WRAY, Sir John (1586-1655), of Wharton, Blyton, Lincs.

Wray’s family had moved to Lincolnshire from Yorkshire after his grandfather, Sir Christopher Wray†, had acquired Glentworth, near Lincoln, by marriage in the mid-sixteenth century. Sir Christopher had represented the Yorkshire constituency of Boroughbridge in all five Marian Parliaments, and Great Grimsby in 1563; and his son (Sir John’s father), Sir William Wray, had sat for Grimsby in 1584 and 1604 and Lincolnshire in 1601.43HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘Christopher Wray’; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘William Wray’. Sir William had made his seat at Ashby cum Fenby, near Grimsby, and had built up a considerable estate in the area as well as at Glentworth.44WARD5/24, pt. 1; C142/386/87. He also established the Wrays as one of Lincolnshire’s leading godly families.45J.T. Cliffe, Puritan Gentry, 184; Holmes, Lincs. 93-4; H. Hajzyk, ‘The Church in Lincs. c.1595-c.1640’ (Camb. Univ. PhD thesis, 1980), 261, 337-8; F. Hill, Tudor and Stuart Lincoln, 112, 113, 116.

Sir John Wray was returned for Grimsby on his father’s interest in 1614, but the Ashby estate, and with it the family’s interest at Grimsby, were inherited by Wray’s half-brother Sir Christopher Wray*. Sir John resided chiefly at Wharton, near Glentworth and, after inheriting at least three of Sir William’s advowsons, was able to continue the family’s patronage of puritan ministers.46Dalton, Wrays of Glentworth, i. 149. Among the clergymen he nominated to benefices was the future Westminster Assembly divine and Erastian Presbyterian, Thomas Coleman.47Lincs. RO, DIOC/PD/1623/47. Wray’s ‘more than ordinary zeal for holiness and religion’ moved the puritan minister, Richard Bernard, to dedicate one of his works to him in 1635.48R. Bernard, A Ready Way to Good Works (1635), 87; Cliffe, Puritan Gentry, 119, 221. Yet despite his godly convictions, Wray was active on the Lincolnshire commission for collecting contributions in the 1630s towards the re-edification of St Paul’s Cathedral – an endeavour much favoured by the king and Archbishop William Laud, but denounced by the puritan physician John Bastwick as ‘making a seat for a priest’s arse’.49LMA, CLC/313/I/B/004/MS25474/002, p. 46; K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I, 322-6.

Wray’s prominence in Lincolnshire by 1625 was such that he was returned for the county to the first Caroline Parliament. Although appointed a Forced Loan commissioner the following year, he refused to pay the levy and was imprisoned in the Gatehouse in April 1627 and remained in custody for the next eight months.50APC 1627, pp. 253, 338, 475; 1627-8, p. 217; CSP Dom. 1627-8, p. 81; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir John Wray’. His fellow Lincolnshire loan refusers included his brother-in-law Sir Edward Ayscoghe*, Sir William Armyne*, Sir Anthony Irby* and John Broxolme*. Returned for Lincolnshire again in 1628, Wray spoke repeatedly in the House against George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham.51HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir John Wray’. Wray emerged during the personal rule as one of Lincolnshire’s leading opponents of royal policies. In 1630, he and Sir Christopher Wray criticised the crown-sponsored scheme for draining the Isle of Axholme.52Holmes, Lincs. 139-40. And having refused to pay Ship Money in 1636, he was removed from the Lindsey commission of peace.53C231/5, p. 223; CSP Dom. 1635-6, pp. 289, 361; Holmes, Lincs. 139-40. His friendship with Archbishop Laud’s bête-noire, Bishop John Williams of Lincoln, would also have done little to endear him to the crown.54Holmes, Lincs. 140.

