THORPE, Francis (1594-1665), of Beverley and Bardsey Grange, Bardsey, Yorks.

Although labelled an ‘upstart’ by one modern authority, Thorpe belonged to a junior branch of the Thorpes of Thorpe, who had been established in the East Riding of Yorkshire since the early thirteenth century.58Vis. Yorks. ed. Foster, 52-3; Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. iii. 450-2; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 36. His father, Roger Thorpe, was a magistrate and sewers commissioner for the East Riding and also served one of James I’s gentleman ushers and quarter waiters.59SP14/33, f. 20; C193/13/1, f. 30v; C181/3 ff. 96, 187v; E115/370/156; REQ2/413, f. 216v; CSP Dom. 1619-23, p. 433. More significantly, at least in terms of Francis Thorpe’s political career, his father was receiver during the 1580s and 1590s of the estates belonging to the Percies, earls of Northumberland, in Northumberland and Yorkshire.60Cumb. RO (Whitehaven), DLEC/169/1591-2, 1592, 1593; Alnwick, X.II.6, box 10a, l; Estate Accts. of the Earls of Northumberland 1562-1637 ed. M. E. James (Surt. Soc. clxiii), 95, 120, 129. Although Roger Thorpe was styled ‘of Birdsall’, a few miles south of Malton, the family appears to have moved to the parish of Leconfield (where Thorpe was baptised), near Beverley, in the mid-1590s.61C2/JAS1/T6/13; Leconfield par. reg. The Percies owned considerable property in Leconfield, and it is likely that both Roger and Francis Thorpe were tenants of the 3rd and 4th earls of Northumberland.62Alnwick, O.I.2(f): Algernon Percy, 4th earl of Northumberland to Hugh Potter*, 17 Feb. 1646.

Thorpe was admitted to Gray’s Inn – of which his grandfather, the prominent lawyer William Danyell, had been a leading member – and, having been called to the bar in 1621, became a successful lawyer himself.63Philipps [sic], Illustrious Fams. of Eng. 137-8; PBG Inn, 38. In 1624, he was elected recorder of Beverley, where he was required to reside as a condition of his appointment.64Beverley Borough Recs. ed. Dennett, 102. His clients by the mid-1630s included the Yorkshire peer and future royalist Thomas Viscount Savile – a noted opponent of Viscount Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†, the future earl of Strafford), president of the council of the north.65CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 462; Oxford DNB, ‘Thomas Savile, 1st earl of Sussex’. He was also employed by ‘sundry honourable persons’ as steward of their Yorkshire properties, among them the bishop of Durham (Thomas Morton), the duke of Buckingham’s son (and future royalist) Francis Lord Villiers, and the Catholic peer, Henry Constable, 1st Viscount Dunbar [S].66E113/7, pt. 2.

In the course of his legal practice in the north, Thorpe made frequent use of writs of prohibition – typically employed by common lawyers to challenge the proceedings of the conciliar courts – which brought him into conflict with Wentworth. In about 1630, Wentworth had Thorpe removed from the East Riding bench for supposedly slighting both himself and the jurisdiction of the council. Not long afterwards, Thorpe was detained in London by Wentworth for failing to pay his composition fine for distraint of knighthood – although the real reason, according to Thorpe, was his continued ‘meddling with prohibitions’. With the help of his ‘noble friend’ George Lord Goring† (father of the future royalist general George Goring*), Thorpe managed to obtain Wentworth’s permission to depart from London. Back in Yorkshire, however, Wentworth had Thorpe detained in custody at York and then arraigned before the council of the north, where he was required to kneel in submission as a delinquent. In addition, Wentworth had Thorpe bound over at the quarter sessions for his good behaviour.67Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 140-4; W. R. Prest, The Rise of the Barristers, 262-3.

Despite incurring Wentworth’s displeasure, Thorpe had been retained by 1636 as a counsellor-at-law to the future parliamentarian grandee Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland and lord high admiral.68Alnwick, U.I.5 (general acct. 1636). It was possibly on Northumberland’s recommendation that Thorpe was elected recorder of Hull in 1639. One of his first duties as recorder was to deliver a welcome address to Charles during a royal visit to the town in April 1639, during preparations for the first bishops’ war. ‘We make bold’, declared Thorpe, ‘with the utmost zeal and fidelity that can be, to give your majesty a full assurance of our most sincere loyalty and [that we] will adhere to you against all your enemies with the utmost of our lives’.69J. Tickell, Hist. of Hull (1798), 319-20. Following the summoning of a new Parliament late in 1639, Thorpe helped to manage Northumberland’s electoral interest at Beverley. The identity of the earl’s nominee for the borough is not entirely clear, but it appears to have been Sir Henry Vane II*. As Thorpe had predicted, however, Beverley ignored Northumberland’s recommendation and returned two local gentlemen – Sir John Hotham and Michael Warton.70Supra, ‘Beverley’. With the Long Parliament keen by early 1641 to abolish the conciliar courts, Thorpe resumed his open opposition to the council of the north, insisting in a case before the court of wards that ‘no man, saving those that got [profitted] by it, would speak in defence’ of the council. He was ‘often times crossed’, however, by Sir Thomas Widdrington*, who was a client of both Wentworth (now the earl of Strafford) and Northumberland.71Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Widdrington’; HEHL, EL 7875. In March 1641, Thorpe was a witness for the prosecution at Strafford’s trial, giving evidence on the first article – that the earl had exercised an ‘exorbitant and unlawful power’ as president of the council of the north.72Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 137-8; Procs. LP 95, 96.

