39, 117n Mary 102, 321n Done, Sir Ralph, of Duddon 98 Dorfold Hall 51, 69n, 100 Downes of Pott Shrigley family 49 Drayton, Michael 83, 89, 108

Duckenfield, Robert, of Duckinfield 349n Dugard, Thomas 268n Dugdale, Wiliam 35, 64, 73n Du Moulin, Pierre 319n Dunham Massey Hall 34, 72n, 131, 336–7 Dutton of Dutton family 72n, 82, 83, 124 Eleanor 82 Thomas 82, 89, 132–3 Eales, Jacqueline 8 Eaton, Richard 90, 132–3 Eaton, Samuel 230–1, 293, 294, 304, 305, 331–2 Eaton Hall 92–3, 118n Edisbury Hundred 127, 143, 333, 356 Edwards, William 338, 341 Egerton of Egerton family 72n, 124 Egerton of Oulton family 32 John 140 Egerton of Ridley family 31, 61, 62 Sir Richard 65 Egerton of Tatton family 32 Sir John 28, 111 Lady Egerton 32 Thomas, Lord Ellesmere, lord keeper 31–2, 39, 48, 58, 84, 97 Elizabeth I, Queen 38, 61, 289, 290 Elizabeth’s reign, invocation of purest times of 247–8, 256, 289–90 episcopacy attack on 231–2, 273 defence of 231–6, 246–54, 257–66, 272, 297–9, 310–11, 313, 332 iure divino 235, 245–6, 257–60, 270n, 273, 285–6 iure humano 235, 245–6, 257–60 limited or reduced 188–90, 201, 237–9, 255–6, 257, 259–60, 265, 270–1n, 286, 288 Essex 67n, 173, 177 Everitt, Alan 1, 3, 5 6, 7, 11, 93 excommunication, power of 292–4, 295 family chapels 41–4, 61–3, 98 Farndon 91–2, 136, 141 Ferne, John 34, 108 Fielding, John 8 Fincham, Kenneth 200, 221n Fitton of Gawsworth family 44, 71n Sir Edward (d. 1606) 73n

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Index Sir Edward (d. 1643) 127–8, 173, 250, 331, 345, 356 Francis 71n Fletcher, Anthony 3, 5, 6, 47, 50, 304, 327, 358 Flintshire 143, 155 forced loan 7, 25, 125, 163, 165, 169, 170, 172, 176, 190, 224 Ford, Alan 284 Frodsham 32–3, 314, 348n Fuller, Thomas 32, 58, 77–8 funerals and funeral monuments 38–42, 55, 62, 99 funeral sermons 41, 75, 90, 132, 139, 213, 217 Gamull of Chester Francis 280, 283, 333 William 72n, 96, 146n William jnr. 96 Gardiner, S. R. 247, 307 Geerhaerts, Marcus II 98–9, 101–2 Gerard, Gilbert, of Crewood 341 Glaseor of Lea family 31 William 61 Glegg, William, of Gayton 126, 250 Glegg, William, of Lower Kinnerton 54 Glendole, John 189, 197, 201, 216, 226 Gloucestershire 173 Glover, Robert 37 Golborn, Richard 210–13, 215 grand jury charges to 119–23 activities of 125–9, 141–2, 143, 147n, 232, 325, 326, 327, 335 Grand Remonstrance 311–12, 326, 327 Great Budworth 187, 199, 255 Grimesditch, John 269n Grosvenor of Eaton family 30, 34 Christian 53 Richard (d. 1619) 52, 71n, 140 Sir Richard (d. 1645) 2, 14, 34, 47, 52–6, 60, 85–8, 90–2, 97, 107, 117n, 118n, 122–4, 130–3, 138–9, 149n, 170, 272–3 local governor 156–7, 165–6, 176–7, 224 ‘Patriot’/middle group 153–5, 172, 277, 279–83, 305–6, 308–11, 325–9, 339–41, 346, 349n, 351–3, 361–2

