WRAY, Sir Christopher (1602-46), of Ashby cum Fenby, nr. Grimsby, and Barlings, Lincs.

Wray was the first son of Lincolnshire’s godly grandee Sir William Wray† and his second wife. He inherited his father’s substantial estate around Grimsby and with it the family’s electoral interest in the borough.37C142/386/87. With his marriage in 1623 to a daughter of Edward Cecil, 1st Viscount Wimbledon, Wray became the brother-in-law of the future parliamentarian peer Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham, and of James Fiennes*, the son of the prominent puritan and critic of Caroline policies, William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele.38CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 106. Wray was returned for Great Grimsby to all but one of the 1620s Parliaments, but made little impact upon proceedings at Westminster.39HP Commons, 1604-29, ‘Christopher Wray’.

In 1630, Wray joined his half-brother Sir John Wray* in criticising the crown-sponsored scheme for draining the Isle of Axholme.40Holmes, Lincs. 139-40. And he joined Sir John again a few years later in refusing to pay Ship Money, declaring (or so it was alleged) that he ‘neither had nor would pay’, and that although his assessment was small he would not pay it ‘if it were but a groat’.41CSP Dom. 1636-7, pp. 118, 215. But unlike Sir John he was not removed from the Lindsey bench for his recalcitrance. And although he was not a conspicuous patron of puritan ministers – Sir John had inherited the majority of their father’s church livings – his friends by the late 1630s included the godly Lincolnshire peer (and Viscount Saye and Sele’s son-in-law) Theophilus Clinton, 4th earl of Lincoln.42Infra, ‘Sir John Wray’; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 15.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Wray stood as a candidate for Grimsby, but came third on a poll behind Gervase Holles* and Sir John Jacob*. Jacob resigned his place shortly afterwards, however, having securing a seat elsewhere, whereupon the mayor and freemen drew up an indenture returning Holles and Wray, in that order.43Supra, ‘Great Grimsby’. Wray received only one committee appointment in the Short Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate.44CJ ii. 4a. The marriage of his daughter in July 1640 to the puritan former governor of Massachusetts, Sir Henry Vane II* – son and heir of Secretary of State Sir Henry Vane I* – suggests that he was not regarded as an open opponent of the personal rule of Charles I.45Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’.

In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, Wray and Holles were returned for Great Grimsby again, but on this occasion Wray took the senior place.46Supra, ‘Great Grimsby’. He was named to over 40 committees before the outbreak of civil war and was appointed a messenger to the Lords on four occasions.47CJ ii. 367a, 382b, 490a, 505b; LJ iv. 502b, 517b, 683b. Many of his early committee appointments place him among those in the House eager to reform the perceived ‘abuses’ of the personal rule in relation to the prerogative courts, the levying of military charges, Ship Money and customs duties and the machinery of county government.48CJ ii. 34b, 43a, 50b, 51b, 52b, 53b, 55a, 58a, 197b. Mindful of his own region’s grievances, he secured nomination to a number of committees concerning the supply of the king’s army and the payment of billet money due for Lincolnshire and adjacent counties, where English troops had been quartered since the summer of 1640.49CJ ii. 34a, 69b, 85b, 196a; Procs. LP v. 390. His concern to lighten the burden of quartering upon the county probably accounts for his willingness to stand bond for £1,000 towards securing a City loan late in 1640 to pay the English and Scottish forces in the north.50CJ ii. 238b; Procs. LP i. 228. He was also active on the bicameral commissions for disbursing the proceeds of the subsidies Parliament voted in 1641, most of which went towards paying the soldiery.51SP28/1C, ff. 1-4, 23-4, 31-2, 35-6, 38-9, 41-2, 49-50.

Wray was regularly named to committees during the first 18 months of the Long Parliament for purging the church of Laudian innovations and promoting a godly ministry.52CJ ii. 54b, 72a, 74b, 84b, 129a, 496b, 541b. But in contrast to Sir John Wray he was not a vocal supporter of the campaign for root and branch church reform.53Infra, ‘Sir John Wray’. Furthermore, he played no significant part in the prosecution of the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†), although his implicit criticism of the king’s reprieve in January 1641 of the condemned Catholic priest John Goodman is significant in this context, for Charles’s use of the royal pardon on this occasion was generally seen as ‘a preparative to save the life of the Lieutenant [Strafford] and Canterbury [Archbishop William Laud]’.54Procs. LP ii. 261; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. i. 295. On 13 July, Wray and Sir Philip Stapilton were majority tellers against tacking on the words ‘for the present’ to an order for petitioning the king not to confer any honour or employment upon George Lord Digby*, who had fallen into displeasure at Westminster for having opposed Strafford’s attainder.55CJ ii. 209b.