Thorpe remained in London for much of the civil war, playing a prominent part in the affairs of Gray’s Inn and serving on at least one occasion as a legal assistant to the House of Lords.73PBG Inn, 343, 358; LJ vi. 114a. He spent at least some time in Yorkshire during 1644 – having been added to the East Riding sequestration committee, of which he was an active member – when the county committee appointed him steward of the now sequestered estates of his royalist clients in Yorkshire.74CJ iii. 369a; LJ vi. 431a; SP20/1, f. 256v; E113/7, pt. 2; PBG Inn, 351. He was operating as one of Hull corporation’s men-of-business in London by December 1644 at the latest – working closely with the town’s MP Peregrine Pelham in this role – and would continue to serve the town’s interests even after his own election in October 1645 as a ‘recruiter’ for Richmond, in the North Riding.75Supra, ‘Hull’; D. Scott, ‘‘Particular businesses’ in the Long Parliament: the Hull letters 1644-8’, in Parliament, Politics and Elections, 1604-48 ed. C. Kyle (Cam. Soc. ser. 5, xvii), 277-8 and passim. Clearly a carpet-bagger, he may have owed his return to the local influence of the Independent grandee, Philip Lord Wharton, who was a factional ally of the earl of Northumberland. Thorpe was certainly on friendly terms with Wharton by mid-1646.76Scott, ‘Hull letters’, 323. Another possible electoral patron was Sir Henry Vane I* (also a close ally of Lord Wharton), who had succeeded Strafford as bailiff and steward of the liberty of Richmond.77Supra, ‘Richmond’.

Between his first appointment in the House early in November 1645 and 21 February 1646, when he was granted leave of absence, Thorpe was named to 15 committees and three conference-management teams and served once as a messenger to the Lords (the timing of his requests for leave in February and July 1646 and in February 1647, coming as they did just a few weeks prior to the Yorkshire spring or summer assizes, suggest that his legal practice in the north was still flourishing).78CJ iv. 363a, 417a, 418a, 431a, 448a, 609b; v. 98b; LJ viii. 126a. Having attended Hull’s affairs at Westminster for some time now, he was an experienced hand in working the parliamentary system, particularly when it came to handling business in the Committee for Examinations*, the Committee for Revenue* and similar executive bodies.79Supra, ‘Hull’; Hull Hist. Cent. C BRL/325; C BRB/3, p. 675; Scott, ‘Hull letters’, 282-3, 296, 297-8, 298-9, 300, 305. And as his correspondence with Hull corporation reveals, he shared the Independents’ distrust of the king and their desire to impose a stringent settlement upon him.80Scott, ‘Hull letters’, 278, 306, 309, 311, 313-14.

Thorpe’s familiarity with parliamentary business and his support for a dictated settlement probably explain his speedy enlistment by the Commons in the sensitive work of drafting what would become the Newcastle peace propositions. These controversial new terms for settlement had begun life as an Independent initiative to limit not only the king’s powers in the post-war political order but also the confederal ambitions of the Scottish Covenanters.81D. Scott, ‘The ‘northern gentlemen’, the parliamentary Independents, and Anglo-Scottish relations in the Long Parliament’, HJ xlii. 365-70. In only his second appointment after taking his seat, on 1 December 1645, the House referred the task of preparing a bill on three of the propositions relating to parliamentary control over the armed forces in England and Ireland – a particularly contentious issue in Anglo-Scottish relations – specially to his care.82CJ iv. 359b. The propositions would account for several more of his committee appointments that winter.83CJ iv. 364b, 424b. Moreover, on 2 December and again on 7 February, he was among the small groups of leading Commons-men who were appointed to manage conferences with the Lords on the propositions.84CJ iv. 363a, 431a. Thorpe was convinced that Charles’s requests that winter for a personal treaty were merely a trick ‘to gain time till some foreign forces ... can be got ready and in the meantime to sow seeds of dissension and disobligation between the two nations [England and Scotland]’.85Scott, ‘Hull letters’, 311. The propositions, on the other hand, would require nothing but ‘positive answers upon them [from the king]. For the great advantages gained by the king upon the last treaty [at Uxbridge], and the designs discovered in his since intercepted letters [the Naseby letters], have taught the House that wisdom which otherwise they could not have learned’.86Scott, ‘Hull letters’, 309. Five years of civil strife, declared Thorpe, had opened the people’s eyes to Charles’s fundamental untrustworthiness, whereas ‘the Parliament of England never did, nor can, betray the kingdom’.87Scott, ‘Hull letters’, 311, 314. Keen to keep the king’s perfidy to the forefront of MPs’ minds, Thorpe presented captured royalist correspondence to the House on 11 December, detailing the proceedings of Charles’s party in Yorkshire.88CJ iv. 372b. He would interpret the king’s flight to the Scottish army in the spring of 1646 as a design to ‘divide and embroil the two nations and to raise a new war’.89Scott, ‘Hull letters’, 323.

