WHITE, Charles (1607-61), of Newthorpe, Greasley, Notts.

White’s family had settled at Sturton le Steeple, near East Retford, by the late 1570s; his great-grandfather serving as bailiff of the manor.27W.H. Burgess, The Pastor of the Pilgrims: a Biography of John Robinson (1920), 17-18. One of White’s aunts married the renowned puritan theologian and separatist minister John Robinson of Sturton, and, through him, White was related to the future Lincolnshire parliamentarian Original Peart*.28Supra, ‘Original Peart’; Burgess, Pastor of the Pilgrims, 16-26, 341, 345; ‘John Robinson’, Oxford DNB. Lucy Hutchinson – wife of the parliamentary governor of Nottingham, Colonel John Hutchinson* – who hated and despised White as a leading member of the faction opposed to her beloved husband, referred to him as a gentleman of ‘mean birth and low fortunes’, who ‘kept company with the underling gentry of his neighbourhood’.29Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 69. Nevertheless, White’s father, ‘Charles White of Sturton, gent.’, was of sufficient standing to secure a place on the Nottinghamshire sewers commission as well as the office of treasurer for maimed soldiers for the north parts of the county in 1620-1.30C181/2, f. 255v; C181/3, f. 199v; Notts. RO, DD/LM/187/2/7; DD/LM/208/11/12; Notts. Co. Recs. 13. And White himself was wealthy enough by 1642 to put up £300 as an Irish Adventurer, in collaboration with his friend and neighbour Gilbert Millington*.31CSP Ire. Adv. 1642-59, pp. 265, 266.

White was among the first of the Nottinghamshire parliamentarians to take up arms against the king, securing a commission from Parliament in July 1642 as a captain of foot and another from Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, at some point that summer or autumn as a captain of dragoons.32LJ v. 173b-174a; Bodl. Nalson II, f. 227; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 69. In November, he led his troop of dragoons to Derby and placed himself under the command of Sir John Gell (brother of Thomas Gell* and father of John Gell*), and he was instrumental in December in seizing Nottingham Castle for Parliament.33A. Polkey, ‘Civil war Derbys.: Sir John Gell’s ‘True relation’ reconsidered’, Derbys Miscellany, xiv. 157. White’s motives in siding with Parliament remain obscure. The godly minister of Ashover in Derbyshire, Immanuel Bourne, was convinced that they were entirely self-interested:

Now there is one Charles White ... a man of mean birth and education, but glib of tongue, and making a great show of piety did set himself up to be somebody. And he going into Nottinghamshire by some means did get himself chosen captain of a troop of dragoon, and being sent to Wirksworth to assist Sir John [Gell], he did raise near a hundred more in that neighbourhood. But having been sent for to help Colonel Hutchinson, he did come by the way of Asher [Ashover] on purpose to spite his betters ...34J. Pendleton, Hist. of Derbys. 274.

Bourne alleged that White had threatened to seize all his cattle unless he contributed £20 ‘for the cause of God and the Parliament’, which Bourne duly did, being ‘right glad to get rid of such a knave’. Lucy Hutchinson painted an even less flattering picture of White:

This man had the most factious, ambitious, vainglorious, envious and malicious nature that is imaginable; but he was the greatest dissembler, flatterer, traitor and hypocrite that ever was … knowing himself to be inferior to all gentlemen, he put on a vizard of godliness and humility and courted the common people with all plausibility and flattery that could be practised. All this while he was addicted to many lusts, especially to that of women, but practised them so secretly that they were not vulgarly taken notice of, though God, to shame him, gave him up to marry a wench out of one of the alehouses he frequented. But to keep up a fame of godliness, he gave large contributions to puritan preachers ...35Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 69.

Similarly, Oliver Cromwell* insinuated in 1646 that White was an enemy of the ‘honestest men’ in the army, by which he probably meant religious Independents.36HMC Portland, ii. 137.

Yet these assessments of White are difficult to reconcile with his career during the 1640s and 1650s. He was appointed by the Commons to the Nottinghamshire county and sequestration committees and remained active on the former until at least 30 January 1649.37CJ ii. 905a, 940b; iii. 225a, 322a; Add. 25901, f. 90v; Add. 40630, f. 227; SP28/213, unfol.; SP28/241; Nottingham Borough Recs. v. 220, 221. He fought bravely in numerous military engagements during the first and second civil wars and was evidently willing to employ separatists under his command so long as they were militarily useful.38Add. 34253, f. 39; Bodl. Nalson IV, ff. 279, 300; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 77, 86, 97; HMC Portland, i. 293, 295; An Impartiall and True Relation; Wood, Notts. 132; S. Race, ‘The British Museum ms of the life of Col. Hutchinson’, Trans. Thoroton Soc. xviii. 51. And his appointment as an ejector under the protectorate, and his involvement in the Nottingham Presbyterian classis, suggests that his commitment to a godly preaching ministry was sincere.39Nottingham Univ. Lib. Hi2 M/1, f. 5; A. and O.; J. A. Williams, ‘The Nottingham Presbyterian classis’, Trans. of the Unitarian Hist. Soc. viii. 166, 167, 168.