political ideology of 108–11, 146n, 156–7, 174–6, 168, 353, 357 puritanism 144–5, 232–6, 246, 249–50, 252, 305, 307, 309, 353 Richard (d. 1664) 52, 86, 108, 122–3 Habington, Thomas 77, 85 Haigh, Christopher 19, 186, 225 Hall, Joseph, bishop of Exeter 255–6, 257, 263–4, 266, 271, 287, 290 Halton Castle 32–3, 60–1 Hamling, Tara 37 Hampden’s case 174, 177–8, 225 Hardware, Henry. of the Peele 97, 101 Harley, Sir Robert 137, 139, 255 Harsnet, Samuel, archbishop of York 192–3, 196, 207 Hassall, William, of Nantwich 50 Heal, Felicity 26, 32, 47, 89–90 Hegbin-Barnes, Penny 37 heraldry, 25, 29–30, 34–44, 57, 59, 62, 74 Herle, Charles 189, 214, 226, 237 Herring, Julines 88 Hertfordshire 67n Hicock, Thomas 325–6, 335 Higgins, Geoff 147n High Commission 194, 196, 197, 208, 210, 211, 213, 245 Hill, Christopher 4 Hinde, Samuel 217 Hinde, William 64, 84, 88, 97, 133–8, 140–2, 143, 157, 217–19, 225–6 Hindle, Steven 8, 131–2, 157 Hirst, Derek 355 Holcroft of Vale Royal family 31 Sir Thomas 80 Holford, Sir George, of Holford 85 Holford, Thomas 189, 214–16, 219, 294, 304, 310, 328, 335, 341 Holford Hall 62 Holme, Randle I 25, 34, 40, 61, 101 Holme, Randle II 35, 101 Holmes, Clive 5, 6, 26, 32, 47 Hooton Hall 72n hospitality, of gentry 89–91, 134 house building and gentry status 25–6, 32–5, 99–100 Hughes, Ann 5, 6, 9, 47 Hunt, Richard 306, 328, 341 373

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Index Hurleton of Picton family 31 John 55 Roger 54, 72n Hutton, Ronald 3 Hyde of Norbury Edward, Captain 349n, 357 Hamnett 127–8, 143, 150n, 156, 250 Lawrence 131 Hyde, Sir Edward 253–4, 323, 358 iconoclasm 8, 135, 219, 231, 232, 281, 304–5 Ince, Nicholas 207, 326 Ince, Peter 207, 210, 213 independency, 293 Ingram, Martin 8 Inns of Court 48, 94–5, 96, 111, 209 Grays Inn 94–5 Lincolns Inn 51, 95 Isle of Wight 32 James I, King 2, 10, 40, 47, 48, 52, 57, 67n, 69n, 85, 141, 142, 187, 202, 241–2, 289 Jodrell of Yeardsley family 54 Johnson, Cornelius 101–2, 116n Jones, John 230 Keep, Rosemary, 69n, 117n Kent 5, 11, 45, 67n, 82, 355 Kinderton Hall 35, 72n King, Daniel 31, 64, 80 Kishlansky, Mark 153–4 Knowsley Margaret 132, 157 Knutsford 45–6, 126, 127, 129, 131, 142, 187, 293, 305, 334, 342, 348n Lake, Peter 8, 12, 294 Lancashire 45–7, 129, 142, 164, 323–4 Lancaster, Nathaniel 139, 188, 213–14, 216, 230–1, 279, 294, 310, 318n, 328, 341, 349n, 361 Laslett, Peter 4 Laud, William, archbishop of Canterbury 99, 105–6, 184n, 193, 194, 196, 201, 205–6, 213, 226, 238, 293, 318n, 360 Laudianism 12–13, 15, 173, 179, 192–213, 226, 235, 238–46, 287–9, 295 altar policy, 200–5, 237–40, 270n, 331