Wray received only a handful of appointments in the final three months of 1641; and although one of these was to a twelve-man committee to present the Grand Remonstrance to the king, he does not appear to have been among the committeemen who actually attended Charles at Hampton Court on 1 December.56CJ ii. 327a; D’Ewes (C), 219-20. He was named on 31 December to another committee to attend the king – this time to request that the Commons be allowed a guard of the London trained bands under the command of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.57CJ ii. 365a; D’Ewes (C), 372. In the wake of the king’s attempted arrest of the Five Members, Wray was named to the committees that sat in Guildhall and Grocers’ Hall (set up on 5 and 17 Jan. 1642) for securing Parliament’s and the kingdom’s safety.58CJ ii. 369a, 385a. On 2 February, he was a teller with the godly knight Sir William Lewis in favour of sending Sir Edward Dering* to the Tower for having his parliamentary speeches published – contrary, it was judged, to the privileges and honour of the House.59CJ ii. 411a. Dering was particularly disliked by the godly element in the Commons for his perceived apostasy on the issue of abolishing episcopacy.60Supra, ‘Sir Edward Dering’; PJ i. 253-5, 261-3. A month later (1 Mar.), Wray was the first MP nominated to a committee of both Houses for presenting the king with Parliament’s demands concerning the disposal of the militia – Charles having refused to give his assent to the militia ordinance.61CJ ii. 462. Wray was a messenger to the Lords on 31 March to desire a conference concerning a London petition against the militia ordinance.62CJ ii. 505b; LJ iv. 683b.

Late in April 1642, the Houses commissioned Wray, his brothers-in-law Willoughby of Parham – Parliament’s lord lieutenant of Lincolnshire under the militia ordinance – and Sir Edward Ayscoghe, and Thomas Hatcher to secure Lincolnshire for Parliament and to assist Sir John Hotham* at Hull.63CJ ii. 544b, 545b, 547b-548a; LJ v. 27b. A month later, the Commons sent Ayscoghe, Wray, Hatcher, Sir Anthony Irby and several other Lincolnshire MPs into the county to execute the militia ordinance and frustrate any attempt to raise the county for the king.64CJ ii. 585b; LJ v. 87a-88b; PJ ii. 281, 286, 288, 336. It was with these appointments that the Lincolnshire county committee was established. Wray spent most of the summer in Lincolnshire assisting Willoughby of Parham in his efforts to wrest control of the county’s trained bands from the king’s party.65PA, Main Pprs. 4 July 1642; CJ ii. 812b; LJ v. 104, 131b-132a; The Humble Petition of Captain William Booth, 1-2; A Declaration of the House of Commons in Vindication of…Their House 3-7; PJ iii. 12, 13-14; HMC Portland, i. 40. He also played a leading role in sustaining Hotham’s command at Hull during the first royalist siege of the town.66CJ ii. 564a, 611a; PJ ii. 281, 293, 336; HMC Portland, i. 38-9. He had returned to Westminster by 9 September, when he was appointed with John Pym and John Glynne to manage a conference with the Lords concerning the imminent departure of the earl of Essex to assume command of Parliament’s field army.67CJ ii. 760a; PJ iii. 340. By this point, Wray had himself been commissioned as a captain of horse in Parliament’s army, adopting the motto ‘That war is just which is necessary’ on his troop’s colours.68SP28/261, ff. 252, 255; DWL, Modern Ms, Folio 7, f. 14. Granted leave on 15 September to attend his command, he was among six Lincolnshire MPs who were subsequently reported to have brought in money and horses upon the propositions for the maintenance of Essex’s army.69CJ ii. 768a, 772b. Wray’s decision to side with Parliament was almost certainly linked to his godly religious convictions.

In October 1642, Wray and Thomas Hatcher led their troops into Yorkshire to the assistance of Captain John Hotham* (the Hothams and Wrays had been on close terms since John Hotham’s marriage in 1631 to Wray’s niece).70Supra, ‘John Hotham’; E. Riding RO, DDHB/57/2; England’s Memorable Accidents (17-24 Oct. 1642), 51-2 (E.240.45). They remained in Yorkshire until late December, forming part of the force with which Hotham and the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*) attempted to impede the southward march of the earl of Newcastle’s royalist army.71Add. 18777, f. 45; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 416, 417, 420; HMC Portland, i. 68-9; LJ v. 586; Dalton, Wrays of Glentworth, i. 234-46; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Christopher Wray’. Wray and Hotham were in the Lincolnshire forces that Willoughby of Parham led to defeat at Ancaster Heath in April 1643.72SP28/299, ff. 837, 849; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Christopher Wray’. With Newcastle’s army threatening his estates, and the soldiery of both sides becoming increasingly plunder-prone, Wray may have come to share the view of the peace party at Westminster that a swift accommodation with the king was the only safeguard against a complete breakdown in the social order. Captain Hotham certainly thought so, informing Newcastle in April 1643 that he had been treating with Wray and Sir Edward Ayscoghe – ‘men as considerable as any in the north’ – and had been ‘so earnest with them’ that he was confident they would declare for the king and bring most of the county with them if they were given assurances ‘that they shall have his Majesty’s favour and pardon’.73HMC Portland, i. 702-3. Early in May, Wray and Ayscoghe wrote to Parliament, praising Hotham’s ‘great industry and care’ in strengthening Lincoln’s defences and complaining of the tardiness of Oliver Cromwell* and his troops, ‘which long since were promised to our assistance’.74HMC Portland, i. 706. In another letter a few days later, Wray, Ayscoghe and Hotham defended themselves against allegations of negligence in Parliament’s service and again accused Cromwell of failing in his duty to assist them. They asked the Commons to send down ‘some soldiers of knowledge’ to take charge of the county’s military affairs.75HMC Portland, i.707-8; Bodl. Nalson III, f. 22.

But rather than remain with Hotham – who would shortly attempt to defect to the king – Wray returned to Westminster, and on 27 June 1643 he took the vow and covenant.76CJ iii. 146a. On 5 July, he informed the House of a design by the governor of Lincoln (one of Hotham’s subordinates, whom Wray and Ayscoghe had defended in a letter to Parliament of 12 May) to deliver up the city to the royalists.77Harl. 165, f. 107; Bodl. Nalson III, f. 22. That same day, he was appointed one of the managers of a conference concerning the safety of the northern counties.78CJ iii. 156a. Wray and another of the Hothams’ kinsmen, Sir Henry Anderson, opposed a motion on 14 July for assigning £3,500 sequestered from Sir John Hotham to Lord Fairfax; and on 2 August, he supported Captain Hotham’s account of his dealings with Sir William Savile* for delivering up York to Parliament.79Add. 31116, p. 126; Harl. 165, f. 133v. But there is no evidence that he went any further in defending the Hothams or in seeking to mitigate their punishment.

Apart from four relatively brief periods of absence on leave, Wray seems to have been in more or less regular attendance at Westminster between July 1643 and the autumn of 1645.80CJ iii. 373b, 501b; iv. 211b, 308b. During that period he was named to approximately 50 committees, many of them to do with the maintenance or conduct of the war effort. He also featured regularly on committees for the supply and encouragement of its commanders in the north, particularly Willoughby of Parham and Lord Fairfax.81CJ iii. 174b, 188b, 232b, 271a, 279b, 333a, 463a, 541a, 657a, 679b; iv. 114b, 120a, 267a; LJ vii. 453a; SP28/264, f. 113. He was active on the Committee for Irish Affairs* (Parliament’s principal executive committee for managing the war in Ireland), although he was never formally added to this body, and he was named to a series of ad hoc committees relating to the supply of the Protestant forces in Ireland.82Add. 4771, ff. 22v, 46, 62v; CJ iii. 236a, 599b, 640b; iv. 276a, 368b.