Several of Thorpe’s early appointments in the Commons, in addition to those relating to the Newcastle propositions, suggest that he was aligned with the Independents. On 8 December 1645, for example, he was named to a committee for investigating the London adventurers for refusing to lend further money for the reconquest of Ireland.90CJ iv. 368b. Dominated by the Independents and those aligned with them, this committee – which Thorpe chaired – was probably set up to cow the pro-Scottish element among the adventurers, whose refusal to lend money was motivated in part by their desire to have Parliament maintain the Scots and their allies in Ireland.91The State of the Irish Affairs...from the Committee of Adventurers in London (1646, E.314.7). Although he took the Covenant on 28 January 1646, it is very likely that he shared the Independents’ determination to curtail continued Scottish intervention in English affairs.92CJ iv. 420b. He and the markedly anti-Scots trio of Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire, William White and Richard Barwis were appointed managers of a conference with the Lords on 24 January concerning letters from the commissioners with the Scottish army at Newark.93CJ iv. 417a; LJ viii. 122b. Five days later (29 Jan. ), he was named to an Independent-dominated committee, chaired by Nathaniel Fiennes I, for responding to the Scots’ denunciations of information sent to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, detailing their clandestine transactions with the royalists. This committee was also charged with investigating the publication of a ‘scandalous’ pamphlet by the Scottish polemicist David Buchanan, vilifying the Independents.94CJ iv. 422a; LJ viii. 123-5.

Having taken leave of absence in February 1646 – almost certainly to attend the Yorkshire spring assizes (he was at York in March of that year) – Thorpe had returned to the House by late April; and during the next three months he was named to a further 13 committees and one conference management team and served once as a messenger to the Lords.95CJ iv. 595b, 602a; Hull Hist. Cent. C BRL/437. Once again, he was named to several committees for prosecuting the Commons’ various grievances against the Scots, particularly regarding the abuses committed by their army in the northern counties.96CJ iv. 560b, 570b. On 4 and 6 July, he reported – probably from one of the above committees – the ‘great sufferings’ of the inhabitants of northern England and ‘some expedients for their present relief’, and amendments to an ordinance for paying the English forces in the region.97CJ iv. 602a; Add. 31116, p. 552. His services were also called upon in July to help draft and report several of the Newcastle propositions and to prepare instructions for the commissioners to present them to the king.98CJ iv. 592b, 594b, 595a, 595b, 606b, 617a; LJ viii. 408b. On 10 July, he was named to a committee on the controversial ordinance for the sale of delinquents’ estates – the proceeds of which were earmarked for paying Parliament’s soldiers and the maintenance of the war in Ireland. This legislation was opposed by the Presbyterian grandees, who were conspicuous by their absence from the committee.99CJ iv. 613a; J. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics 1645-9’ (Cambridge Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1986), 162.

But the majority of Thorpe’s appointments in the Commons in 1645-7 were less partisan in nature and represented an acknowledgement of his legal expertise and evident skill as a draftsman. Thus he was regularly named to committees on legislation for regulating the fining of delinquents and the managing of their estates and for settling the custody of Parliament’s great seal and other legally-complex business.100CJ iv. 374a, 376a, 394a, 411b, 445b, 538b, 574b, 592b, 595b, 611b, 613a, 699b, 703a, 704b, 710a, 727a; v. 21b, 51b, 60a, 70a, 85a. It was probably as a respected lawyer that he was made chairman of a committee of the whole House in mid-January 1646 to examine the quarrel between Francis Allein* – one of the earl of Northumberland’s electoral clients – and Walter Long*.101CJ iv. 407a; Add. 31116, p. 505. The work of a committee for preparing an ordinance to regulate – that is, promote godly reform at – Oxford University and to send preaching ministers to the city was specially referred to Thorpe and the prominent Presbyterian Member, Sir Gilbert Gerard, on 1 July.102CJ iv. 595b. Thorpe supported the ministry of Hull’s Presbyterian preacher John Shawe, though he took a more relaxed attitude towards sectarian activity in the town than would MPs such as Gerard and his ‘Covenant-engaged’ allies. ‘You need not fear that they [sectaries] can rule or trouble you much when peace and government is [sic] settled’, Thorpe assured the corporation, ‘and in the meantime their noise is but like the humming of a fly. Only we must beware that good men, who are truly so called and approved, be not reproved with the name of sectary’.103Scott, ‘Hull letters’, 278, 307, 310-11, 316, 319, 326, 335; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 76.

Thorpe was busy in the Commons from mid-October 1646 until late February 1647, during which time he was named to 18 committees and assigned charge of at least five of them – including those for winding up the court of wards and suggesting suitable recompense for its officials, to consider a petition from a group of clothiers for regulating the cloth trade and for preparing instructions for the judges on circuit.104CJ iv. 702b, 710a, 722a, 727a; v. 39b, 60a, 85a; Add. 31116, p. 578; Leics. RO, DE730/3, f. 61; Peacey, Print and Public Politics, 325. He may also have chaired, and certainly reported from, a committee set up on 19 October to prepare reasons for rejecting amendments by the Lords to an ordinance for vesting custody of the great seal in parliamentary commissioners. The members of this committee were then made managers and reporters of a conference with the Lords to put the Commons’ case directly.105CJ iv. 699b, 700a. He continued to be associated with measures demanding that the Scots army comply with parliamentary orders and maintain proper discipline while it remained on English soil.106CJ iv. 731a, 731b; v. 26b, 34a. And as chairman of the committee for recompensing the officials of the court of wards, he made several reports to the House early in January 1647 in which he recommended that the court’s former master – the Independent grandee Viscount Saye and Sele – receive £10,000. On 9 January, Thorpe was charged with preparing ordinances for settling forfeited royalist property on Saye and other court officials to the value of their allotted awards.107CJ v. 39b, 40a, 46; Add. 31116, p. 592.

