WHITE, John II (1590-1645), of the Middle Temple and Whitefriars, London

During a parliamentary career of little more than four years, White was one of Westminster’s most widely recognised figures, and his notoriety outlasted his sudden death. Thrust almost instantly to the forefront of proceedings, thanks to his longstanding connections in both Commons and Lords, and to his record as victim of the ecclesiastical policies of Archbishop William Laud, he soon chaired grand committees on religion. In time he also chaired two important standing committees of the House, the actions of which constituted some of the most visible and far-reaching expressions of the reforming and regulatory zeal of the Long Parliament. Although he evidently had wide interests outside Parliament, and occasionally revealed a close engagement with his constituency and with his native county, his single-mindedness in the pursuit of remoulding the church and punishing the perpetrators of Laudian ‘innovations’ made for an unusually focussed record in and around the chamber.

‘A puritan from his youth’

White came from a family of mercantile origin which had been prominent in the Pembrokeshire town of Tenby since before 1415 and which could reliably trace its ancestry back a century earlier.22Pemb. Historian, v. 58–62. In 1545 his grandfather, Griffith White (d. 1590), acquired an estate at Henllan, about six miles west of Pembroke; steadily accumulating other properties in the area, he became a wealthy man. He was three times sheriff of the county.23Pemb. Historian, v. 62–7. White’s father, Henry, added further to the family patrimony and also served as a justice of the peace and sheriff (twice).24Pemb. Historian, v. 67–71. White’s elder brother, another Griffith, with whom he was admitted in 1607 to Jesus, the Oxford college frequented by Welshmen, was sheriff in 1627, while an uncle by marriage, also educated at Jesus, was Richard Middleton (d. 1641), sometime prebendary of Brecon and archdeacon of Cardigan.25Al. Oxon.; Pemb. Historian, v. 68, 71–2.

Called to the bar at the Middle Temple in June 1618, White, was accounted even by the hostile Anthony Wood as ‘a counsellor of some note’ and by fellow practitioner Edward Hyde* as ‘a grave lawyer’.26Wood, Ath. Ox. iii. 144; Clarendon, Hist. i. 264. ‘A puritan from his youth to his death’, at the inn his associates included the like-minded William Drake*, Edward Bagshawe* and Simonds D’Ewes*, while outside it he was soon drawn into the godly networks pioneering colonisation of north America and promoting the gospel at home, and thus also into the circles of peers like Robert Rich†, 2nd earl of Warwick, Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke, Francis Russell†, 4th earl of Bedford and William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele.27MTR ii. 703, 777. A member of the Virginia Company from May 1623 to its dissolution the following year, in 1625 he joined the overtly confessional Dorchester Company founded by his namesake, John White of Dorchester.28Genesis of the US ed. Brown, ii. 1051; Calder, Activities of the Puritan Faction, p. xxiv; ‘John White (1575-1648)’, Oxford DNB. Before December 1624, when their daughter Winifred was baptized at St Dunstan-in-the-West, Fleet Street, White married Katherine Barfoot, a kinswoman of John Winthrop.29St Dunstan in the West, London, par. reg.; Vis. London (Harl. Soc. xvii), 346; Winthrop Pprs. i. 289. A joint guardian with Winthrop of the latter’s nephew, he participated with Winthrop and White of Dorchester in the establishment in 1629 of the Massachusetts Bay Company, drawing up the articles of agreement between the adventurers and the settlers.30Winthrop Pprs. ii. 82, 109; Rose Troup, The Massachusetts Bay Co. 85; Mass. Hist. Soc. ser. 4, ii. 217-18.

Meanwhile, in 1626 White was one of the dozen London clergy and laymen who formed the feoffees for impropriations, with the object of raising funds to acquire the patronage of church livings and fill them with well-qualified godly clergy. Some of the feoffees’ meetings took place at his house and he had custody of documents relating to one of their major projects, the provision of further preaching at the London church of St Antholin, Budge Row.31Calder, Activities of the Puritan Faction, 3, 15-16, 76-9, passim. It was probably no coincidence that another of its benefactions was at Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire.32Calder, Activities of the Puritan Faction, 9, 14, 35, passim. In 1629 he was defence counsel for William Coryton†, one of the MPs prosecuted for their opposition to crown policies in the 1628 Parliament, while a few months later his professional advice was sought by his kinsman Sir William Masham*, a key member of the East Anglian godly.33CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 555; Barrington Family Letters ed. A. Searle (Camden Soc. ser. 4, xxviii), 179–80. By that time a widower, he re-married on 1 September 1631 at St Stephen Coleman Street, the home of an increasingly radical congregation where fellow feoffee John Davenport was minister.34St Stephen, Coleman Street, par. reg.; ‘John Davenport’, Oxford DNB; Guildhall Misc. iii. pt. 2, pp. 98-119; Jnl. Eccles. Hist. xxxviii. 210-35. It is not clear to what extent he associated with that particular church: between June 1632 and November 1635 the first four children of this marriage were baptized, like their half-sister, at St Dunstan-in-the-West, where their home was given in the register as Whitefriars.

Summoned to answer in the exchequer court, most of the feoffees, including White, had William Lenthall* as their counsel, but their defence was of no avail and they were suppressed by decree in February 1633.35Calder, Activities of the Puritan Faction, 26n, 125-42. According to Wood, White ‘enraged against the bishops and orthodox clergy ... studied all the ways imaginable to be revenged’.36Wood, Ath. Ox. iii. 144. He was, said Hyde, ‘notoriously disaffected’.37Clarendon, Hist. i. 264. This would seem to cast doubt on his being the John White named as a justice of the peace in Pembrokeshire in 1635 or (especially) a commissioner of sewers in Middlesex in 1639, but the negative judgements were retrospective, White probably had high-placed patrons and south-west Wales – where he undertook legal business – was perhaps sufficiently removed from Whitehall for different considerations to apply.38C181/5, ff. 21, 143; Coventry Docquets, 624.

Early in 1640, however, he again marked himself out as an opponent of the Laudian establishment in the church. When his colleague Bagshawe, who shared many of White’s connections and who had previously fallen foul of the court of high commission, was prevented by the archbishop from completing his Lent readings at the Middle Temple because they questioned the temporal power of the clergy, White accompanied him to Lambeth to plead his cause.39SP16/447, f. 65v; Laud, Works, iv. 132. Their continuing credentials thus established, partisan support ensured that both men were elected to Parliament that autumn for Southwark, a borough which had a record of returning candidates critical of court policy.