Wray’s standing as one Lincolnshire’s foremost landowners and ‘patriots’ was re-affirmed in the spring of 1640, when he was returned in first place for the county in the elections to the Short Parliament.55Supra, ‘Lincolnshire’. He was named to four committees in this Parliament and was a minority teller with Sir Edward Hales on 1 May in favour of summoning the Cambridge divine Dr William Beale for a sermon in which he had claimed that the king could make laws without parliamentary consent and that the subject had ‘property in nothing’.56CJ ii. 9b, 12a, 12b, 18a, 18b; Aston’s Diary, 112-15; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 116. Wray himself took a very different line, emerging as a leading critic of the perceived abuses and innovations of the personal rule. Indeed, it has been argued that he was part of a pro-Scots faction at Westminster (that also included John Pym and Nathaniel Fiennes I) that was intent on scuppering any compromise between Charles and Parliament that would have allowed him to continue his campaign against the Scottish Covenanters.57Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 99. However, there is no clear evidence to substantiate this claim. Only one of his speeches in the Short Parliament is known about in any detail, and this seems to have been a largely unremarkable relation of his county’s grievances such as many other Members would have endorsed. Speaking on 20 April (and not 2 May as some authorities have stated), Wray complained that Ship Money and fen drainers had deprived his constituents of ‘propriety’ in their goods. More controversially, he inferred that the crown’s seizure of Lincolnshire’s militia arms for use against the Scots was illegal, ‘and we are left without defence to the Romish invasion, if any should arise’.58Add. 6411, ff. 34v-35; Aston’s Diary, 18; Procs. Short Parl. 227-8; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 99. But his tone of patrician indignation suggests that he was speaking more to the concerns of the Lincolnshire freeholders than to the pro-Scots faction.

Wray’s subsequent contributions to debate in the Short Parliament confirm his dislike of Laudian innovations and of ‘Thorough’, but little more. On 23 April 1640, following on from Sir John Strangways, he argued that if grievances, and specifically Ship Money, were redressed then Parliament could perform ‘miracles’ for the king.59Aston’s Diary, 38. In a debate on ecclesiastical grievances on 29 April, he joined Sir Robert Harley, Francis Rous and other godly speakers in attacking the Laudian altar policy.60Aston’s Diary, 89. And on 2 May, in a confused debate on whether to vote the king supply, he seems to endorsed the line suggested by Pym – although it was also supported by several Members who were no friends to the Scots – that the House investigate the causes of the breach with Scotland: ‘Divisions of Great Britain resemble to a great ship: ‘tis full of leaks. Stop those leaks [and] we shall bring in the greatest prize that ever was brought in by this House’.61Aston’s Diary, 125-6; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 117-18. As this and subsequent speeches in the Long Parliament suggest, Wray was certainly pro-Scots in the sense that he favoured a closer union between the two kingdoms, at least in terms of religion. His last known contribution in the Short Parliament was on 4 May, when he took issue with the crown’s offer to give up Ship Money in return for twelve subsidies – or as Wray damningly put it: ‘To buy Ship Money and purchase war [with the Scots]’.62Aston’s Diary, 131.

Wray’s views evidently struck a chord with the Lincolnshire freeholders, for he and Ayscoghe were returned (in that order) for county in the elections to the Long Parliament that autumn.63Supra, ‘Lincolnshire’. His career in the Long Parliament, like Ayscoghe’s, was not fully commensurate with his status as a knight of the shire or the experience he had gained in previous Parliaments. He was named to approximately 59 committees (32 of them before the outbreak of civil war), was selected on 12 occasions as a messenger to the Lords and served as a teller in four divisions.64CJ ii. 94b, 832a, 842b, 861b, 955b, 1002b; iii. 17a, 215b, 235a, 253a, 271b, 674b, 690b; iv. 84a, 196b, 324b; LJ v. 430b, 455b, 647b, 688a; vi. 194a, 230a, 251b; vii. 52a, 279b, 478a, 662a; Procs. LP ii. 501. Again, he has been characterised as a vocal supporter of the Scots and as part of Pym’s ‘inner ring’ in the Commons, but his agenda appears to have been at once broader and more personal than either group would have found entirely to their liking.65Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 166. Nine of Wray’s speeches – or perhaps, in some cases, purported speeches – in the Long Parliament were published in 1641, and from these it appears that his priority at Westminster was church reform.66Eight Occasionall Speeches, Made in the House of Commons…by Sir John Wray (1641, E.196.10-17); An Occasionall Speech Made to the House of Commons…Against Bishops by Sir John Wray (1641, E.198.8). In his first recorded speech, on 9 November 1640, he expressed the hope that the Members’ ‘constant resolutions will be to settle religion in his [sic] splendour and purity by pulling Dagon from the altar’. He was confident that the hearts of all MPs were ‘fully fixed upon the true reformation of all disorders and innovations in church and religion and upon the well-uniting and close rejointing of the now dislocated Great Britain’.67Eight Occasionall Speeches, 2, 3 (E.196.10); Procs. LP i. 68; vii. 164. Expanding on this theme later that month (25 Nov.), he argued that the only way to preserve religion was ‘to lay the axe to the root, to unloose the long and deep fangs of superstition and popery’ by a ‘thorough reformation’.68Eight Occasionall Speeches, 4 (E.196.11); Procs. LP i. 292; vii. 166-7. These contributions to the debate on ecclesiastical reform would have been music to the Scots’ ears, but then Wray spoiled the effect on 15 December, when he declared that it was not his intention to overthrow the government of the church by bishops ‘in the plural, but to limit and qualify it in some particulars’. His objections to the bishops were twofold, he claimed: ‘the sole exercises of their authority; and … the deputation of that authority’. In other words, he was against prelacy, not the office of bishop. Indeed, he declared that ‘I love some of them so well, am so charitable to the rest, that I wish rather their reformation than their ruin’.69Eight Occasionall Speeches, 6 (E.196.12); Procs. LP i. 604; vii. 168.

