WHALLEY, Edward (d. c.1675), of King Street, Westminster.

Background and early career

Whalley belonged to an ‘ancient and honourable family’ that had moved from Staffordshire to Nottinghamshire after acquiring Kirkton Hall, in the parish of Screveton, by marriage in the late fifteenth century.46TSP iv. 469; R. Thoroton, Antiquities of Notts. (1677), 129, 130; Vis. Notts. (Harl. Soc. iv), 117. His great-grandfather, Richard Whalley†, had sat for Nottinghamshire in the 1554 and 1555 Parliaments and had augmented the family estate with substantial purchases of monastic lands in the county.47HP Commons 1509-1558. Whalley’s father, also Richard Whalley†, had represented Nottinghamshire in 1597 and the Yorkshire constituency of Boroughbridge in 1601.48HP Commons 1558-1603. Richard’s injudicious resort to litigation had forced him to sell a significant part of his estate, which at one time may have been worth in excess of £1,600 a year.49Notts. RO, DD/4P/22/11; 157 DD/P/8/122; DD/2P/28/371, 376-7; CJ v. 8a.

It was perhaps the family’s straitened circumstances that explain the unusual nature of Whalley’s education; for having been a student at Emmanuel (Cambridge’s most godly college), it was then determined that rather than enroll at one of the inns of court he should pursue the cheaper course of apprenticeship to a London Merchant Taylor – one Nathaniel Busher, who was apparently a kinsman of Whalley’s future wife Judith Duffell.50PROB11/160, f. 276; GL, MS 34038/8, p. 224. Richard Whalley died in about 1632, ‘much reduced in circumstances’, the bulk of his estate having probably been entailed upon his grandson Peniston Whalley*.51Infra, ‘Peniston Whalley’; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Richard Whalley’. Perhaps Richard’s most valuable legacy to Edward was not in property but in marrying into the Cromwells of Huntingdonshire, which made Whalley a first cousin of no less a figure than Oliver Cromwell*.

Although Whalley became a freeman of the Merchant Taylors’ Company in 1627, he waived his prospects as a London clothier and became instead a gentleman farmer in Essex – backed by one of the county’s grandees, his kinsman by marriage Sir Alexander Temple† (Temple had married the widowed mother of Sir Thomas Penyston*, whose sister had married Whalley’s brother Thomas).52GL, MS 34017/3, p. 402. Temple had a high opinion of Whalley’s skills as an estate manager, thinking him ‘of good ability and experience in the managing of a stock in the way of grazing and feeding of cattle and other improvements’, and he therefore settled a house and lands in Chadwell, Essex, worth £200 a year upon Whalley, and gave him over £100 to invest in leases and livestock.53C6/17/130; C10/58/76; Essex RO, D/DRU T1/229. Whalley himself, it was later alleged, invested no money of his own in the venture but merely ‘some small stock … having only about 50 sheep – so poor and scabbed as they were worth but 30 pounds or thereabouts – and only one horse’. The aim of the enterprise was to raise enough money to provide legacies for the children of Temple’s second son James Temple* – who was a future regicide, like Whalley.

At first, all seemed to go well. By 1632 (three years after Sir Alexander Temple’s death), Whalley was able to pay James Temple £340 for the lease of a capital messuage and other property in Chadwell.54Essex RO, T/B 388/1. By 1635, he had built up assets that in ‘stock’ (i.e. goods, excluding land and leases) alone amounted to £2,200, and in that year he entered into several indentures and bonds for securing the profits of the venture to Temple’s children.55C6/17/130. It was probably at around this time, at the height of his prosperity, that he re-married; his second wife being Katherine, the daughter of a minor Essex gentleman Richard Middleton of Rainham (not, as is generally stated, Mary, sister of the future royalist Sir George Middleton).56PROB11/247, f. 399v; Vis. Notts. (Harl. Soc. iv), 118; ‘Edward Whalley’, Oxford DNB. But from the mid-1630s, ‘by living at a higher rate than formerly and other miscarriages, ... [Whalley] did much decline in his estate and did very much waste, consume and diminish the aforesaid stock’.57C6/17/130. He certainly seems to have had cash-flow problems by 1637, when he borrowed £500 by statute staple (he was described on this occasion as living in Rainham).58LC4/202, f. 6v. His fortunes had declined so much by 1639 that he was forced to sell up and flee the country in order to avoid his creditors. His place of refuge, according to several reports, was Scotland.59C6/17/130; [G. Wharton], A Second Narrative of the Late Parliament (1659), 25 (E.977.3). The collapse of Whalley’s business affected not only the Temples but also his father-in-law, who complained that his daughter had been ‘undone’ by her husband’s imprudence and that he himself had lost out to the tune of £1,000.

Whalley had returned to England by mid-1642, when Temple ran into him, quite by chance, on the Strand. Whalley lamented his ‘present want and indigence’, at which Temple asked some of his ‘friends’ to find Whalley a position in the army that Parliament was then raising under Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex – and, sure enough, by September, Whalley had been made a cornet in the troop of horse commanded by Temple’s kinsman Captain John Fiennes*.60C6/17/130; List of the Army Raised under...Robert Earle of Essex, sig. C3. In gratitude, Whalley promised that he would compensate Temple’s children for their losses out of any money that came his way in the forthcoming campaign – a promise that, according to Temple, he never fulfilled.61C6/17/130.

Whalley in the wars, 1642-8

Although probably in his late thirties or early forties at the outbreak of civil war, Whalley took to soldiering with an alacrity that belied his age and lack of military experience. As a cornet in Fiennes’s troop, he would have taken part in the first notable action of the war – the cavalry engagement at Powick Bridge in September 1642 – and helped to rally the parliamentarian soldiers who had fled the field at the battle of Edgehill.62Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 23; A Most True and Exact Relation of Both the Battels fought by His Excellency (1642), 2-3 (E.126.38). Whalley’s reasons for siding with Parliament were almost certainly linked to his godly religious convictions; but his reason for actually taking up arms probably owed more to his ‘present want and indigence’. In February 1643, he received a captain’s commission in his cousin Oliver Cromwell’s regiment of horse in the Eastern Association army, and within less than eight months he had risen to the rank of lieutenant-colonel.63SP28/267, f. 96. He earned Cromwell’s praise for his ‘gallantry’ at the battle of Gainsborough in May 1643, and he doubtless acquitted himself stoutly alongside his cousin at Marston Moor in July 1644.64Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 240-4. If his fellow officer Major-general Lawrence Crawford can be credited, Whalley and the future Leveller leader Lieutenant-colonel John Lilburne had acted for Cromwell at the siege of York that summer in promoting a petition among the Eastern Association cavalry for religious toleration.65‘The quarrel betweem the earl of Manchester and Oliver Cromwell’ ed. J. Bruce, D. Masson (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xii), 60; D. Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford, 2018), 254-5.