Lawton of Church Lawton family 49 William 200 Lea Hall 39 Lee, Sir Richard, of Lee 64 Leicestershire 8, 11, 48 Leigh of Adlington family 30 Thomas 30, 100, 101, 333–4 Sir Urian (d. 1627) 30, 55, 62, 156, 168 Urian, Major 356 Leigh of Lyme family 28–9, 30, 68n, 83 Francis 29, 53, 96, 340 Sir Peter 28–9, 39, 47, 53, 55, 62, 91, 96, 101, 107, 111, 131 Piers 28–9 Thomas 28, 96 Leigh, Gerard 34 Leigh, Peter, of Chester 210 Leigh, Thomas, artist 101 Leighton, Alexander 208, 290 Lely, Peter 102 Leversage of Wheelock family William (d. 1613) 55, 85 William (d. 1638) 106, 127 William (d. 1668) 252, 305–6, 318n, 340 Ley, John 12, 13, 140, 222n, 254–5, 268, 270n, 328, 341, 361 altars 201–6, 238–41 anti-Laudianism 229, 239–46, 263, 287, 288, 295 anti-popery 240–6, 289 Bishop Bridgeman, relationship with 187–90, 197–200, 214, 236–9, 261–6 limited episcopacy 245–6, 255–67 presbyterianism 255–65 puritanism 187–90, 194, 197–200, 215–16, 217–19, 226, 236–46, 247, 249, 284–5, 286–7, 294, 295 Leycester, Peter, of Tabley 310 Lincolnshire 5, 6, 95n Little Moreton Hall 37, 74, 106–7 Liverpool 46–7 Llewellyn, Nigel 99 ‘localism’ 1–12, 111, 129, 351 London 6, 31, 45, 48, 53, 54, 81, 153 contact with 86–7, 92–5, 97–9, 101, 105, 172–3, 254 Covent Garden 98 Fleet prison 92–3, 108

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Index Royal Exchange 105 St Pauls Cathedral 105, 193–4 Tower Hill 32, 86, 98 Long Parliament 126, 181, 188, 198, 214, 225, 226, 229, 231, 243, 247, 252, 272, 273, 274, 278–9, 300, 301, 307, 310, 327, 329, 333, 334, 352, 353, 354, 355, 359, 363 lordship, notion of 33, 56, 86–9, 93, 123, 126, 130, 132, 171, 250–2, 313, 355–8 Lords, House of 13, 18, 67n, 120, 232, 247, 250, 252, 253–6, 262, 272, 274, 276, 278–9, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 288, 290, 298, 308, 311, 312, 326, 331, 360, 361 Lyme Park 29, 39, 91, 96 Lytler, Thomas 85, 90, 156 Macclesfield 40–3, 45–7, 49, 68n, 69n, 77, 85, 250, 309 Macclesfield Forest 91 Macclesfield Hundred 126, 128, 147n, 309, 356 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 3, 83 Maltby, Judith 287–8, 313, 314, 317n, 333, 358 Manning, Brian 4 Mainwaring of Baddeley and Over Peover 34, 38 Edward, diocesan chancellor 190 Philip 43–4, 51, 97, 106, 177, 246, 255, 266, 270n, 345, 346 Sir Randle (d. 1612) 38 Sir Ranulph (d. 1633) 56 Thomas 43–4, 53, 54, 55, 94, 97 Mainwaring, Henry, of Kermincham 143, 334, 346 Maisterson, Richard, of Nantwich 50 Malpas 60, 61 Manchester 45–7, 54, 187, 336–7, 342, 356 Marbury of Marbury family Frances 199 Thomas 55, 85, 92, 130, 143, 156 William 96, 181–2, 305, 309, 340, 346 Marple 53–4 Massey, Hugh, of Audlem 100 Massey, John, of Coddington 54 Massey of Puddington family 72n Sir William 84, 92

Massey, James, of Sale 98 Mawdesley, James 200, 201, 221n, 231, 305 Melford Hall, Suffolk 32, 98, 114n Mendle, Michael 284 ‘Middle group’, the 252, 256, 257, 266–7, 272, 277, 279–81, 283, 303–6, 308–9, 315–16, 323–3, 335, 337–40, 342–3, 346–7, 351–3, 360–3 Middlewich 45, 126, 142, 180, 181, 200, 314 militia 125, 169, 327, 331 Militia Ordinance 331, 334, 335, 336, 337, 340, 341, 342, 345, 361 Millstone, Noah 107–9 Milton, Anthony 204 Minshull of Minshull family 43–4 Ellen 43–4 John 170, 250 Minshull of Nantwich family 50 Richard 51 minstrels, lordship of 82, 140–3 ‘moderation’, struggle over, 234–6, 240, 256–7, 262–6, 284–7, 296 Molineux, Sir Richard 40 Lady Molineux 28 monarchical republicanism 9–11, 119–24, 152–3 monarchy, divine right 296–9, 318–19n Moreton of Little Moreton Hall family 37, 99, 155 Edward 99, 105, 206 John 99, 155 Matthew 99, 155 Peter, 99, 105–7, 155, 171 Philip 99, 271, 304 William (d. 1654) 37, 99, 105–7, 108, 125, 155, 171, 272, 279, 334 William jnr. 99 Morgan, Philip 35, 38 Morgan, Victor 6–7, 76–7, 95–6 Morrill, John 1, 4, 11, 13, 16, 19, 55, 67n, 93, 125–6, 129, 147n, 170, 287, 313, 315, 339, 349n, 358 Morton, Thomas, bishop of Chester and Durham, 186–7, 203, 225 Mostyn of Mostyn, Flintshire family 52 Sir Roger 52, 108, 131 Sidney 52 Muldrew, Craig 8 375

