PELHAM, Peregrine (1601-50), of High Street, Holy Trinity, Kingston-upon-Hull, Yorks.

Descended from a cadet branch of the distinguished Sussex family, the Pelhams of Laughton, Peregrine Pelham was second cousin to Henry Pelham* of Brocklesby, Lincolnshire, and a kinsman of Sir Thomas Pelham* of Laughton. Although Pelham was born in Bosham, in Sussex, his family moved from there in the mid-1610s to Cadney in north east Lincolnshire, where his father and uncle had inherited an estate in the 1580s.27Cadney par. reg.; PROB11/72, ff. 95r-v; Pelham, MacLean, Some Early Pelhams, 181-2; Keeler, Long Parl. 300. Somewhat unusually for the heir of a gentry family, Pelham was put to a career in trade, becoming apprenticed to a merchant of Hull – the nearest major town to Cadney.

Granted his freedom as a merchant in 1626, Pelham quickly established himself as one of Hull’s most successful overseas traders, importing considerable quantities of French wine and exporting lead.28C7/275/91, 94; Hull Hist. Centre, C BRG/1, f. 179; CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 249; 1628-9, p. 313; VCH E. Riding, i. 142. He would later claim that his trade before the civil war had been ‘so considerable’ that he had paid customs duties of £2,000 a year.29Bodl. Nalson VIII, f. 67. Pelham’s commercial success was reflected in his steady rise in the town’s cursus honoroum, serving as chamberlain in 1630-1, sheriff in 1636-7 and being elected an alderman in September 1641.30Hull Hist. Centre, C BRB/3, ff. 234, 422, 542. His mercantile connections apparently extended to London by the mid-1640s, when he married the widow of the son and heir of the eminent City merchant and moneylender Sir Peter Vanlore (not the widow of Vanlore himself, as is generally supposed).31CB; ‘Peregrine Pelham’; ‘Sir Peter Vanlore’, Oxford DNB.

Pelham found himself in trouble with the crown several times in the late 1630s. In December 1638, the court of wards issued a warrant for his imprisonment and the seizure of his property until he had paid a debt of £5 owing to the court.32WARD10/5/3, packet 2, item 3. Six months later, in June 1639, he was among a group of leading Hull and York merchants who were apprehended on a warrant from Lord High Treasurer William Juxon (the nature of their offence is not clear).33T56/11, f. 104. Whether Pelham suffered any serious loss of liberty or damage to his estate as a result of these proceedings seems unlikely, but they cannot have improved his opinion of the personal rule of Charles I or its agents.

Pelham was returned for Hull – almost certainly on the corporation interest – in January 1641 in place of the recently deceased Sir John Lister, who had been the town’s leading merchant and had made Pelham one of the trustees in his will.34Supra, ‘Hull’; ‘Sir John Lister’. Pelham was apparently not one of the more active MPs, at least on the floor of the House, and although he was regularly paid ‘knight’s pence’ by Hull corporation and sent gifts of ale for his services, it was alleged by the town’s recorder, Francis Thorpe*, in 1645, that he seldom attended.35Hull Hist. Centre, C BRB/3, ff. 541, 552, 581, 636, 645, 655, 661, 684, 702, 782, 812; Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 299. It is difficult to form a precise impression of Pelham’s appointments, however, because of the clerk of the Commons’ persistent failure to distinguish between Pelham and his second cousin Henry Pelham, MP for Grantham, referring to both simply as ‘Mr Pelham’. It is likely that the majority of such references in the Journals and in various parliamentary diaries during the early 1640s relate to the Lincolnshire MP, particularly during 1642 and 1643, when Pelham spent a considerable amount of time at Hull or with Sir Thomas Fairfax’s* forces in Lincolnshire.36Bodl. Nalson VIII, f. 67. Certainly those appointments where legal expertise was required, such as to committees for the abolition or regulation of the prerogative courts, can reasonably be assigned to Henry Pelham, who was one of the House’s most eminent lawyers. Likewise, the fact that Henry was of higher social standing than Peregrine suggests that it was the former who was the ‘Mr Pelham’ regularly appointed as a messenger to the Lords.