On the formation of the New Model army in the spring of 1645, Whalley was appointed colonel of one of the regiments of horse created when Cromwell’s old command was divided in two.66Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 209. Several writers referred to Whalley at this time as being ‘orthodox in religion’, which was more than could be said for many of his men.67Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 212; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 19. His officers, for example, included the ‘notorious Anabaptist’ William Packer*.68Supra, ‘William Packer’; R.K.G. Temple, ‘The original officer list of the New Model army’, BIHR lix. 66-7. It was perhaps in the hope of restraining his troops’ religious extremism that Whalley secured the services of Richard Baxter as the regiment’s chaplain in June 1645.69Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 212. Baxter claimed that in supporting his ministry, Whalley ‘grew odious among the sectarian commanders at the headquarters ... and he was called a Presbyterian, though neither he nor I were of that judgement in several points’.70R. Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae ed. M. Sylvester (1696), 53, 55-6.

Whalley and his regiment served with distinction at the battles of Naseby and Langport in the summer of 1645 and were also involved in storming Bristol in September.71Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 210-11. In December, the regiment was sent back from the west country to straiten the king’s headquarters at Oxford – and, to that end, it besieged the nearby royalist garrison of Banbury, which surrendered early in May 1646. In recognition of his services, the Commons granted Whalley £100 to buy himself two horses.72CJ iv. 542a; LJ viii. 317b. Whalley and his regiment next besieged Worcester, which capitulated in July, but not before he had been superseded by Colonel Thomas Rainborowe*. Baxter and other commentators claimed that Whalley had been replaced by the more radical Rainborowe because he was ‘a Presbyterian and an anti-libertine’.73T. Edwards, The Third Part of Gangraena (1646), 138 (E.368.5); Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae ed. Sylvester, 56; Clarke Pprs. i. 424. A more likely explanation is simply that Rainborowe’s foot were better suited to siege-work than were Whalley’s cavalry.74J. Heath, A Chronicle of the Late Intestine War in the Three Kingdoms (1676), 109; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 211. In December, the Commons resolved to grant Whalley lands worth £300 a year from the estate of the sequestered royalist general the marquess of Newcastle, although as a deduction from Whalley’s arrears of army pay rather than as an outright gift.75CJ v. 8a. Moreover, it was not until March 1648 that the two Houses passed an ordinance to this effect, whereby Whalley was granted the sequestered manor of Flawborough (worth £410 a year) together with £1,000 over and above his arrears of pay.76CJ v. 454b, 484a; LJ x. 133.

Whalley was a leading figure in the army’s defiance of the Westminster Presbyterians and their efforts in the spring of 1647 to disband and dismember the New Model. He sympathised with the soldiers’ material grievances and was forward in representing them to the council of officers.77Clarke Pprs. i. 34, 46, 49, 51, 80, 81. He also clashed with the leading Presbyterian officer Colonel Thomas Sheffield, whom he accused of misrepresenting the army at Westminster.78Clarke Pprs. i. 70, 71, 76-7, 82; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 89-90. Nevertheless, his soldiers were not (in his words) ‘carried away by passion’ when stating those grievances; and although their complaints and concerns were marked by a keen resentment of Parliament’s treatment of the army, they were apparently devoid of any radical religious or proto-Leveller sentiments.79Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XLI, ff. 112-13; Clarke Pprs. i. 51; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 76, 85. Nor did the Westminster Presbyterians entirely despair of Whalley at this stage, for on 8 April 1647 his was one of only five regiments of horse that the Commons voted should be maintained in England after the rest of the New Model had been disbanded or sent to Ireland.80CJ v. 137a; LJ ix. 217b. Three of the other four regiments were given to Presbyterian officers. But the Westminster Presbyterians were mistaken if they thought they could detach him from their leading opponents in the army – as his signature on the officers’ Petition and Vindication to Parliament late in April would have made abundantly clear.81The Petition and Vindication of the Officers of the Armie (1647, E.385.19).

Following Cornet George Joyce’s seizure of the king at Holdenby early in June, Sir Thomas Fairfax* assigned the custody and protection of Charles to Whalley and his regiment.82LJ ix. 243b; Clarke Pprs. i. 130, 138-9. Whalley seems to have treated the king courteously and would not obey parliamentary demands for the removal of Charles’s royalist chaplains until he received orders to that effect from Fairfax.83LJ ix. 305b, 308a, 328a; Clarke Pprs. i. 122-3, 140-1. A report in mid-June that the king had struck Whalley for listening in on a private conversation is almost certainly false.84LJ ix. 273a; Clarke Pprs. i. 169. In fact, Whalley probably thought better of the king than he did of the more radical elements in the army – and this, according to Edmund Ludlowe II*, was the basis of the ‘great familiarity’ that grew between Whalley and the king’s bedchamber man John Ashburnham*.85Ludlow, Mems. i. 159. Whalley played no recorded part in the debates at Putney, while his own troop of horse published a declaration denouncing the ‘preposterous proceedings’ and ‘pretended authority’ of the pro-Leveller ‘new agents’.86A Full Relation of the Proceedings at the Rendezvouz (1647), 10-14 (E.414.13). When Charles fled from Hampton Court in November 1647, he left a letter thanking Whalley for his civility and ‘to desire the continuance of your courtesy by your protecting of my household stuff’.87LJ ix. 520b. Ashburnham, in a letter to the Speaker vindicating Charles’s actions, also spoke well of Whalley.88J. Ashburnham, A Letter Written by John Ashburnham Esquire (1647, E.418.4). These letters are difficult to reconcile with Sir Edward Hyde’s* claim that Whalley was ‘a man of a rough and brutal temper who had offered great violence to his nature when he appeared to exercise any civility and good manners’.89Clarendon, Hist. iv. 262. In his own account to Parliament of his proceedings as the king’s custodian, Whalley claimed that he had treated Charles with honour and respect.90E. Whalley, A More Full Relation of the Manner and Circumstances of His Majesties Departure from Hampton-Court (1647, E.416.23).

