PENNYMAN, Sir William, 1st bt. (1608-43), of Marske Hall, Marske-by-the-Sea, Yorks.

Pennyman’s intimacy with Sir Thomas Wentworth† (the future earl of Strafford), his court connections and his large estate were belied by his family’s less than illustrious pedigree. Although the Pennymans had settled at Stokesley, in the North Riding, by the early sixteenth century, they had not been granted arms until 1599 and had therefore enjoyed full gentry status for a mere two generations by the time the civil war broke out. Pennyman, moreover, belonged to an illegitimate branch of the family – his father, William Pennyman senior, being the bastard first son of James Pennyman of Ormesby in Cleveland.35Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. iii. 70-1. Pennyman senior established his main residence at St Albans, but used the profits of his lucrative office as one of the six clerks in chancery to build up a large estate in Yorkshire. It was Pennyman senior who commissioned the building of Marske Hall, which was completed in 1625.36VCH N. Riding, ii. 399; Cliffe, Yorks. 94, 103. Pennyman junior also acquired considerable property in Yorkshire through his marriage to Anne Atherton.37Pennyman, Fam. of Pennyman, 25-6, 61-2; VCH N. Riding, i. 315; ii. 218, 322, 402, 408.

William Pennyman senior’s office was lost to the family at his death, but this setback was more than offset (at least in terms of prestige) by his son’s spectacular rise to prominence in Yorkshire. Within a few years of assuming his majority in 1629, Pennyman had been added to the North Riding bench and the commission of oyer and terminer for the northern counties and been appointed a member of the council of the north and a deputy lieutenant for the North Riding. Pennyman owed his rapid advancement almost entirely to Wentworth, who became lord lieutenant of Yorkshire and president of the council of the north in the late 1620s. How Pennyman and Wentworth became friends is not clear. Fourteen years separated the two men in age and almost the entire length of the county their estates. Nevertheless, by 1631, Pennyman was writing regularly to Wentworth, keeping him abreast of local events, fulminating against Thomas Belasyse†, Lord Fauconberg (Wentworth’s principal opponent in the North Riding and the father of Henry Belasyse* and John Belasyse*), and relaying news of Wentworth’s children, whom Pennyman’s wife helped to look after whilst the lord lieutenant was away.38Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P12/190, 198, 201, 247, 252, 257, 259, 268-70, 297, 13/51, 22/13, 95, 96; Strafforde Letters, i. 55, 57, 60-1. From his correspondence with Wentworth, Pennyman emerges as an energetic deputy lieutenant and a zealous exponent of ‘thorough’, particularly where the maintenance of the trained bands was concerned. He advocated the ‘often viewing of arms’, brushing aside the objections of those who ‘out of an austere stoical opinion will needs have it an unnecessary charge to the country’.39Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P8/351-3, 13/32, 76. Like Wentworth, he also favoured dealing firmly with those who refused to pay military charges.40Strafforde Letters, i. 56; K. Sharpe, Personal Rule, 487.

Pennyman’s zeal in office undoubtedly antagonized a number of the Yorkshire gentry. At the same time, Wentworth’s appointment as lord deputy of Ireland in 1633 served to weaken Pennyman’s position within local government, especially in the North Riding where Wentworth had relatively few supporters.41CSP Dom. 1635, p. 507; Cliffe, Yorks. 298. Hostility towards Pennyman surfaced early in 1634, when one of his fellow magistrates persuaded Lord Keeper Coventry that Pennyman had spoken insultingly of him; and the result was that Pennyman was removed from the North Riding bench and omitted from the commission of oyer and terminer for the northern counties. With Wentworth’s help, Pennyman managed to persuade Coventry of his innocence, and he was restored to office in July.42Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P14/37; C231/5, pp. 127, 143. It may partly have been Pennyman’s unpopularity with some of his fellow Yorkshire gentry that caused him to be pricked for sheriff in the autumn of 1635. Nevertheless, Pennyman was characteristically zealous in the performance of his shrieval duties, successfully collecting the full quota of Ship Money for the county.43M. D. Gordon, ‘The collection of ship money in the reign of Charles I’, TRHS 3rd ser. iv. 161. His attention to duty impressed Wentworth, and when the office of custos rotulorum for the North Riding seemed likely to fall vacant in the spring of 1637, Wentworth tried to secure the place for Pennyman, recommending him to Lord Keeper Coventry as ‘the fittest man you can choose in those parts, whether you consider his quality, a baronet, his sufficiency, integrity, or good affection to his majesty’s service, of which he has given very good testimonies in all the commissions he is employed in, as deputy lieutenant, one of the council in those parts, as justice of oyer and terminer and the peace’.44Strafforde Letters, ii. 70.