In December 1647, the Leveller leader John Wildman* would claim that the scheme for recompensing the court of ward’s officials had been devised by Oliver Cromwell* and Henry Ireton* as part of their plan to reach a settlement with the king whilst enriching their friends at Westminster – notably, in this instance, Viscount Saye and Lord Wharton, who was the son-in-law of the court’s attorney, Sir Rowland Wandesford.108J. Wildman, Putney Proiects (1647), 42 (E.421.19). More seriously as far as Thorpe was concerned, the northern sectary and pamphleteer John Musgrave publicly accused him, in mid-1647, of treason against Parliament. According to Musgrave, a ‘Yorkshire gentleman’ had

waited upon the House of Commons more than half a year, with a charge and discovery of the treasonable practices and great oppressions of Mr Thorpe ... amongst many other his wicked practices, this lawyer, first by persuasion, then by threats, attempted to have got Sir John Hotham* to betray his trust and to have delivered up Hull to the king’s party. But upon Sir John’s refusal, Mr Thorpe caused that then deserving gentleman ... to be proclaimed traitor by two heralds at arms, but not a Yorkshire gentleman of the House would present the same.109J. Musgrave, A Fourth Word to the Wise (1647), 8 (E.391.9).

Supposing there is any truth to this story, then it can plausibly be dated only to March or early April 1642, and it is surprising that so public a denunciation of Hotham did not attract attention at the time. Any quarrel that Thorpe may have had with Sir John did not extend to one of his younger sons, Durand Hotham, whom he commended to Henry Marten* in the early 1650s as ‘the best and most active justice of peace this country [i.e. the East Riding] now hath and the most serviceable in our present public affairs there’.110Brotherton Lib., Marten-Loder mss, box 67, item 76: Thorpe to Marten n.d. [but 1649-53]. More mud was flung at Thorpe in 1648, when he was accused in print of embezzling £25,000 of public revenue.111The Mournfull Cryes of Many Thousand Poore Tradesmen (1648, 669 f.11.116). And another pamphleteer, writing in 1649, would claim that

at Hull I met with a charge which was proved and sworn before Sir Matthew Boynton* [who died in March 1647] and diverse others which renders him [Thorpe] disaffected. It consists of many articles, material enough to forfeit the honour lately conferred upon him [his appointment as baron of the exchequer] and make him as grand a delinquent as any whosoever.112The Countrey Committees Laid Open (1649), 5 (E.558.11).

This allegation, too, is hard to credit, given that Thorpe, as recorder of Scarborough, seems to have worked closely during the mid-1640s with Boynton, the town’s recruiter MP. In February 1647, for example, Boynton and his fellow recruiter Luke Robinson relied heavily on Thorpe and Henry Darley* to secure a favourable ruling for the town from the Committee for Revenue (Thorpe and Darley were on close terms with two of the committee’s leading members, Northumberland and Saye).113Supra, ‘Scarborough’; Scarborough Recs. 1641-60 ed. Ashcroft, 61-2, 82, 86, 90, 92.

Thorpe was apparently keen to avoid the Presbyterian ascendancy at Westminster during the first half of 1647 – and also, perhaps, any unpleasantness arising from Musgrave’s allegations – for having been granted leave of absence on 26 February he did not return to the House at the conclusion of the Yorkshire spring assizes.114CJ v. 98b. Declared absent at the call of the House on 9 October, he was fined £20, although this sum was subsequently returned to him on the recommendation of the committee for absent Members.115CJ v. 330a, 337a. He had resumed his seat by mid-November, when he and Edmund Fowell were assigned the care of a committee to prepare legislation for reforming the office of county sheriff.116CJ v. 362a. During the next six weeks or so, he received five appointments in the House, including nomination to a committee for drafting the Four Bills, although he had little hope that the king would assent to them.117CJ v. 373b, 378b, 379b, 383a, 411b, 417a; Scott, ‘Hull letters’, 333. And on 4 January 1648, the day after the vote of no addresses, he was included on a committee to prepare ordinances for the redress of grievances and the removal of burdens on the people’s liberties. Chaired by the Independents Alexander Rigby I and Thomas Scot I, this committee was apparently intended to appease reformist and radical constituencies in the army and in London.118CJ v. 417a. Thorpe seems to have spent the early months of 1648 in Yorkshire. His employments as a commissioner for oyer and terminer and as an assize judge for Yorkshire in 1647 and 1648 help to account for his absences from the House during those years.119E113/7, pt. 2.

Thorpe returned to London late in April 1648, when he wrote to Hull corporation, urging them to discount ‘a foolish report, much fomented here, of the army’s coming to demand a million [pounds] of the City and of their resolution to disarm and plunder all those who refused to join in their assistance’.120Scott, ‘Hull letters’, 334. Similarly, he sought to downplay the seriousness of the skirmish at Westminster in mid-May in which Parliament’s guards killed a number of Surrey men petitioning for a peace treaty with the king:

it is conceived it was a thing purposely plotted by divers who have been in arms against the Parliament, under colour of coming along with the petitioners and then exasperating the soldiers...from whence grew all the disorder.121Scott, ‘Hull letters’, 335.