Whalley served with Fairfax during the second civil war, his regiment fighting in the battle of Maidstone and at the siege of Colchester.91Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 217-18. At the end of the siege, Whalley supported the execution of the royalist commander Sir Charles Lucas – perhaps a sign that his experiences during the second civil war had eroded the gentlemanly forbearance he had shown the royalist grandees, not least the king himself, in 1647.92Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS LXX, ff. 23v-24v; Gentles, New Model Army, 257. When the struggle for settlement switched back to the political arena in the autumn, Whalley’s regiment joined those of John Barkstead* and Charles Fleetwood* in a petition to Fairfax, urging him to demand justice against ‘the fomenters, contrivers and actors in the first and late wars’, but stopping short of calling for the king’s trial.93The Moderate no. 18 (7-14 Nov. 1648), 149-51 (E.472.4). Whether or not Whalley himself was fully convinced at this stage of the case for trying the king, he certainly supported the army’s Remonstrance, its march on London and its purge of the Commons on 6 December.94CJ vi. 94a; Clarke Pprs. ii. 54, 56, 61; LJ ix. 556ab; Gentles, New Model Army, 272, 279, 282; D.P. Massarella, ‘The Politics of the Army 1647-60’ (York Univ. DPhil. thesis, 1977), 147, 157, 160, 162-3. He subsequently attended the debates of the council of officers on the Agreement of the People, where his voting pattern indicates that he generally supported Henry Ireton* and other ‘conservative’ officers in allowing Parliament to have the final word on moral and religious issues.95B. Taft, ‘Voting lists of the council of officers, Dec. 1648’, BIHR lii. 146-9. In his only recorded speech on the Agreement, delivered on 14 December, he was less than enthusiastic about the Levellers’ manifesto.

How can we term that to be an agreement of the people which is neither an agreement of the major part of the people, and truly, for anything I can perceive ... not [an agreement] of the major part of the honest party of the kingdom? ... We have been necessitated to force [purge] the Parliament, and I should be very unwilling we should force the people to an agreement.96Clarke Pprs. ii. 84.

Regicide and republic, 1649-53

Whereas Whalley clearly had misgivings about the Levellers’ blueprint for settlement, he was apparently ready by early January 1649 to contemplate regicide, asking the self-styled prophetess Anna Trapnel that if the king should be found guilty of ‘great crimes ... then must he not die?’97Clarke Pprs. ii. 168. Named as a commissioner in the ordinance for a high court of justice (6 Jan.), he attended all but one of the 19 meetings of the trial commission and was named to several sub-committees for considering where and how to bring the king to trial and for examining the witnesses against him. He likewise attended all four sessions of the trial itself and signed the royal death warrant.98Muddiman, Trial, 76, 200, 202, 207, 213, 228. It is not clear precisely what drove Whalley to regicide. He evidently did not desire’s the king’s death as a necessary prelude to constitutional revolution. Ultimately, it seems that in Whalley’s eyes the king’s trial had answered the question that he had asked of Anna Trapnel – Charles had been found guilty of ‘great crimes’, had refused to repent or to renounce the use of force in defiance of divine and earthly judgements against him and therefore deserved to die.

Whalley showed a more forgiving spirit during the army’s debates in March 1649 on how to proceed with the reconquest of Ireland, arguing that the commander of the expedition should not be saddled with orders that would force him to destroy the native Irish or rob them of their lands.99Clarke Pprs. ii. 208. He was apparently less worried by the resistance the army would encounter in Ireland than by Leveller agitation at home, which he was keen to suppress.100J. Lilburne, The Legall Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England Revived (1649), 74 (E.560.14); The Declaration and Unanimous Resolution of Colonel Whaley (1649, E.555.31); Clarke Pprs. ii. 192; Gentles, New Model Army, 316, 327; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 210, 223. One pro-Leveller tract in the spring of 1649 referred dismissively to what has been described as Whalley’s ‘flamboyant taste in dress’ – one of his soldiers had found him dressed in a ‘sky colour satin waistcoat laced with silver and his pantophles [slippers] daubed with silver lace’.101The Army’s Martyr (1649), 6 (E.554.6); ‘Edward Whalley’, Oxford DNB. But it should be remembered that Whalley was, and considered himself to be, a gentleman and that this rich attire was not unusual for a man of his rank.

What certainly was unusual for a man of Whalley’s rank was his membership of Thomas Goodwin’s gathered church in London. The evidence for his membership rests solely on the claim of the author of the Second Narrative, who was writing in the late 1650s and was not the most impartial of commentators.102[Wharton], Second Narrative, 25. Nevertheless, it seems likely that Whalley was an Independent in religion (or moving in that direction) by July 1649, when he signed a testimonial to the council of state on behalf of the Congregationalist minister John Canne. The other signatories were Whalley’s younger brother Judge Advocate Henry Whalley*, his son-in-law Colonel William Goffe*, colonels John Okey* and Thomas Pride* and Major Waldive Lagoe*.103SP46/95, ff. 155-6. Whalley’s regimental chaplains during the late 1640s included the Baptist ministers Jeremiah Ives and Hanserd Knollys.104Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS LXVII, f. 20; A. Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains (Woodbridge, 1990), 138, 142-3, 197. Yet their predecessor, Richard Baxter, would rejoice in 1654 that Whalley remained ‘a friend to sound doctrines, to unity and to piety and to the preachers, defenders and practisers thereof’.105R. Baxter, Rich. Baxters Apology (1654), epistle dedicatory.