Almost a third of Wray’s early committee appointments in the Long Parliament addressed the cognate issues of further reformation in religion and the suppression of popery.70CJ ii. 29a, 54b, 99a, 100b, 156b, 158a, 185b, 221b, 268a, 496b, 523b. He attended at least four meetings of the sub-committee of the Commons’ standing committee for religion – set up on 23 November 1640 ‘to discover the many sufferings of ministers by ecclesiastical proceedings’.71Procs. Principally in the Co. of Kent ed. L. B. Larking (Cam. Soc. lxxx), 80, 81, 98. And he took the threat of popish subversion as seriously as Pym could ever have desired. On 14 November 1640, Wray complained that a proclamation ordering the disarming of all papists and their removal from London was too brief and its provisions too limited, adding that the Caroline attempt to foist a new prayer book on Scotland had been ‘plotted at Rome four years since’.72Procs. LP i. 147, 148. He continued in this vein two days later (16 Nov.), claiming that the attorney general had evidence of a ‘great plot that within 14 days would be attempted against this kingdom’.73Procs. LP i. 155, 158. On 26 February 1641, he advised the Houses that ‘it will not be our six subsidies that will help us unless we be good husbands and cut off all superfluous charges, disband all needless armies and disarm all papists and banish all priests and Jesuits – then we shall thrive and prosper’.74Eight Occasionall Speeches, 9 (E.196.14). He would tolerate no alternative view of the kingdom’s ills, serving as a minority teller with John Moore on 1 March in favour of sending the clergyman Dr Thomas Chafin to the Tower for publicly calling upon God to deliver the nation from ‘lay puritans and lay Parliaments’. As Moore’s diary reveals, he and Wray were tellers for the yeas not the noes, as the clerk of the Commons mistakenly recorded.75CJ ii. 94b; Procs. LP ii. 589; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 279.

Wray’s zeal for stamping out popery backfired on him on 12 April 1641, when he moved that there were 30 priests lodging in one residence in London and that if the House thought fit he would ‘discover’ it to Alderman Isaac Penington*. The Commons gave order accordingly, but the initiative quickly collapsed when it turned out that the residence in question was the Spanish ambassador’s house.76CJ ii. 119a; Procs. LP iii. 507, 511, 516. After hearing the Speaker relate words spoken by a Catholic in mid-May that ‘there is a black day coming that shall make many children fatherless’, Wray warned MPs that the engineers employed by Edward Somerset, Lord Herbert of Ragland – the son and heir of England’s greatest Catholic peer the marquess of Worcester – in his experimental workshop at Vauxhall, just across the Thames from Parliament, ‘can undermine [i.e. tunnel under] the Thames and so may under this House’.77Procs. LP iv. 382; H. Dircks, The Life, Times and Scientific Labours of the Second Marquis of Worcester, 264-7. Wray’s crusading zeal against the forces of popery almost certainly informed his decision to invest £600 that spring as an Irish Adventurer.78Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 565.

There are signs that Wray’s attitude towards bishops hardened during the early months of the Long Parliament.79Holmes, Lincs. 144. In the great root and branch debate on 8 February 1641, he insisted that unless the bishops

be able to justify by the holy scriptures that such rights and liberties as they pretend for their spiritual primacy over the ministers of Christ be indeed and truth inferred unto them by the holy law of God, I suppose the king’s Highness...by the words of the great charter [Magna Carta] and by his [coronation] oath is bound utterly to abolish all lordly primacy, as hitherto upheld and defended, partly by ignorance and partly by an unreasonable and evil custom.80An Occasionall Speech, 5.