Between mid-May and late August he was regularly called upon by the House to prepare letters and ordinances and to carry up legislation to the Lords, for raising money and troops to prosecute the war against the royalists and invading Scots in the northern counties.122CJ v. 568b, 571a, 584b, 613b, 614b, 615a, 635b; LJ x. 276a, 348a; Scott, ‘Hull letters’, 338, 340. On 25 July and 28 August, he was ordered to draft ordinances for sequestering the estates of the English royalists and Scots who had fought against Parliament in the second civil war.123CJ v. 646b, 689a. He was rewarded for his work in helping to secure the north for Parliament with the stewardship of the sequestered Yorkshire estates of one such royalist-in-arms, the 2nd duke of Buckingham.124CCAM 529.

Thorpe was granted leave of absence on 31 August 1648 and was at Hull, or thereabouts, on 26 September, when he was declared absent and excused at the call of the House.125CJ v. 693b; vi. 34b; HMC 10th Rep. iv. 98. As part of a major shake-up of legal appointments that autumn, he was one of a number of prominent lawyers (mostly allies of the Independent grandees) who were made serjeants-at-law; his fellow Gray’s Inn lawyer John Hewley* giving him his ring of office, with Lord Wharton and the Presbyterian peer Francis Lord Dacre acting as his sponsors.126CJ vi. 50b; LJ x. 551a; Baker, Serjeants at Law, 188. He was named to two committees in late October – one of which was for reducing the propositions that the king had agreed to at the Treaty of Newport into parliamentary bills – but these were his only such appointments at Westminster between late August and mid-December.127CJ vi. 60a, 62b.

Having retained his seat at Pride’s Purge on 6 December 1648, Thorpe was named first to, and chaired, a committee set up on 14 December to obtain clarification from the army concerning its grounds for excluding Members from the House. Thorpe reported from this committee on 20 December and on 4 January 1649.128CJ vi. 97a, 101a, 111a; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 195-6. On 18 December, he was added to the Committee for Revenue – of which he was an active member under the Rump – and to a committee set up on 13 December for preparing the dissent to the 5 December vote, that the king’s answer to the Newport propositions were an acceptable basis for settlement.129CJ vi. 99a; LJ x. 632b; SP28/269, ff. 308, 309; SP28/353, f. 181; PA, Ms CJ xxxiii, p. 462. Named to a committee set up on 23 December ‘to consider how to proceed in a way of justice against the king’, he was also included on its successor of 29 December for perfecting an ordinance reported the previous day to establish a high court of court for trying the king and other ‘capital offenders’.130Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; ‘Thomas Scot I’; CJ vi. 103a, 106a. On 26 and 28 December, Thorpe received appointments for drafting and carrying up to the Lords legislation for paying off and disbanding forces raised in Yorkshire during the second civil war.131CJ vi. 104a, 105v; LJ x. 639a. Anticipating that the Lords would reject the second ordinance for trying Charles as they had the first, the Rump set up a 14-man committee on 4 January 1648, to which Thorpe was named, for framing the three resolutions adopted later that day: that ‘the people are, under God, the original of all just power’; that the Commons, being chosen by the people, ‘have the supreme power in this nation’; and that ‘whatsoever is enacted or declared for law by the Commons, in Parliament assembled, hath the force of law, and all the people of this nation are concluded thereby, although the consent and concurrence of the king or House of Peers be not had thereunto’.132CJ vi. 111a. Little wonder that Thorpe was identified by William Prynne* early in January as an adherent and legal adviser of the pro-army ‘junto’ in the Commons.133W. Prynne, A Breife [sic] Memento to the Present Unparliamentary Junto (1649), 10 (E.537.7).

Yet although Thorpe was named to the 6 January 1649 high court of justice, he attended none of its sessions and took no part in the king’s trial and execution. Nor did he receive any appointments in the House between 6 and 30 January. Although apparently willing to condone the Rump’s intimidation of the king, Thorpe could not countenance legal proceedings against him. It was not until 1 February – two days after the regicide – that he entered his dissent to the 5 December vote. That same day (1 Feb.), he was named to a committee for taking the dissent of MPs seeking admission to the House – an important body in defining the Rump’s membership and political complexion.134[W. Prynne], A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members Case (1660), 23, 25 (E.1013.22).

Thorpe was a conspicuous figure both at Westminster and in his native Yorkshire during the first half of 1649. He was named to 28 committees in the Rump, all but two of these appointments falling in the six month period between mid-December 1648 and mid-June 1649. And he reported from, and probably chaired, a committee set up in February on an ordinance concerning sheriffs’ accounts.135CJ vi. 141b, 142b. His most important appointment in the weeks after the regicide came on 13 February, when he was ordered by the House to ride the northern circuit for the forthcoming spring assizes.136CJ vi. 139b, 144b, 148a. Three days later (16 Feb.), he was named to a committee for preparing a declaration to be read by the judges on circuit, vindicating the Rump’s proceedings.137CJ vi. 143b. In his charge to the grand jury at York, delivered on 20 March and subsequently published, he defended the establishment of a ‘common law republic’, in which ‘the name and word king’ applied to ‘the supreme authority’, whatever form it happened to take.138Sergeant Thorpe Judge of Assize for the Northern Circuit, His Charge (1649, E.1068.1); A. Cromartie, Sir Matthew Hale, 1609-76: Law, Religion and Natural Philosophy, 61. Kingship, he argued, was ‘essentially a trust, created by the people for the common benefit, which could legitimately be revoked’ if the monarch resorted to tyranny.139Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: an Essay on the History of Eng. 1450-1642, 268. Echoing the words and sentiments of the 4 January declaration of Commons supremacy, he insisted that ‘the people (under God) is the original of all just power; and that, let the government run out into what form it will ... yet still the original fountain thereof is from the consent and agreement of the people ... but to the people in their politic constitution lawfully assembled by their representative’. Nothing had so guided his own political course, he claimed, ‘as the mischiefs I understood to be in the two negative voices of the king and the Lords’ and in the