Whalley covered himself in yet more glory during Cromwell’s invasion of Scotland in 1650; and in October of that year he was promoted to the rank of commissary-general of horse.106CSP Dom. 1650, p. 400; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 224-5. He interpreted the army’s victories in Scotland as a sure sign of divine approval – as he rather tactlessly informed Colonel Gilbert Ker and Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston*, who were among the least hostile of leading Scotsmen to English intervention.107Gentles, New Model Army, 399. Whalley’s contribution to the victory at Worcester in September 1651 earned him a grant from the Rump of forfeited lands in Scotland worth £500 a year.108CJ vii. 14a, 77b; Cal. of the Corresp. of Richard Baxter ed. N. H. Keeble, G. F. Nuttall (Oxford, 1991), i. 314. Shortly after the battle, Whalley joined Cromwell, Oliver St John*, Bulstrode Whitelocke* and other grandees at the Speaker’s house to discuss whether to maintain a republican style of government or to establish a mixed monarchy. In contrast to Cromwell, Whalley preferred ‘not to have anything of monarchical power in the settlement of our government’ – largely, it seems, on the practical grounds that there was no suitable candidate for monarch: ‘the king’s eldest son hath been in arms against us, and his second son likewise is our enemy’.109Whitelocke, Mems. iii. 372-4; Worden, Rump Parl. 276.

With his regiment quartered in England from 1651, Whalley was able to play a leading role in the army’s increasingly fractious dealings with the Rump. Late in January 1652, he headed a delegation of officers that presented a petition to the House, requesting that it reconsider its recent order for the banishment of John Lilburne, whom many officers thought had been victimised at the expense of his principal enemy in the House, Sir Arthur Hesilrige.110CJ vii. 77b; Gentles, New Model Army, 418, 552. A few weeks later, on 18 February, a scheme for church settlement that had been drawn up by John Owen*, Thomas Goodwin and other Independent divines, and signed by Whalley and Goffe (among others), was presented to a Westminster committee to receive proposals for the propagation of the gospel.111CJ vii. 259a; J.R. Collins, ‘The church settlement of Oliver Cromwell’, History, lxxxvii. 24. The petitioners evidently envisaged an established church, with a ministry supervised by triers and ejectors and toleration for nonconforming congregations.112CJ vii. 258a-259a; Collins, ‘Church settlement’, 24-5. On 13 August, Whalley headed another officer delegation to Parliament, this time to present a much more controversial petition, calling for (among other things) legal reform, the abolition of tithes and for the Rump to set a period to its sitting and to bring in qualifications for electing ‘such as are pious and faithful to the interest of the commonwealth’.113CJ vii. 164b; Worden, Rump Parl. 307-8; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 286. Whalley undoubtedly approved of the army’s dissolution of the Rump in April 1653 and figured prominently on the council of officers and on several important army committees that spring.114Bodl. Clarendon 45, f. 400v; Clarke Pprs. ii. 2, 7; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 615; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 112, 121; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 308.

Serving the protectorate, 1654-6

Despite his close links to Cromwell and his high-profile support for the establishment of the protectorate, late in 1653, Whalley was relatively slow to profit from the change of government.115C. Feake, A Beam of Light, Shining in the Midst of Much Darkness and Confusion (1659), 50 (E.980.5); Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 339, 346, 352. He was not considered suitable for a place on the protectoral council or for a more senior role in the army. The army intelligencer Gilbert Mabbott was apparently mistaken in April 1654 in stating that Whalley had been made commander-in-chief, under General George Monck*, of the horse in the army in Scotland.116Clarke Pprs. v. 176.

In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Whalley was returned in second place – behind the former Independent grandee William Pierrepont – for one of Nottinghamshire’s four county seats.117Supra, ‘Nottinghamshire’. He had also been nominated for one of the two Westminster places (his principal residence was the house he rented on King Street, Westminster), but had tried hard to waive his candidacy, and in the event he was not elected.118E317/Middx/48; Add. 70007, f. 106; The Faithful Scout no. 187 (7-15 July 1654), 1481 (E.230.12). On election day, 12 July, he had been

set upon by a great masty [mastiff] dog, as he rid among his friends, and had they not used all their might and strength to have prevented his [the dog’s] fury, he had (in all probability) destroyed him [Whalley]. But blessed be God he had no hurt, for the dog was so beaten and cut that every one gives him up for a lost creature.119The Faithful Scout, no. 187 (7-15 July 1654), 1481.

Whalley’s return for Nottinghamshire – which was evidently in absentia – probably rested in large part on the influence he was thought to have with the protector. Nevertheless, he would also have had a considerable proprietorial interest in the county by the mid-1650s, having acquired or purchased several properties forfeited by the royalist Cavendish family – notably, the manors of Flawborough, Sibthorpe (which Whalley’s father had been forced to sell in the 1620s) and Welbeck Abbey.120Notts. RO, DD/4P/22/11; DD/P/6/1/18/22; 157 DD/P/8/122, 148; DD/2P/28/371, 376-7; LJ x. 133; CCC 1735, 1736. He also acquired the forfeited manor of Tormarton, Gloucestershire, and the former crown manor of West Walton, Norfolk.121G. Jaggar, ‘Col. Edward Whalley’, 157. His purchase of fenland in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk in 1653 was from a private seller, but it would draw him into the very public battle between the supporters and opponents of schemes to drain the Bedford Level.122C54/3764/41; Jaggar, ‘Col. Edward Whalley’, 157; K. Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (1982), 179, 181, 182, 209, 221. He would become even more closely embroiled in this dispute in 1656-7, when he was granted 500 acres of fenland by the Bedford Level Company and was added to the benches for Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and the Isle of Ely.123TSP v. 475; C231/6, p. 362; The Case and Proceedings of at Least Sixty Gentlemen Participants and Purchasers (1656), 11, 13-14. His property investment during the 1650s was doubtless sustained in large part by his army pay, which netted him – as a colonel, commissary-general and major-general – almost £1,500 a year by 1656.124[G. Wharton], A Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 11 (E.935.5).