Most of Pelham’s early appointments appear to have related to mercantile affairs. He was probably the Pelham named to the 18 March 1641 committee to prepare a bill for tonnage and poundage and to a committee set up on 26 May to discover the beneficiaries on the patent for paying £2 per tun of wine – the import of wine being one of Pelham’s main stocks in trade.37CJ ii. 107a, 157a, 461a. On 7 June, he and several other Members, including the York merchant Thomas Hoyle and the Newcastle tradesman John Blakiston, were appointed to confer with the Scots commissioners about regulating trade between the two kingdoms in accordance with the terms of the treaty of London.38LJ iv. 268b. Appointment to committees on the import and manufacture of gunpowder (21 July) and to confer with naval officers and merchants about supplying ships for the defence of the kingdom (14 Jan. 1642) may well have followed.39CJ ii. 219b, 378b.

Another area of parliamentary business in which Pelham was probably involved was the paying off and disbandment of the English and Scottish armies that had been quartered in northern England since the second bishops’ war of 1640. He may have been the ‘Mr Pelham’ appointed on 14 June 1641 (with the Yorkshire MPs Sir John Hotham, Sir Ferdinando Fairfax, 2nd Baron Fairfax, and Sir Philip Stapilton, among others) to manage a conference concerning the disbandment of the English army, and he was certainly named to the 2 July committee for securing the billet money due to the inhabitants of Yorkshire.40CJ ii. 175b, 196a. One of the Pelhams, possibly the Hull MP, was also named to a committee for securing the arrears of the Brotherly Assistance (5 Aug.).41CJ ii. 239a.

Pelham’s most important role as an MP prior to the outbreak of civil war was not at Westminster but in securing Hull for Parliament. On 17 January 1642, he was named to a committee to examine the future royalist commander Captain William Legge concerning his failed attempt to garrison Hull for the king.42CJ ii. 383b, 387b; PJ i. 89, 95, 112. And three days later (20 Jan.), Pelham offered to return to Hull in order ‘to accommodate things so as the town should readily obey the orders of Parliament’. ‘Divers’ spoke in support of this motion, but the town’s former governor and MP for nearby Beverley, Sir John Hotham, who had been ordered on 11 January to garrison Hull for Parliament, questioned whether Pelham’s freeman oath would allow him to condone admitting soldiers into the town and this being seconded by other MPs, Pelham’s offer came to nothing.43PJ i. 116. The mayor of Hull and some of the aldermen clearly looked to Pelham to keep their town free of soldiers, which lent added force to Hotham’s suggestion that Pelham was compromised by his freeman’s oath.44PJ i. 124. Pelham, however, although probably anxious to impose limitations on Hotham’s authority in Hull, apparently accepted the necessity of garrisoning the town, and on 7 February he moved that the mayor of Hull be discharged for having refused to admit Hotham’s troops.45PJ i. 294-5.

Pelham had returned to Hull by 23 April 1642, when he helped stiffen Hotham’s resolve in the face of the king’s efforts to gain admittance to the town.46Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 567. After consulting with Pelham, Hotham informed Charles that to admit him within the walls would be a betrayal of the trust reposed in him by Parliament. In recognition of Pelham’s role in buttressing the ‘startled’ Hotham, the Commons ordered a letter to be written to Hull thanking him for his ‘especial service’.47CJ ii. 561a; PJ ii. 261. Hotham himself conceded that Pelham had done him ‘very good service’.48PJ ii. 265. Evidently trusted by the Commons’ leadership, Pelham was appointed to a seven man committee set up in May 1642 to assist Hotham as governor of Hull.49CJ ii. 577b, 592; LJ v. 82b; PJ ii. 341. The composition of this committee was apparently determined by John Pym and his allies and reflected their desire to surround Hotham with men they trusted.50Infra, ‘Sir John Hotham’; CJ ii. 584b-585a; Clarendon, Hist. i. 523-4.

