WOLSELEY, Sir Charles (1630-1714), of Wolseley, Colwich, Staffs.

Background and early career

Wolseley belonged to a junior branch of one of the oldest gentry families in Staffordshire.32‘Collns. for a hist. of Pirehill hundred’ ed. F. Parker (Collns. for a Hist. of Staffs. 1914), 137; Aylmer, King’s Servants, 302. The Wolseleys were said to have been established at Wolseley, in the parish of Colwich, before the Norman Conquest, although the earliest property deeds relating to their estate in Wolseley date from the twelfth century.33Staffs. RO, Catalogue of Wolseley Pprs. D(W)1781; D(W)1781/1/1-2; ‘Pirehill hundred’ ed. Parker, 137, 140. They had provided MPs for Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1449 and Gatton, Surrey, in 1477-8, but otherwise had made relatively little impression upon local or national affairs.34Return of Members, i. 342, 365. The first member of the family to break into Staffordshire’s ruling elite in several generations, perhaps centuries, was Wolseley’s father, Robert Wolseley of Moreton. According to one report, Robert’s father (a second son) ‘was ever esteemed a base son of their house, and himself known within these 30 years in Stafford town to have been glad of a good meal’s meat’.35CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 170.

Despite his lack of a university education or formal legal training, Robert Wolseley obtained an under-clerkship to one of the six clerks of the chancery; and he had prospered sufficiently by 1625 to acquire a half-share in the clerkship of the patents in chancery, worth about £500 a year.36‘Pirehill hundred’ ed. Parker, 144; Aylmer, King’s Servants, 303; CSP Dom. 1625-6, p. 29. Moreover, he seems to have had friends in high places, for on his being made a baronet in 1628 the usual creation fee of £1,095 was waived.37CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 380. Over the course of the late 1620s and early 1630s, he raised £7,275 from the proceeds of his office, his wife’s marriage portion and by mortgaging his estate to acquire from the senior branch of the family the manor of Wolseley, which became his principal residence.38Staffs. RO, D(W)1781/5/8/4, 6; Aylmer, King’s Servants, 303-4. Appointed to the Staffordshire bench in 1636, he quickly established himself as one of the county’s most active magistrates.39Staffs. RO, Q/SO/5, pp. 1, 142; Coventry Docquets, 72. Like his friend and fellow Staffordshire gentleman Richard Weston*, he sided with the king during the civil war and had yet to compound for his estate when he died in September 1646.40PROB11/197, f. 266; Wm. Salt. Lib. S.MS.502; Staffs. RO, D(W)1781/19/2/4.

Wolseley himself would later be described as a royalist, although he was probably too young to have played any meaningful role in the civil war.41[G. Wharton], A Second Narrative of the Late Parliament (1659), 16-17 (E.977.3). Nevertheless, he was required to pay £2,500 by Parliament to have the sequestration on his estate removed, which effectively amounted to a composition fine.42CCC 1771. Fortunately for him, his wife, whom he married in 1648, was a daughter of the Independent grandee William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, and came with a portion of £3,000.43CB. Exactly how the son of a relatively insignificant Staffordshire royalist had come to marry into one of the kingdom’s most powerful parliamentarian families is not clear. Perhaps the likeliest explanation is that Saye had used his position as master of the court of wards to acquire Wolseley’s wardship – much as he had in the case of another future Cromwellian grandee Charles Howard*, whose wardship he had granted to his friend and political ally Henry Darley*.44Infra, ‘Charles Howard’.

Commonwealth to protectorate, 1653

Wolseley probably spent much of the period between his marriage in 1648 and his political debut in 1653 at Saye’s Oxfordshire residence of Broughton Castle. Wolseley owed his selection to represent Oxfordshire in the Nominated Parliament of 1653 entirely to the influence that Saye and his second son Nathaniel Fiennes I* enjoyed with Oliver Cromwell* and his circle.45Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 123. Despite his youth and inexperience as a Parliament-man, Wolseley made an immediate impact in the House, chairing, or at least reporting from, a committee set up on 7 July 1653 for preparing a declaration inviting ‘all the people of God, within this commonwealth, to seek the Lord, for a blessing upon the counsels and proceedings of this Parliament’.46CJ vii. 282b, 284a. This declaration committed MPs ‘to be as tender of the lives, estates, liberties, just rights and properties of all others as we are of ourselves and our posterities, whom we expect still to be governed by successive Parliaments’.47A Declaration of the Parliament (1653), 2 (E.1062.5); Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 154-5. If Wolseley’s political and religious sympathies bear any relation to this parliamentary mission statement, it suggests that he shared the godly earnestness and desire for an essentially traditional settlement of his colleague on the drafting committee Sir Gilbert Pykeringe. Wolseley may have helped to draft another parliamentary declaration in August – this time announcing a day of thanksgiving for God’s ‘great mercy in the late successes vouchsafed unto the navy of this Commonwealth against the Dutch’.48CJ vii. 297b, 299b. In total, he received only eight committee appointments in this Parliament, all in July and August, of which perhaps the most prestigious was his nomination in first place to a committee for Irish affairs (9 July).49CJ vii. 282a, 282b, 283b, 285a, 290a, 297b, 299b, 304b.