Whalley demonstrated the same diligence as a Parliament-man that he did as a soldier. He was named to 18 committees in the first protectoral Parliament, including those for the affairs of Scotland and Ireland, to consider the powers of the Cromwellian triers and ejectors and to determine the size of the military establishment.125CJ vii. 370a, 370b, 371b. Several of his committee appointments also related to Parliament’s determination to have the protectoral constitution, the Instrument of Government, confirmed by statute.126CJ vii. 370a, 390b, 399b, 415b. It was doubtless as a firm supporter of the Instrument that Whalley was named to the 25 September committee for introducing a ‘recognition’ of the protectorate to be subscribed by MPs.127CJ vii. 370a. Similarly, all but one of his five tellerships in this Parliament related to a bill before the House for settling the government and reveal that he consistently followed the line favoured by Cromwell and the protectoral council.128CJ vii. 391b, 399a, 401a, 402b, 417b. On 27 November, he was a teller with Sir Thomas Rous in favour of the clause in the Instrument that limited the franchise in parliamentary elections to persons with an estate worth at least £200.129CJ vii. 391b. And he would be true to the sense – if not, on this occasion, the exact letter – of the Instrument again on 9 December, when he was a teller with the protectoral councillor Colonel Philip Jones against including the words ‘damnable heresies’ in a clause in the bill for settling the government that dealt with toleration for tender consciences.130CJ vii. 399a. Like Jones, it seems, Whalley was against measures that threatened to work against the spirit of Cromwellian godly ecumenism.131Supra, ‘Philip Jones’. His next tellership, on 14 December, saw him partner his son-in-law Colonel William Goffe in favour of adding the words ‘which shall be agreed on by the protector and the Parliament’ to a clause in the bill for punishing ‘such as shall preach, print, or avowedly maintain anything contrary to the fundamental principles of doctrine held forth’.132CJ vii. 401a. Besides conveying the House’s requests and thanks to the Independent divines George Griffith and Ralph Venning for their assistance in organising a day of public humiliation, the only piece of parliamentary business that was specially referred to Whalley’s care was a clause in the bill for Anglo-Scottish union concerning the distribution of parliamentary seats north of the border.133CJ vii. 367b, 369b, 376a, 411b. He reported this clause to the House on 2 January 1655, and it was promptly rejected.134CJ vii. 411b.

True to form, Whalley was one of the most conscientious and energetic of the Cromwellian major-generals. Assigned responsibility for the east and north midlands, he began ‘the work of reformation’ (to use his own phrase) in his native Nottinghamshire in October 1655, before moving on to Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Warwickshire.135CSP Dom. 1655, p. 275; TSP iv. 125-6, 146, 156, 162, 197, 211, 241, 273; C. Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals (Manchester, 2001), 22, 26, 27, 31, 159-60; ‘Edward Whalley’, Oxford DNB. In a stream of letters to Secretary John Thurloe* from late 1655, he detailed his activities ejecting scandalous ministers, levying the decimation tax, arresting vagrants, setting the poor on work and closing down unlicensed alehouses.136TSP iv. 125-6, 146, 156, 162, 185, 197, 211-12, 240-1, 248, 272-3, 284, 308, 411-12, 434, 495, 509-11, 607, 663, 718-19; v. 187, 211-12, 234, 320-1. Yet there was more to his activities as a major-general than the busy workings of puritan moral reformism. He showed a genuine concern to ameliorate the lot of the deserving poor, supporting initiatives to suppress profiteers and dishonest traders and to curb enclosure. At the same time, he was relaxed enough about ‘gentlemanly’ pastimes to permit the holding of the Lady Grantham’s cup race-meet at Lincoln.137Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals, 48, 158, 169-71; ‘Edward Whalley’, Oxford DNB. He was also the only major-general who disagreed with lowering the threshold on decimation to include royalists with estates worth less than £100 a year.138Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals, 117. Similarly, he was more restrained than his colleagues in imposing bonds for good behaviour on royalist suspects.139Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals, 130, 149.

Nevertheless, Whalley was in no doubt that the major-generals experiment, and the decimation tax that helped sustain it, were the right course. Indeed, after only a few months on the job he was convinced that the major-generals were a great success: ‘Our presence, I find, is desired in all places and gives life to all proceedings ... You cannot imagine what awe it hath struck into the spirits of wicked men, what an encouragement it is to the godly’.140TSP iv. 434, 509. Yet if the ‘ways of godliness’ were to prevail, he told Thurloe, it was of ‘absolute necessity you put us [the major-generals] in [the] commission of peace’; and he was subsequently added to county benches throughout his association.141C231/6, pp. 327, 328, 329; TSP iv. 241, 273; Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals, 76. During the spring of 1656, he followed the assize judge Matthew Hale* around all the counties under his charge and, in the case of Nottinghamshire, attended four quarter sessions meetings between April and July 1656.142Notts. RO, C/QSM, unfol.; Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals, 82.

Whalley’s most conspicuous failure as a major-general was his management of the parliamentary elections within his association in the summer of 1656. Despite his assurance to Thurloe that ‘not a man from hence [his association] would be chosen to sit in this Parliament’ in whom the voters detected a ‘spirit of opposition to this present government’, he went on to name several prominent republicans – Hesilrige and John Weaver* – who would be returned despite his best efforts to frustrate their campaigns.143TSP v. 296, 299-300; Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals, 192-3. In fact, his association topped the table in terms of the percentage of its MPs subsequently excluded from sitting by the council of state.144Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals, 200. His embarrassment was probably compounded by the fact that among those returned for his native Nottinghamshire and then excluded by the council was his own nephew Peniston Whalley – particularly if, as seems likely, Whalley had supported Peniston’s candidacy.145Infra, ‘Peniston Whalley’.

The second protectoral Parliament, 1656-8

Whalley was returned for Nottinghamshire again in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, this time in first place.146A Perfect List of the Names of the Several Persons Returned (1656), 5 (E.498.5). It is not known whether he was among the senior army officers who had reportedly persuaded the protector to call this Parliament, but he certainly applied himself willingly to its proceedings, receiving 71 committee appointments, serving as teller in eight divisions and contributing regularly to debate.147CJ vii. 427b, 455b, 461a, 520b, 529b, 549b, 550b, 562a. His main preoccupation at Westminster was the advancement of godly religion and moral reformation. Indeed, his first two appointments in the House, on 18 September, were to ask the Presbyterian divine Thomas Manton and his Congregationalist colleague George Griffith to preach at the next day of public fasting and humiliation (it is interesting to note that it was the godly Yorkshire MP Sir William Strickland who was assigned this task in relation to a third minister, Whalley’s reputed spiritual mentor Thomas Goodwin).148CJ vii. 424a. Whalley was subsequently appointed to thank Manton and Griffith for their sermons.149CJ vii. 427b, 447b.

