WARWICK, Philip (1609-83), of Westminster, and Frognal, Chislehurst, Kent.

Warwick’s family was said to have been descended from the Warwicks (or Warthwykes) of Cumberland and bore the same arms. However, it could trace its ancestry only as far back as his grandfather, the organist of Hereford cathedral in the 1580s.42Vis. Kent, 174; Wood, Fasti, i. 505; Old Cheque-Bk. ed. Rimbault, 207; W. Shaw, The Succession of Organists of the Chapel Royal and the Cathedrals of Eng. and Wales, 134. Warwick’s father – who, like the young Philip, signed himself ‘Warrick’43SP16/319/41, f. 86. – replaced Orlando Gibbons as organist of the Chapel Royal in 1625, but there is no evidence for the antiquary Anthony Wood’s assertion that he was also organist of Westminster Abbey.44CSP Dom. 1625-6, p. 541; Old Cheque-Bk. ed. Rimbault, 11, 207; Shaw, Succession of Organists, 7.

In June 1629, Warwick was granted, in reversion, the office of clerk of the signet; and by mid-1633 he had entered the service of his ‘distant relative’, the queen’s master of horse George Lord Goring† (father of the future royalist general George Goring*).45Coventry Docquets, 175, 184; CSP Dom. 1633-4, p. 87; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Philip Warwick’. Having travelled to the continent late in 1633, he spent some time in Geneva, subscribing at the Academy, where he was reportedly under the tutelage of the Calvinist theologian Giovanni Diodati (uncle of John Milton’s friend Charles Diodati).46SP16/248/82, f. 190v; Wood, Fasti, i. 505; Oxford DNB, ‘Charles Diodati’. From Geneva, Warwick travelled to Paris, and by August 1634 he had volunteered as a pikesman – probably in George Goring’s regiment – in the English forces fighting the Spanish in The Netherlands, where he also acted as an intelligencer for Secretary of State Sir Francis Windebanke*.47Supra, ‘George Goring’; CSP Dom. 1633-4, p. 578; 1634-5, pp. 35, 189. In 1636, he became secretary to the lord treasurer, Bishop William Juxon – a post he retained after succeeding to the office of clerk of the signet in November 1638.48CSP Dom. 1635-6, p. 301; 1638-9, p. 103. As clerk of the signet, Warwick would have enjoyed the influence that went with access to the secretaries of state and a salary and gratuities of at least £240 a year.49T56/5, p. 146; The Household Accts. of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1635-42 ed. L. James (C. of E. Rec. Soc. xxiv), 68, 78, 197; Aylmer, King’s Servants, 204. He was already wealthy enough by 1634 to purchase (for £2,500) the mortgage of the manor of Frognal, in Kent – a property worth £200 a year.50SP23/192, pp. 721-2.

If Warwick stood as a court nominee in the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640 – as he would do in the elections to the Long Parliament later that year – it has left no trace in the records. In the autumn, he was returned for two boroughs – New Romney in Kent and New Radnor Boroughs in Wales. He was also recommended to the Cornish borough of Grampound by the duchy of Cornwall council, but without success.51Supra, ‘Grampound’. His patron at New Romney was the king’s bedchamber man and lord warden of the Cinque Ports, James Stuart, 4th duke of Lennox, whom Warwick admired and was ‘in some good measure well acquainted with the posture of his affairs at court’.52Supra, ‘New Romney’; Warwick, Mems. Charles I (1701), 144. But how Warwick managed to prevail at New Radnor, where he enjoyed no proprietorial interest or known family connections, is not clear. Perhaps the likeliest explanation is that he was recommended by the borough’s MP in the 1620s Parliaments, Charles Price*. Price was deputy steward of the lordship of Maelienydd (which included the constableship of Radnor Castle) and had strong connections with George Goring and with the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) – one of the crown’s electoral managers in 1640.53Supra, ‘New Radnor Boroughs’; ‘Charles Price’. Warwick opted to sit for New Radnor and was replaced at New Romney by Lennox’s secretary, Thomas Webb.54CJ ii. 21b.