Through Wentworth, Pennyman became closely involved in the alum business in Cleveland (alum, at that time, being used as a fixer of dyes). Pennyman owned the land on which several of the largest alum works were situated, but it seems to have been Wentworth who encouraged his friend to consider overseeing the manufacture of alum. By March 1636, Pennyman and another North Riding gentleman were preparing to enter into an agreement with the financier Philip Burlamachi (who had been assigned the lease on the Yorkshire alum mines by Wentworth) for the supply of 1,800 tons of alum a year – a task that Pennyman reckoned would require an initial outlay of £2,000. But as the deadline for signing the agreement approached, Wentworth began to have doubts about involving Pennyman in what was, after all, a risky venture, and in August 1637 he urged his friend to accept an offer of £600 a year from another financier, Sir Paul Pindar, for the rights to work the alum: ‘There is a great difference’, he advised Pennyman, ‘betwixt £600 per annum in certainty for seven years and, for a little more, to hazard the shaking of a man’s whole estate, upon a business you are not versed in experimentally’. Although mindful of the amount he had already invested in the alum works (£1,000 a year, or so he claimed), Pennyman decided to follow Wentworth’s advice.45E125/22, ff. 58v-59v; Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P10a/22, 39, 52-6, 15/359, 16/126, 17/8, 139; HMC Var. viii. 40; Cliffe, Yorks. 91.

The alum business was possibly not the only risky venture to which Wentworth introduced Pennyman; he may also have provided him with an entrée at court. By 1634, Pennyman was probably attending court at least once a year and was careful to keep his ears open for anything at Whitehall that touched upon Wentworth’s interests.46Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P14/116, 18/43, 177. It was possibly through Wentworth that Pennyman became acquainted with the lord chamberlain, Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke. In May 1638, Pennyman boasted to Wentworth that ‘at this time of year I have as much conversation and credit with his lordship [Pembroke] as any man, and to speak but a truth, he is as good a winter friend’.47Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P18/43. Pennyman’s intimacy with Pembroke paid dividends, for that October he informed Wentworth that ‘my lord chamberlain (out of his affection to me, I am confident) moved the king I should be one of his majesty’s [gentlemen of the] privy chamber in ordinary’. Pennyman’s only worry was that the office ‘might bring a servitude upon me contrary to my own nature, and especially invite me too often into the south, which (without some more profitable employment) would neither consist with my own constitution, nor my estate’.48Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P18/132. In the event, he was granted the less time-consuming court office of gentleman of the privy chamber extraordinary.49LC3/1, f. 25v.

Nevertheless, with his purchase late in 1638 (apparently for £12,000) of the clerkship of the council in star chamber in place of Sir William Uvedale*, Pennyman attained that ‘profitable employment’ in London which he thought necessary to sustain a place at court. He was also able to secure a grant of the office in reversion to Wentworth’s nephew Sir William Savile* and to one of his own cousins.50SO3/12, f. 15v; Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P18/177; Strafforde Letters, ii. 258. The clerkship was reportedly worth almost £2,000 a year, although according to Pennyman’s kinswoman Lucy Hutchinson – wife of the future regicide John Hutchinson* – ‘the gentleman who held the next to him was careless and debauched and thereby a great hindrance of Sir William’s profits, who apprehended if he could get an honest man into that place, that they might mutually much advantage each other’. Pennyman persuaded John Hutchinson, his wife’s cousin, to buy the place, but the sale had not been completed before the court of star chamber was abolished by the Long Parliament.51Strafforde Letters, ii. 258; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 37; Cliffe, Yorks. 87.