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Index Nantwich 45–7, 50–1, 53, 55, 61, 77, 126, 129, 130, 335–6, 341–2, 343 Nantwich Hundred 127, 129, 250 Ravensmoor Heath 84, 341 Townend 51, 99 Needham of Shavington family 32, 82 Maude 98 Sir Robert, 1st Viscount Kilmorey (d. 1630) 82 Robert, 2nd Viscount Kilmorey 98, 141, 145, 183n, 184n, 233, 250, 266, 274, 333–4, 335, 358 Neile, Richard, archbishop of York 192, 194–6, 197–206, 206–13, 226 Nether Peover 62 neutralism 2–3, 339, 351 news 95–108, 173–4, 276, 301 Nicholls, Robert 88 Norfolk 45, 67n Northamptonshire 5, 8, 165, 173, 177, 224 Northwich 45–7, 126, 129, 137, 147n, 327, 341 Northwich Hundred 127, 130 office holding 124–32 Oglander, Sir John 32 Oldfield, Philip, of Somerfield 125 Over Peover Hall 34, 38, 53 Oxford University 48, 95–7, 187, 268n, 303–4 Brasenose College 51, 95–7 Queen’s College 97, 138 Page, Humphrey, of Erdeswick 125 Paget, John 188, 197 Paget, Thomas, 188, 197, 321n Parker, Kenneth 141 parliament, idea of 10–11, 18, 108–11, 120–1, 145, 152–5, 172, 174–6, 178–9, 235, 297–8, 354 paternalism 87–92, 122, 155–7 ‘Patriot’, notion of 10, 145, 172–82, 332 Peacey, Jason 355 Peltonen, Markku 10 Personal Rule of Charles I 11, 15, 180–2, 189–220, 236, 249, 287–9, 351–4, 359, 363 petitioning and popular agency 246–52, 308–9, 313–14, 355–8, 362 petitions Aston’s first pro-episcopal petition 232–5, 246–54, 302, 313

Aston’s second pro episcopal petition 278–9, 280 Attestation, the 279–82, 302–6, 309, 314, 315, 317n, 329, 340, 352, 361 prayer book petition 147n, 305–12, 313 Remonstrance 338–43, 346, 349n, 327 root and branch petition 229, 231–2, 246, 274, 280, 283, 298, 299, 353, 356 Pevsner, Nicholas 43 Phelpis, Sir Robert 118n, 170, 359 Pocklington, John 204–5, 236, 241, 262 Poole, John, of Poole 324 ‘popularity’ 179–80, 232, 236, 246, 284, 290, 292–3, 297, 299–301, 320n, 332, 345, 353, 354, 362 Porter, Endymion 71n, 335 portraits, of the gentry 38–9, 98, 101–5 Poulteney, Magdalene, of Misterton 48, 60, 102–4, 153 Powell, Thomas, of Birkenhead 178, 250, 333, 363 ‘Prayer Book Protestantism’ 249, 304, 306–9 Presbyterianism 231, 236, 256, 257, 289–93, 295–6, 298–300, 307 and resistance theory, 294–6 Prestbury 53, 62, 95, 126, 147n printed sources, use of 4,7 primogeniture 26–9 privy council 6, 12, 98, 120, 140, 152, 164, 166, 169, 173, 177, 180, 181, 194, 254 privy seal loan 164, 169 Prynne, William 206–13, 215, 226, 229–30, 326 public man, ideal of 10, 108–11, 122–4 Pulford, Mr 206, 209–11 puritanism 7, 10, 12, 15, 55, 64, 84, 88, 92, 97, 84, 92, 108–9, 132–45, 158, 172, 180, 187–90, 194–5, 197, 206–20, 229–32, 237–8, 261–5, 295, 335 radical and moderate, compared and contrasted 214–20, 240–1, 256, 261–5, 281 Pym, John 110