Reformation by Parliament 1640-2

Notwithstanding his lack of experience in the House, White – who was well known to his former counsel, Speaker Lenthall – was rapidly at the heart of action aimed at religious reform. Probably the White named to the privileges committee (6 Nov.), there seems little doubt that it was he who three days later was nominated (third after John Pym* and Sir Robert Harley*) to ensure that no Catholic or person who neglected to take holy communion might sit in the Commons; as a Member for Southwark he was also appointed to deal more generally with recusancy around the capital (9 Nov.).40CJ ii. 20b, 24a, 24b. Although he was not initially appointed to the committee which addressed the case of Dr Alexander Leighton, who had been prosecuted in star chamber and suffered imprisonment and disfigurement for his opposition to episcopacy, he was first among those added to it four days later (13 Nov.).41CJ ii. 24a, 28b. By the 18th he had attained sufficient stature in what had become a wider committee for religion to chair it and report its desire to sit as a committee of the whole House not just every Monday, as previously decided, but also on Saturday ‘since there be very many matters that come before’ it. Even this did not leave enough time for its other request – debate on the validity of the ecclesiastical Canons issued by Convocation in the absence of Parliament – which, having been granted, was scheduled for a Friday morning.42CJ ii. 30b; Procs. LP, i. 168-70; E. Dering, A Collection of Speeches (1642), 43 (E.197.1). The following Saturday and Monday (21, 23 Nov.) White again sat in the chair at the grand committee.43Procs. LP, i. 239, 260.

Already there was scope for White to wield substantial influence. Over succeeding months he chaired and reported the House’s debates on contentious religious issues, and the opportunity for translating the opinions of a sub-committee into parliamentary action is readily seen, as is White’s vehement confidence.44CJ ii. 35b, 57a, 70a, 139a, 139b; Procs. LP, i. 288-9; iv. 337. On 24 November, with what must surely have been carefully calculated timing, he laid before the Commons allegations that Dr Edward Layfield, nephew and appointee of Archbishop Laud as vicar of All Hallows, Barking, was guilty of ‘divers words and acts of popery’.45Northcote Note Bk.5. The next day, in a report from grand committee recorded in unusual detail in the Journal, he described the railing of the communion table, set altar-wise at the east end of the church, and the introduction of images, auricular confession and the expression of an interpretation of the sacrament that appeared to amount to the Real Presence. Layfield had likened those parishioners who had objected to the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381

he said ... that they are black toads, spotted toads and venomous toads, like Jack Straw and Watt Tyler, that speak against the ceremonies of the church, and that they were in the state of damnation.46CJ ii. 35b; Procs. LP i. 288-9, 291, 294-7.

The outrage such remarks engendered was doubtless compounded as White went on to report other cases: the refusal of a justice sitting at Newgate, Sir Henry Spiller, to allow prosecution of a curate who denied his parishioner the sacrament (a decision supported by Laud) and the dismantling, on orders from the privy council, of expensive ‘beautifying’ works paid for by the Drapers at St Gregory by St Paul’s in the City. All these grievances were condemned in short order and White, with Bagshawe, was placed on a committee to investigate further complaints from St Gregory’s.47CJ ii. 36a.

White then launched into a lengthy attack on the newly-drafted ecclesiastical Canons. They were ‘against the law of God, the prerogative of the king, and the liberty and conscience of the subject’. Collectively they constituted praemunire, the usurpation of secular by spiritual power, and placed ‘all our estates in jeopardy’. The oath to be imposed on clergy ‘blows up the chariot and horsemen of Israel that is godly ministers’.48Procs. LP i. 307-9, 312-13, 322-3, 327-8. Three weeks later White was placed on the large committee to investigate those principally responsible for the Canons, and especially to prepare charges against Laud, suspected to have been the chief ‘actor in all proceedings and in the great design of subversion of the laws of the kingdom and of religion’ (16 Dec.).49CJ ii. 52a. He took the opportunity to recount the experience of the feoffees for impropriations, testifying how, by means of the exchequer decree, their ‘good work’ had been ‘wholly destroyed, and most of the good uses perverted, and thereby general discouragement drawn on all men from giving to such pious causes’; Laud had ‘procured this work to be crushed and bragged that he was the man that had set himself against it, and thanked God that he hath effected it’.50SP16/473, f. 221. In succeeding months White continued to pursue the task of bringing the archbishop and his lieutenants to account, whether with a small group of other lawyers (12 Feb., 5 June 1641; 26 Mar. 1642) or on a larger committee, as when addressing the wider question of punishing members of Convocation (27 Apr. 1641).51CJ ii. 84a, 129a, 168b, 499b.

White was regularly appointed to further committees dealing with recusants (28 Nov., 1 Dec. 1640; 28 Jan., 26 Mar., 8 May 1641), but the state of established church remained his primary concern.52CJ ii. 39a, 42b, 74b, 113b, 139a. Parliament was evidently swamped by allegations about the failings of the clergy, which could not be dealt with by the whole House. A retrospective account by a hostile witness described a committee of religion divided

into many sub-committees as Mr White’s committee, Mr [Miles] Corbett’s* committee, Sir Robert Harlow’s [Harley’s*] committee, Sir Edward Deering’s [Dering’s*] committee, and divers others, upon pretence of hearing the multitudes of petitions daily brought in against scandalous ministers (as the term was) which committees were made as several stages for continual clergy-baitings.53Persecutio Undecima (1648), 11.

This analysis chimes with the rather complex picture which emerges from the Journal and diaries: on the one hand particular business continued to be referred to specific ad hoc committees named for the purpose; on the other hand, there developed more formal standing committees, albeit with fluctuating remit and membership. On 12 December 1640 White was among about 30 MPs to whom were referred various petitions relating to Somerset and the conduct of William Piers, bishop of Bath and Wells.54CJ ii. 50a. A week later he was among those named to the standing Committee for Preaching Ministers or, more familiarly, the Committee for Scandalous Ministers. Its brief was to consider the ‘scarcity of preaching ministers and ways of removing and replacing scandalous ones’ and was to be supplied within six weeks with local reports from all MPs.55CJ ii. 54b. Although White was eventually to emerge as its driving force, at this point he was less prominent than Corbett and possibly Harley, but like them he used the chairmanship of the grand committee on religion and general debate to bring its business before the House (8, 12 May; 10, 17 July 1641).56CJ ii. 139a, 139b, 215b; Procs. LP iv. 271–2, 278–80, 337, 346; v. 586, 589.