By early 1639, Pennyman had apparently made the acquaintance of another of Wentworth’s allies at court, Archbishop William Laud. Like Wentworth, Pennyman appears to have thought highly of Laud; he certainly approved of the prosecution in star chamber of his old headmaster at Westminster, Lambert Osbaldeston, for making scandalous comments about the archbishop.52Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P18/177; Works of Laud, vii. 572; Oxford DNB, ‘Lambert Osbaldeston’. Pennyman contributed the sizeable sum of £100 towards the re-edification of St Paul’s Cathedral – a project cherished by the king and Laud but denounced by the puritan physician John Bastwick as ‘making a seat for a priest’s arse’.53LMA, CLC/313/I/B/004/MS25474/006, p. 18; CLC/313/I/B/005/MS25474/002, f. 11; K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, CT, 1992), 322-6. Whether Pennyman approved of Laudian church reforms is not clear, but there seems little doubt that he heartily disliked the puritans, in which category he almost certainly included the Scots. For Pennyman, the Scottish prayer-book rebellion merely confirmed what he had always thought about the Scots, that they were ‘for the most part, subtle, insinuating and impudent’.54Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P22/13. After the outbreak of the Scottish rebellion in 1637, Pennyman had begun training his own private company in anticipation of meeting the rebels on the field.55Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P17/324. But it was not the Scots whom Pennyman thought posed the greatest danger, rather it was their English supporters – as he confided to Wentworth early in 1639, ‘the [greatest] mischief of all is (and I speak it knowingly) that we shall leave near as many ill spirits behind as we shall find before us and such as do rather foment and approve, than desire to repel or condemn, the insolencies of Scotland’.56Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P18/177.

Yet despite Pennyman’s strong support for the bishops’ wars, he was concerned to defend Yorkshire’s interests where they appeared to be threatened by royal policies. In January 1639, following a royal order that the county’s trained bands muster for possible deployment against the Scots, Pennyman signed a petition to the king from the Yorkshire deputy lieutenants and militia commanders, expressing their readiness to march to any rendezvous, but reminding Charles that their troops were ‘never ... once employed out of our county upon any remote service whatsoever’.57Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 353-4. In the event, only six of the Yorkshire militia regiments were selected for inclusion in the royal army, of which Pennyman’s was one – the king having privately consulted him, late in 1638, concerning the ‘the army in Yorkshire ... [the] character of every colonel there and of their particular affections to his Majesty’s service’. Not only was his the first Yorkshire regiment to be ordered northwards, it was the only one to be included in the 4,000 strong force that the earl of Holland led out to challenge the Covenanters at Kelso in June.58Add. 28566, f. 17; Bodl. Rawl. B.210, ff. 43v, 44; Strafforde Letters, ii. 258, 314-15; CSP Dom. 1639, p. 268; HMC Cowper, ii. 220.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Pennyman was returned for Richmond along with another of Wentworth’s (now the earl of Strafford) supporters, Major Norton. Pennyman’s estate in Cleveland lay at least 30 miles east of Richmond, and it is almost certain that he, like Norton, owed his return to Strafford’s close friend Christopher Wandesford†, who was the earl’s deputy as bailiff and steward of the liberty of Richmond and had represented the borough himself in the 1620s.59Supra, ‘Richmond’; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Christopher Wandesford’. A few weeks after Pennyman’s election, on 23 March, he joined Sir John Hotham* and other Yorkshire deputy lieutenants and militia officers in a letter to the privy council in which they had refused to send reinforcements to Berwick until the necessary money had been provided and due consideration had been given to ‘the last year’s past and great charge of this county’.60SP16/448/66i, f. 133; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 573. Strafford regarded this letter as an act of ‘insolence’ and vowed to give ‘the chief leaders in this business ... something to remember it by hereafter’.61Strafforde Letters, ii. 408-9. Nevertheless, Pennyman’s was again one of six Yorkshire militia regiments that the king ordered to be mobilized against the Scots early in April.62Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland ms vol. 1608-1700, N33 Car. I: king to Sir Edward Osborne, 4 Apr. 1640.