fundamental court-errors and destructive positions maintain’d and held forth to the people by flattering royalists and proud and ambitious prelates and courtiers...that the king had an original right to rule and ... was accountable to none but God for his misgovernment ... The Parliament hath found the kingly office within this nation to be useless and dangerous, and...therefore they will no more trust the crown upon the head of any one person...[but] resolve to keep the crown within its proper place, the cabinet of the law, and to allow the law only to king it among the people ...140Sergeant Thorpe Judge of Assize.

That Thorpe had developed a deep distrust of the king – and of personal monarchy, too, in all likelihood – is clear from his letters to Hull corporation. But his claim to have been guided by an objection to the Lords’ negative voice is highly implausible, given his close association with Northumberland and Wharton during the 1640s. The opposition he would express in 1658, in the second protectoral Parliament, to reviving the Lords’ negative voice probably had its origins in the events of 1648-9 – and particularly, perhaps, to the spectacle, in the summer of 1648, of the Lords refusing to vote the invading Scots traitors to the kingdom. On resuming his seat in April 1649, he received the thanks of the House for his ‘great services done to the commonwealth ... in the last circuit’.141CJ vi. 187a. Doubtless in the hope of putting the new regime on a firmer legal footing, he was among a group of six prominent lawyers who met at the chambers of Bulstrode Whitelocke* on 10 May to peruse two bills, ‘one concerning the settlement [declaring England to be a commonwealth and free state] and the other to declare what shall be treason’.142Whitelocke, Mems. iii. 31; Worden, Rump Parl. 194. And on 15 May, he chaired a committee of the whole House on parliamentary succession-planning, reporting its resolution that ‘in order to the declaring a certain time for putting a period to the sitting of this Parliament ... consideration be had of the stating the succession of future Parliaments and of the regulating of their elections’.143CJ vi. 210a. During the next month, he was named to committees for settling an estate worth £3,000 a year on the lord general, Thomas 3rd Lord Fairfax* and, with Widdrington and Vane I, to draft ordinances for holding assizes in the county palatines of Durham and Lancaster.144CJ vi. 225b, 233a, 233b, 242b. The reward for his ‘great services’ to the Rump came on 1 June, when the House gave order for appointing him one of the barons of the exchequer – an office worth £1,000 a year, excluding ‘profits’.145CJ vi. 222a; The Mystery of the Good Old Cause Briefly Unfolded (1660), 31 (E.1923.2). On 15 June, he was ordered to ride the northern circuit for the summer assizes – an assignment that, according to one royalist newsbook, was ‘much against his stomach’ and which he accepted only in the hope of further reward.146CJ vi. 233a; Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls II) no. 10 (19-26 June 1649), sigs. K2-K2v (E.561.16).

Thorpe’s elevation to the bench in 1649 obliged him to resign as recorder of Beverley, Hull and Scarborough and as steward of the manorial courts of Holderness. He was succeeded as recorder of Beverley and steward of Holderness by his son-in-law, William Wise.147CJ vi. 309a; CCC 227, 615; Beverley Borough Recs. ed. Dennett, 103; Hull Hist. Cent. C BRB/3, p. 820; Scarborough Recs. 1641-60 ed. Ashcroft, 162. As in the case of Alexander Rigby, who also joined the judiciary in June 1649, Thorpe’s ‘weighty employments’ in the court of exchequer and as a regular assize judge were largely responsible for his lengthy absences from the House after mid-1649.148Infra, ‘Alexander Rigby I’; CJ vii. 131b; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 187. Nevertheless, he continued to serve the Rump in a quasi-political capacity, most notably as one of the judges at the trial in October 1649 of the Leveller leader John Lilburne.149J. Lilburne, The Triall of Lieut. Collonell John Lilburne (1649, E.584.9). In addition, he was active on the high court of justice established in April 1650 for trying Sir William Davenant and other enemies of the state.150CJ vi. 392a, 586a; An Act for the Tryal of Sir Iohn Stowel Knight of the Bath (1650, E.1061.5); J. Stawell, To the Supreme Authority the Parliament of the Common-wealth of England (1653), 38 (E.1072.2). A report by a royalist agent of his intelligence-gathering mission in England that spring, described Thorpe as being ‘one who had formerly been theirs [the Rump’s], though now converted, but did still comply with them so far as not to make himself suspected’. The agent claimed that at a recent private dinner, Thorpe had agreed with Vane II that ‘they’ – by which Vane seems to have meant the civilian republican interest – ‘were in a far worse estate [sic] than ever they have yet been ... [and] that their own army and generals were not to be trusted’.151CSP Dom. 1650, p. 155. This report has been seen as evidence of Thorpe’s disillusionment with the Rump.152Worden, Rump Parl. 241; But the very fact that Vane was confiding in Thorpe suggests that he remained close to members of the governing ‘junto’. Moreover, they were aggrieved not with the Rump itself, it seems, but at the prospect of the civilian foundations of republican rule being eroded by war with the Scots and growing army influence as a result.