Pelham, along with John Alured* and John Hotham II*, played a leading role in organising Hull’s defences during the summer of 1642.51Bodl. Nalson II, f. 83; LJ v. 183a; CJ ii. 678b; HMC Portland, i. 41; PJ iii. 115, 170, 171, 196, 200, 227, 228, 232. However, by the autumn a serious rift had developed between Sir John Hotham and Pelham over the government of the town, with Hotham alleging that Pelham was attempting to subvert his governorship. Pelham was almost certainly trying to preserve some vestiges of municipal authority, of which Hotham was notoriously contemptuous, but this is not to say, as Hotham implied, that he was hostile to the presence of a parliamentary garrison in the town. At some point in September, Hotham requested that the Commons recall Pelham to Westminster, and on 23 September the House ordered that Pelham be summoned to attend the service of the House.52CJ ii. 779b. Pelham refused to leave Hull, however, and towards the end of October, Hotham wrote a long letter to the Speaker in which he alleged that Pelham had accused both himself and the garrison of intending to plunder the town. According to Hotham, the root cause of Pelham’s anger was Hotham’s refusal to allow Pelham’s brother-in-law into Hull on the grounds that he had been implicated in a plot to betray the town to the royalists. On the advice of Sir Hugh Cholmeley* and Michael Warton*, Hotham ‘sequestered’ Pelham and put him aboard ship for London.53Hotham Pprs. 62-5; HMC Portland, i. 66-7. Anxious not to upset the fractious Hotham, the Commons ordered that Pelham be brought down to Westminster having done ‘no good service in Yorkshire’.54CJ ii. 820b; Add. 18777, f. 41v. Pelham had resumed his seat by 28 October, when he was named to a committee for quickening the collection of contributions for the maintenance of Parliament's field army under Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.55CJ ii. 825b. The next day (29 Oct.), he declared himself ready to assist the earl with life and fortune.56CJ ii. 827a.

The quarrel between Hotham and Pelham flared up again in November 1642, after Hotham intercepted a letter from one of Pelham’s servants in which the writer declared that ‘notwithstanding the complaints of Sir John Hotham against his master, he [Pelham] was well received into the House of Commons and that the said House accounted ... the said Sir John Hotham ... a mad man’.57Harl. 164, ff. 155v, 161v. Hotham sent this letter to the Commons with one of his own demanding justice against Pelham.58Harl. 164, f. 155v; Add. 18777, f. 69v. After these letters were read, Pelham responded with a long speech in which he claimed that he had laid out almost £1,000 in the town’s defence and had done ‘many considerable services for the safeguard of the town, and that if this should be the reward for that loss and service he must submit to it’. He denied accusing Hotham of intending to plunder the town (although admitted that he had said this about some of the garrison) and complained that Hotham’s imprisoning him in October had been a breach of parliamentary privilege.59Harl. 164, ff. 161v, 166v. After debating the matter, the Commons voted that Hotham had performed his duty ‘with all trust and fidelity’ and ordered that Pelham’s servant be sent for as a delinquent.60CJ ii. 863a; Harl. 164, f. 166v. Pelham himself emerged from the controversy apparently unscathed, although Hotham continued to complain to the Commons that he was spreading scandalous reports about him.61CJ ii. 885a; Add. 31116, p. 28; Harl. 164, f. 336v.

The conflict between Pelham and Sir John Hotham was not fully resolved until the arrest of the Hothams late in June 1643 for their attempted betrayal of the town. On 3 July, Pelham was added to the committee at Hull (from which he had probably been removed at Sir John Hotham’s instigation), and in September he and several other MPs were ordered to bring the Hothams to the House following a Commons resolution that they be kept close prisoners in the Tower.62CJ iii. 152a, 230b. Almost certainly a firm ally of the war-party grandees, Pelham denied reports in the royalist press that he endorsed Sir John Hotham’s allegations that John Pym and Viscount Saye and Sele had transported bullion abroad.63Add. 18778, f. 9v; Mercurius Aulicus no. 30 (23-29 July 1643), 401 (E.64.11). When, late in December 1644, the House debated the punishment of the Hothams, Pelham was adamant that both men deserved death.64The Hull Lttrs. ed. T.T. Wildridge (Hull, 1887), 48.