Pennyman received only two appointments in the Short Parliament – one of which was to the committee of privileges, on 16 April 1640 – and made no recorded contribution to debate.63CJ ii. 4a, 8b. After the dissolution of the Short Parliament, when many of his fellow Yorkshire gentlemen came to regard Charles’s Scottish policy, rather than a Covenanter invasion, as the greatest threat to the county, Pennyman remained steadfastly loyal to the king and to Strafford. He disdained to join the ‘disaffected’ Yorkshire gentry that summer, signing only the last of their three petitions to the king and then retracting his signature after Strafford objected to a clause requesting that Charles summon Parliament.64Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland ms vol. 1608-1700, N38 Car. I; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 618; Procs. LP iii. 450. Pennyman’s was one of two Yorkshire militia regiments – the other being that of Strafford’s cousin Sir Thomas Danbie* – that the king and Strafford ordered to remain in the field after mid-September to guard against possible Scottish incursions into Yorkshire. Pennyman’s regiment defended the line of the River Tees, while Danbie’s guarded the border with County Durham in Richmondshire. Pennyman threw himself into this task with enthusiasm, building fortifications to guard the crossing at Yarm and apparently relishing the prospect of ambushing the Scots as he had been instructed to do by the king.65Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Danbie’; CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 102, 111-12, 138, 177; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 606, 608-9, 623; Procs. LP iii. 438. The deployment of these two regiments violated if not the terms at least the spirit of the treaty with the Scots at Ripon. Moreover, the regiments were maintained by levies (authorised by Strafford) that were widely regarded as illegal.66Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 600. Pennyman was one of only a handful of Yorkshire deputy lieutenants – the others included Sir Edward Osborne*, Sir Robert Stryckland* and William Malory – who were willing to sign warrants for these levies that autumn.67N. Yorks. RO, ZFW, Wyvill of Constable Burton mss, Wyvill fam. pprs. to 1700 (mic. 1761); Procs. LP i. 459-60. Almost every member of this group was to side with the king in 1642, although it was probably hostility to the Scots which served to unite them in 1640.

In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, Pennyman was again returned for Richmond, on this occasion with Danbie, who was Wandesford’s son-in-law.68Supra, ‘Richmond’. From almost his first day in the House, Pennyman was closely identified with Strafford and was hence regarded with considerable suspicion and hostility by the earl’s opponents. On 7 November, he was removed from a sub-committee involved in investigating Strafford’s administration in Ireland after John Pym’s close ally Oliver St John had excepted against him as one of the earl’s Yorkshire deputy lieutenants. In his defence, Pennyman had ‘confessed himself to honour the lord lieutenant [Strafford] so far as to die for him, yet he loved no man so well but he loved the truth better’.69Procs LP i. 36, 44; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 96. He came under fire again on 4 December, during a debate on Yorkshire’s grievances, when complaints were laid before the House that Pennyman’s sergeant major had levied money in October using musketeers and the threat of force. When Pennyman countered that he could not be made answerable for the indiscretion of his officers, Sir Hugh Cholmeley argued that ‘all the insolencies grew from Sir William Pennyman’s own warrant ... Nor was the lord lieutenant’s unjust dealing and oppression a sufficient ground for Sir William Pennyman’s unjust proceedings’.70Procs LP i. 459-60, 464; Northcote Note Bk. 30. The debate ended inconclusively, but was resumed on 15 December, when the House again heard testimony that Pennyman’s sergeant major had levied money by force. Pennyman admitted that there may have been ‘irregularities’ committed at Yarm and that the warrants he had issued may have been illegal, but he ‘excused it by the law of necessity and nature in respect the Scots were advanced to the very skirts of Yorkshire, and so if he had erred, he had rather fall under the mercy of this House than under the contribution of the Scots’. Once again, Cholmeley took issue with him, arguing that ‘all things were settled when this warrant was granted [Parliament had been summoned] ... and so no necessity’. He correctly adduced that the forces about Yarm had ‘special relation’ to Strafford and had been maintained ‘to act his designs’. Before Pennyman had a chance to reply, Sir Walter Erle demanded that he withdraw from the House as a delinquent – but then Pym intervened and said that Pennyman could speak in his defence and that he only need withdraw when the House should pronounce judgement. In the end, the whole matter was referred to a committee set up to investigate the proceedings of the lord and deputy lieutenants during the king’s personal rule.71CJ ii. 51a; Procs LP i. 602; Northcote Note Bk. 63-4.

