PEDLEY, Nicholas (1615-85), of Lincoln’s Inn, Mdx., and Abbotsleigh, Hunts.

The Pedleys could claim no great antiquity of descent and it was only as recently as the late sixteenth century, when this MP’s grandfather, John Pedley, was living there, that they can first be associated with Abbotsleigh in the southernmost part of Huntingdonshire. The lands at Abbotsleigh passed on John Pedley’s death in 1602 to his eldest son, James, while his second son, Nicholas senior, pursued a career in the church, becoming rector of Springfield Richards, Essex. By 1621 Nicholas senior was dead and it is likely that his son, Nicholas junior, then aged no more than six years old, was brought up in his uncle’s household.29Vis. Hunts. 78; Le Neve’s Pedigrees, 273-4; Al. Cant. However, his wardship was granted in 1629 to a local Springfield gentleman, Ruke Church.30Coventry Docquets, 469; Vis. Essex 1552, 1558, 1570, 1612 and 1634 (Harl. Soc. xiii-xiv), i. 376. In time, James Pedley realised that his own marriage would be childless and so came to regard his nephew as his heir. Even so, it was still felt necessary for Nicholas to train as a professional lawyer. His marriage in 1641 to a daughter of Robert Bernard*, the 1st earl of Manchester’s steward, had a double advantage, for the Bernards were establishing themselves as a family of some importance within the county and, initially at least, much of Pedley’s legal practice was probably built up as an adjunct to that of his father-in-law. When not in London, Pedley seems to have been still living with his uncle at Abbotsleigh and it was there that the two of them took the Protestation in May 1641.31G. Proby, ‘The Protestation returns for Hunts.’, Trans. of the Cambs. and Hunts. Arch. Soc. v. 349. Given that James Pedley was now in his seventies, it is likely that Nicholas had already taken over control of the estates, while, at the same time, completing his legal training.32Hunts. RO, Acc. 148/2/299-300. There is no evidence that he played any part in the civil war, but by the late 1640s he was beginning to be included by Parliament on some of the local commissions.33A. and O. As justices of the peace in the spring of 1646, he and his father-in-law took the statements for those in Huntingdonshire who made witchcraft allegations as part of the East Anglian witchcraze.34J. Davenport, The Witches of Huntingdon (1646), 1-2, 5-11. His purchase in 1648 from Sir Oliver Cromwell† of a substantial estate at Wistow (where his tenants included John Sewster, the brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell*) was presumably made in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time before he inherited the Abbotsleigh estate.35Hunts. RO, Acc. 848/5; Acc. 783/7; Add. 33462, f. 140; Lansd. 921, f. 79v; C9/13/125. That came to pass with James Pedley’s death in 1651.36PROB11/219/331. The advent of the commonwealth and later of the protectorate seems not to have interrupted Pedley’s limited service as a local officeholder. He also, through his father-in-law, remained closely linked to the Montagus. In 1655 he and Lancelot Lake† became the trustees for the jointure lands provided for the new wife of Viscount Mandeville (Robert Montagu†), the 2nd earl of Manchester’s son and heir.37Norris Museum, St Ives, UMS/KIMBN/177.