The majority of Pelham’s appointments between 1643 and 1646 appear to have related to military and commercial issues. It was probably Pelham rather than his cousin Henry who was named to a series of committees relating to the customs and the excise, the supply of the Protestant forces in Ireland and the prevention of goods entering the kingdom through royalist ports.65CJ iii. 29b, 41a, 142a, 211a, 236a, 196b, 501a, 551b, 722a. But the fact that he did not take the Solemn League and Covenant until 29 January 1645 – well over a year after it had been introduced – suggests that he did not regularly attend his seat in the House.66CJ iv. 35b. As his numerous letters to Hull corporation between December 1644 and October 1646 reveal, he was far more active as a committeeman and in lobbying the chairmen of various standing committees – notably, Miles Corbett and Laurence Whitaker who headed the Committee for Examinations*, John Wylde the chairman of the Committee for Sequestration*, and John Blakiston and John Goodwyn, chairmen of the committee for petitions.67Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 280, 290-8, 300-5, 308-10. He claimed to have numerous ‘friends’ in the House who would support Hull’s interests – although not, it seems, among the majority of Yorkshire Members, who felt that the town had grown rich from the war while the county as a whole had been ruined.68Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 280-3, 289, 291, 293, 294, 295, 298, 302, 311, 312, 315, 331-2. The town was certainly able to lay out large sums to prosecute its businesses at Westminster; in one letter, Pelham assured the mayor and aldermen that ‘you need not fear any committee to do you any prejudice. I do not spend £500 per annum here for nothing’.69Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 279, 292. Besides disposing of large amounts of money in treating the town’s friends, Pelham persuaded the corporation to send gifts to the Speaker and other influential Members.70Hull Hist. Centre, C BRB/3, ff. 645, 709; Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 279-80, 292, 305, 311, 317.

With so many parliamentary allies and so much money at his disposal, Pelham was generally confident of getting his way in committee and had altercations with Corbett, Whitaker and Blakiston when his desires were frustrated.71Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 292, 294-5, 296-7, 300, 302, 304. Despite Thorpe’s insinuation that neither of the town’s MPs were diligent in attending its interests, Pelham was instrumental in securing the appointment of Sir Thomas Fairfax as the town’s governor in April 1645 and tried hard, if unsuccessfully, to have Hull exempted from the Northern Association ordinance as the corporation had wished.72Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 292-3, 295-6, 298, 299-300. On most issues affecting Hull, he could generally count on support in the House from his cousin Pelham, Wylde, Sir William Strickland, Sir Thomas Widdrington (chairman of the House Committee for the Northern Association*) and Sir Henry Vane II – Pelham’s fellow member for Hull.73Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, passim. He also reckoned among his friends John Rushworth*, secretary to the New Model army, and was on good terms by early 1646 with the prominent Independent MP Samuel Browne, whom he described as ‘a very solid lawyer and a man in very great esteem’.74Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 305, 309, 315-16, 317. On 26 March, the corporation sent two barrels of ale to Browne, ‘Mr Pelham having given intimation so to do’.75Hull Hist. Centre, C BRB/3, f. 709; Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 317.

Unfortunately, Pelham’s correspondence with Hull corporation reveals relatively little about his political and religious views. He clearly wished for a favourable outcome to the Uxbridge peace negotiations early in 1645, expressing the hope that ‘if they at Oxford be as desirous of peace as we, I hope God will give a blessing to it [the Uxbridge treaty]’. However, with the collapse of the talks he was keen to see Parliament deploy a strong army and navy, and he supported both the establishment of the New Model army and the appointment of Sir Thomas Fairfax as its commander.76Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 289-90. He was probably the ‘Mr Pelham’ who was named third to a committee for the recruitment of soldiers for the new army (17 Feb. 1645) and to a committee on the Self-Denying Ordinance (24 Mar.).77CJ iv. 51a, 88a.

On 28 April 1645, the Commons appointed Pelham and Alexander Bence to serve alongside Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, as commissioners to command the fleet over the summer – Pelham and Bence being chosen on the grounds that they were ‘experienced seamen’.78CJ iv. 125a, 128b; Add. 31116, pp. 413-14; Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 294. However, the Lords desired that command of the fleet should be given to ‘some one person of honour who had an estate answerable for what he should be trusted with’ – that is, to Warwick alone.79Supra, ‘Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports’; Add. 31116, p. 417; LJ vii. 359. Pelham claimed that Warwick had shown him ‘many courtesies’ and had opposed the appointment of a commission to command the fleet only because he disliked Bence.80Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 296. But though Pelham claimed to be friendly with Warwick, his letters make it clear that he favoured the vigorous prosecution of the war and therefore, by implication, the replacement of irenic aristocratic commanders, Warwick probably included. Indeed, at some point in mid-1645 (probably soon after the fall of Leicester to the king late in May), Pelham voiced this sentiment out loud. On 11 June, the Presbyterian grandee Sir Philip Stapilton informed the Commons that Pelham had declared that it was ‘no marvel if our business prospered not’ so long as we trusted ‘these disobliged persons’ on the Committee of Both Kingdoms* – naming the earls of Essex, Manchester and Warwick and Stapilton himself – ‘because they liked not the New Model’. When questioned by the House, Pelham admitted that he had spoken words to this effect but that he could remember naming only Manchester and Stapilton.81Add. 18780, f. 35; Harl. 166, f. 218; CJ iv. 172b; M. Mahony, ‘The Savile affair and the politics of the Long Parl.’, Parl. Hist. vii. 218.