Not surprisingly, given his intimacy with Strafford, Pennyman was called upon as a defence witness at the earl’s trial in the spring of 1641.72LJ iv. 115b, 191a. Nor was it a surprise that, whenever summoned, he deposed ‘point blank all he [Strafford] required’.73Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. i. 321. His first appearance was on 24 March, when he gave evidence on the second article: that Strafford had declared at a meeting of the Yorkshire assizes that ‘in some cases the prerogative was easier than the law and that the little finger of the law was heavier than the loins of the king’. Pennyman admitted that he had heard Strafford say something along these lines, but insisted that the lord lieutenant's remark was devoid of any sinister connotations. This testimony was not well received by the trial managers, who implied that Pennyman had been deliberately withholding information from the House; whereupon, according to the (far from impartial) Scottish minister Robert Baillie, ‘there arose ... so great a hissing in the House that the gentleman was confounded and fell a-weeping’. At this point Strafford stepped in to defend Pennyman, who he described as ‘my noble friend and a worthy gentleman, and I would give him my life on any occasion, but I know him to be a person so full of virtue and nobleness, that he would not speak an untruth for all the world’.74LJ iv. 197a; Baillie, i. 321; Rushworth Hist. Collns. viii. 151-2; Procs. LP iii. 98, 103. On 5 April, Pennyman was summoned as a witness again, this time to give evidence on the 21st article: that Strafford had plotted to bring over the Irish army to subdue England. According to Pennyman, Strafford had assured him that there was never any intention to deploy the Irish army upon English soil.75LJ iv. 207a; Procs. LP iii. 383, 391, 399. His last appearance was on 7 April, testifying on the 27th article, that Strafford had levied an illegal tax upon Yorkshire for the maintenance of the trained bands. This charge, as Pennyman admitted, had ‘an oblique aspect’ on himself, and indeed the warrant that he had issued to his sergeant-major was produced as evidence. Pressed by John Maynard* as to whether the warrant had been issued on Strafford’s orders, Pennyman admitted that it had, but was entirely confident that the lord lieutenant had acted with the knowledge and consent of the king and the council of peers. Maynard, however, was not satisfied with his answers, declaring that ‘his testimony is not of much validity’.76LJ iv. 209b, 210a; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 606-7; Procs. LP iii. 431, 435, 437, 441-2, 447-8, 451. On 21 April, Pennyman was one of only seven Yorkshire MPs who voted against the bill for Strafford’s attainder.77Procs. LP iv. 42, 51. Three weeks or so after Strafford’s execution on 12 May, the king granted a patent to Pennyman, Sir William Savile, Sir George Wentworth I* and others to act as trustees of the earl’s estate, from which they were to provide for his widow’s jointure, pay off his debts and raise portions for his children.78SO3/12, f. 157; W. Yorks. Archives (Leeds), WYL100 (former Temple Newsam ms TN/F/18/1).

Pennyman was named to only ten committees during his relatively brief career in the Long Parliament – all but two of them in 1641 – and seems to have taken very little part in debate, certainly on the floor of the House.79CJ ii. 69b, 73b, 79b, 82a, 85b, 131b, 294b, 314a, 440a, 462a. If he was active at Westminster then it was probably in matters relating to the king’s army, which had been quartered in northern England since the summer of 1640. He was added to the committee for the army on 18 January 1641; and on 3 May (when he took the Protestation) he was named to a committee for supplying the soldiery with shoes and clothing.80CJ ii. 69b, 131b, 133b. On 25 October, he was named to a committee for considering soldiers’ complaints about their officers detaining coat and conduct money.81CJ ii. 294b. But Pennyman was not particularly assiduous, it seems, even when it came to defending his own interests. When a bill for abolishing the court of star chamber was passing the Lords in June, Henry Belasyse moved the Commons that Pennyman’s counsel be granted leave to speak in the Lords on the matter, but after some Members demanded ‘to what end his counsel should speak or to what part of the bill’, and receiving no satisfactory answer, the motion was rejected.82Procs. LP v. 251. The next day (22 June), Gervase (or possibly Denzil) Holles presented a petition from Pennyman, asking leave to petition the Lords ‘to consider him in his estate and livelihood which will now be overthrown and ruined if the court be taken away’.83Procs. LP v. 280. Predictably, Pennyman’s request fell upon deaf ears. Faced with the loss of his office and the huge investment he had made in procuring it, he was forced to borrow £2,500.84LC4/202, f. 227v. In December, the king had hopes of compensating Pennyman by appointing him one of the joint treasurers of the navy in place of Sir Henry Vane II*, but the Commons intervened to retain the younger Vane in his post.85CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 200, 201, 210-11, 218.