Warwick received only three appointments in the Long Parliament – to committees for the redress of grievances concerning tonnage and poundage (2 Dec. 1640); to consider a petition from Weymouth against the customs officers (21 Dec.); and on a bill for punishing and fining members of the 1640 Convocation (27 Apr. 1641).55CJ ii. 43a, 55a, 129a. His only known contribution to debate during the early months of this ‘deplorable and dismal Parliament’, as he later termed it, was on 21 December 1640, when he informed the House that the lord treasurer had lately received letters from the king signifying his abandonment of the imposition on salt.56Northcote Note Bk. 88; Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 153. He regarded Parliament’s prosecution of the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) as ‘very unjustifiable’, an exercise in ‘arbitrary power’, and he voted on 21 April 1641 against his attainder.57Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 111, 155, 161; Procs. LP iv. 42, 51. He may also have had reservations about taking the Protestation, for he did not do so until 5 May – two days after the great majority of Members had taken the oath – and in the company of his fellow courtiers Sir Thomas Jermyn and Endymion Porter.58CJ ii. 135b. In a debate on 3 August concerning legislation for impeaching those clergy involved in introducing the new Canons, Warwick moved (successfully) that his master, Lord Treasurer Juxon, had had no hand in that policy and therefore that his name should be removed from the list of proscribed bishops.59Procs. LP vi. 182, 185; Oxford DNB, ‘William Juxon’.

By the autumn of 1641, Warwick was evidently in close communication not only with Webb, but also with the clerk of the privy council, Edward Nicholas†, who had been charged with the responsibility of organising the king’s party at Westminster while Charles was in Scotland.60Nicholas Pprs. i. 38, 46, 53; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 392-3. Part of a letter from Warwick to Webb, giving details of parliamentary proceedings, was read in the Commons on 4 November, the writer being described merely as ‘some Member of this House’. Denzil Holles having urged that the writer’s identity be discovered, Warwick satisfied the House the next day (5 November) with ‘an ingenious acknowledgment’ that the letter was his handiwork.61D’Ewes (C), 86. He seems to have defied the parliamentary leadership more directly on 7 December in response to Sir Arthur Hesilrige’s introduction that day of a draft bill for transferring control of the militia and navy from the king to the Houses – although the evidence for Warwick’s speech is confined to a single source (the commonplace book of William Drake*). He began by taking aim at Charles’s leading opponents at Westminster

Cunning, ambitious men first fix their opinions, next set their chaplains to maintain them. The Parliament, by this long sitting, have come to know their own strength so well that they have learned that damnable secret of making and unmaking a king at pleasure, whereby the foundation of all monarchy, which is the due reverence towards the loin royal [i.e. the royal line], is so irreparably shaken that, like the lost state of innocency, [it] can never be restored; so that we are like to grow to such a military anarchy as did the Praetorian bands in Rome in their empire, till they reduced it to nothing.62HEHL, Ms HM 55603, f. 36v.

Yet if Warwick did indeed make such a speech, it is surprising that it went unrecorded by any of the parliamentary diarists, or that it failed to provoke calls for his censure at the bar of the House. In an effort on 27 January 1642 to allay Members’ anger at an attempt by Lennox (now duke of Richmond) to have the Lords adjourned for six months, Warwick informed the House that the duke had sent arms and ammunition to support the Protestant war effort in Ireland.63PJ i. 197-8. The next day (28 Jan.), Warwick was ordered to attend a committee of both Houses for investigating ‘ill counsellors’ at court, in order ‘to give satisfaction ... of such provisions as have been sent by the duke of Richmond into Ireland’.64CJ ii. 400a, 401a. On 7 February, the House ordered Warwick to expedite a royal order for shipping provisions and clothing to Ireland customs-free.65CJ ii. 418b.

Warwick had probably abandoned his seat in the Commons by the spring of 1642; and on 16 June he was among a group of MPs – mostly future royalists – who were declared absent at the call of the House.66CJ ii. 626. His decision to side with king’s party in the civil war was all but inevitable given his strong personal loyalty to Charles, his reverence for ‘the regal prerogative’ and the ‘sacred order’ of episcopacy and his evident admiration for Laudian divinity.67Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 48, 75, 78-82, 164-5, 176-7, 185, 186, 205-6. ‘When I think of dying,’ he would write many years later, ‘it is one of my comforts, that when I part from the dunghill of this world, I shall meet ... King Charles and all those faithful spirits that had virtue enough to be true to him, the church and the laws unto the last’.68Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 331.