He then moved that the London root and branch petition, which called for the abolition of episcopacy, should be committed for consideration by the House rather than laid aside.81Procs. LP ii. 390. The parliamentary diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes was almost certainly correct in stating that it was Wray (and not Ayscoghe, as another parliamentary diarist, Sir Framlingham Gawdy, claimed) who presented a petition from Lincolnshire on 27 May ‘for the abolishing of the government of archbishops, bishops and their subordinate officers’, which served as a prelude to Sir Edward Dering’s introduction of a bill for abolishing episcopacy.82Procs. LP iv. 605, 610, 611, 613; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 344. Wray supported this bill on the grounds that the House had ‘endeavoured by all means possible to reform the episcopacy government but could not, and now this bill is as a vomit to them’.83Procs. LP iv. 615. In an effort to expedite its progress on 11 June, he cited the case of Denmark: ‘Had the Danish prelates sought the service of God, they had not utterly been extirpated, as they were both by kings and commons’.84Procs. LP v. 91, 99. On 28 December, he supported Pym, John Glynne and other godly Members in urging the exclusion of the bishops from the Lords.85Add. 64807, f. 21. Nevertheless, he generally reserved his criticism not for the office of bishop but for prelates and prelacy. In common with many of England’s leading puritan ministers, he may have favoured the retention of bishops as ‘diocesan co-ordinators’ within a system of church government that lay somewhere between ‘primitive’ episcopacy, of the kind advocated by Bishop James Ussher, and Scottish-style Presbyterianism.86E. Vernon, ‘The Sion College Conclave and London Presbyterianism during the English Revolution’ (Cambridge Univ. PhD thesis, 1999), 57-61.

Although it is questionable whether Wray was fully committed to religious uniformity between England and Scotland, he was certainly keen to promote closer union between the two kingdoms. When Sir John Holland, on 9 November 1640, insisted that removing the Scots should be one of the kingdom’s main priorities, Wray declared his support for ‘the threefold cord’ of England, Scotland and Ireland, which he thought was under threat from ‘subtle enemies’ and the ‘lukewarmness’ of the Church of England.87Procs. LP i. 68; vii. 164. He supported the terms of the treaty with the Scots, arguing on 22 January 1641 that nothing should be allowed to divide the English from ‘them who worship but one God and serve but one master with us’. ‘Think of it [i.e. the treaty] what you will’, he told the House, ‘their subsistence is ours, we live or die, rise or fall, together … Nor need we fear that they intend to dispossess the English of their inheritance or freehold, being ready to withdraw their forces upon reasonable terms’.88Eight Occasionall Speeches, 8 (E.196.13); Procs. LP ii. 240-1; vii. 171; CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 425-6; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 187. This speech in support of the Treaty of London was probably his most notable service for Pym’s ‘junto’. On other issues, he may have been working at cross purposes to Pym and his allies. With some of Pym’s group working desperately to raise money in order to facilitate their negotiations with the king, Wray served as a teller with John Moore on 20 February against granting two subsidies. It seems that Wray and other ‘honest men’ were determined to withhold supply until more progress had been made in the prosecution of the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†).89Procs. LP ii. 498-9, 500-1; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 263-4.

In speeches that he supposedly gave on 26 February, 10 March and 9 April 1641 (although there is no record of them in any of the parliamentary diaries), Wray sought to hasten Strafford’s trial and execution: ‘is there any way to go wolf-free but one?’, he asked, rhetorically.90Eight Occasionall Speeches (E.196.14-16); Procs. LP vii. 174-5, 175, 177. Pym and some of his confederates, on the other hand, were anxious to keep open the prospect that Strafford might yet escape with his life; executing him would make it much harder for them to wring concessions from the king.91Adamson, Noble Revolt, 240-1. In a speech on 3 May, Wray supported Henry Marten in urging that a committee be established to expedite Strafford’s prosecution and that there be an oath of association drawn up for defence of king and church.92Procs. LP iv. 180-1; vii. 179; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 294. The English, he declared, should endeavour to be

loyal covenanters with God and the king: first, binding ourselves by a parliamentary and national oath (not a Straffordian nor a prelactical one) to preserve our religion entire and pure, without the least compound of superstition and idolatry; next, to defend the defender of the faith, his royal person, crown and dignity, and maintain our sovereign in his glory and splendour, which can never be eclipsed if the balance of justice go right and his laws be duly executed.93Eight Occasionall Speeches, 12 (E.196.17).

The result of this proposal for an oath of association was the Protestation, which Wray took the same day.94CJ ii. 133a.