Over the next few months White was involved in multi-pronged attack on the Laudian church order. He was appointed to committees working on legislation to ‘abolish superstition and idolatry’ (13 Feb.), disable clergy from interfering in secular affairs (1 Apr., 3 June), promote the ‘more free passage of the gospel’ (12 Apr.) and reform the ecclesiastical courts (27 Apr.).57CJ ii. 84b, 115a, 119a, 128b, 165b. He moved to restrict the oath given to ministers at ordination to the oaths of supremacy and allegiance also imposed on lay officeholders (31 May), quoted John Selden’s* book on tithes to support lay patronage in the church (8 Feb.) and was in the vanguard of the attack not just on individual bishops who had offended – like Matthew Wren of Ely (22 Dec. 1640) – but also on the whole episcopal order.58Procs. LP ii. 393; iv. 660; CJ ii. 56a. Turning on its head the question of holding Convocation outside Parliament, he affirmed that according to law reports, in the 7th year of Henry VIII ‘all the judges’ ruled ‘that the king might hold a Parliament without bishops’ and in the third year of Richard II a Parliament had been held with no clergy at all (8 Feb. 1641).59Procs. LP ii. 392. He endorsed the proposition that bishops could no longer lawfully sit in the Lords (19 June).60Whitelocke, Memorials (1732), 46.

In an undated speech of 1641 White dismissed the four orders of ministry recognised by the episcopal church – deacons, presbyters, bishops and archbishops. Archbishops were not found in scripture and deacons only in a role now held by churchwardens; bishops had unwarrantably expanded their authority and ‘usurped’ the rights of presbyters; archdeacons and chancellors of dioceses were a ‘merely human’ invention. The presbyter ‘is of all hands acknowledged to be iure divino’ (instituted by divine right); ‘I conceive we are the first to restore the presbyter to his due’.61A speech of Mr John White concerning episcopacy (1641), sig. Hhh1-3 (E.198.18). He conceded that ‘some of the bishops have been and are good men’, but if his hearers would ‘look into their diocese[s] and the churches in their gift and judge whether they be good bishops or no, you shall find them as faulty concerning this great trust as any of the rest’. Astonishingly, he claimed that Parliament’s survey of churches ‘throughout the kingdom’ and attendant examinations taken in the Commons had revealed that

near eight parts of ten of them [are] filled with idle or scandalous ministers, whom the bishops might have by law refused [to institute] if discovered unto them beforehand, and ought to have removed being discovered to them afterwards.

Even where deficient ministers were prosecuted, they had received light punishment ‘and so sent home to destroy more souls’. In contrast, where bishops encountered ‘any godly, learned and painful preacher’, they ‘sought out all occasions against them, to thrust them out of the church and lay their congregations waste and desolate’.62A speech of Mr John White, sig. Iii2. Since the Prayer Book had been used to countenance popish practices, it too was in the firing line.63A speech of Mr John White, sig. Iii3. White’s agenda was comprehensive and uncompromising:

Therefore let us proceed to the perfecting of the reformation of our church, and to the gathering out of it every stone that offends, even whatsoever is not according to God, and the standard of his word, and reduce everything in the government to the rule, and walk in it in God’s way, which is the sure way to have his presence with us, and blessing upon us and ours for ever.64A speech of Mr John White, sig. Iii3v.

A manager of a conference with the Lords on 11 August 1641 on the impeachment of those bishops who were guilty of putting into execution the 1640 Canons, held as some who had earlier voted for punitive action began to have doubts, White insisted that there should be no retreat.65CJ ii. 251b; Procs. LP vi. 357. He was consistently among those prosecuting the case over the winter of 1641-2 and by 17 January ‘great evils committed by ill-affected persons to the peace and security of the kingdom’ had served only to strengthen his convictions and indeed induce a near-apocalyptic vision.66CJ ii. 314b, 364b, 385b, 467b. ‘These troubles of our times’ were of ‘far more dangerous consequence’ than ‘the civil divisions between the two Houses of York and Lancaster, or barons’ wars’ of the thirteenth century: this time

we have adversaries of no courage or magnanimity that riseth against us, only subtle and treacherous spirits lying in their cabinets, and keeping themselves close in their stately buildings, their devising on devilish and hellish stratagems to be put secretly in execution for our destruction; as powder-plots, firing privately of towns, nay, cities, if their endeavours might have success according to their desires, which strikes us with amazement and continual fear of our safety in our own habitations and places of livelihood.

He detected the ‘malice of Satan’ and his ‘plots among Christians, as by sorcery, witchcraft, poisoning and the like’.67Mr Whites speech in Parliament on the 17th of January (1642), A2-A2v (E.200.12). ‘The greatest and chiefest authors of our miseries’ were

the bishops and their adherents, favourers of the Romish and Arminian faction, that have here with a high hand and stretched out arm in their several places of power and jurisdiction, both spiritual and temporal exercised cruelty and tyranny over the children and saints of God, binding the consciences of free subjects only to their opinions and commands.68Mr Whites speech on the 17th of January, A3.

As before, he claimed to speak ‘not ... altogether against their persons’; rather, his target was ‘their offices and places of authority as they are now used’, together with the particular bishops who now deserved impeachment.69Mr Whites speech on the 17th of January, A3v-4. However, he had encouraged the ‘root and branch’ petition against episcopacy where his colleague Bagshawe had not and he informed against those who presented the Kentish petition in its favour (28 Mar., 7 Apr. 1642).70E. Bagshawe, A Just Vindication (1660), 3 (E.1019.6); PJ ii. 100, 139.

Meanwhile White continued to be visibly engaged in other religious business. He successfully moved (10 July 1641) that a London parson against whom his parishioners had laid a complaint before Parliament, citing him as a scandalous minister, could not proceed with a suit against his accusers in the court of common pleas, and thereby established what doubtless proved a significant precedent.71Procs. LP v. 586, 589. White was one of eight MPs delegated to review a sermon delivered by one Williamson at the nearby fashionable church of St Martin-in-the-Fields which had led to the preacher’s being arrested and consigned to the custody of the serjeant-at-arms (24 Dec. 1641).72CJ ii. 356b. Although on the floor of the House attention largely turned elsewhere in 1642, White was among those still pursuing reform, being appointed to committees preparing legislation for suppressing innovations, and promoting sabbath observance and preaching (17 Feb. 1642), and for better maintaining the ministry (25 Mar.)73CJ ii. 438a, 496b.

Other business, 1640-2

While religion was clearly White’s first priority, from the beginning of the Long Parliament he participated in other reforming activity and, if not as important in those areas, was nonetheless also a notable figure. In its early days there seems little doubt that he was the White who was named to committees which addressed key secular grievances arising from or pre-dating Charles I’s personal rule: illegal taxation (27 Nov. 1640); the abuses of the prerogative courts, as exemplified in the cases of William Prynne* (on whose behalf White spoke, 9 Dec.) and others (3 Dec.); patents (16 Dec.); and the prosecution of those who had opposed royal policy in the 1628–9 Parliament (18 Dec.).74CJ ii. 38a, 44b, 51b, 53b; Procs. LP i. 528. He was almost certainly the White appointed to consider the bill for annual Parliaments (30 Dec.) and for prioritising committee business (8 Jan. 1641).75CJ ii. 60a, 65b.