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Index quarter sessions 60, 88, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 180, 181, 232, 277, 305, 314, 324, 328, 331, 334, 335 Quintrell, Brian 11, 192, 205 Radcliffe, Richard 336–7 Ratcliffe, Jane 139, 199, 217–19 Ratcliffe, John 139, 199, 217–19 Reading, Berkshire 139 revisionism 4 Rock Savage 33, 67n, 89–90, 99–100, 153 Roles, Mr 187–8, 197–8 Rosenheim, James 93 Rowton 247–8, 269n royalism, incipient, culture of 252–4, 257, 274–7, 301–4, 311–12, 316–17 Russell, Conrad 1, 4, 16, 232, 252–4, 265, 311–12, 358 Rutter, Mr 211, 213, 223n Ryece, Robert 83 sabbatarianism 15, 92, 137, 140–4, 158, 188–90, 205, 262–4, 268n St George, Sir Richard 74 Sandbach 247, 250 Savage, Thomas, of Barrow 349 Savage of Clifton family 30, 32–3, 43 Grace 55, 138 Sir John VIII (d. 1597) 32–3, 40–2, 58–9, 61, 89–90 Sir John IX (d. 1615) 60 John, Earl Rivers (d. 1654) 97, 127, 171, 172–3, 178–80, 182, 250, 305, 331, 333–5, 343–5, 348n, 353, 358, 363 Thomas Viscount (d. 1635) 33, 39, 41–2, 55, 56, 69n, 84, 86, 97–8, 114n, 138–9, 145, 153–5, 157, 164, 165–6, 171, 190–1, 200, 224 Thomas 127, 180, 250, 333 Savile, Anne 28 Savile, Sir John 28 Saxton, Christopher 76–7 Scott, David 70n, 71n, 185n, 318n, 350 Segar, Sir William 40, 57 separatism 236, 257, 284, 294, 295, 296, 304–7, 309, 320n Shakerley of Hulme family 62–3 Geoffrey (d. 1618) 62 Geoffrey (d. 1696) 275, 317n, 333–4

Shalcross, Edward 54, 231 Sharpe, Kevin 11 Sheffield 54 ship money 12, 129, 163, 166–70, 173, 174, 176, 177–83, 225, 226, 300, 307, 309, 353, 359, 363 Short Parliament 181, 182, 225, 226, 231, 334, 352, 353, 363 Shotwick 55, 140 Shrewsbury 53, 88, 344–5 Shropshire 8, 45 Smith of Hough family 44 Sir Thomas 56, 76, 98, 173, 283, 303, 304, 333, 340 Smith, William, Rouge Dragon pursuivant 73n, 76–7, 78, 81, 83 Smythe, John, of Nibley 141 Somerset 7, 224 Souch, John 101, 103 Speed, John 76–7, 83, 91 Spurstow, George, of Spurstow 92, 143 sports, pastimes, attempted reformation of 91–2, 135–7, 139, 141–5 Staffordshire 45, 49, 165, 323–4 Stanley, earls of Derby Henry, 4th earl 61 James, Lord Strange, 6th earl 92, 164, 168, 171, 180, 183n, 223n, 336, 342 William, 5th earl 28, 61, 135, 164, 167, 168, 171, 274, 276, 302, 333 Stanley of Alderley Sir Thomas (d. 1605) 73n Thomas (d. 1672) 96, 127–8, 170, 180, 181–2, 305, 309, 340, 346, 356 Stanley of Hooton family 38, 72n Stapleford 15, 218 Starkey of Darley family Henry (d. 1653) 324 Henry jnr. 324 Starkey, Hugh, of Knight’s Grange 140 Stephens, Isaac 8 Stockport 45–7, 53–4, 60, 231 Stone, Jeanne 32 Stone, Lawrence 26, 32 Suffolk 3, 6, 45, 67n, 85–6, 153 Sussex 3, 5, 6, 47, 50, 67n Talbot, earls of Shrewsbury 28 John, 10th earl 92 377