Warwick fought at the battle of Edgehill in October, as part of an irregular cavalry unit, the king’s volunteer guard of noblemen and gentlemen.69Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 230-1. He attended his place at court for most of the war, residing in University College, Oxford, and – according to Anthony Wood – ‘his counsel was much relied upon by his Majesty’.70Wood, Fasti, i. 505. Twice during 1643, the king sent him on unsuccessful missions to persuade the marquess of Newcastle, the commander of the royalist forces in the north, to march his army southwards.71Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 242-5, 264. Warwick sat in the Oxford Parliament in 1644, signing its letter to the earl of Essex on 27 January, urging him to compose a peace.72Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 574. On 5 February, he was among a group of MPs whom the Commons at Westminster disabled from sitting ‘for deserting the service of the House and being in the king’s quarters and adhering to that party’.73CJ iii. 389b. In April 1644, he was at Newark, where he joined Goring, Henry Belasyse*, Robert Sutton* and other royalist gentlemen in a letter to the king, urging him to send Prince Rupert northwards to support the marquess of Newcastle.74Add. 18981, f. 163. In September 1645, Warwick and Webb were identified by a friend of George Lord Digby* at court as supporters of Rupert’s efforts to seek an accommodation with Parliament.75CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 141. Writing his Memoires 30 years later, Warwick would evince little admiration for Digby but plenty for Rupert.76Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 226-7, 269, 274, 279, 290-1.

Wood attributed to Warwick a pamphlet published early in 1646, advising the Commons to heed the king’s overtures for peace rather than ‘pursue the destruction of this land in the continuance of this unnatural war’.77Wood, Fasti, i. 506; A Letter to Mr Speaker Lenthall (1646). In May 1646, following the king’s flight from Oxford, Warwick was appointed one of the royalist commissioners to negotiate the city’s surrender.78Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 279. In August, he petitioned to compound on the Oxford articles, and the Committee for Compounding fined him £447 18s – that is, at one tenth of his estate. He had paid half of this sum when he appealed, on 11 January 1649, and secured its reduction to £241; and later that year the Rump granted him a pardon. His second wife, Lady Joan Boteler, faced a heftier fine as the widow of a royalist officer.79CCC 1447, 1462.

In 1647 the army permitted Warwick to join Charles at Hampton Court, where he acted as one the king’s ‘scribbling men of the pen’ during the negotiations over the Heads of the Proposals.80Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 303. In the summer or autumn of 1648, Sir John Temple* arranged for his brother-in-law, the episcopalian divine Henry Hammond, to be placed under Warwick’s custody in the latter’s house at Clapham, near Bedford. Warwick thought highly of Hammond and shared his deep and abiding attachment to the Prayer-Book Church of England and, it would appear, his interest in heterodox Protestant theology – specifically, the writings of the Polish Socinian, Jan Crell.81Harl. 6942, f. 28; Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 282; Packer, Transformation of Anglicanism, 12, 29, 35-6, 204, 205; Oxford DNB, ‘Henry Hammond’. In August 1648, Warwick was among the royalist grandees and penmen who were allowed to attend the king at the treaty of Newport on the Isle of Wight.82CJ v. 694b; LJ x. 474b, 484b; Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 322. Charles evidently reposed great trust in Warwick, whose notes on the day’s negotiations he used in dictating dispatches to the prince of Wales concerning the treaty proceedings.83Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 325.

Warwick was absent on private business when the king was seized by the army in November 1648 and carried to Hurst Castle. His account in the Memoires of Charles’s final days was obtained from Bishop Juxon, to whom the king, on the eve of his execution on 30 January 1649, commended Warwick’s fidelity: ‘My lord ... I must remember one that hath had relation to you and myself; tell Charles [the prince of Wales] ... he hath been an useful and honest man unto me’.84Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 329, 331, 341. Despite this recommendation to the new king, Warwick opted to remain in England rather than join Charles II’s court, and he also tried to persuade Secretary Nicholas to return home and compound.85Nicholas Pprs. i. 131-3.