The selection of Pedley by the Huntingdonshire electorate in 1656 to sit alongside Henry Cromwell alias Williams* and Edward Montagu II* represented a more conservative choice than that of Stephen Phesant*, who had sat with Cromwell and Montagu in the previous Parliament. It would probably not be unfair to assume that Pedley had stood in order to advance his legal career by establishing a favourable reputation for his talents in Parliament, and, once they had assembled, the Commons were quick to make use of Pedley’s legal expertise. Almost immediately Pedley was appointed to the committees on the bill to abolish feudal tenure in Scotland (23 Sept.) and to consider abuses in the use of writs of certiorari (25 Sept.).38CJ vii. 427b, 428a. Thereafter he seems to have specialised, becoming particularly associated with the problem of personal indebtedness. This was most obvious in his involvement in the various attempts to introduce legislation to regulate this field. He sat on the committees which revised and then considered the second bill which proposed putting additional pressure for repayment on small-scale debtors. Perhaps dissatisfied with the lack of progress which that bill then made, Pedley introduced his own bill for the relief of prisoners and creditors on 3 December. However, this failed at its second reading on 23 February 1657.39CJ vii. 447a, 449a, 494a, 496a; Burton’s Diary, i. 5. He had in the meantime been named to sit on the committee to investigate one of the private debt cases which had come before the Commons, that of George and Sarah Rodney (22 Nov.), and it was he who reported the committee’s findings to the House on 5 January 1657.40CJ vii. 457b, 478b; Burton’s Diary, i. 300-1. This set the pattern for much of that session, with him being named on a regular basis to many of the other committees appointed to settle cases of a similar sort or to deal with private estate bills.41CJ vii. 465a, 484a, 488a, 488b, 491b-492a, 494b, 495b, 498a. That he was appointed to act as their reporter on a number of occasions indicates that he played a full part in their deliberations.42CJ vii. 495b, 498a. He probably also chaired the committee on fen drainage.43CJ vii. 472b; Burton’s Diary, i. 345.

Pedley had a direct professional interest in the bill to prevent new buildings in and around London, because it is clear that he was acting on behalf of Lincoln’s Inn to defend its interests in its planned development in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He was involved with this from the outset, being named to the committee which devised the legislation (19 Feb. 1657) and the committee to which the bill was referred (9 May), but had to be added to the subsidiary committee on the proviso concerning sailors on 11 June so that he could press for a similar proviso for the Lincoln’s Inn scheme. He soon got results, reporting back to the House eight day later on these and another proviso.44CJ vii. 493b, 531b, 555a, 563b-654a; LI Black Bks. ii. 469-71. Significantly, having gained this assurance, the benchers of Lincoln’s Inn concluded their agreement with the contractors that same day. Pedley had earlier argued that the lord protector should nominate the commission created to enforce this new Act, and he used the debate on this subject on 9 June to complain that the 2nd earl of Clare (John Holles†) had built Clare Market but had built no churches.45Burton’s Diary, ii. 161, 206-7.

Pedley otherwise commented on religious issues only on very rare occasions and, when he did so, he usually focused on the legal perspective. It was characteristic of him that the arguments he used in favour of leniency in the James Naylor heresy case were legal ones. In his speech on 15 December he maintained that neither the laws of God nor of man required Naylor to be executed for the crime of blasphemy and that putting him to death would only create a martyr. Whether his suggestion, made in the following day’s debate and seconded by William Purefoy I*, that Naylor should be imprisoned on the Scilly Isles was intended to be an amelioration of his sentence is not clear.46Burton’s Diary, i. 51, 137-8, 155. He was far less sympathetic when it came to the question of Catholic recusants. It would appear that Thomas Burton* asked Pedley and Richard Croke* to attend the meeting of the committee for recusants on 11 December 1656 to support his call for the old apparatus of persecution to be revived, although, in the event, neither Pedley nor Croke turned up.47Burton’s Diary, i. 117. Pedley showed more interest when the bill to discover popish recusants came before the Commons, with him acting as teller on 29 May 1657 in the division on the form of the oath contained in it.48CJ vii. 541b. The couple of committees on ecclesiastical affairs to which he was named both involved disputed legal titles to livings, while the Plymouth vicarage bill, the subject of his maiden speech on 3 December 1656, was mainly concerned with the leasing of land by the parish.49CJ vii. 449b, 485b; Burton’s Diary, i. 1.