Given his links with those who constituted the junto driving the political agenda in both Houses, he is likely to have been the White who reported joint conferences on affairs in the north (12 Nov. 1640) and a treaty with Scotland (12 Jan. 1641), and who was named to prepare questions to be put to those alleged to have encouraged recusants to escalate conflict in the north (28 Jan.).76CJ ii. 27b, 67a, 74b. Periodically involved in other conferences, he was given leave to act as counsel in the Lords on 10 February.77CJ ii. 53a, 81b, 189b, 251b, 280a. A combination of his experience and his proven trustworthiness probably explains his selection (with Edmund Prideaux I*) to take notes of the trial in the Lords of the lord deputy of Ireland, Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford (20 Mar.).78CJ ii. 108b.

Otherwise, as a member of the privileges committee and a lawyer, this White was more obviously the man who expounded the law relating to charters in connection with the disputed election at Tewkesbury (11 Dec. 1640) and probably the man appointed to consider the bill for preventing disorders in elections (30 Mar. 1641).79Procs. LP i. 570; CJ ii. 114a. Like others of his profession, from time to time he gave legal advice and was involved in bills for property settlements, including those for the earl of Bedford (17 July) and Surrey grandee Sir Richard Onslow* (19 July), which hint at some of his continuing connections.80CJ ii. 103b, 164b, 215a, 477a, 553b; Procs. LP vi. 437, 441; D’Ewes (C), 167. Less engaged by consideration of abuses in court procedures than some of his colleagues, he was still occasionally placed on committees relating to prisons, the law or the legal profession.81CJ ii. 69a, 274b, 440a, 682a, 691a. However, as Parliament struck at its political enemies in the spring and summer of 1642 he was among managers of the impeachments of the recorder and the lord mayor of London, Sir Thomas Gardiner* and Sir Richard Gurney, Judge Bartlett (Robert Berkeley†) and the attorney-general, Sir Edward Herbert I*.82CJ ii. 492b, 504a, 539b, 571a, 681b, 684b.

White’s rather slight involvement in commercial matters strengthens the impression that his interest in colonisation had been overwhelmingly motivated by religious considerations. Named to the committee which considered a petition from adventurers in Virginia (18 Dec. 1640), he delivered a petition against the export of leather (26 July 1641), but was not again called upon to engage in economic or trading issues until 1642, when he was added to the committees dealing with vintners and brewers (5 Feb., 5 Mar.).83CJ ii. 54b, 414b, 467b; Procs LP vi. 93. This was an area of concern to his constituents, and on 5 March he moved for a prompt meeting of the latter.84PJ i. 513. On 8 April he was also appointed to address complaints regarding charges surrounding the carriage of commodities.85CJ ii. 517a.

Adventuring in Ireland was confessionally-driven, especially after the rebellion of autumn 1641, and here White was more noticeable. He first appeared with fellow lawyers John Whistler* and John Glynne* assembling material on Londonderry to be sent to the Lords (25 Oct. 1641).86CJ ii. 294b. Delegated on 31 December to prepare an ordinance to secure £30,000 borrowed from the Merchant Adventurers to put down the rebellion, he reported a fortnight later and continued to be closely involved in the loan and other funding of the Irish expedition into the summer, as well as being among lawyers who perfected a commission for a parliament in Dublin (19 July).87CJ ii. 364a, 380b, 493a, 563a, 611b, 681a, 736b; PJ i. 80; ii. 75. The cause of the Irish Protestants was popular with some of his constituents and his relatives in Pembrokeshire lived close to the embarkation point for Ireland at Milford Haven, but his attitude to the unprecedented petitioning about it by local women in February – brought to the House’s attention by an apparently reluctant Bagshawe – is unknown.88PJ i. 277.

Although White’s vehement anti-episcopal stance set him apart from the junto, he was, as has been seen, susceptible to Pym’s claims of an army or popish plot in the summer of 1641, and, in an atmosphere of hostility to a court seen as crypto-Catholic, evidently a man to have on side in the pursuit of a robust political strategy. On 28 June White was among MPs who conferred with the Lords over Pym’s Ten Propositions to deal with the crisis.89CJ ii. 190b. As a reward for his service to the House and presumably also as an assurance that he would not be too busy to continue, unknown friends obtained for him on 8 July an excusal from the second week of the reading which he was due to give at the Temple in the autumn.90CJ ii. 202b. On the 24th he was among MPs tasked with producing a bill to regulate the book trade and thus control the flow of information, while it was a mark of his standing that on 9 September he was included on the committee appointed to sit during the parliamentary recess.91CJ ii. 222b, 288b.

The committee of printing

Over the winter of 1641-2, already busy prosecuting bishops and arranging funds for Ireland, White was party to discussions with the Lords about the attempted impeachment of the Five Members (13 Jan. 1642) and the subsequent representations to the king of breach of privilege and the necessity for ‘putting the kingdom in a posture of defence’ (26, 31 Jan.).92CJ ii. 376b, 398a, 406a. As divisions opened up at Westminster, on 7 February Sir Edward Dering, who had parted company with the reformers over the extent of religious and other change, was ordered to surrender the papers he held as chairman of the ‘committee of printing’, the standing committee which had evolved out of the legislation of the previous June to deploy the power of licensing the press.93PJ i. 304; J. Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers (2004), 139. White replaced Dering immediately and may even have been fulfilling the role beforehand: his imprimatur appeared on title pages from that month if not before; an order signed by him on 21 February reveals his power to delegate the perusal of works.94G. Buchanan, Tyrannicall-Government Anatomized (1642) [title p.] (E.88.29); S. Ashe, A Support for the Sinking Heart (1642), sig. A2v (E.141.28); C. Moore, Viscount Moore, A Certificate from the Lord Moor (1642) [title p.] (E.142.16); J. Mede, The Key of Revelation (1642) [facing title p.] (E.68.6).

White was a strong candidate to drive Parliament’s quest for ‘further reformation’ through this channel, although in practice keeping control of the press was complex and difficult.95Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 139-40. A pamphlet which was referred to his committee on 8 March threatened to derail delicate negotiation with the Irish Protestant leader James Butler, 1st earl of Ormond.96CJ ii. 472a. Reporting from the committee on 28 March, White noted the circulation of ‘weekly false diurnals of proceedings of Parliament’, ‘false and scandalous rumours’ about ‘differences’ between the states of the United Provinces and the prince of Orange (which undermined Protestant solidarity) and the promotion by his predecessor Dering of the Kentish petition in favour of episcopacy, while a week later (8 Apr.) the problem under discussion was the importation of bibles, prayer books and psalm books from the Low Countries which, if not necessarily unorthodox in themselves, breached native monopolies.97PJ ii. 97-8, 100, 129. Locating and punishing the printers of the Kentish petition proved more difficult than anticipated, and was still detaining the committee and the House at the end of April.98PJ ii. 139, 141; CJ ii. 549b. It became White’s responsibility to instruct the judiciary to proceed against delinquents, as on 28 April, when the Commons resolved to prosecute Thomas Kilcop, who had published a treatise advocating believers’ baptism only.99CJ ii. 547a.