In Lucy Hutchinson’s case certainly, the root of her animus against White was not his political and religious sympathies per se but rather the prominent part he played in challenging her husband’s authority as governor of Nottingham. Some of the parliamentarian officers of the horse stationed at Nottingham, and in particular White, disputed Hutchinson’s command over them when they were in the town, and from this disagreement there developed a bitter feud that during the mid-1640s divided the committeemen, the leading townsmen and local parliamentarian officers.40Supra, ‘John Hutchinson’; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 112, 116-17, 128-9, 132, 135, 138-9, 141, 144-5, 147, 150-1; Nottingham Borough Recs. v. 227-32; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 111, 115, 117; Race, ‘British Museum ms’, 47; P. R. Seddon, ‘Col. Hutchinson and the disputes between the Notts. parliamentarians, 1643-5’, Trans. Thoroton Soc. xcviii. 71-9. White, Millington, James Chadwicke* and John Mason* headed a faction that sought to vest military authority in the committee rather than the governor.41Seddon, ‘Hutchinson and the Notts. parliamentarians’, 72, 74, 76, 77, 78. Ranged against them in support of Hutchinson’s claim to overall command were Francis Thornhagh*, Gervase Pigot* and – on the rare occasions he visited Nottingham – Henry Ireton*. Religious tensions among the Nottingham godly apparently exacerbated this conflict. White and his confederates were said to have ‘engaged the persecuting priests [orthodox puritan ministers]’ and the Presbyterian grandees at Westminster against Hutchinson for his willingness to tolerate separatists.42Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 125, 131-2, 140, 153, 178-9; Seddon, ‘Hutchinson and the Notts. parliamentarians’, 75.

Despite his strong Presbyterian sympathies, White continued to receive appointments to local parliamentary committees under the commonwealth. His promotion to the Nottinghamshire bench seems to have occurred early in 1654 – shortly after the establishment of the protectorate – and in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament that summer he was returned for the county, taking the fourth and last place.43Supra, ‘Nottinghamshire’; Notts. RO, C/QSM/1/12, p. 262. The basis of his evident popularity with the county’s voters is not clear. He received no committee appointments in this Parliament, and it is far from certain that he took his seat. On the other hand, he was one of the most active of the Nottinghamshire magistrates during the Cromwellian period, earning a reputation as a persecutor of the Quakers.44Notts. RO, C/QSM/1/13; Extracts from State Pprs. rel. to Friends ed. N. Penney (1910), 112. As a magistrate, he also seems to have supported the programme of godly reform initiated by Major-general Edward Whalley*.45Notts. RO, C/QSM/1/13. At the same time, he regularly attended meetings of the Nottingham Presbyterian classis set up in 1656 and, with Gilbert Millington, served as one of the ruler elders for the parish of Greasley.46Nottingham Univ. Lib. Hi2 M/1, ff. 2v, 5, 6v, 7v, 8; Williams, ‘The Nottingham Presbyterian classis’, 166, 167, 168. White contributed to a collection of elegies published after the death in 1658 of Nottinghamshire’s most eminent Presbyterian, Francis Pierrepont*. The other contributors included Gervase Pigot, the Presbyterian ministers Samuel Coates, Arthur Squire and John Viner, the episcopalian ministers Zachary Cawdrey and Edward Stillingfleet and the Huguenot academic and religious controversialist Lewis du Moulin, who was a friend of the eminent godly divines Richard Baxter and John Owen.47Elegies on the Much Lamented Death of Francis Pierepont (1659), sigs. B2r-v; Calamy Revised, 123-4, 457; ‘Zachary Cawdrey’, ‘Lewis du Moulin’, Oxford DNB.

The fall of the protectorate in April 1659 and the subsequent restoration of the Rump were so repugnant to White that he joined the royalist-Presbyterian insurrection organised by Sir George Boothe* in the summer of 1659. On 12 August, White and a small group of insurgents were dispersed by Captain Edward Cludd* as they moved towards Nottingham. Undeterred, White and a handful of men then marched into Derby and proclaimed Boothe’s declaration calling for a ‘free Parliament’ and a return to the known laws. According to one report, there was also a cry raised for the king. When challenged as to his own loyalties by a local militia officer, White declared that he was for a free Parliament, but against the restoration of Charles Stuart – although, in practice, the former would very likely have resulted in the latter. Colonel Thomas Sanders* persuaded the insurgents to disperse, and order was quickly restored, whereupon White fled.48Derbys. RO, D1232/O/102-3; The Copy of a Letter from an Officer under the Lord Lambert (1659), 2-3 (E.995.3); Clarke Pprs. iv. 45; CCC 773; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 216; G. Turbutt, Hist. of Derbys. (1999), iii. 1097. Granted liberty by the council of state to turn himself in, he was committed on the council’s orders to the Gatehouse prison, Westminster, on 12 September on a charge of ‘high treason in levying war against the Parliament’.49Bodl. Rawl. A.259, p. 104; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 158, 188; CCC 769.

White was released from prison by order of the Commons on 25 February 1660 – four days after the re-admission of the secluded Members.50CJ vii. 853a. In June 1660, he petitioned the king for an office in the court of common pleas, or the exigenter’s officer in London, claiming that he had been ‘long kept in loathsome restraint and his estate seized and embezzled for associating with Sir George Boothe to promote the Restoration, being particularly commanded thereto under his Majesty’s sacred hand’.51CSP Dom. 1660-70, p. 644. In acknowledgment of his loyalty to the crown, he was restored to the Nottinghamshire bench in the autumn of 1660, having been omitted in the March 1660 commission of peace.52C220/9/4, f. 67; Notts. RO, C/QSM/1/13. He had little time to enjoy his return to favour, however, for he died in the autumn of 1661 and was buried at Greasley on 20 October.53Greasley par. reg. No will is recorded. Lucy Hutchinson, commenting on the deaths of White and his wife in October 1661, claimed that they and some of their children had died ‘altogether in a few days of a fever little less than the plague’.54Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 69. None of his immediate family sat in Parliament.