Whalley’s concerns as a major-general to promote a godly preaching ministry, suppress alehouses, improve the lot of the poor and to remedy abuses in the legal system are reflected in many of his committee appointments in the House.150CJ vii. 428a, 429b, 430a, 434a, 435b, 436b, 438a, 446b, 447a, 448a, 449a, 450a, 453b, 456a, 461a, 466a, 490b, 515b, 569a. On 19 December 1656, he presented a bill to the Commons for reversing or restraining land enclosure, claiming that although he himself stood to the lose if the bill became law – ‘for I have no commons; all mine [his lands] are enclosed’ – it was ‘for the general good to prevent depopulation and discourage to the plough, which is the very support of the commonwealth’.151Burton’s Diary, i. 175. His fellow MPs took a less altruistic view of ‘this most mischievous bill’, however, and it was rejected at the first reading.152Burton’s Diary, i. 176. ‘The poor have but few friends’, he declared on one occasion in the House, and obviously included himself in that select group.153Burton’s Diary, ii. 187. He apparently saw no inconsistency here with his support for draining the Bedford Level, which promised to improve his own rents at the expense of poor commoners.154Burton’s Diary, i. 199-200; CJ vii. 460b, 472b.

Whalley’s plans for moral and social reform were closely linked with the fate of the major-generals, which, in turn, came to depend on the militia bill that was introduced by Major-general John Disbrowe on 25 December 1656.155TSP iv. 367; Burton’s Diary, i. 233, 239. The bill proposed making the decimation tax permanent – and unless it passed the House, the rule of the major-generals would effectively be at an end. When the opponents of the bill tried to defer its discussion until there was a fuller House (many of the less puritanical Members being away celebrating Christmas), Whalley defended decimation and could see ‘no reason why you [the House] should defer this business, to make so long a debate’. But deferred it was, before being thrown out entirely late in January 1657.156Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals, 214. With the major-generals in abeyance, the related issues of securing adequate maintenance for the army and recompensing officers for their services to the commonwealth became even more important. Whalley and Goffe (by now a familiar political double act) were assiduous attenders at the Drury House committee for the sale of delinquents’ lands, much of the proceeds of which went towards satisfying the soldiery.157Burton’s Diary, i. 149, 344. Henry Whalley’s struggle to make good on his investment in Irish lands (to which Whalley had donated his £100 share as an Irish Adventurer) probably strengthened Whalley’s resolve to support similar claims from other officers and ‘well-affected’ interests.158Infra, ‘Henry Whalley’; CSP Ire. Advs. 1642-59, p. 23; CJ vii. 463b, 491b, 494a, 505b, 529a, 539a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 95. On 8 June 1657, he expressed surprise that the question of rewarding the protectorate’s commander-in-chief in Ireland, Charles Fleetwood, ‘should abide any debate, knowing the eminency of this person, who has served you faithfully in both nations [England and Ireland]’.159Burton’s Diary, ii. 198-9. That same day (8 June), Whalley and Goffe were majority tellers in favour of granting Irish lands to Fleetwood worth £1,500 a year.160CJ vii. 550b. In fact, most of Whalley’s involvement with Irish or Scottish affairs at Westminster, either as a committeeman or on the floor of the House, was usually with an eye to his own or the army’s interests.161CJ vii. 427a, 526a; Burton’s Diary, i. 15; ii. 63, 247, 249.

But the issue that weighed mostly heavily with him in this Parliament was the crimes and punishment of the Quaker evangelist and alleged blasphemer, James Naylor. Whalley was in no doubt that Naylor was guilty of ‘horrid blasphemy’, and on 10 December 1656 – in what was probably the longest speech of his parliamentary career – he insisted that the only ‘proportionable punishment’ was death.162Burton’s Diary, i. 54, 80, 101-4. To the argument that there was ‘no [civil] law in being against such offenders’, he retorted that ‘God provides a law’, and he quoted scripture in support of the death penalty. ‘I know no reason’, he added, ‘but we may make the same law [death by scriptural warrant] against working on the sabbath’ – which was another offence that Whalley was keen to punish.163Burton’s Diary, i. 103; ii. 260, 268; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 209-10. But his call for a capital sentence was tempered by the hope that once Naylor was confronted with the prospect of execution he would recant his crimes and thereby earn a reprieve.164Burton’s Diary, i. 104. Naylor showed no sign of repentance, however, and although a vote for putting him to death was narrowly defeated on 16 December there were plenty of blood-curdling alternatives suggested.165Burton’s Diary, i. 150-5. Whalley proposed that ‘his lips might be slitted’.166Burton’s Diary, i. 154. Once again, he was hoping that the threat of punishment would bring Naylor to repentance and a more lenient sentence; and it was in this spirit of wishing to destroy the sin not the sinner that he pointed out to the House on 18 December that if they ordered Naylor put in the pillory immediately after he had been whipped ‘it will go near to kill him’.167Burton’s Diary, i. 166, 168. Concerning the Quakers generally, he professed that ‘it is a hard thing to make a law against them. Some do acknowledge Scripture, magistracy and ministry; others, not. Good ministers is the only remedy to suppress them’.168Burton’s Diary, i. 170.