At some point during Oliver Cromwell’s* time as protector, Warwick was detained for six weeks in the custody of the protectoral council, presumably on suspicion of complicity in royalist plotting.86Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 248. But there is no evidence that he was actively working against the Cromwellian regime, beyond assisting the episcopalian clergyman Eleazar Duncon in finding candidates to fill vacant church positions in England.87Clarendon SP iii. pp. ci-cii; Oxford DNB, ‘Eleazar Duncon’. In May 1659, following the fall of the protectorate, (Sir) Edward Hyde* was informed by one of his correspondents that Warwick was in favour of ‘sitting still’ when most other royalists wanted to attempt a coup.88CCSP iv. 195. Hyde received a report that autumn, claiming that Warwick had custody of six or seven thousand pounds to help advance a royal restoration.89CCSP iv. 403, 510. It was also reported that Warwick was involved in making approaches on the king’s behalf to the army grandee John Lambert*.90CCSP iv. 403, 410, 467, 485. ‘The king knows very well Mr Warwick’s affection and zeal to his service and his abilities to promote it’, Hyde wrote to one of his agents in January 1660, ‘and that you do, upon all occasions, communicate with him and transmit his advice to your other friends’.91Clarendon SP iii. 649. Some royalists were dismayed by Warwick’s willingness to act as an intermediary between the king’s party and the leaders of the Presbyterian interest. In his support for conciliation and ‘moderation in all things’, he was accused (falsely) of wishing to barter away ‘crown, church and sequestered lands’.92Clarendon SP iii. 705; Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 428; CCSP iv. 561, 580, 602-3, 614, 622, 683; v. 25; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 307.

As his correspondence with Hyde and the king reveals, Warwick welcomed the fact that the final dissolution of the Long Parliament in March 1660 meant that no terms for settlement could be presented in its name; and he looked forward to the demise of the Presbyterian church interest and the restoration of personal monarchy.93CCSP iv. 611, 623, 683. At some point that spring, he joined many royalist nobility and gentry ‘now residing in and about the city of London’, in a declaration thanking General George Monck* for his courage in asserting ‘the public liberty’. The signatories also renounced any intention to take revenge upon their parliamentarian enemies and declared their loyalty ‘to the present power, as it now resides in the council of state’.94A Declaration of the Nobility and Gentry that Adhered to the Late King (1660, 669 f.24.69).

Warwick was rewarded at the Restoration with a knighthood and re-instatement to his lucrative offices as clerk of the signet and secretary to the lord treasurer (now Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of Southampton).95Eg. 2542, f. 365; CTB i. 50-3; Officials of the Secretaries of State 1660-1782 ed. J.C. Sainty, 114; Office-Holders in Modern Britain: Treasury Officials 1660-1870 ed. Sainty, 30. Defeated as a candidate for Radnorshire in the elections to the Cavalier Parliament in 1661, he was returned for his native Westminster, almost certainly with the crown’s backing. He was an active Member of this Parliament, in which, on the great majority of issues, he was a prominent supporter of the court interest.96HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Sir Philip Warwick’; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Philip Warwick’. According to Gilbert Burnet, Lord Treasurer Southampton ‘left the business of the treasury’ entirely to Warwick, who was lavishly praised by Samuel Pepys for his ‘great industry’, his honesty and his formidable knowledge of the state’s financial machinery.97Burnet, i. 171; Pepys Diary, iv. 305, 317; v. 68-70, 327-8; vi. 46, 75; vii. 382. Pepys also admired Warwick as a ‘pious, good man and a professor of a philosophical manner of life and principles like Epictetus [the ancient Greek Stoic philosopher], whom he cites in many things’.98Pepys Diary, vi. 110. When the treasury was put in commission following Southampton’s death in May 1667, Warwick was replaced as secretary by Sir George Downing*. Warwick had probably gained about £2,000 a year from his post as secretary, which given the opportunities it would have afforded him for self-enrichment showed considerable restraint on his part. Burnet thought Warwick ‘an incorrupt man, and during seven years management of the treasury [he] made but an ordinary fortune out of it’.99Burnet, i. 174; HP Commons 1660-1690. He remained active at Westminster in the government interest, although he deviated from the court line in his firm opposition to toleration either for Catholics or Dissenters and in his preference for an anti-French foreign policy.