Pedley supported the Humble Petition and Advice, judging by his role in the passage of the related legislation and from his subsequent remarks about the Other House. Ever the lawyer, Pedley was fully aware of the complexity of the issues raised by the Humble Petition and so gave his support to the proliferation of measures supplementing it.50Burton’s Diary, ii. 10. One such measure was the separate Act clarifying the status of the various statutes passed in 1653 and 1654 in the light of Cromwell’s doubts about the sixteenth clause of the Humble Petition. Given that Pedley reported back to the House on 28 April on the wording of the key passages in the preamble, he had probably played a major part in drafting this bill.51CJ vii. 524a-b, Burton’s Diary, ii. 47, 67, 79. On 27 May he opposed the printing of the Humble Petition until the Additional Petition was ready, in case the former was misrepresented, and was named to the committee to draft further bills arising from the votes on the Humble Petition.52Burton’s Diary, ii. 135; CJ vii. 540b. His final committee appointment of this session was that created three days before the prorogation to decide what still needed to be done to implement the provisions of the Humble Petition.53CJ vii. 570b. Overall, this first session had been a distinguished debut for Pedley. He had shown himself to be an effective participant in routine committee work, he had been called on every so often to act as a teller, and some of his speeches showed promise. His knowledge of procedure visibly developed as the session progressed.54Burton’s Diary, i. 1, 51, 216, 227; ii. 193; CJ vii. 534a, 542a, 566b.

Pedley’s priority in the short second session of this Parliament in early 1658 seems to have been the bill which would have united the four parishes within the town of Huntingdon. His addition to the committee considering the bill for the maintenance of ministers no doubt arose from his attempts to lobby support for this measure, but, if he hoped to use the maintenance bill as a vehicle for his own specific proposal, he quickly changed tack. The following day (22 Jan.) he introduced a separate bill and he was later first-named to the committee appointed to consider it. He is known to have chaired at least one of that committee’s meetings.55CJ vii. 580b, 588a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 336, 441. As with all the other bills considered during this session, this measure came to nothing. Another committee on which he played an active part was that appointed to examine the inventory of the Commons’ archives; Pedley was among the members of this committee who, unsatisfied with the inventory, paid an unannounced visit to the clerk of the Parliaments, Henry Scobell, to check his records for themselves.56CJ vii. 588a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 403-4. Pedley’s most important intervention on the floor of the House came on 29 January in the debate on whether the Other House could also be referred to as the House of Lords. Pedley reviewed the relevant legal precedents to come to the conclusion that the Other House had been summoned in the same way as the House of Lords had originally been and could thus be regarded as comparable to it.57Burton’s Diary, ii. 381-2. A further intervention the following week saw him arguing against one of the procedural tactics Sir Arthur Hesilrige* intended to impede recognition of the Other House.58Burton’s Diary, ii. 439. Pedley had also spoken during the debate on the application of William Craven, 1st Baron Craven, to regain his confiscated estates, although his motion that Craven’s counsel be summoned may have reflected a concern for due process than sympathy for this royalist peer.59Burton’s Diary, ii. 345.

The restoration of the old franchises for the 1659 elections might have caused Pedley some problems, for Huntingdonshire thereby lost one of its county seats, but Edward Montagu II had been summoned to the Other House, allowing Pedley and Henry Cromwell alias Williams to be re-elected for the two remaining seats. Pedley used his place in this Parliament mainly in order uphold the 1657 settlement. His interventions during the debates on Henry Neville*, the republican critic of the protectorate whose election as MP for Reading was disputed, seem to have been intended to promote Neville’s expulsion.60Burton’s Diary, iii. 19, 20, 21, 54. Pedley clearly backed the bill to recognise Richard Cromwell’s title as lord protector, seconding the motion on 7 February summoning those MPs in Westminster Hall to ensure that as many of his fellow lawyers as possible were present to support it.61Burton’s Diary, iii. 86, 153, 196.

The full extent of Pedley’s constitutional conservatism was revealed when he addressed the question of relations with the Other House on 22 February. He was confident that the existing laws would ‘well fall in with the frame that you propound; a monarchical government, by a single person and two Houses of Parliament’, and suggested that an examination of English history in the fifteenth century would show that ‘in cases of necessity, the king and Commons together might have made a constitution suitable to the good of the people’.62Burton’s Diary, iii. 405. He returned to this theme on 1 March when he told the Commons that, ‘if you make not a settlement now, I fear the consequence, that good men in the nation will think you cannot settle them’, and that these good men would therefore seek the settlement they longed for ‘by forced means, from beyond the seas’.63Burton’s Diary, iii. 550. He then argued at length that peers who had sat in the old House of Lords had no automatic right to be summoned to sit in the Other House.64Burton’s Diary, iii. 551-4; Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, pp. 156-7. That Pedley was still suspicious of a restoration of the monarchy at this time is also suggested by his attitude towards the expulsion of the royalist MP, Robert Danvers alias Villiers*; in acting as teller in the division on 12 February relating to this case, Pedley was probably favouring the view that Villiers should be imprisoned as well as expelled.65CJ vii. 603a.

Elected for Huntingdon to the Convention in 1660 with his brother-in-law, John Bernard*, Pedley came to accept the Restoration. Edward Montagu II, soon to become earl of Sandwich, was most annoyed by the selection of Pedley and Bernard.66Pepys’s Diary, i. 99. Pedley was, however, quick to re-establish cordial relations with Sandwich and the incident did no long-term harm to the influence of either of them in the borough.67Bodl. Carte 73, f. 515. If Pedley is to be believed, his failure to get re-elected in 1661 owed more to his own unwillingness to stand than to any reluctance on the part of the Huntingdon electorate to back him. The day after the Huntingdon election he told Sir Thomas Cotton* (whose son, John, had secured the senior seat) that

I have my desire: I have asserted my interest for myself, it appearing plainly that I might have been chosen if I would: nay I had more trouble to lose one place than I was solicitous to get the other.68BL, Cotton appendix LVIII, f. 56.

The following month he obtained a royal pardon for having sat in the 1656 and 1659 Parliaments.69PSO5/9, unfol. His knighthood in 1672 and his appointment as a serjeant-at-law three years later were the marks of a successful lawyer. His second wife, Anne, was the widow of Lawrence Torkington, who by his first marriage had been Robert Bernard’s other son-in-law and thus one of Pedley’s closest friends.70Vis. Hunts. 1684, 89; Hunts. RO, Acc. 15/220; Acc. 15/102-105. He re-entered Parliament in a contentious by-election in 1673, becoming an opponent of Lord Treasurer Danby (Sir Thomas Osborne†), but, as MP for Huntingdon again in the first 1679 Parliament, he later voted against exclusion. Samuel Pepys†, who made use of his services as a lawyer, thought him ‘a man of very good language and mighty civil, and I believe very upright’.71Pepys’s Diary, ix. 453.

Pedley lived to see the early months of James II’s reign, finally dying on 6 July 1685. A Latin epitaph by Richard Bentley, who was then his grandson’s tutor, was erected to his memory in St Mary’s, Huntingdon. This praised his ‘exceptional courtesy, hospitality and kindness’, adding that he had been elected to Parliament by means of ‘free and unbought votes’.72Peck, Desiderata Curiosa, i. 553; Lansd. 921, f. 35; RCHME Hunts. 149. His will sheds some light on his legal practice, for it shows that a significant proportion of his assets consisted of estates which had been acquired as collateral on unpaid loans he had made to a number of local landowners. The suspicion that he had had a personal interest in the various debt bills considered by the 1656 Parliament thus seems all the stronger. Pedley’s intention was that his second surviving son, John†, should enter the church and he left the advowson of Wistow to trustees, with instructions that they should, in due course, present John to the living.73PROB11/381/85. However, his principal heir, his eldest son, Robert, survived him only until 1687, whereupon John succeeded to this inheritance and trained instead as a lawyer. He was elected as MP for Huntingdon as a whig in 1706.74HP Commons 1690-1715. Sir Nicholas’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, had married Edward Stillingfleet, the dean of St Paul’s who went on to become bishop of Worcester.