Whalley clearly had misgivings about the shift towards a more civilian and monarchical form of government in the first half of 1657. But his opposition to the Remonstrance, and to its amended version the Humble Petition and Advice, would be more tempered than that of most senior army officers. The central issue in his eyes seems to have been whether the protector should accept the title of king. After Cromwell had agreed on 3 March to postpone debate on the kingship question ‘until the rules be agreed upon whereby he is to govern’, the pro-Remonstrance MP William Jephson reported that Whalley, Goffe, Major-general William Boteler and other MPs on the moderate wing of the army interest had begun to lower their resistance to the Remonstrance.169Henry Cromwell Corresp. 214. From mid-March, Whalley began to receive committee appointments for re-drafting the new constitution and presenting it to Cromwell (Whalley was appointed to nine such committees in all), and on 19 March he was named second to a committee on a clause in the Petition and Advice that allowed toleration for ‘those ministers and others who agree in matters of faith with the true Protestant reformed religion, although in their judgment and practice they differ in matters of discipline and worship’.170CJ vii. 505a, 507b, 514a, 521a, 521b, 524a, 535a, 557a, 570b. Following a ‘pitched battle’ in the Commons on 24 March over the postponed question of whether Cromwell should be offered the crown, Sir John Reynolds* claimed that whereas most of the major-generals had been ‘much averse’, Whalley and Goffe had been ‘moderate opposers, almost indifferent’.171Henry Cromwell Corresp. 236. Yet the fact that Whalley had been granted leave to depart the House following a division in which the ‘kinglings’ emerged the clear winners does not suggest that he was entirely happy with the direction the debate was taking.172CJ vii. 511a. It is possible that Reynolds had confused Whalley’s customary temperance in debate for political acquiescence.

Whalley had returned to the House by 27 March 1657, when he was named to a committee for presenting the Petition and Advice, complete with an offer of the crown, to the protector.173CJ vii. 514a. By the time the new constitution was presented to Cromwell, on 31 March, Jephson was reporting that while Disbrowe, Fleetwood and John Lambert* remained in a ‘sullen posture’, Whalley, Goffe and Boteler had ‘grown good-natured’.174Henry Cromwell Corresp. 243. Once again, however, the supporters of the Petition and Advice may have been premature in seeing Whalley as more or less one of them. When the House debated, on 4 April, whether to adhere to the Petition and Advice – in other words, to ignore Cromwell’s initial refusal to accept the crown – Whalley was a teller with Lambert’s friend Thomas Talbot II against putting the question, with the leading kinglings Charles Howard and Jephson acting as tellers for the yeas. Whalley and Talbot lost this division, and on the main question Disbrowe and Colonel John Hewson were defeated by two more kinglings.175CJ vii. 520b.

It may well have been the uncertainty and the threat of constitutional confusion that attended Cromwell’s failure to make up his mind on the kingship issue that inclined Whalley towards accepting the Petition and Advice and the establishment of a Cromwellian monarchy. On 9 April 1657, he was named to a committee for satisfying Cromwell’s doubts and scruples about accepting the crown; 176CJ vii. 521b. and five days later (14 April), he wrote to Henry Cromwell* in terms that suggest he was beginning to reconcile himself to the protector assuming the title of king.

If the Parliament continue to adhere to their former vote of kingship, his Highness will rather accept of that title then either revert to the Instrument of Government, which is now become very odious, or leave us in confusion, which inevitably we shall run into if he refuses. There is only this bad expedient left us, to dissolve into a commonwealth, which many aim at, but I hope they [sic] expectation will be frustrated.177Henry Cromwell Corresp. 260.

He expressed similar sentiments in a debate on the Petition and Advice on 24 April: ‘I believe we all agree to come to settlement and in all the things contained in the Instrument, except that of the title [of king], and for my part, rather than forego the other good things contained in it [the Petition and Advice], I could well swallow that of the title’.178Burton’s Diary, ii. 43. Cromwell’s refusal of the crown, on 8 May, probably removed any lingering doubts Whalley may have had about accepting the Petition and Advice. On 24 June, with the House preparing to adjourn, he supported the proposal that all Parliament-men subscribe an oath of loyalty to the new constitution.179Burton’s Diary, ii. 293.

In December 1657, Whalley was nominated to the Cromwellian Other House, which brought with it the title of Edward Lord Whalley.180TSP vi. 668; Sloane 3246. He attended the Other House regularly from its first day of sitting, on 20 January 1658, until Parliament was dissolved the following month.181HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 505, 523. The author of the Second Narrative of the Late Parliament, in reviewing the membership of the Other House, claimed that Whalley was

for a king, or protector, or what you will, so long as it be liked at court, [and] is ... grown a great man and very considerable and wiser (as the protector sayeth) then Major-general Lambert ... being every way fit to be a lord and to be taken out of the House to have a negative voice in the Other House ... for that he never (as he sayeth) fought against any such thing as a negative voice.182[Wharton], Second Narrative, 25.

The inference here that Whalley had supplanted Lambert in the protector’s inner ring of advisers is not altogether fanciful. Whalley was never a member of the protectoral council and, until 1658, had not been mentioned as one of Cromwell’s political confidants. However, in about February 1658, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-general of horse; and in March, a royalist agent reported that the ‘present affairs’ at court were ‘communicated to none save Fleetwood, Disbrowe, Whalley, Goffe and Thurloe; his [Cromwell’s] only aim being to preserve (if possible) the army entire to him’.183Clarke Pprs. iii. 141; P. Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge, 2004), 164. That spring, Whalley joined Disbrowe and other senior officers in an address to Cromwell in which they expressed their support for him ‘as our general and chief magistrate’ and their confidence in the Petition and Advice as a means of securing ‘the great ends of all our former engagements: our civil and spiritual liberty’.184A Further Narrative of the Passages of These Times (1658), 51-2. Thurloe informed Henry Cromwell in June that Fleetwood, Disbrowe, Whalley and Goffe were part of a nine-man committee that met daily to consider the legislative programme in a forthcoming Parliament.185TSP vii. 192.

Whalley and the fall of the protectorate, 1658-9

Whalley supported the succession of Richard Cromwell* and – in contrast to the army’s senior figures Fleetwood and Disbrowe – would remain ‘firm to the protectoral party’.186Clarke Pprs. iii. 165; TSP vii. 495; Baker, Chronicle, 639; G. Davies, The Restoration of Charles II (Oxford, 1955), 3, 4, 5. He was a leading signatory to the army’s loyal address to the protector shortly after his succession, requesting that he maintain the army under men of ‘honest, godly principles’, with liberty of conscience to ‘all persons that profess godliness that are not of turbulent spirits as to the peace of these nations’. The officers pledged to stand by Richard against ‘all that shall oppose you ... or make it their design to change or alter the present government established in a single person and two Houses of Parliament, according to the Humble Petition and Advice’.187Bodl. Rawl. A.61; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 405; Mercurius Politicus no. 434 (16-23 Sept. 1658), 844-7; Davies, Restoration, 8-10.