More revealing of Wolseley’s importance in the Nominated Parliament’s proceedings are his 12 tellerships.50CJ vii. 282b, 284a, 288b, 292a, 304b, 347a, 347b, 352b, 358b, 359a. Most of these divisions related to minor, apparently non-factional, business, although in all but three cases he partnered men who at this stage stood in or close to the Cromwellian mainstream – among them Henry Cromwell and the future protectoral councillors Pykeringe, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, Colonel Philip Jones and Edward Montagu. Wolseley was closely involved, however, in one of the ‘four great votes’ that effectively divided the House between the supporters and opponents of legal and church reform.51[S. Hyland*], An Exact Relation of the Proceedings and Transactions of the Late Parliament (1654), 12 (E.729.6). Thus, on 19 August, he was a majority teller with Pykeringe against adjourning a debate about setting up a committee to overhaul the administration of the law.52CJ vii. 304b. Neither Pykeringe nor Wolseley favoured wholesale legal reform, and it seems that in voting to continue the debate they were trying to force the issue in the hope of killing it off entirely.53Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 269. In the division that immediately followed this one, the unlikely pairing of Wolseley and the radical Welsh MP Hugh Courtney were majority tellers for putting the question that a committee be established ‘to consider a new body of the law’. But if Wolseley calculated that when it came to the crunch the House would plump for the status quo, he was in for a nasty surprise, for in the vote on the main question the radical MPs Arthur Squibb and Barnaby Bowtell defeated Major-general John Disbrowe and Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper by a margin of eight votes.54CJ vii. 304b. Wolseley and Pykeringe were named to the 13-man committee that was set up in consequence of this last vote, but they were heavily outnumbered by radical MPs.55CJ vii. 304b; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 270. It was perhaps no coincidence that three days after this defeat for the opponents of legal reform (22 August), Wolseley was granted leave of absence and appears to have spent September and October away from the House.56CJ vii. 306a.

Wolseley’s rapid rise to political prominence was hastened by his addition to the council of state on 14 July 1653.57CJ vii. 284b. The committee responsible for nominating the additional members was dominated by MPs close to Cromwell – indeed, it included the lord general himself – and it is likely that Wolseley was first and foremost their choice.58CJ vii. 283b. Wolseley attended council meetings regularly during July and August and was named to numerous conciliar committees, on business ranging from foreign and diplomatic affairs to the investigation of the Leveller leader John Lilburne and his supporters.59CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. xli; 1653-4, pp. 25, 26, 39, 66, 87, 90. He also reported council business to the House on two occasions – the second, on 26 August, to move for the recruiting of 500 men for Cromwell’s regiment.60CJ vii. 292a, 308b. Wolseley’s withdrawal from the Commons soon after 26 August was to some extent mirrored at Whitehall, where he attended only nine of the council’s 65 sessions during September and October.