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Index Tatton of Wythenshawe family 65, 73n, 124 Tarporley 137, 230–1, 279, 310, 349n, 356 Tarvin 135, 141, 276, 304 Thornton, Tim 80 Tilston Fearnall 55, 64, 137, 348n Tittler, Robert 101 Torshell, Samuel 144, 341, 361 Trafford, Mr 210–13 Treuherz, John 101, 103–4 Tyacke, Nicholas 200 Underdown, David 7 Ussher, James, archbishop of Armagh 259, 263–5, 271n, 284, 287 Utkinton Hall 37, 72n, 74 Vale Royal 52, 85 Van Dyck, Anthony 102–4 Vawdrey, Edward, of Riddings 131 Venables of Kinderton family 35, 58–9, 60, 72n John 131 Peter, baron of Kinderton, 51, 92, 127, 180–2, 279–83, 305, 318n, 340, 352 Thomas 58, 65 Vernon of Haslington family 72 Sir George 97 Henry 345 Villiers, George, duke of Buckingham 105–6, 110, 139, 164, 165, 176, 191 Walter, John 8, 304, 313, 322, 338, 357, 362 Walthall, Richard, of Wistaston 50 Wanklyn, Malcolm 345 Warburton of Arley family 30 Peter 250 Warburton, Peter, of Grafton 97 Warburton, Sir Peter, of Tilston 32 Ward, John 105–6 Warren, Ian 86, 93–4 Warren of Poynton family 53–4, 60 Edward 62, 127 Warrington, Lancashire 45–7, 129, 187, 189, 236–8, 292 Warwickshire 5, 6, 9, 47, 74, 165 Webb, William 26, 33–4, 38, 45–6, 58, 61, 63–5, 67n, 73n, 76–8, 83, 84,

89, 90, 97, 99–101, 131, 134, 157, 357 Weden, John, of Burton Hall 54, 172–3, 230–1, 235, 250, 254, 273–4, 276–7, 294, 301–2, 304–5, 309, 310, 315, 326, 331, 341, 352, 353 Weld, John 106 Weld, William 106, 107 Wentworth, Thomas, earl of Strafford 118n, 187, 193–4, 206, 280, 283, 359 Westminster 81, 154, 164, 176 Wettenhall Hall 101 Whitchurch, Shropshire 45–7, 53 Whitgift, John, archbishop of Canterbury 266, 287 Whitelocke, James, Chief Justice of Chester 119–24, 126, 130, 132, 141, 168, 224, 357 Whiting, Geoffrey 88 Whitmore of Leighton family William 84, 138, 139, 173, 178–80, 250, 326, 333 Wigan, Lancashire 187, 191, 200, 237, 355 Wilbraham of Dorfold family 51, 69n Ralph 51, 55, 100–1, 124 Roger 51, 55, 96, 100–1, 233, 340, 341, 345 Wilbraham of Nantwich family 50–1 Elizabeth, 50, 51 Richard 50–1, 55 Sir Roger 50–1, 100, 101 Thomas 50–1, 94, 98–9, 125, 233 Wilbraham, Hugh, of Eccleston 277, 305–6, 340, 342, 346, 363 Wilbraham of Woodhey family 50–1, 54 Sir Richard 50–1, 52, 55, 56, 62, 94, 98, 101, 127, 130, 131, 132, 170, 183n, 310, 333–4, 343 local governor 165, 172, 176–7, 178–81 ‘Patriot’/middle group 158, 170, 172–3, 174, 178–80, 249, 277, 279–83, 305–6, 308, 311, 325–9, 339–41, 345–7, 351–2, 361–2 puritanism 137–8, 233–6, 246, 249–50, 252, 353 Thomas (d. 1610) 50–1, 55, 64, 73n, 137–8 Thomas (d. 1660) 51, 178, 182, 340

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Index Williams, John, bishop of Lincoln 284 Wilmslow 144–5 Wiltshire 8 Windebank, Sir Francis 105–6 Winnington, Hugh, of the Hermitage 84, 97, 156 Winnington, Paul, of the Birches 125 Winship, Michael 294 Wirral 45–7, 55, 77, 126, 308, 327 Wirral Hundred 127, 143, 325, 333 Woodhey 51, 55, 234, 346 Woodnoth, Jonathan 334

Wootton, Sir Henry 38–9 Worcestershire 77, 85 Worth, Jasper, of Tytherington 62 Wrenbury 47, 88, 250 Wright of Offerton family 54 Wright, Richard, of Pulford 54 Wybunbury 230–1, 304 Wythenshawe Hall 73n York 120–1, 328–9 Yorke, Peter 200 Yorkshire 45, 349n

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