Thorpe’s continuing commitment to the Rump was such that during the Scottish invasion of England in the summer of 1651 he remained in Yorkshire after the August assizes and reportedly ‘exchanged a gown for a sword’.153CJ vii. 5b; Mercurius Politicus no. 63 (14-21 Aug. 1651), 1001 (E.640.14). He also organised a declaration for the county’s ‘well-affected’ to sign, pledging loyalty to the commonwealth.154Add. 21424, f. 46. Evidence that he may have made a brief re-appearance in the Commons after the victory at Worcester – he was named to a committee on 9 September for settling lands on Major-general John Lambert* and other army officers – is contradicted by his signature on letters to Parliament from the Yorkshire county committee on 25 August and 9 September.155CJ vii. 5b, 14a, 18b. His last appointment in the Rump was on 2 February 1653, when he was named to a committee on a bill for establishing county registers to record land transactions. His inclusion on this committee has plausibly been seen as part of efforts by the House’s ‘conservative lawyers’ to frustrate further legal reform.156CJ vii. 253b; Worden, Rump Parl. 320.

Although Thorpe had been a willing servant of the Rump, he was considered sufficiently conformable by the Cromwellian regime to retain his offices as a baron of the exchequer and circuit judge. In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Thorpe stood as a candidate for the newly-created constituency of the West Riding, where he had established his main country residence – at Bardsey Grange, near Leeds. But in the ‘shout’ on election day for the sixth and last place, his electoral manager John Hewley could not prevail against Lambert’s republican following.157Supra, ‘Yorkshire’. If there was any substance to rumours that some of Leeds’s inhabitants were keen to elect Thorpe, then here, too, the Lambertonians would prove to strong for him.158Add. 21422, f. 347. As a relative newcomer to the West Riding and without close ties to either Fairfax or Lambert – the heads of the dominant political interests in the region – Thorpe was always going to struggle at the hustings. Defeated in the West Riding, he was returned for Beverley in his native East Riding, having continued to serve the town’s interests after resigning as its recorder in 1649.159E. Riding Archives, BC/II/7/4, f. 94. He was named to six committees in the first protectoral Parliament, including those on ordinances for regulating the court of chancery and confirming the abolition of the court of wards, and to prepare legislation confirming parliamentary votes for revising the protectoral constitution.160CJ vii. 374a, 380a, 380b, 381b, 403a, 409b. His only appointment as teller during his parliamentary career came on 19 January 1655, when he partnered Sir William Masham in a minor division concerning the former tenants of the bishop of Durham.161CJ vii. 420a.

Having been appointed one of the judges for the Western circuit in the summer of 1654, Thorpe was made a commissioner of oyer and terminer in March 1655 for the trial of those involved in Penruddock’s rising.162C181/6, pp. 48, 49; CSP Dom. 1654, p. 400; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 90. After trying the western insurgents he was ordered by the protectoral council to sit in judgement on the rebels in Yorkshire.163CSP Dom. 1655, p. 117; TSP iii. 332. However, he and his fellow judge, (Sir) Richard Newdigate†, refused to serve, protesting that their commission from the council violated legal precedent and raising objections to trying prisoners on the basis of hearsay and without evidence of treasonable intent.164TSP iii. 359, 385; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, iii. 696-7. But the true ground of their refusal, so it was reported at Gray’s Inn, was their unwillingness to proceed according to the Cromwellian treason ordinance, as opposed to the treason statute of 25 Edward III that had been used against the western insurgents.165Cromartie, Hale, 80-1. It would appear that they were willing to defend Cromwell from his enemies so long as they could act under parliamentary legislation rather than on the basis of the Instrument of Government.166J. Fitzgibbons, ‘The definition of treason and the offer of the crown’, in Revolutionary England ed. G. Southcombe, G. Tapsell (2017), 135-7. The two men attended the council on 3 May 1655 and were removed from office.167Abbott, Writings and Speeches, iii. 704; Mercurius Politicus no. 256 (3-10 May 1655), 5323. With more time on his hands to devote to local affairs, Thorpe became an active member of the West Riding magistracy from mid-1656.168W. Yorks. Archives (Wakefield), QS 10/3, pp. 165, 361.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament, in the summer of 1656, Thorpe was returned not only for Beverley but also, this time, for the West Riding, taking the second place behind Lambert. However, like three of his fellow successful candidates for the West Riding – Henry Arthington, John Stanhope and Henry Tempest – he was excluded from the House as an opponent of the protectorate. Thorpe very likely shared their hostility to Lambert and his following and to military rule more generally.169CJ vii. 425b; Supra, ‘Yorkshire’. In his petition to Cromwell in November 1657 for payment of his salary arrears as a judge, Thorpe acknowledged that he had incurred the lord protector’s displeasure (a reference to his removal from the bench in 1655), but pleaded that ‘the searcher of all hearts [God] knows that my desire was to serve your highness so far as in my judgement and conscience I was enlightened to do ...’.170SP18/157, f. 263; CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 186. The protectoral council duly issued a warrant for payment of Thorpe’s arrears.171DNB ‘Francis Thorpe’.