Wolseley’s return to the political fray in the autumn of 1653 was prompted, it seems, by his appointment on 1 November to a new council of state.61CJ vii. 344a. That he polled a very creditable 62 votes in the election of those to be continued on the council, putting him in eighth place out of 17, is a measure of the favourable impression he had made upon MPs during July and August. Once again, he was named to numerous council committees and was given particular responsibility for implementing parliamentary orders to crack down on those who disturbed public worship.62CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. xl, 229, 252. A significant number of his senior council colleagues, and very likely Wolseley himself, were closely involved in the ‘cabals at Whitehall’ that led to what amounted to the forcible dissolution of the Nominated Parliament on 12 December.63A Faithfull Searching Home Word (1659), 18-19 (E.774.1); Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 343. It was Wolseley who opened the debate that day which precipitated the House’s collapse, inveighing bitterly against his fellow MPs for their ‘ill management of the power betrusted with us’.64A True Narrative of the Cause and Manner of the Dissolution of the Late Parliament (1653), 1 (E.724.11); [Hyland], Exact Relation, 10, 18, 20; Clarke Pprs. iii. 9; Ludlow, Mems. i. 366; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 343. He claimed that Members had ‘dealt disingenuously with the army’ in trying to suspend officers’ pay and opposing the passage of the assessment act; had exhibited ‘a principle of destroying and pulling down ... especially manifested in our vote for removing the [court of] chancery and total alteration of the laws’; had tried to ‘destroy propriety [i.e. property] in attempting to take off the power of patrons to present to church livings’; and, in attacking tithes, had sought to ‘destroy the ministry itself’.65True Narrative, 1-2. Other speeches followed in a similar vein, after which the majority of Members withdrew from the House, forcing its dissolution.66Clarke Pprs. iii. 9; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 344. A few days later, Wolseley was among the first group of men appointed to a new protectoral council of state – a 21-strong body whose members enjoyed their places for life.67Ludlow, Mems. i. 371; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 379. Edmund Ludlowe II* observed that ‘in the choice of this council, such were put in for the most part who had been principal instruments in the interruption of the late assembly and leading men in the resignation of that power into the hands of Cromwell’.68Ludlow, Mems. i. 371. In a letter to his close friend Bulstrode Whitelocke* in January 1654, Wolseley was candid in his assessment of the recent change of government.69Whitelocke, Diary, 290, 294, 331, 342, 346, 422-3.

My lord, the state and complexion of affairs are much altered here since you left us [as ambassador to Sweden], and I think very much for the better. The Parliament you left sitting [the Nominated Parliament], the major part of them (being indeed grown so injurious to magistracy, property and ministry that the safety of the whole would not admit them to sit longer) delivered up their power to my lord general [Cromwell] from whence they received it. The government now established is by a lord protector (who hath much the same power with [sic] the king formerly) ... the present protector is my lord general, whose personal worth I think I may say without vanity qualifies him for the greatest monarch of the world.70Add. 32093, f. 317.

Protectoral councillor and MP, 1654-6

Wolseley seems to have earned his £1,000 a year salary as a protectoral councillor.71Add. 4197, f. 162. In terms of attendance, he generally ranked about sixth or seventh out of a total membership that fluctuated between 14 and 18.72CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. xl; 1654, p. xliv; 1655, p. xxviii; 1655-6, p. xxx; 1656-7, p. xxii; 1657-8, p. liv; 1658-9, p. xxiii; B. Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the council’, in The Cromwellian Protectorate ed. P. Little (Woodbridge, 2007), 84. His myriad appointments to conciliar committees suggest that his competence covered almost all aspects of the council’s business, from promoting godliness and the advancement of trade, to diplomatic affairs and the governance of Scotland and Ireland. As one of the council’s ‘ordinance-framers’ in the first nine months of the protectorate, he was apparently involved in drafting legislation for the reform of chancery and for establishing the commission for ejecting scandalous ministers (the Cromwellian triers and ejectors).73CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 76, 190, 202, 252, 267, 308; I. Roots, ‘Cromwell’s ordinances’, in The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement ed. G. Aylmer (1972), 153, 154, 162. He was also – with his fellow councillors Nathaniel Fiennes, Philip Jones and Walter Strickland – a key figure in the council’s dealings with the Dutch ambassador.74TSP iii. 749; iv. 17, 588, 656; v. 5, 361; vi. 79, 511; vii. 458, 504, 513, 547. In June 1654, Wolseley and his brother-in-law Fiennes offered the Staffordshire Presbyterian John Swynfen* the post of ambassador to the United Provinces to promote ‘not only the civil good of these nations ... but the Protestant interest throughout Christendom’.75Wm. Salt. Lib. S.MS.608.

In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Wolseley was returned in first place for his native Staffordshire.76Supra, ‘Staffordshire’. He almost certainly owed his election more to the perceived strength of his influence at Whitehall than to his proprietorial interest in the county. In the early 1660s, his Staffordshire estate was valued at £1,000 a year, which for a county grandee was relatively modest. 77‘Gentry of Staffs.’ ed. Kidson, 33. He was named to 18 committees in this Parliament, including those to consider the powers of the triers and ejectors and for regulating the court of chancery.78CJ vii. 370a, 374a. Five of these appointments related to a bill before the House for giving statutory authority to the Instrument of Government.79CJ vii. 369a, 411a, 415a, 415b, 419a. It was on this issue that Wolseley emerged as one of the Cromwellian court’s leading parliamentary spokesmen.80Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 105. All but two of his 11 tellerships in this Parliament were in divisions concerning the settlement of government; and on five of these occasions he was paired with the Irish Cromwellian grandee Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill.81CJ vii. 367a, 378b, 380a, 384a, 385a, 393b, 394b, 409b, 413b. Perhaps the most important of these divisions was that of 10 November, when he partnered Broghill in opposing a proposal to limit the protector’s negative voice by allowing Parliament to pass bills without consent if, after 20 days, the protector had either failed to veto them or had failed to justify his vetoing of them to Parliament.82CJ vii. 384a. Wolseley and Broghill lost this division by 24 votes, at which the ‘court party’ was furious, claiming that ‘this vote had destroyed the government’ and had as good as ‘unmade the protector’.83Burton’s Diary, i. pp. lxvi-lxvii. Four days later (14 Nov.), the two men teamed up again in support of the protector’s veto, and once again the vote went against them.84CJ vii. 385a. That same day (14 Nov.), Wolseley and his fellow councillor Major-general John Lambert were minority tellers in favour of the House considering the introduction of an oath binding future MPs not to alter the government by a single person and a Parliament – a deliberate echo of the formula employed in the 1654 election indentures stipulating that those ‘so chosen shall not have power to alter the government as it is now settled in one single person and a Parliament’.85CJ vii. 385a. Wolseley’s defeats in November were offset by two victories in December and January 1655. On 2 December, he and Broghill were majority tellers in favour of reserving the nomination of the protectoral council to Cromwell rather than to Parliament.86CJ vii. 394b. And on 8 January 1655, they succeeded in blocking any reference to Parliament in the title of the bill for settling the government.87CJ vii. 413b.

Wolseley was part of the conciliar team that spearheaded the government’s response to the abortive royalist risings of early 1655.88CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 82, 89, 117; TSP iii. 295. However, it is unlikely that he approved of the direction in which Lambert and the army grandees then steered the protectorate – that is, towards the introduction of provincial military government in the form of the rule of the major-generals. Wolseley’s name was certainly absent from the various council committees that determined the major-generals’ powers and jurisdictions.89C. S. Egloff, ‘The search for a Cromwellian settlement’, PH xvii. 193-4. In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, he was again returned for Staffordshire and once more secured the senior place.90Supra, ‘Staffordshire’. Among the MPs elected for Scottish constituencies was Wolseley’s younger brother Robert, who may well have owed his return to the influence of the Scottish protectoral council under its president, Lord Broghill.91Infra, ‘Robert Wolseley’.

Although Wolseley is regarded as one of Broghill’s friends in the Cromwellian court, the partnership that the two men had struck up in the first protectoral Parliament was slow to materialise in the second.92P. Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge, 2004), 127, 129. Central to Broghill’s plans for settlement were the bills for Scottish and Irish union that were introduced in the House that autumn.93Little, Broghill, 131, 134, 136. Yet when the Scottish union bill was debated on 4 December 1656, Wolseley was a majority teller against an amendment allowing borough rights to be included in the legislation and thus found himself in the opposite camp to Lord Cochrane, George Downing, Whitelocke and several other close allies of Broghill.94Burton’s Diary, i. 12-18; Little, Broghill, 131. Wolseley and Broghill also lined up on opposite sides in the debates over the punishment of the Quaker evangelist and alleged blasphemer James Naylor. As he made clear on 9 December, Wolseley did not agree with many of Broghill’s allies in their insistence that Naylor’s offence warranted the death penalty: ‘I cannot apprehend this matter to be of that height as to merit the punishment of death. I am for a lesser punishment, as pillory, imprisonment, whipping or the like’.95Burton’s Diary, i. 89-90; Little, Broghill, 140. Similarly, on 17 December, he was a minority teller with Philip Jones in favour of giving Naylor a chance to speak before sentence was passed against him – the hope being that he would recant his offence and thereby obviate the need to punish him.96Burton’s Diary, i. 166. In contrast to many of MPs who would later support the Remonstrance – the new protectoral constitution – Wolseley did not use the Naylor case as a pretext to promote the judicial role of Parliament and thereby undermine the Instrument of Government.97Little, Broghill, 141. ‘The legislative power of Parliament is great’, he conceded,

but not so as to be taken up on this occasion. I am afraid of an ill precedent. As I would have us bear witness against this crime, yet I would have us do justice in a just way. We may not, by the legislative power, do what we please, call that an offence which is not. We have also a master in heaven, to whom we must give an account.98Burton’s Diary, i. 89.

When the House debated the protector’s letter asking MPs to justify their judgement against Naylor, Wolseley again questioned Parliament’s authority to override the Instrument of Government.

This constitution is new, and this is the first case. It will not be enough to return this answer [to the protector] – that we passed this judgement because we have passed it. The question is, whether this House has jurisdiction to pass such a sentence as this. This House cannot put anything but an affirmative upon a law or a judgement. The negative lies in his Highness.99Burton’s Diary, i. 257.

Wolseley’s standpoint on the Naylor case was doubtless heavily influenced by his understanding of Cromwell’s views on this issue. Yet in implicitly defending the Instrument of Government, Wolseley was broadly aligning himself with the Instrument’s architect – and Broghill’s chief political rival – Lambert. For Lambert and the army grandees, the Instrument’s establishment of a strong and largely independent council served to consolidate their influence at the centre of government.100Supra, ‘John Lambert’; Worden, ‘Cromwell and the council’, 87, 102-3. Yet Wolseley was evidently keen to weaken the power of the military and has been identified as one of the ‘five great persons’ referred to in November 1656 as enemies of the army’s ‘exorbitances’.101Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 107. Where his and Lambert’s attachment to the Instrument of Government seems to have overlapped was in the protection it afforded to ‘such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ (though differing in judgement from the doctrine or discipline publicly held forth)’.102Constitutional Docs. of the Puritan Revolution ed. S. R. Gardiner (1906), 416. In other words, Wolseley seems to have favoured an Erastian state church with a wide measure of toleration for tender consciences. It was probably no coincidence that his father-in-law, Viscount Saye, was also very much against imposing a narrow conformity on doubting consciences, regarding it as a threat to social and political order.103J. Adamson, ‘The Vindiciae Veritatis and the political creed of Viscount Saye and Sele’, HR lx. 58-9. For Broghill’s Presbyterian allies, by contrast, the latitude that the Instrument allowed sectarians such as Naylor seemed to threaten the scripture-based orthodoxy which they thought essential to the stability of the state.

Wolseley and the ‘kinglings’, 1657-9

The failure of the army’s militia bill in January 1657 (which effectively spelled the end of the major-generals), the Commons’ harsh punishment of Naylor, and (probably most importantly) Cromwell’s evident desire for a more traditional settlement, were probably decisive in persuading Wolseley to abandon the Instrument of Government in favour of a new constitutional blueprint. Thus, like Broghill and Fiennes, he was part of the ‘cabal’ of leading civilian politicians that was behind the February 1657 Remonstrance and the offer of the crown to Cromwell.104Little, Broghill, 148; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 107. The debate on the new constitution and the work of pushing it through the House accounted for four of Wolseley’s seven tellerships and over a quarter of his 37 committee appointments in the second protectoral Parliament.105CJ vii. 461b, 496a, 499b, 500b, 505a, 507b, 508b, 509a, 511a, 511b, 514a, 520b, 521a, 521b, 523b, 526a, 575b. When the Remonstrance was presented to the Commons on 23 February, Wolseley was among those councillors present who were ‘highly for it’, and he served as a teller with the Presbyterian MP Sir John Fitzjames in favour of having it read – winning the division from two of Lambert’s allies by 90 votes.106Henry Cromwell Corresp. 205; CJ vii. 496a; Little, Broghill, 152.

Wolseley would have found the Remonstrance appealing on several counts. In the first place, it invested Cromwell with powers similar to those enjoyed by Charles I before 1642 – and Wolseley was evidently keen to make the protector ‘the greatest monarch in the world’. Secondly, it reduced the power of the council, and hence of the army grandees, vis-à-vis the protector. Thirdly, it allowed for considerable latitude in matters of ‘doctrine, discipline and worship’ and did not enjoin a confession of faith that might proscribe tender consciences.107Little, Broghill, 149. This last aspect of the Remonstrance proved unacceptable to the more ‘orthodox’ puritans in the House, however, and on 9 March, the leading Presbyterian MP Joachim Matthews introduced an amendment for preventing the election to Parliament of those who had violated the 1650 act against atheism and blasphemy or who denied the authority of scripture.108Supra, ‘Joachim Matthews’. When this amendment was put to the vote, Wolseley and Broghill – well knowing Cromwell’s aversion to a narrowly defined puritan orthodoxy – were tellers against its acceptance.109CJ vii. 500b; Little, Broghill, 150. Similarly, on 20 March, Wolseley was a teller with Secretary John Thurloe in favour of inserting a clause in the Remonstrance to the effect that ministers who gave outward conformity to the ‘public profession’ of faith should have ‘protection in the way of their churches’ and be esteemed capable of any ‘trust, promotion, or employment’ even if they differed in matters of worship and discipline.110CJ vii. 509a. The opposing tellers were Fitzjames and another prominent Presbyterian, Colonel Henry Markham. Wolseley voted with the majority in the division on 25 March for passing the first clause of the Remonstrance, establishing the royal title, and was duly listed among the ‘kinglings’ in the House.111CJ vii. 511a; A Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 22 (E.935.5).

Wolseley was named in second place to a committee set up on 27 March 1657 for presenting the revised protectoral constitution, renamed the Humble Petition and Advice, to the protector. And following Cromwell’s cool response to the offer of the crown, Wolseley was named to committees on 6, 7 and 9 April to justify adhering to the terms of the Petition and Advice and to satisfy the protector’s scruples on the kingship question.112CJ vii. 514a, 520b, 521a, 521b. When the 9 April committee attended Cromwell on 11 April to satisfy him of the House’s reasons for persisting with its offer of the crown, Wolseley delivered a forthright speech in which he used the language of the people’s birthright to urge the necessity of a return to kingship.

This nation hath ever been a lover of monarchy and of monarchy under the title of a king ... ʼTis the great common law, that is the custom of the nation, approved good by many ages, to have the office and name of a king ... I beseech your Highness consider, if you should refuse this title the Parliament presents you with, you do not only deny yourself the honour they put upon you, but you deny the nation, you deny the people their honour, which by right they ought to have. ʼTis this honour and their just birthright to have a supreme magistrate with the title of king ... The Parliament have highly engaged all the good people of this nation to make you, who are one of them (and have been in these troubles their head and leader), to be their king.113Monarchy Asserted (1660), 19-21.

Wolseley was followed by his brother-in-law Fiennes, who spoke to the same effect although in less effusive terms.

Cromwell’s reluctance to assume the title of king caused Broghill, Wolseley and other leading ‘kinglings’ to absent themselves from the House for much of mid-April 1657.114Henry Cromwell Corresp. 247-8. But Wolseley was back in his seat by 24 April, when he was named first to a committee on an article in the Petition and Advice for confirming previous acts and ordinances.115CJ vii. 523b. In the debate that preceded the establishment of this committee, he had observed that ‘if the legislature had not sometimes been undertaken by another power than was parliamentary, you had hardly sat here now to make this settlement’.116Burton’s Diary, ii. 40. He was probably referring here to the council ordinances of 1654, but he may also have had in mind the Instrument of Government itself. Evidently, like Lambert, he was uncomfortable with the idea of Parliament as the only or final source of authority in a well-ordered commonwealth; although in contrast to Lambert, he put his faith in a Cromwellian monarchy rather than an army-dominated council. More aware than most MPs of Cromwell’s mind on the question of confirming previous legislation – as on matters relating to the religious settlement – he tempered his advice to the House accordingly.117Burton’s Diary, ii. 87, 88. His knowledge of what he termed Cromwell’s ‘scruples’ was undoubtedly authoritative, for according to Whitelocke, the protector at this time was accustomed to send for himself, Wolseley, Broghill and a few others ‘and be shut up with them three or four hours together in private discourse, and none were admitted to come in to him ... and their counsel was accepted and followed by him in most of his greatest affairs’.118Whitelocke, Diary, 464, 477.

Wolseley’s support for the Remonstrance and Humble Petition was consistent with his alignment over the vexed question of the church settlement in Scotland. As president of the council of Scotland, Broghill was keen to stabilise Scottish politics by trying to bring the moderate wing of the Kirk – known as the Resolutioners – into the Cromwellian fold. Lambert and the army grandees, however, disliking some of the Resolutioners’ pro-Stuart sympathies, and keen to block Broghill’s moves towards a more civilian political settlement, gave their backing to the ‘purist’ faction in the Kirk – the Protestors. From the spring of 1657, Wolseley and his fellow councillors Fiennes and Jones were regarded by the Resolutioners as their allies – and Broghill’s ‘great friends’ – at Whitehall. In private conversation with the Resolutioners’ London agent James Sharp, Wolseley assured him that the council in England would never allow the Protesters to gain the upper hand in Scotland.119Consultations of the Ministers of Edinburgh ed. W. Stephen (Scottish Hist. Soc. ser. 3, xvi), 20, 24, 31, 122-3, 123-4; Little, Broghill, 133, 134. Aside from his tactical reasons for taking sides against Lambert’s Scottish allies, Wolseley probably harboured, like his father-in-law, a deep distaste for clericalist churchmen of the Protester variety (or indeed self-styled ‘saints’ in the Fifth-Monarchist mould) trying to impose their will upon the state.120A True Representation of the Rise, Progresse, and State of the Present Divisions of the Church of Scotland (1657), 10, 33. Wolseley was apparently prepared to tolerate Presbyterianism as well as sectarianism so long as they remained firmly subordinate to the civil magistrate.

For all Whitelocke’s preening at his and his friends’ influence at court, the kinglings were weakened by Cromwell’s definitive refusal of the crown on 8 May 1657; and in Wolseley’s case, this seems to have occasioned his absence from the House for much of that month.121Little, Broghill, 157-8. At any rate, he received no committee appointments in May and was not mentioned in Thomas Burton’s parliamentary diary between 1 May and early June. Thereafter, Wolseley and the kinglings seem to have rallied, securing the augmentation of a grant of Irish lands to Broghill (5 June) and a vote in favour of an oath to be taken by the protector in accordance with the terms of the Humble Petition (23 June).122Burton’s Diary, ii. 177, 275-6; CJ vii. 546a; Little, Broghill, 159. On 25 June, Wolseley was named to a committee for managing Cromwell’s investiture under the new constitution – a task that included the provision of a purple robe lined with ermine, a sword of state and a sceptre.123CJ vii. 575a. The next day (26 June), Wolseley and Jones were majority tellers in favour of adjourning the House until 20 January 1658.124CJ vii. 575b.

Wolseley was nominated to the Cromwellian Other House in December 1657, which brought with it the title of Charles Lord Wolseley.125TSP vi. 668; Sloane 3246. He attended the Other House regularly from its first day of sitting, on 20 January 1658, until Parliament was dissolved the following month.126HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 505, 523. In March, a royalist agent claimed that the protector’s desire to preserve his powerbase in the army meant that he consulted with senior officers on affairs of state while leaving ‘the trivial business of the council’ to Broghill, Wolseley ‘and all of that party’.127CCSP iv. 19; Little, Broghill, 164. But if Wolseley was indeed excluded from the protector’s inner circle during the last year of Cromwell’s life, he remained strongly committed to the protectorate, unlike several of the army grandees. Wolseley may well have been the driving force behind the loyal address, ‘filled with expressions of duty and love’, that Staffordshire presented to Richard Cromwell* soon after his succession in September 1658.128TSP vii. 414. In November, he was described, with Fiennes, Thurloe and Jones as among those councillors who were ‘strict adherents to the protectoral party’.129TSP vii. 495. He certainly attended the council on a regular basis in the months after Protector Richard’s succession.130PRO31/17/33, passim.

As a member of the Other House, Wolseley did not stand for election to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, although he may well have helped secure the return of the Cromwellian knight Sir Thomas Whitgreave for Staffordshire.131Supra, ‘Thomas Whitgreave’. Wolseley attended his place in the Other House regularly from its first day of sitting, 27 January, until mid-April.132HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 525-60. When most of the army grandees moved to bring down the protectorate on 21-2 April, Wolseley, Broghill, Fiennes and Thurloe were among those to whom the protector turned for advice on how to preserve the government, but to no avail.133Whitelocke, Diary, 512; Clarke Pprs. iii. 212. The royalist conspirator-general John Mordaunt, 1st Viscount Mordaunt, believed that Wolseley was ready to raise Staffordshire in support of Sir George Boothe’s* rebellion against the restored Rump in the summer of 1659, but there is no evidence that Wolseley went any way towards answering Mordaunt’s expectations.134Mordaunt Letter-Bk. 24, 30.

Later career and death

In the elections to the 1660 Convention, Wolseley and John Swynfen were returned for Stafford, and both were listed by Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, as likely supporters of a Presbyterian church settlement.135G.F.T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 342. Wolseley does not appear to have stood as a candidate in the elections to the Cavalier Parliament, and in about 1662 he was described by a Staffordshire royalist as ‘a very able man, hath been active, now lives retired’.136‘Gentry of Staffs.’ ed. Kidson, 33. Wolseley certainly withdrew from parliamentary and national politics in the early 1660s. Nevertheless, he retained his place on the Staffordshire bench; and in May 1667, he joined Whitelocke and Thurloe at a conventicle held at Greenwich in May 1667 by the Independent divine John Owen*.137Whitelocke, Diary, 718. Furthermore, in 1668, he published (anonymously) two tracts rehearsing numerous arguments in favour of liberty of conscience.138[Wolseley], Liberty of Conscience upon its True and Proper Grounds Asserted and Vindicated (1668); Liberty of Conscience the Magistrates Interest (1668). Besides displaying a fine turn of phrase – ‘Nature abhors compulsion in religious things as a spiritual rape upon the conscience’ – and a sound understanding of practical statecraft, these works mounted a sophisticated case against an array of contemporary ideas on the proper relationship between church, conscience and the state. Thus, Wolseley took aim at Hobbesian notions of the supreme magistrate as ‘the sole judge of all spiritual matters’, at clericalist arguments that ‘whatsoever the church determines, he [the magistrate] is bound to execute by the temporal sword as the great law of Christ’, and at the extreme sectarian position that the magistrate ‘is a mere civil officer ... and hath nothing to do with things of a spiritual nature’.139[Wolseley], Liberty of Conscience upon its True and Proper Grounds, 17, 22, 48; B. Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian protectorate’, in Persecution and Toleration ed. W. J. Sheils (Oxford, 1984), 229. Although he was scathing in his denunciation of popish clericalism, the only contemporary author he attacked by name was the Presbyterian polemicist William Prynne*.140[Wolseley], Liberty of Conscience upon its True and Proper Grounds, Likewise, he only mentioned Charles II in relation to the argument that it was in his ‘true interest to become head of all the Protestant party in the world, and he will never do that but by first making himself a common father to all his Protestant subjects at home’.141[Wolseley], Liberty of Conscience the Magistrates Interest, 10.

Wolseley followed up his 1668 publications with The Unreasonableness of Atheism (1669) and the Reasonableness of Scripture-Belief (1672), both of which he wrote at the behest of the whig magnate Arthur Annesley*, 1st earl of Anglesey, who encouraged persons of such differing religious views that according to Anthony Wood it was hard to tell what his own were.142Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian protectorate’, 229-30; ‘Arthur Annesley’, Oxford DNB. Wolseley also wrote pieces during the 1670s and 1690s on divorce, soteriological questions (in which he took an essentially Arminian line) and meditations upon the gospel.143The Case of Divorce and Re-marriage (1673); Justification Evangelical (1677); The Mount of Spirits (1691); Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian protectorate’, 231-2. All of his published works evince what has been described as ‘the old Erasmian spirit of religion’ – a belief in the fundamental congruity between reason and revelation and a concern with ‘practical sanctity’ that also marked the writings of Whitelocke, Matthew Hale*, William Penn and other advocates of liberty of conscience.144Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian protectorate’, 229-33.

Wolseley’s attack upon the Restoration religious settlement resulted in his removal from the Staffordshire bench in 1670.145C231/7, p. 375; HP Commons, 1660-90. He expressed a ‘great desire’ to represent Stafford in the first exclusion Parliament in 1679, but when it became clear that the corporation was committed elsewhere he declared it his aim ‘to continue my retirement and leave those that have hitherto been conversant in affairs to proceed in them’.146HP Commons 1660-1690; Add. 5832, f. 219. He put himself forward for Lichfield in the 1681 elections, but again withdrew before the voters had chance to deliver their verdict.147HP Commons 1660-1690. His brief imprisonment in Chester Castle during Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685 was merely a precautionary measure.148Staffs. RO, Staffs. RO, D798/3/3/2/2c; D(W)1781/13/2/7. Perhaps influenced by his political collaborator William Penn, Wolseley emerged in 1688 as a supporter of James II’s tolerationist policies, declaring himself ‘right and ready to serve his Majesty in any capacity’.149Duckett, Penal Laws and Test Act (1882), ii. 251; Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian protectorate’, 230. He was approved in September 1688 as a court candidate for the Oxfordshire borough of New Woodstock, presumably on the basis of his connection with the Fiennes family, but yet again he seems to have fallen by the wayside well before election day.150CSP Dom. 1687-9, p. 275. Similarly, nothing came of his announcement in February 1690 that he had been chosen by ‘many principal persons’ to stand for election at Tamworth.151Longleat House, TH/VOL/XXIV, f. 140.

According to his memorial inscription in Colwich church, Wolseley died on 9 October 1714.152MI, Sir Charles Wolseley, Colwich. However, his burial entry in the parish register is dated 8 October.153Colwich par. reg. In his will, he charged his estate with bequests totalling £5,340 – the bulk of which (£4,000) was to be divided between three of his daughters. His personal estate at Wolseley was inventoried at £2,507.154Staffs. RO, P/C/11, Sir Charles Wolseley. His descendant Charles Wolseley† sat for the Dorset constituency of Milborne Port from 1775 to 1780.155HP Commons 1754-1790.