As the political situation became ever more sensitive over the summer, the work increased in importance. On 8 June White’s reports informed debates on pamphlets which purported to give accurate accounts of the campaign of Scottish and English forces in Ulster and of the incident at Heworth moor (3 June) when the king had summoned Yorkshire gentry and freeholders and Sir Thomas Fairfax* had attempted to present to him a petition from those who desired a reconciliation with Parliament.100CJ ii. 612b, 613b; PJ iii. 37. A desire to tighten control, perhaps driven by White himself, prompted the resolution of 15 June for an ordinance preventing the ‘publishing of any scandalous or libellous pamphlet that may reflect on the king, kingdom, or Parliament or Scotland’ and for the suppression of those which had already appeared.101CJ ii. 624b; PJ iii. 78.

War, administration and the law 1642-1644

On 10 June White promised £100 for the war effort.102PJ iii. 472. Since his constituency was close, he was better able than many to combine any local canvassing with a contribution to preparations at Westminster. Part of a lawyer-dominated group who met the Lords on the 17th to discuss measures to impede the dissemination of the king’s commissions of array, he subsequently prepared impeachments against sheriffs and others who obeyed the royal command (11 July, 24 Aug.) and an indemnification for parliamentarian volunteers (18 July).103CJ ii. 630a, 664a, 675a, 679b, 734b. He now used his Merchant Adventurer connections to raise money for conflict at home (1 Aug.) and drafted an ordinance regarding loans from merchant strangers and via Trinity House (16 Aug.).104CJ ii. 698b, 722a.

His religious role not forgotten – he was among MPs named to discuss a bill for observation of public fast days (4 Aug.) – he seems nonetheless to have been temporarily preoccupied with pressing secular affairs.105CJ ii. 702b. He headed the committee nominated on 12 August to consider the adjournment of the Surrey assizes from Kingston-upon-Thames, where royalist sympathies prevailed, to Dorking where the county’s parliamentarians had greater hope of exercising control, and worked with three others to produce a form of order for guards in Southwark intended to be a blueprint for similar orders in Middlesex and elsewhere (13 Aug.).106CJ ii. 716b, 717a, 719b. Among other appointments in the next fortnight he was added to the Committee for Examinations as it received power to seize suspect consignments (17 Aug.), involved in reviewing the conduct of justices of assize and grand juries (26 Aug.) and among six lawyers ordered to prepare the impeachments of leading royalists (30 Aug.).107CJ ii. 721a, 725a, 737b, 745a, 745b. Temporarily and understandably distracted from his work as chairman of the printing committee – on 24 August Sir Henry Mildmay* presented an order from it ‘which he said should have been delivered in by Mr White’ – he was back in harness the same day.108CJ ii. 734b, 741b; PJ iii. 314.

Over the next two years White was a regular presence in the Journal – his only prolonged absences being four weeks each in January-February 1643 and December 1643, when his imprimatur on publications reveals that he was nonetheless still at Westminster. The sheer number of his committee appointments may have been less than those of others in constant attendance in the House like William Wheler* and Sir Robert Pye I*. He was never a teller, but his chairmanship of major committees and evident industriousness behind the scenes allowed him to maintain a considerable influence.

Like other lawyers remaining with Parliament, White spoke against the disablement of moderate Middle Templar Geoffrey Palmer* (7 Sept.), who had earlier shared opposition to Laudian innovation but had then chosen to adhere to the king.109PJ iii. 336. On the other hand, like Robert Reynolds*, he was also involved in preparing a declaration that the absence of Members ‘on the king’s special command ... tends to the dissolution of Parliament’ (19 Sept).110CJ ii. 772a. Through the autumn and into the winter he was named to committees regularising and legitimating the raising of money and horses for the parliamentary cause and he continued to take a prominent part in punishing recalcitrant sheriffs and appointing replacements.111CJ ii. 763b, 805a, 819b, 867b; Add. 18777, f. 11v. His proximity to the core of decision-making and propaganda is indicated by his inclusion on committees to take care of the defence of Windsor Castle (17 Oct.) and control the public narrative of the indecisive battle at Edgehill (27 Oct.).112CJ ii. 811b, 824a, 825a.

White was associated with money-raising occasionally through 1643 and beyond, but this came to constitute only a minor part of his parliamentary service and was probably only an adjunct to his other roles.113CJ iii. 211a, 236b, 257b, 260b, 385a, 482a, 619b. A more substantial contribution was his legal expertise. He was among lawyers who conferred with the Lords on the problems arising from the king adjourning the Westminster law courts to Oxford (5 Jan. 1643) and from postponing the assizes (25 Feb.), and considered the vital question of what was to be done about legitimating the great seal, present physically in Oxford, but thought to be required in London (9, 23 Oct.).114CJ ii. 915b, 979b; iii. 269a, 283b. He reported (12 June 1644) the ordinance for the abolition of the court of wards, the existence of which had been one of the major grievances of the propertied in the early days of the Parliament, and was also named to committees preparing to abolish knights’ tenures, another relic of feudalism (16 Aug.), and to appoint a new judge to deal with the probate business of the otherwise defunct prerogative court of Canterbury (25 June).115CJ iii. 422b, 527a, 541b, 592a. As well as being part of the ongoing proceedings against Laud, he was one of the lawyers named to draw an impeachment of treason against Queen Henrietta Maria (24 May 1643) and involved in prosecuting other delinquents.116CJ iii. 100b, 486b, 694b. He addressed matters relating to prisons and prisoners, and oversaw the arrangements for the fining and release of imprisoned plotter Edmund Waller* (Sept.-Oct. 1644). 117CJ iii. 20a, 44a, 288b, 637a, 639b, 671b, 677b.

Allegiance and propaganda

In the absence of direct evidence of White’s political and personal alignment within Westminster over this period, his relationship with his native county is illuminating. In the early days of the war Griffith White had been at best a lukewarm parliamentarian and had perhaps given some support to the crown.118Pembs. Historian v. 72. However, on 14 April 1643 he wrote to his brother alerting him not only to the threats of plunder issued by forces under William Seymour†, 1st marquess of Hertford, to those who, like Griffith, had refused to enter a royalist association, but also to the intentions of Richard Vaughan†, 2nd earl of Carbery [I], to fortify Milford Haven for the king and thus secure the route to Ireland. John White was doubtless particularly exercised by the information that:

the preachers stirred up the people against the Parliament and one of them preached that such as stood for the king and were killed in this war were martyrs and went to heaven and such as stood for the Parliament and were killed were damned.119Harl. 164, f. 373.