Pelham took considerable heart from the New Model’s victory at Naseby, writing to the corporation that, God willing, ‘Sir Thomas Fairfax will be the happy instrument to end these great distractions’. At the same time, the disclosure of the king’s correspondence captured after the battle convinced him that Charles was fighting to establish Catholicism and that ‘there is no hopes of peace but by the sword’.82Hull Lttrs. ed. Wildridge, 96; Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 300, 301, 302. Yet although he was an Independent in politics, he had little sympathy for the sects and evidently shared the determination of Hull’s municipal leaders to prevent Sir Matthew Boynton* and his Congregationalist friends gaining a foothold in the town.83Hull Hist. Centre, C BRL/314. Writing to a corporation in 1646, Pelham expressed the hope that the ‘multiplicity of opinions [on religion] which swarm generally (of which your town is much infected as I hear) will ere long be reduced to government’.84Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 313. He favoured a parochial puritan ministry and ‘orthodox’ ministers such as Hull’s vicar William Stiles (who was removed from his living in 1650 for refusing the Engagement) and the Erastian Presbyterian divine Thomas Coleman, who disliked both the gathering of churches and the ‘rigid’ Presbyterianism of the Scots.85Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 277, 288, 289, 292, 312, 316, 332; ‘Thomas Coleman’, Oxford DNB.

Pelham appears to have received only a handful of committees appointments between the summer of 1645 and Pride’s Purge – possibly as few as six – and probably spent most of his time lobbying for Hull’s interests behind the scenes.86CJ iv. 250a, 703a; v. 119b, 274a, 383a, 615a; Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 338, 339, 340, 341. Although he was keen to avoid a breach with the Scots, by the spring of 1646 he wanted the Scottish army in northern England sent home, and he urged the corporation to have a Commons’ declaration denouncing the Scots’ ‘plunderings’ read in all the town’s churches.87Hull Lttrs. ed. Wildridge, 136; Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 317. Only one of his letters to the corporation after 1646 has survived, making it difficult to establish more than the broad outlines of his later parliamentary career. That he remained aligned with the Independent interest can be inferred from his appointment in September 1647 as a commissioner for compounding in place of the secluded Presbyterian leader Denzil Holles.88CJ v. 314a. Moreover, during the last three months of 1647 he signed at least nine warrants of the Independent-dominated Committee for the Army*, although he had not been formally added to that body and hence, perhaps, the inking out of his signature on five of these documents.89SP28/48, f. 33; SP28/49, ff. 226, 263, 357, 369, 372, 374, 376; SP28/352/2, unfol. (warrant 7 Dec. 1647).

During the second civil war, Pelham remained steadfast in the parliamentary cause and was appointed with Vane II and Giles Grene* to confer with Fairfax – who was on campaign at the time – about securing Hull and recovering the ships that had defected to the king.90CJ v. 615a; CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 88, 102, 104, 105, 110, 111, 112-13, 115, 118, 119. In his last surviving letter to the corporation, late in November 1648, he made clear that he had never expected any good to come of the treaty of Newport, which suggests that by this point he had lost all hope that a durable settlement could be reached with Charles.91Scott, ‘Hull lttrs.’, 341.

Pelham retained his seat at Pride’s Purge on 6 December 1648 and entered his dissent to the 5 December vote (that the king’s answers at Newport were a sufficient grounds for a settlement) on 20 December – the day on which the dissent was introduced as a test of the Rump’s membership.92W. Prynne*, A Full Declaration of the true State of the Secluded Members Case (1660), 21 (E.1013.22). Appointed one of the judges in the high court of justice, he was among the most zealous of the trial commissioners, attending 15 of the commission’s 18 meetings, all four sessions of the trial itself and then signing the royal death warrant.93Muddiman, Trial, 76, 228.