Although Wray apparently had no qualms about taking the Solemn League and Covenant in September 1643, there are no grounds for the claim that he had lined up behind Vane II, John Pym and other war party grandees in pushing for a military alliance with the Scottish Covenanters.83L. Glow, ‘Political affiliations in the House of Commons after Pym’s death’, HR xxxviii. 61, 62, 63. Indeed, the evidence suggests that from late 1643 he was aligned with the earl of Essex and his allies in seeking a moderate, negotiated settlement with the king. This reading of his political sympathies is consistent with his role as an apologist for Willoughby of Parham, whose poor military record and alleged patronage of men of doubtful allegiance and religion enabled the ‘fiery spirits’, led by Oliver Cromwell* and Colonel Edward King, to mount a successful campaign over the winter of 1643-4 for replacing him as commander-in-chief in Lincolnshire with Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester.84Add. 31116, p. 129; Harl. 165, f. 280v; C. Holmes, ‘Col. King and Lincs. politics, 1642-6’, HJ xvi. 454-8. The Commons summoned three of Wray’s sons as delinquents early in 1644 after they had assaulted a parliamentarian officer (the son of Sir Matthew Boynton*) in a tavern for criticising Willoughby of Parham.85CJ iii. 387b; Add. 18779, f. 61v; Add. 31116, p. 227. In 1645, King accused the Lincolnshire county committee, and in particular, it seems, Wray and Sir Edward Ayscoghe (another of Willoughby of Parham’s erstwhile supporters), of putting private interest and the maintenance of military authority before the welfare of the community.86CJ iv. 296a; E. King, A Discovery of the Arbitrary, Tyrannical and Illegal Actions of Some of the Committee of the County of Lincoln (1647), 10 (E.373.3); Holmes, ‘Col. King’, 451-84. Wray and Ayscoghe used King’s attack on the committee to obtain a Commons order obliging him to travel to Westminster to defend his actions, thereby preventing him from standing against Wray’s son, William Wray*, in the recruiter election at Great Grimsby in October 1645.87Infra, ‘Great Grimsby’; Holmes, ‘Col. King’, 473. But the quarrel between Wray and King seems to have been more personal than political, for both were associated with the Presbyterian interest and were hostile to the New Model army. Wray was not among the signatories to the Lincolnshire county committee’s letters to Parliament in the mid-1640s, denouncing King as a delinquent.

A number of Wray’s Commons’ appointments during the mid-1640s point to his alignment with Essex’s faction at Westminster. On 7 October 1643, for example, he was named with many of Essex’s leading partisans in the House to a committee for informing the lord general of a Commons’ resolution confirming the subordination of Sir William Waller* – the champion of London’s godly militants – to his command.88CJ iii. 266b. Even more revealing is Wray’s nomination among a group of prominent Essexians and opponents of the war party in a draft ordinance from the Lords in May 1644 for re-establishing the Committee of Both Kingdoms*. The Commons, led by the war-party grandees, would not accept the Lords’ nominees and revived a dormant bill for renewing the committee.89Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; LJ vi. 542b. In mid-November, Wray was named to a committee chaired by Essex’s ally, Robert Reynolds, for inquiring into the profits of parliamentary office – an issue of particular concern to the more peace-minded Members, who suspected that their opponents were spinning out the war for their own profit.90CJ iii. 695b.

In the debates over the Self-Denying Ordinance and new-modelling the armies in 1644-5, Wray almost certainly sided with those who wished to retain Essex as commander-in-chief. He signalled his Presbyterian loyalties clearly on 13 February 1645, when he was a teller with one of Essex’s most trusted lieutenants, Sir William Lewis, in support of a clause that the Lords had inserted in the New Model ordinance requiring Sir Thomas Fairfax’s* soldiers to take the Covenant.91CJ iv. 48a. The opposing tellers were the Independent faction’s champions Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire and Cromwell. A few weeks later (28 February), Wray was a majority teller with John Glynne against commissioning one of the nominees of Fairfax’s officer list, the radical Colonel Nathaniel Rich*.92CJ iv. 64b. And on 18 March, he was a majority teller with another leading Presbyterian, Sir Philip Stapilton, in favour of paying James Fiennes (Wray’s brother-in-law) £500 for his present subsistence.93CJ iv. 82b.

Although named to several committees that spring for recruiting and maintaining the New Model, Wray was also included on a committee set up on 2 April for acknowledging the faithfulness and industry of Essex, Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick and Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh and for satisfying the arrears of their officers.94CJ iv. 51a, 71a, 96b. He was among the six MPs – all either noted for their opposition to the New Model or for their Presbyterian piety – who were appointed on 15 April to congratulate the Scots commissioners on ‘the good success of their forces in Scotland’.95CJ iv. 111b. And a few days later he was named with Essex, Warwick, Denzil Holles, Stapilton and several other Presbyterians in the ordinance establishing a Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports*. Wray was an active member of this committee under its chairman, the Presbyterian grandee the earl of Warwick.96Supra, ‘Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports’; WO47/1, ff. 125v, 129v, 130v, 145v, 148v, 153v; Bodl. Rawl. C.416, passim; R. McCaughey, ‘The English Navy, Politics and Admin. 1640-9’ (New Univ. of Ulster PhD thesis, 1983), 275.

Wray’s links with the Presbyterian grandees appear to have strengthened over the summer of 1645. He was one of a group of leading Presbyterians – among them Essex, Willoughby of Parham and Stapilton – who worked with the Scots commissioners in June in trying to discredit their Independent rivals over the Savile affair.97Harl. 166, f. 219; D. Holles, Mems. (1699), 40; M. Mahony, ‘The Savile affair and the politics of the Long Parliament’, PH vii. 218-9. And he collaborated with Holles, Reynolds and Stapilton shortly afterwards to frustrate the efforts of Miles Corbett to prosecute the astrologer William Lilly in the Committee for Examinations*.98Supra, ‘Committee for Examinations’; The Lives of Those Eminent Antiquaries Elias Ashmole Esquire and Mr William Lilly (1774), 68-9. On 14 August, Wray was a minority teller with yet another leading Presbyterian, Sir John Clotworthy, in favour of deferring debate on whether to issue writs for holding new elections in the borough of Southwark.99CJ iv. 241b. The Presbyterians were opposed to ‘recruiting’ the House, fearing that the army would use its influence to return radicals. Wray’s last tellership was on 1 October, when he and Stapilton defeated the Independent pairing of Wray’s son-in-law Vane II and John Blakiston in a division on whether to establish a Commons’ committee to nominate officers for the Northern Association army. The Independents had sought to transfer this responsibility from the Northern Association to a Westminster committee, which they could expect to dominate.100Supra, ‘Northern Committee’; CJ iv. 296a.

With Newark, on the Nottinghamshire-Lincolnshire border, the focus of military operations in the north by December 1645, Wray was named with Ayscoghe and other Members from the two counties as a commissioner from both Houses to reside with the English and Scottish forces besieging the town.101CJ iv. 366b. The commissioners’ principal role was to supply and police the pay-starved and ill-disciplined Scottish army in order to prevent any ‘plundering, robbing or spoiling’ of the Newark area.102CJ iv. 374b-375a; LJ viii. 43b-44a. In mid-January 1646, the commissioners sent Wray and Willoughby of Parham back to Westminster to obtain relief for the distressed inhabitants of Nottinghamshire; and Wray was still in London when he died, on 6 February.103LJ viii. 96a, 192b; Dalton, Wrays of Glentworth, i. 254; ii. 365. He had evidently been sick since at least the previous summer, when he had been given leave of absence ‘to go to the waters’.104CJ iv. 211b. He was buried at St Giles-in-the-Fields on 13 February 1646.105Dalton, Wrays of Glentworth, ii. app. p. 17.

In his will, Wray asked to be buried without any public service and with no other monument but a black marble stone bearing the inscription ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am chief’.106PROB11/195, f. 291v. He left two of his manors in Lincolnshire and other property in the county in trust to his widow, Sir Edward Ayscoghe and Vane II to raise portions worth £10,500 for his four younger daughters.107PROB11/195, ff. 291v-292; C8/318/274-5. Wray’s son and heir William represented Great Grimsby in the Long Parliament (he was secluded at Pride’s Purge), in all three Cromwellian Parliaments and in the 1660 Convention.108Infra, ‘William Wray’.