Laying the letter before the House on the 19th, he moved that the earl of Carbery be impeached of high treason; when the motion was carried, he was instructed to prepare the case.120CJ iii. 52b. Given that Carbery was not in Parliament’s power, this was something of an academic exercise, but with Pembrokeshire’s own MPs away on campaign, White had established himself as an important conduit of opinion from south Wales. In the short term he was unable to secure much support for his beleaguered kinsfolk: royalist forces were in the ascendant and his family was at the mercy of an unsympathetic Carbery.121Pembs. Historian v. 72. But as the tide turned in 1644 he was a leading light in the creation of the parliamentarian association of Pembrokeshire, Cardigan and Carmarthen under Major-general Rowland Laugharne† and in the sustenance of its Pembrokeshire arm thereafter.122CJ iii. 455b, 457b, 471b, 500b, 502b, 590a, 644b; Harl. 166, f. 64.

All the same, White showed occasional signs if not of reservations about the prosecution of the war, at least of a desire to contain it. In June 1643, when the military situation made the preservation of Parliament’s good name in the eyes of the people particularly critical and perhaps mindful of his own family’s experience, he brought to the attention of the Commons the ‘horrible outrages the troopers of the Parliament side had committed in Buckinghamshire’.123Harl. 165, f. 114v. He appeared keen to satisfy soldiers’ arrears of pay and to ensure those burdened by free quarter should be reimbursed (24 July).124CJ iii. 180b. In the aftermath of parliamentarian reversals in Wales in the late spring/early summer of 1644 he was among those appointed to devise greater powers for the committee of militia (13 June), but following the victory at Marston Moor in July he was named to draft peace propositions to present to the king (17 Aug.).125CJ iii. 527b, 594a.

Throughout he retained his chairmanship of the printing committee, an occupation always potentially varied and time-consuming, but made the more sensitive and demanding in war conditions.126Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 143. On 2 November 1642 he reported to the Commons a book by Dr John Price, ‘lying many scandals upon the Parliament’ including neglect of Ireland and ‘that our votes bind not because we are not a full house’; the work was ‘against the militia, against the war’. The upshot was that White and others were to search for Price’s papers in his three studies at Blackfriars, Covent Garden and Doctors’ Commons and prepare an impeachment.127Add. 18777, ff. 10v, 48v; CJ ii. 831a. When on 4 August 1643 Captain Edward Wingate*, a former member of the Committee for Scandalous Ministers, who had escaped from abusive custody in Oxford, presented to the House a pamphlet ‘lately printed touching the usage of the prisoners at Oxford ... in which there were divers notorious falsities’, the investigation of it was again entrusted to White.128Harl. 165, f. 136v. Involving as it did an exposé of alleged war crimes and the murder by neglect and ill-treatment of MP for Marlborough John Francklyn* by a gaoler who gained national notoriety, this was hot news.129E. Chillenden, The Inhumanity of the Kings Prison-keeper at Oxford (1643), 25, 28 (E.63.17).

Early on White was established as the public face of parliamentarian propaganda. In May a pamphlet purporting to be written by a former MP derided the effrontery of William Prynne’s* The Sovereign Power of Parliaments (1643) with its claims to military and administrative pre-eminence and denial of a negative voice to the king

there could not be a greater justification and fortification of this jealousy, than to see a new book printed by order of a committee of the House of Commons with a Member’s (John White’s) name to it.130A letter from a grave gentleman (1643), 11 (E.102.13).

It is striking how, alongside such apparently non-partisan publications as editions of psalms and devotional works which survive with White’s imprimatur, the combative and factional writings of the irrepressible Prynne predominate.131W. Prynne, The Treachery (1643) (E.248.1); The Soveraigne Power (1643); The Third Part of the Soveraigne Power (E248.3); The Fourth Part of the Soveraigne Power (1643) (E.248.4); The Opening of the Great Seale (1643) (E.251.2); The Doome of Cowardisze (1643); The Popish Royall Favorite (1643), [sig. Av]; Romes Master-Peece (1643); Truth Triumphing (1644) (E.259.1); A Full Reply (1644); A Breviate of the Life of William Laud (1644); Hidden Workes of Darkenes (1645). However, it may be significant that White’s name was not attached to A True and Full Narration (1644), a joint publication by Prynne and Clement Walker* which attacked Colonel Nathaniel Fiennes I* and through him his father, William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele.132W. Prynne, A True and Full Relation (1644, E.255.1). Plausibly, White and Prynne were close allies, although White, while ostensibly a natural Presbyterian, was probably in practice not so narrow in his associations. He had, for example, to deal with Henry Parker, another powerful propagandist, secretary to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, and no advocate of divine-right presbyterianism: in November 1643 White headed a small group delegated to reward him for his efforts.133CJ iii. 313b.

In the meantime, following the rolling out in June of ‘more sophisticated licensing machinery’ via the ordinance for regulating printing, White acquired a regular team of scrutinisers to match that once deployed by Laud.134Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 144. It is impossible to gauge how much influence he had over appointments and difficult to deduce how much they owed to factional interests, especially since the views of some of them – notably Calybute Downing and Joseph Caryl – were evolving from Presbyterianism towards Independency.135‘Caryl, Joseph’, ‘Sedgwick, Obadiah’, Oxford DNB. However, the development did serve to give White more time to devote to his other interests.

Religion 1642-4

On 15 September 1642 White was one of three Members deputed to prepare a bill for convening the long-contemplated gathering of ministers ‘for the synod’.136CJ ii. 767b. Appointed as a lay member of the resulting Westminster Assembly on 9 June 1643, he seems to have contributed to its proceedings relatively frequently during its first year, being at least sometimes distinguished in the minutes from the clerical White of Dorchester.137CJ iii. 119b; Minutes, ed. Van Dixhoorn i. 145; ii. 66, 205, 223. Insofar as it is possible to judge, he appears to have conducted himself more constructively and sympathetically than colleagues like John Selden and Nathaniel Fiennes I, explaining the meaning of parliamentary orders and promising to move the House that ministers physically separated from their books might be able to the supply the deficiency and inform their debates through access to sequestered libraries.138Minutes, ed. Van Dixhoorn ii. 206, 223. His commitment to the Assembly is indicated by his report from a committee to replace absentees with new delegates (22 Aug., 11 Oct. 1643), his responsibility for the order for the Assembly to consider the question of church government (15 Sept.) and his chairmanship of the grand committee which considered its paper on ordination (7, 9 Sept. 1644).139Harl. 165, f. 154v; Harl. 166, ff. 112v, 113; CJ iii. 242b, 273b, 620b. As chairman of the committee for printing, he responded to complaints from the Assembly in a renewed campaign against the importation of bibles with ‘not only gross errors, but foul and dangerous corruptions’ (31 May 1644).140CJ iii. 512a. When in November 1644 the House considered the Assembly’s draft ‘Directory for Public Worship’, White replaced the initial committee chairman, Francis Rous, and brought in the ordinance authorising the Directory and the particular recommendations regarding exclusion of the ‘ignorant and scandalous’ from the sacrament.141CJ iii. 705b, 710a; Add. 31116, p. 353. Six weeks later he was not in the House when the ministers from the Assembly presented a petition regarding their salaries, but it was ordered that he be informed (7 Jan. 1645).142CJ iv. 13b.