Warwick’s long-standing distrust of the French and of their friends at court – such as Digby and James, 1st duke of Hamilton – is reflected at various points in his Memoires, which were written during the long prorogation of Parliament from November 1675 to February 1677.100Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 37-43, 70-1, 73, 97, 103-5, 108-9, 129, 131-2, 134-5, 138, 139-40, 192, 203, 268, 274, 279, 292, 319-20, 373-4, 426; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Philip Warwick’. In 1678, he wrote by way of appendix to the Memoires a Discourse on Government, which was published posthumously in 1694.101Warwick, A Discourse of Government as Examined by Reason, Scripture, and Law of the Land (1694), sig. A7. In this work, he argued that although the monarchs of England were absolute and that the doctrine of legislative co-ordination was ‘like to prove the mother of a civil war’, yet the kingdom enjoyed a ‘limited and mixed monarchy’ in which sovereign power was exercised largely through constitutional forms. Nevertheless, princes were ultimately accountable to God alone, who required ‘obedience and non-resistance to prevent civil dissensions, which are usually worse than tyranny. For tyrants usually extend not their oppression upon a whole nation, but upon some particular persons they are displeased with, whilst civil war, or popular commotions, spread over the whole land’.102Warwick, A Discourse of Government, 19-20, 22, 185.

The dissolution of the Cavalier Parliament in 1679 marked the end of Warwick’s career at Westminster. He died on 15 January 1683 and was buried two days later (17 Jan.) in Chislehurst church.103‘Biographical acct. of Sir Philip Warwick’, 782; Lysons, Environs of London, iv. 355. In his will, Warwick declared that he died ‘a true son of the Church of England as, having examined and chosen as well as been born in her communion, she is a true member of the catholic apostolic church, from which Rome is grossly swerved’. He left the bulk of his estate to his only son Philip and charged it with legacies totalling approximately £530.104PROB11/372, ff. 383v-384v. Philip Warwick junior, a budding diplomat, died childless a few months after his father.105Oxford DNB, ‘Philip Warwick’.

Warwick’s most enduring legacy was the Memoires, which were published posthumously in 1701 and again in 1813. Looking back on Charles I’s reign from the late 1670s, Warwick concluded that the king had been forced from the outset to defend his sovereignty against the ‘attacks of a popular faction’ that ‘made religion their shelter for rebellion’.106Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 1, 2. Nevertheless, the mischief had its roots in factions at court that had fed ‘the peccant humours of the City and country’ and hence the throne was ‘endangered by those whose obligations it is to uphold it and who most commonly suffer with it’.107Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 5, 9. Charles’s primary objective, according to Warwick, should have been ‘to curb the innovating humour of an ambitious sort of men, who made way for their own greatness by making parliamentary authority rival regal [authority], than to satisfy the subject in general’.108Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 62. In failing in this task, Charles initiated a chain reaction in which each change proved fatal to its instrument. Thus the nobility were corrupted by the commoners, to whom they were as servile as they were haughty towards the king; the Commons, who had ‘lorded it over the Lords’, were overawed by their own army; the army proved disobedient to their generals, as the latter had been to those who commissioned them; and the sectarians overrode the Presbyterians, who had overridden the episcopal clergy, only to succumb to divisions themselves. Amid this confusion, Providence at last owned the cause of the royal victim and ‘his posterity was wonderfully re-established’.109Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 9-11, 296-7. Warwick revered Charles I for his ‘sincerity and goodness’, his piety and for his ‘moderation of mind’ and temperate course of life.110Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 1, 10, 64-70, 72-4, 77, 182, 326-7, 329-30, 346-7. But he lamented his inability to overawe either friend or foe and that he lacked ‘the rigid policies’ and the ‘daring and active a courage’ that were ‘necessary for a good prince towards contumacious and innovating spirits’.111Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 46, 74, 228.