Pennyman was involved in mid-January 1642 in conveying a letter from an ‘honourable personage’ – perhaps a leading courtier – to the lieutenant of the Tower. The Commons was suspicious of this episode, but lacked sufficient evidence to proceed against him.86Add. 64807, ff. 25v, 26; PJ i. 54, 60. Yet although it distrusted him, the House was not averse to making use of his good offices with the king. On 18 February 1642, Pennyman and another future royalist Robert Sutton were ordered to join the earl of Westmorland in presenting Charles with Parliament’s propositions for raising money for the reduction of Ireland.87CJ ii. 440a. Six days later (24 February), he reported that the king was prepared to give his assent to any bills confirming these propositions.88CJ ii. 450b. On 1 March, he was named to a committee of both Houses for presenting the king with Parliament’s answer touching the disposal of the militia, Charles having earlier refused to give his assent to the militia ordinance.89CJ ii. 462a.

This would be Pennyman’s last appointment in the House. He had apparently joined the king at York by the end of March 1642, when the Commons voted that he and several other ‘suspicious men’ – namely, Danbie, Savile and William Malory* – be summoned to attend the service of the House.90CJ ii. 503a, 515a; HMC Cowper, ii. 311; HMC Buccleuch, i. 295. Pennyman ignored this summons, however, and on 30 April the House was informed that he had been among the courtiers attending Charles when he had attempted to gain entrance to Hull a week earlier.91CJ ii. 551a; PJ ii. 255. In June, he was appointed to the Yorkshire commission of array.92Northants. RO, FH133. Declared absent at the call of the House on 16 July, he was disabled from sitting by the Commons on 11 August, along with Sir Edward Hyde and several other prominent royalists.93CJ ii. 626, 715a. Pennyman’s royalism may well have had its roots in the parvenu’s sense of social insecurity. The son of an illegitimate minor gentleman, he apparently set great store by obedience to legitimate authority. And although not, it seems, a particularly religious man, his love of order and decency and his apparent admiration for Laud suggest that he had probably welcomed Laudian ecclesiastical reforms. Overall, Pennyman was a natural royalist – relatively young at the outbreak of civil war, a former Straffordian and a zealous opponent of the Scots and their English allies.

Displaying the same martial zeal that he had shown in the bishops’ wars, Pennyman raised a troop of horse and a regiment of foot (probably drawn from his trained bands regiment) for the king over the summer of 1642. In August, after Charles had raised his standard at Nottingham, Pennyman and John Belasyse arrived from Yorkshire ‘with each of them a good regiment of foot of about six hundred men and each of them a troop of horse’.94 A Speedy Post, 6; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 335. Never one to stand on legal niceties where the king’s interests were concerned, Pennyman was said to have recruited men from one Yorkshire town by threatening to burn it to the ground, ‘because they [the inhabitants] would go no further in the king’s service’.95Muddiman, Trial, 215. Pennyman and his men fought at the battles of Powick Bridge and at Edgehill that autumn, and in December they were involved in the storming of Marlborough.96Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 82; P.R. Newman, Royalist Officers (New York, 1981), 292; P. Young, Edgehill 1642 (1967), 171, 175. By January 1643, his regiment of foot had become part of the garrison at Oxford, of which Pennyman was appointed governor in April 1643 after Sir Jacob Astley fell sick.97Harl. 6851, ff. 110, 118, 141; Wood, Life and Times, i. 96; Royalist Ordnance Pprs. ed. Roy, ii. 215, 435. According to Hyde, Pennyman served as governor ‘to the great satisfaction of all men, being a very brave and generous person ... who performed all manner of civilities to all sorts of people, as having a good education and well understanding the manners of the court’.98Clarendon, Hist. ii. 406.

Pennyman’s tenure as governor of Oxford was cut short on 22 August 1643, when he fell victim to the camp fever epidemic that was raging in Oxford. He was buried in Christ Church cathedral on 24 August.99Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford (1786), i. 467; Wood, Life and Times, i. 103. The college erected a monument to its illustrious alumnus, extolling his loyalty to Charles and his zeal in the king’s cause, but this proved offensive to the victorious parliamentarians, and on 15 April 1647 the Commons ordered that it be demolished as being scandalous and reproachful to Parliament.100Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford (1786), i. 467; CJ ii. 143a. Pennyman had died intestate and childless and, after the death of his wife in 1644, the bulk of his estate passed to her kinsman Conyers Lord Darcy. In financial terms, Pennyman died a ruined man. His debts exceeded £20,000, and he had been forced either to sell or mortgage a large part of his estate.101C142/766/69; Yorks. Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. Clay (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. xv), 190; (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. xx), 140; Cliffe, Yorks. 100. He was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.