Nonetheless, the rest of White’s activity reveals how much, even amid the distractions of waging war, the initiative for religious reform still lay in Parliament itself and the degree to which influence still lay in his own hands. In September 1642 he was among five MPs made responsible for preparing the order for appointing preachers to the key public pulpit at Paul’s Cross.143CJ ii. 768b. Subsequently he was nominated to committees to locate and destroy ‘monuments of superstition and idolatry’ in London churches (24 Apr. 1643), to remove the recently-introduced adornments from the Temple church (27 May), to prepare a public vindication of the Covenant (which he had taken second after the Speaker; 19 July), to remove ‘all superstitious and illegal matters in the worship of God’ (27 Apr. 1644) and to uphold the payment of tithes (22 July).144CJ iii. 57b, 106b, 1118a, 178b, 470b, 566b. As chairman of the printing committee, within a few weeks of the order for the vindication he duly licensed two works on the theme.145Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 147.

White’s position as MP for Southwark, a borough which needed careful oversight because of both its proximity to the City and its propensity to harbour radical elements, made him an important broker of information and power, especially after the adjacent episcopal palace at Lambeth had become a prison presided over by the controversial Alexander Leighton.146CJ iii. 130a. When Leighton and his guard clashed with local inhabitants in February 1643, White was one of the locally-resident MPs named to investigate.147CJ ii. 974b. As he reported the committee’s findings in early April and managed a conference with the Lords, his sympathies for the soldiers were readily apparent. The captain of the Lambeth guard was ‘a religious, honest man’; two soldiers under him who had been disconcerted to discover the minister leading divine service in Lambeth church ‘in his surplice and hood’ were implied to have had cause for concern; the soldiers had been attacked by an ‘audacious and impudent’ waterman; in the riot that ensued the soldiers had discharged muskets, but the mob had resolved to ‘go pull down the roundheads’ houses’ and begun ‘to deface the house of an honest man’. In recommending that the verdict of the coroners’ inquest – wilful murder by the soldiers – should be disregarded and the case referred to court martial, White upheld the authority of the lord general and drew attention to the urgency of ecclesiastical reform.148CJ iii. 32b; Add. 31116, f. 78; Harl. 164, ff. 357v-358.

Despite his earlier prominence in the attack on the archbishop, White was not in charge of the committee which was appointed to launch Laud’s impeachment at the bar of the Lord in January 1644, although he was appointed to it.149CJ iii. 357b. Called as a witness (9 Mar.), he testified on at least two days of the trial, first about his visit to Lambeth with Edward Bagshawe and secondly about his experience as a feoffee.150CJ iii. 422a; Laud, Works, iv. 132, 304. Recalling in his memoirs that White accused him of falling ‘bitterly upon him as an underminer of the church’, Laud considered that it was ‘very likely I spake my conscience to him as freely as he did his to me’ and acknowledged the great gulf in their perceptions. While White rejoiced in the founding of the lectureship at St Antholin, Laud deplored the transference of funds from a poor area with ‘little preaching’ to one where there was ‘plenty’; if White considered Laud had given livings to ‘unworthy men’, the latter would not have those at his disposal to ‘Mr White’s worthies’.151Laud, Works, iv. 305. White was among the lawyers still engaged with Laud’s trial that September.152CJ iii. 628a.

Committee for Plundered Ministers

Laud, like many of his contemporaries, identified White above all with his leading role in the Committee for Scandalous Ministers (CSM) and the Committee for Plundered Ministers (CPM).153Laud, Works, iv. 340; J. White, The First Century (1643, E.76.21). There is credible evidence that White was the key player in the evolution of the first into the second. There is no further reference to Miles Corbett as chairman of the CSM after June 1642 and it may be that during the autumn it was functioning mainly in relation to preparing the bill of the same name, with other business being diverted to ad hoc committees. A petition from a Kentish minister requesting a pension due from the archbishop of Canterbury was referred to White and five others on 14 October.154CJ ii. 808a. Orders on 26 December – when John Wylde* was ordered to report on innovations, William Wheler on pluralities, Alexander Rigby I* on the Assembly of Divines and White on scandalous ministers – seem to have heralded a reallocation of responsibilities in religious matters.155CJ ii. 903a. Five days later a Committee for Plundered Ministers was announced with the brief of sequestering ‘malignant’ ministers around London and using the proceeds to relieve those ‘godly and well-affected’ ministers who had suffered from plunder and the other burdens of occupying royalist troops.156CJ ii. 909a. At first sight this might seem to have differentiated it from the CSM, but, as a petition referred to it on 4 January 1643 indicated, it soon proved to be the same committee in war-time clothing, addressing the same issues of punishment and reward as its predecessor.157CJ ii. 913a. Ostensibly, White was not officially named to the CPM at this point (or at all until December 1644, a month before his death) – few from the CSM were – but the gaps in the Journal record leave room for doubt, regarding both him and others.158Add. 15669, f. 239. Sir Gilbert Gerard*, who had been so named, reported from the CPM on 23 January, but thereafter, for the next two years, all indications are that White was chairman.159CJ ii. 931b, 940a-b. On 2 February White reported from the CPM information against Dr Edward Layfield, whom he had been pursuing as far back as 1640; he was then ordered to prepare an ordinance to sequester Layfield’s parsonage and to bestow it on one Glendon, ‘a learned divine and plundered minister’.160CJ ii. 951b.