At the beginning of the second session of the second protectoral Parliament, early in 1658, Thorpe was allowed to take his seat (along with the rest of the excluded Members), and on 26 January, he joined Baynes, Lambert and Henry Darley in moving for a bill to regulate the cloth trade in Yorkshire.172Burton’s Diary, ii. 372. Four days later (30 Jan.), in a debate on how to transact proceedings with the Cromwellian Upper Chamber, he argued that to accept messages from ‘the Other House’ under that title, rather than the House of Lords, was ‘good, honest and religious’.173Burton’s Diary, ii. 400-1. When this debate resumed on 4 February, he admitted his complicity in dismantling the ancient constitution in 1649: ‘I was one of those that did freely and heartily give my consent to take away the House of Lords, and my only reason was their negative voice. They stood so as a screen between you and the king ...’. His professed reverence, moments later, for ‘the old constitution by Lords and Commons’, must have rung hollow, therefore, especially as he followed it with the rhetorical question: ‘if we are now returning to what we were, what have we got by the war?’174Burton’s Diary, ii. 445-8. The Cromwellian peers were there to ‘advise and consult’ with the Commons, he insisted, not to ‘control’ it. He therefore urged the Commons to limit the powers of the Other House before transacting with it: ‘ascertain them [the Other House] in your proceedings ... take care for the old Lords [Northumberland et al.] ... take care about the negative voice’.175Burton’s Diary, ii. 447-8. He was named to four committees during this brief second session, all of which related either to promoting a preaching ministry or repairing highways.176CJ vii. 588a, 592a.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, Thorpe stood against Fairfax, Lambert and Thomas Harrison II as a candidate for Yorkshire. On election day, he reportedly had ‘a general voice for him’, but was defeated nonetheless – largely, it seems, because his election manager, John Hewley, had no horse and was therefore unable to manage his interest among the crowd.177Supra, ‘Yorkshire’. With the restoration of the Rump in the spring of 1659, Thorpe resumed his seat; and on 21 May, he and Sir Thomas Widdrington were assigned care of a committee to review – and, if necessary, to bring in an ordinance for repealing – the legislation passed since April 1653.178CJ vii. 661b. His tally of nine committees in the restored Rump would doubtless have been higher had not the House restored him to the bench and selected him, on 15 June, to ride circuit at the summer assizes.179Bodl. Rawl. C.179, pp. 68, 73; CJ vii. 661b, 666a, 670b, 673b, 676b, 684b, 687a, 687b, 689b, 691b. On 1 July, the commissioners for the great seal informed the Speaker that in contrast to his judicial colleagues – several of whom had refused to serve altogether – Thorpe had come in voluntarily to receive his patent of office and take the oath ‘to be true and faithful and constant to this Commonwealth’.180Clarke Pprs. iv. 284. That summer, Thorpe and John Parker I* rode the northern circuit.181CJ vii. 745b. Declared absent at the call of the House on 30 September, he was fined £20.182CJ vii. 790a. Although he does not appear to have attended the Rump after it re-assembled a second time, late in December, his patent as a judge was still valid, and on 11 February 1660, the House voted that he ride the northern circuit at the spring assizes.183CJ vii. 814b, 840b.

His political confidence apparently undimmed at the prospect of a Stuart restoration, Thorpe stood as one of six candidates at Hull in the elections to the 1660 Convention that April – and came last on a poll.184Hull Hist. Cent. C BRB/4 (Hull Bench Bk. 1650-64), p. 308. More ominously, he was one of only three judges whose patent of office was not renewed at Charles II’s accession, the others being Parker and John Wylde*.185W. H. Bryson, The Equity Side of the Exchequer, 59, 179. Shortly after the Restoration, Thorpe petitioned the king for a royal pardon, avowing that he had opposed the regicide and had forborne to sit in the House ‘while that business was in agitation’. He brushed over the complexities surrounding his removal from the bench in 1655, ascribing it simply to his refusal to try the Yorkshire royalist rebels. And he claimed that he had never purchased sequestered property (indeed, he had been willing to lend money to some Yorkshire royalists during the 1650s, although naturally on terms favourable to himself).186SP29/1/87, f. 163; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 9; CCC 1005. A vocal element in the Convention was not inclined to deal charitably with him, however, and, with William Prynne* in the vanguard, urged that he be punished for taking bribes and other offences. But Francis Goodricke*, John Swynfen* and other Members spoke on his behalf, and he narrowly avoided exemption from the Act of Oblivion.187Bodl. Dep. F.9, ff. 7v-8; OPH xxii, 353-4.

Thorpe was omitted from all local commissions during the course of 1660 and retired to private legal practice. Writing to John Bright*, one of his clients, in 1662, he bemoaned the two men’s pitiable condition – presumably a reference to the distrust and contempt in which they were held by the new regime and its local agents.188Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Br P78/6, 7a, 7b, 19. The authorities apparently ignored allegations that Thorpe had been acquainted with the plans of the Farnley Wood conspirators in 1663.189A. Hopper, ‘The Farnley Wood Plot and the memory of the civil war in Yorks.’, HJ xlv. 295. Thorpe died intestate, and without issue, in mid-1665 and was buried at Bardsey on 7 June.190C10/108/144; Whitaker, Loidis and Elmete, 161. He had made a will in 1660 – in which he left his entire estate to his wife – but its terms appear to have been contested in the church courts, and it was not entered in probate. His personal estate, which was reckoned to be worth between £8,000 and £10,000, consisted chiefly of debts owing to him.191C10/108/144; DEL10/28. He was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.