As a member of the Other House, Whalley did not stand for election to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, although he may well have helped secure the return of Edward Neville and Thomas Bristowe for Nottinghamshire.188Supra, ‘Nottinghamshire’. Whalley attended his place in the Other House assiduously from its first day of sitting, 27 January, until the Parliament was dissolved in April.189HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 525-66. His close association with the protectoral interest meant that he was excluded from some (although not all) of the meetings organised by disgruntled army officers during the Parliament’s sitting – a situation that rankled so much with him that early in March he had a very public spat with Colonel Richard Ashfield and Lieutenant-colonel William Gough. The three men fell into ‘accidental discourse’ in Westminster Hall ‘about the government and such like things’, and when Ashfield denied Whalley’s claim that ‘honest men’ had been kept from army meetings, Whalley lost his temper and accused Ashfield and Gough of ‘uncivil words’ and said that ‘were it in another place’ he would cut open both their heads.190Henry Cromwell Corresp. 470; HMC Leyborne-Popham, 114-15; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 524. Whalley reported the incident to the protector, who instituted proceedings to court martial Ashfield.191Henry Cromwell Corresp. 491; R. Hutton, The Restoration (Oxford, 1985), 34-5. Whalley’s standing with disaffected officers like Ashfield and Gough probably suffered further on 14 April, when he joined Goffe and the Cromwellian grandee Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle*) in trying to rally support for the protectorate at a meeting of the general council of the army.192Orrery State Papers ed. T. Morrice (1742), 27-9; Hutton, Restoration, 36. By this point, perhaps Whalley’s strongest remaining bond with Disbrowe, Fleetwood and other senior officers was their common membership of John Owen’s gathered congregation at Whitehall.193Consultations of the Ministers of Edinburgh ed. W. Stephen (Scottish Hist. Soc. ser. 3, xvi), 158; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 475; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 524-5.

When most of the army grandees moved to bring down the protectorate on 21-2 April 1659, Whalley and Goffe remained staunchly loyal to Protector Richard, only to be abandoned by their own regiments.194Ludlow, Mems. ii. 69; Clarke Pprs. iii. 212; Hutton, Restoration, 38. At some point in the next few weeks, the two men were cashiered by the army – Whalley’s regiment of horse being given to his major.195[Annesley], England’s Confusion, 9; Wanklyn, Reconstructing the New Model Army, ii. 113. In a division in the restored Rump on 5 August on whether to re-commission Whalley as a colonel of horse, the opposing tellers – the republican grandees Sir Henry Vane and Henry Neville – prevailed, and the regiment was assigned instead to the republican officer Matthew Alured*.196CJ vii. 749b. Nevertheless, when the army wanted honest brokers to send to General Monck in Scotland to explain its expulsion of the Rump in October, it brought Whalley and Goffe out of retirement, sending them in a four-man delegation that included the Independent divines Joseph Caryll and Matthew Barker (allies of John Owen).197Clarke Pprs. iv. 82, 83; The Northern Queries from the Lord Gen: Monck His Quarters (1659), 7 (E.1005.15); Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 634-5. Nothing came of these overtures, or was likely to, but once back in England, Whalley and Goffe joined the representatives of the ‘congregation churches about London’ in a letter to Monck trying one last time to dissuade him from endangering the good old cause.

The state of the quarrel in these parts [England] now is not a Parliament or none, the last Parliament or not, but [the preservation] of our lives from the common enemy or not. And we would be sorry on your account that the blood of the saints of God and of all that hath been engaged in our common cause should with so much colour be laid at your door.198Clarke Pprs. iv. 184-5.

This letter represents Whalley’s and Goffe’s political valediction. Neither man made any further impact upon national affairs until they were ordered to be arrested on suspicion of involvement in Lambert’s ill-fated rising of mid-April 1660.199CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 573; Firth and Davies, Regimental History, i. 335.

Exile and death, 1660-74

At the Restoration, Whalley and Goffe fled the country rather than comply with the royal proclamation of May 1660 ordering the regicides to surrender themselves. They arrived at Boston, Massachusetts, on 27 July, bearing testimonials from the London Independent ministers John Rowe and Seth Wood.200E. Stiles, Hist. of Three of the Judges (1794), 22-3. In a colony founded as a godly haven from persecution the two fugitives found many friends and sympathisers; indeed, it was reported that they ‘held meetings where they preached and prayed and were looked upon as men dropped down from heaven’.201CSP Col. 1661-8, pp. 54, 345. The colonists consistently frustrated the government’s attempts to apprehend the two men, although during the early 1660s they were forced to hide in a cave outside New Haven in order to evade capture.202CSP Col. 1661-8, pp. 15, 26, 27-8, 30, 54, 345; Stiles, Judges, 25-6.

In 1664, the two men settled at Hadley, Massachusetts, where they spent the rest of their days ‘in dreary solitude and seclusion’. In August 1674, Goffe wrote to his wife that her father was ‘scarce capable of any rational discourse, his understanding, memory and speech doth so much fail him and [he] seems not to take much notice of anything that is either done or said, but patiently bears all things’.203Stiles, Judges, 26, 118, 185. In about 1675, Goffe recorded how Whalley had declared ‘I desire nothing but to acquaint myself with Je[sus] Chr[ist] and that fullness that is in him for those that believe and have interest in him’, and that he had uttered these words ‘with some stop, yet with more freedom and clearness than usual’.204‘Letters and pprs. relating to the regicides’, 155-6. Whalley seems to have died soon afterwards and was buried in an unmarked grave in Hadley.205Stiles, Judges, 108; ‘Edward Whalley’, Oxford DNB. No will is recorded. His eldest son John Whalley* sat for Nottingham in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament.