DALLTON, John (1609-79), of St Werburgh, Derby, Derbys.

Dallton’s origins were relatively humble for an MP, even in the 1650s.18sig. SP28/257, unfol. (letter 10 May 1647). The son of a wealthy Nottingham vintner, he did not enter his pedigree until the herald’s visitation of 1662.19Borthwick, Prob. Reg. 35, ff. 261-2; Vis. Derbys. 17. His mother’s remarriage to one of the aldermen of Derby probably explains the family’s move to the town at some point after his father’s death.20Glover, Derbys. ii. 487. Dallton had established himself as a woollen-draper by 1641, when he went into partnership with another draper, leasing a shop for £40 a year in Irongate, Derby, and investing (or so he later claimed) £1,500 in the venture. Their customers included some of the leading county gentry.21C6/39/135; C6/144/46.

Early in 1642, Dallton signed a petition from the Derbyshire gentry urging the king to return to Westminster ‘for the reformation of those great grievances which had crept both into the church and commonwealth’.22G. Sitwell, ‘The Derbys. petition of 1641’, Jnl. of the Derbys. Arch. and Natural Hist. Soc. 22, 23. In November of that year, he contributed £20 towards the parliamentary war-effort, and in 1643 he donated clothing for the soldiers of Derby’s parliamentarian garrison. However, he was imprisoned later that year by the town’s governor Sir John Gell for having refused to pay his share of an assessment for the garrison until Gell had recompensed him for £10 worth of stock that he had taken from Dallton’s shop.23J.T. Brighton, ‘Sir John Gell, gov. of Derby 1642-6’, Jnl. of the Bakewell and District Historical Soc. ix. 10, 11-12. In the protracted dispute generated by the Derby recruiter election in November 1645, one of the witnesses for Gell’s brother Thomas Gell* claimed that Dalton had been imprisoned in 1643 ‘for being a malignant and was committed by Mr [Nathaniel] Hallowes* and that Sir John Gell continued him in prison upon the same offence’.24Derbys. RO, D258/9/5/18, p. 10. But Dallton insisted that he had been imprisoned for refusing Gell’s unjust and illegal demands for money.25Derbys. RO, D258/12/16, pp. 37-8. That he was appointed to the parliamentarian sub-committee of accounts for Derbyshire and was regarded by the county committee as an ‘honest and able’ man, is further evidence that he was a ‘malignant’ only in the eyes of the Gells and their faction.26E113/11, unfol. (deposition of Gervase Bennett); SP28/260/1, f. 156; Derbys. RO, D1232/O/37. His harsh treatment by the Gells helps to explain his alignment with the anti-Gell faction among the leading townsmen.27Infra, ‘Derby’; Add. 28716, ff. 43v-46; Derbys. RO, D1232/O/59. In 1645 and 1646, he gave evidence against the Gells to both the Committee for Examinations* and the committee of privileges.28Add. 28716, ff. 43v-46; Derbys. RO, D258/12/16, pp. 37-8.

Elected an alderman of Derby by 1646, Dallton and his allies Hallowes and Gervase Bennett* emerged as the town’s leading figures under the Rump.29Supra, ‘Derby’; Derby Local Studies Lib. DBR/E/42, Derby Borough Recs. 1649-50; Deeds, no. 10889. In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, Dallton was returned for Derby along with his fellow alderman, Bennett.30Supra, ‘Derby’ He was named to only two committees – the committee of privileges (28 January) and a committee set up on 5 February to settle a godly ministry in Wales – and made no recorded contribution to debate.31CJ vii. 595a, 600b. His involvement in the tumult that Sir George Boothe’s* rebellion sparked off at Derby in the summer of 1659 was inadvertent – or at any rate the Rump authorities apparently accepted his excuses to that effect.32Derbys. RO, D1232/O/87. Re-elected for Derby to the 1660 Convention, he was among those Members whom Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, adjudged sympathetic to a Presbyterian church settlement.33G.F.T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 335. His appointment to the Derbyshire commission of peace in October 1660 was resented by some of the county’s royalists, who objected to him as a Presbyterian.34SP29/66/35, f. 52; S.C. Newton, ‘The gentry of Derbys. in the seventeenth century’, Derbys. Arch. Jnl. lxxxvi. 7. He was returned for Derby again to the Cavalier Parliament, but seems to have played little part in its proceedings.35HP Commons 1660-1690. There is no firm evidence for the claim that his removal from the bench in 1670 was on the grounds that he favoured dissenters.36C231/7, p. 375; HP Commons 1660-1690. Nevertheless, the leaders of the country interest at Westminster were hopeful of his support in the mid-1670s.37Browning, Danby, iii. 102.

Dallton died on 30 August 1679 and was buried in the chancel of St Werburgh’s church, Derby, on 1 September.38Add. 6705, f. 102; Vis. Derbys. 17. No will is recorded. Dallton was the only member of his family to enter Parliament.