Pelham’s motives for king-killing are not clear. The fact that he regarded himself, rather than Sir John Hotham, as the man principally responsible for denying Charles admittance to Hull in April 1642, may have some significance.94Bodl. Nalson VIII, f. 67. It is possible that he had convinced himself that Charles would never forgive him and that regicide was the only way to guarantee his own safety. A more plausible explanation, however, is that he had come to regard the king as fundamentally untrustworthy. The revelations in the summer of 1645 of the king’s negotiations with the Catholic Irish appear to have done much to harden his attitude. And his distrust of Charles may have been further strengthened by the first hand experience of the horrors of the second civil war that he had probably gained while conferring with Fairfax in Kent during the summer of 1648. It was probably Pelham who sent Hull corporation an eye-witness account by the Southwark MP, Colonel George Thomson, of the battle of Maidstone in June 1648.95Hull Hist. Centre, C BRL/497; R.K.G. Temple, ‘Discovery of a manuscript eye-witness acct. of the battle of Maidstone’, Arch. Cantiana, xcvii. 209.

Pelham was named to 15 committees during his two years in the Rump, including those for the relief of poor debtors and for repealing legislation punishing persons who failed to attend their parish church.96CJ vi. 100b, 116a, 127a, 127b, 178b, 179b, 181b, 245b, 251b, 262a, 266b, 290b, 380a, 382a. Apparently a committed supporter of the commonwealth, he wrote several letters to Hull corporation, urging it to have the king’s arms on the town’s mace replaced by those of the commonwealth.97Hull Hist. Centre, C BRB/3, f. 830. Indeed, he was so well thought of by the council of state that there was even talk of reducing or disbanding the Hull garrison following his election as mayor of the town in September 1649.98Add. 21418, f. 145; Hull Hist. Centre, C BRB/3, ff. 821, 822; CJ vi. 309a, 328a. In March 1650, he secured an order from the Rump, authorising the corporation to appoint a deputy-mayor until his ‘necessary service’ in the House would permit him to attend his duties at Hull in person.99Hull Hist. Centre, C BRB/3, f. 829; CJ vi. 379b. Having returned to the town in August 1650 to enforce a parliamentary order for the removal of several malignant alderman and the election of a well-affected mayor, Pelham had returned to Westminster by 23 December, when he wrote to the influential Rumper Bulstrode Whitelocke, requesting that he move the House for the grant of ‘some considerable sum of money for my present supply’.100CSP Dom. 1650, p. 298; Hull Hist. Centre, C BRB/3, ff. 842-3, 844; Bodl. Nalson VIII, f. 67v. He claimed to have been instrumental in preserving Hull for Parliament, to have laid out over £2,000 in provisions for the Scottish army in England and to be owed almost £15,000 in largely unredeemable debts. His condition, he informed Whitelocke, was

deplorable, being so much indebted that I can give no satisfaction to my creditors, which is no small vexation to me. My wife and children are altogether unprovided for, and now I am in course [of] physic, and how it may please God to deal with me I know not ... I want money to keep house and to pay the doctors, although my wife hath pawned the pearls and jewels, and now I intend to make sale of my coach and horses.

‘If you have opportunity to move for me tomorrow’, he informed Whitelocke, ‘I doubt not but I shall have many of my friends in the House to second you.’, principal among whom he named as John Lisle, Sir Thomas Widdrington, Henry Marten, Robert Goodwin and Sir Peter Wentworth.101Bodl. Nalson VIII, ff. 67r-v.

Within four days of writing this letter, Pelham had died – perhaps hastened to his grave by the ‘course [of] physic’ he had undergone. Given his apparent fondness for drink – he owned capacious ‘wine cellars’ in Hull – and a contemporary reference to him as ‘the fat man’, it is tempting to conclude that he had died of complications after being cut for the stone.102Bodl. Nalson VIII, f. 67; CSP Dom. 1647, p. 125. His place of burial is not known, although it was presumably somewhere in London. On 27 December, Pelham’s brother-in-law petitioned the House on behalf of Pelham’s children and creditors, whereupon £500 was granted to Goodwin towards defraying the cost of Pelham’s funeral and to provide for his family. A committee was also set up, comprising Goodwin, Lisle, Vane II, Whitelocke and eight other MPs, to consider what was ‘further due’ to Pelham.103CJ vi. 516a; vii. 22b; CCAM 1294. Pelham died intestate, and the administration of his estate was granted to his only son John.104PROB6/26, f. 184v. None of his immediate descendants sat in Parliament.