The fragmented and opaque nature of the committee documents surviving from 1643 and 1644 does not allow a complete and secure picture of White’s activity as chairman, or to differentiate with certainty between what came his way via this role and what he undertook outside it. However, it is clear that he continued to have a finger in almost every pie. On 8 March 1643, when a petition was read from the patron, he was chairing a ‘committee for the parish of Bushey’, which may or may not have been a stand-alone committee.161CJ ii. 993b. He later appeared in the Journal preparing ordinances to sequester and collate to livings (10 June; 3, 19 July) and joining the committee setting up the new parsonage at Covent Garden (25 Nov. 1644).162CJ iii. 123a, 173a, 704a. Having been named first to a committee to bring in an ordinance preserving patrons’ rights of presentation (6 Nov. 1643) – a law which might be regarded by the godly as cutting two ways – he spoke against approving the countess of Exeter’s nomination to a sequestered living (11 Apr. 1644).163CJ iii. 302b; Harl. 166, f. 48. Mentioned from time to time as reporting to the House and to its other committees on sequestrations of clerical livings and property, he also seems still to have had access, directly or indirectly, to money collected by the feoffees, now ordered to be used for both religious and secular purposes.164CJ iii. 139b, 293b, 298a, 236b, 612b,

On 3 July 1643 White was ordered to bring in an ordinance enabling all county committees to sequester livings and to substitute suitable candidates.165CJ iii. 153b. His lasting association with that role was sealed by the publication, authorised on 17 November by his own order from the committee for printing, of a digest of the first hundred cases heard at Westminster. He did not explain whether he was talking of the CPM alone or the CPM and CSM together, but the former seems the more likely as, while the CSM had heard cases from all over the country, those he cited were almost exclusively from the south east, reflecting the Parliament’s wartime sphere of influence. His primary object, proclaimed in an epistle to the reader, was

to open thine eyes and clearly convince and satisfy thee, that the Parliament had good, and very great cause ... to declare and resolve, that the present church government by archbishops, bishops, their chancellors, commissaries, deans, archdeacons, and other ecclesiastical officers ... is evil and justly offensive and burdensome to the kingdom, a great impediment to reformation and growth of religion, and very prejudicial to the state and government of this kingdom, and therefore to be taken away.166J. White, The First Century (1643), sig. A2 (E.76.21).

It was intended to expose the shortcomings of the clergy – ‘one principal ground and cause of the general ignorance and debauchery of the gentry and people of this kingdom: like priest, like people’ – and the hollowness of denunciations of reforming work which were emanating from the royalist headquarters at Oxford, and it invited the reader to ‘behold with admiration, and acknowledge with love and thankfulness the transcendent mercy of the Lord’.167White, First Century, sig. A3.

But White’s chronicle seems to have back-fired. Hostile commentators seized on its intemperate language, its implausibly pessimistic outlook and its sensational content: the perception that the majority of the clergy were ‘illiterate and insufficient dumb dogs’, ‘whoremongers and adulterers’ and ‘vermin’, and the inclusion in the first case discussed of an accusation of buggery rendered it not only distasteful and ridiculous, but liable to undermine the whole Protestant church in England, to the delight of the papists.168White, First Century, sig. A2v; Persecutio Undecima, 14; Wood, Ath.Oxon. iii. 144-6. While a near-namesake, Peter White, might extol him in a footnote to a fast sermon of May 1644 as ‘a religious gent and worthy patriot’, there were doubtless others at the time who presaged Richard Baxter’s later comment that the publication was unwise.169P. White, A Sermon Preached on May 29 1644 (1644), 32. Meanwhile, according to Sir Simonds D’Ewes*, it was from the Committee for Plundered Ministers that on 22 August 1643, White reported several of its orders ‘for the putting out of several ministers in London and the putting in of several others in their stead’. White received the desired confirmation from the House in all cases, but D’Ewes – a pious man but never a hot-head – recorded that he had said ‘no to every one of them’, because he thought they ‘pressed very hard’, ‘especially on innocent wives and children’.170Harl. 165, f. 154.

In 1644 White can be seen in surviving orders of the Committee for Plundered Ministers, appending his signature in March and September.171SP22/3, ff. 142, 316-17, 416. By this time its remit was evidently broad and the boundaries of responsibilities between it and other committees porous. On 28 February 1644 John Glynne* moved successfully that ‘Mr White who sat in the chair for plundered ministers should bring in a bill for the better observation of the sabbath ... which had long since been referred to that committee’.172CJ iii. 410b; Harl. 166, f. 19v. Delayed, no doubt, by Laud’s trial, he delivered it not the following Saturday but the following month (29 Mar.) and sat on the committee which then discussed it further.173CJ iii. 440b; Harl. 166, f. 40v. In November he reported votes from the CPM ‘for suppressing of Anabaptists and antinomians’, a concern which had originated in a representation from the Westminster Assembly and which might seem not to be within the Committee’s provenance.174CJ iii. 684b; Harl. 166, f. 151v. Perhaps other Assembly business with the House had taken this route; perhaps this explains the order of 7 January 1645 to acquaint White with the ministers’ petition on their salary.175CJ iv. 13b.

Death and reputation

White was possibly already in the throes of a fatal illness. He died on 30 January at his house in Whitefriars.176Mercurius Britannicus no. 68 (27 Jan.-3 Feb. 1645), 540 (E.27.8). An order was issued to MPs the following day to attend his funeral in the Middle Temple church on 1 February, an action justified in some newspapers as fitting for a ‘most faithful Member of the House of Commons, and servant to the church and commonwealth, and chairman to the Committee for Plundered Ministers’.177CJ iv. 37b; A Perfect Diurnall no. 79 (27 Jan.-3 Feb. 1645), 629 (E.258.19); A Diary, or an Exact Iournall no. 38 (30 Jan.-6 Feb. 1645), sig. Ll2v (E.268.8); Temple Church Records, 6. He had been, said Mercurius Britannicus, ‘a zealous, religious, faithful patriot, and severe scourge of the prelatical clergy ... the whole body cannot but lament and languish for the loss of so principal a Member’.178Mercurius Britannicus no. 68, p. 540.

Other observers were less kind. Bulstrode Whitelocke* considered him ‘an honest, learned and faithful servant to the public’, but admitted that he was ‘somewhat severe at the Committee for Plundered Ministers’.179Whitelocke, Memorials (1732), 128. Mercurius Aulicus declared that ‘the world knew him for the most malicious, bold, obscene speaker of any of the chairmen’, while Anthony Wood was told that

when he was elected one of the committee for religion, (of which he was mostly chairman) no man was more violent against the orthodox clergy than he, no man more ready to license books against them than he, and as ready as any (except Prynne) to be a witness against Laud at his trial.180Mercurius Aulicus (26 Jan.-2 Feb. 1645), 1362 (E.270.14); Wood, Ath. Oxon. iii. 144-6.

The author of Persecutio Undecima, furthermore, damned him for a hypocrite, by an elliptical but unmistakeable accusation: ‘what man in his wits could believe that adulteries, fornications and such deeds of darkness’ as affirmed to exist in The Century ‘could be proved ... unless so many saw what this worthy Member did with his neighbour’s wife in Whitefriars, which made his own wife so jealous of this Mr White’.181Persecutio Undecima, 14.

The truth of this cannot be verified. White’s will has not come to light and the fate of his wife, if she was still alive, is unknown. White’s son and heir, also John, was on 16 May 1645 granted the privilege of a bencher’s son and admitted free to his father’s chamber at the Middle Temple.182MTR ii. 934. Neither he nor any other close family member sat in Parliament.