Wray seems to have devoted relatively little of his time at Westminster to securing redress for his county’s grievances. On 7 November 1640, he and Ferdinando Fairfax, 2nd Baron Fairfax, presented petitions to the Commons from Lincolnshire and Yorkshire respectively. The Lincolnshire petitioners complained about Ship Money, fen drainers and probably, like their Yorkshire counterparts, about the billet money they were owed after playing reluctant hosts to the king’s army since the summer.95CJ ii. 22b; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 21; Procs. LP i. 31, 38, 64. A desire to alleviate the pressure of military quartering on his county probably explains Wray’s willingness to stand bond for £1,000 towards securing a City loan in November 1640 for the maintenance of the armies.96Procs. LP i. 228, 231, 235. But while Fairfax continued to address the issue of billet money and other northern grievances, Wray’s interest in these issues seems to have waned after 1640.97Supra, ‘Sir Ferdinando Fairfax’; CJ ii. 196a; Procs. LP iv. 461. Similarly, although he evidently favoured prosecuting the Ship-Money judges and supported legislation for holding annual Parliaments, his interjections on these matters were apparently perfunctory. The more obviously secular grievances of the commonwealth concerned him much less than its moral and ecclesiastical afflictions, and he received only a handful of committee appointments for remedying them.98CJ ii. 44a, 50b, 75a, 200a; Northcote Note Bk. 38, 107; Procs. LP ii. 65.

As partisan feeling increased in the Commons during the latter half of 1641, Wray’s speeches and committee appointments decreased in number, which again belies his label as a close ally of the parliamentary leadership. He received only one committee appointment in the final three months of 1641 and made only two known contributions to debate.99CJ ii. 357b; Add. 64807, f. 21; D’Ewes (C), 229. A speech that it has been suggested he made on 13 November can be indentified from D’Ewes’s remarks on its content as the one Wray gave on 8 February.100An Occasionall Speech; Procs. LP ii. 390; D’Ewes (C), 134. He remained sufficiently prominent in the House to be included on committees set up on 5 and 17 January 1642 – which sat in the Guildhall and Grocers’ Hall respectively – for securing Parliament and the kingdom in the wake of the king’s attempted arrest of the Five Members.101CJ ii. 369a, 385a. But despite his claim in February that he was ‘continually kept at work’ in the Commons, his committee appointments and comments on the floor of the House were few and far between during the first half of 1642.102CJ ii. 496b, 500b, 523b; PJ ii. 93, 343, 359-60; HMC Buccleuch, i. 291.

On 24 May 1642, the Commons ordered that Wray, Ayscoghe, Sir Christopher Wray, Sir Anthony Irby and several other Lincolnshire MPs be sent as committees for preserving the peace of the county.103CJ ii. 585b. Wray spent most of the summer assisting Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham – the parliamentary lord lieutenant of Lincolnshire – in trying to wrest control of the county’s trained bands from the king’s party.104LJ v. 131b-132a; PJ iii. 114, 136. He had returned to Westminster by 7 September, when he declared his readiness to ‘live and die’ with the earl of Essex, and on 19 September he pledged to bring in £100 and 200 marks in plate upon the propositions for advancing Essex’s army.105CJ ii. 755b, 772a; Add. 18777, f. 110.

Wray was named to 27 committees in the three years following the outbreak of civil war – a large proportion of which concerned the maintenance of Parliament’s forces (particularly in the north), sequestering delinquents and raising money to prosecute the war effort.106CJ ii. 769a, 785b, 819b, 951a, 981a; iii. 140a, 203b, 360a, 457a, 489a, 536b, 579b, 626a, 626b, 655b; iv. 155b. In the autumn of 1642, he was associated with Pym’s efforts to secure a military alliance with the Scots and to water down the Houses’ resolve to open peace talks following the king’s advance upon London after Edgehill. On 2 November 1642, Wray carried up to the Lords a declaration that Pym had drafted in the Committee of Safety*, requesting ‘speedy and powerful assistance’ from the Scots against the king.107Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’; CJ ii. 832a; LJ v. 430b-431a; Add. 31116, p. 10. And Wray’s motion on 21 November, that the Houses should ‘send propositions to the king and go on with a war’ was in line with the war-party grandees’ strategy of paying lip-service to the idea of an accommodation while raising practical barriers (such as the continuation of hostilities) to its realisation. Sir Henry Vane II, who spoke after Wray, proposed essentially the same course – sending propositions only when ‘we are in good case [militarily]’.108Add. 18777, f. 64; D. Scott, ‘Party politics in the Long Parliament, 1640-8’, in Revolutionary Eng. c.1630-60 ed. G. Southcombe and G. Tapsell (2017), 40. Wray’s tellership with Sir William Strickland on 4 February 1643 against an ordinance for maintaining forces in Hampshire by an assessment upon a range of ‘disaffected’ persons, including bishops and deans, could be read as a sign of more eirenic leanings on his part.109CJ ii. 955b. But it is more likely that Wray and Strickland – both zealous puritans (as indeed were the opposing tellers, Francis Rous and Richard Knightley) – were simply representing those in the House who wished to preserve church revenues for the maintenance of a godly preaching ministry.110CJ ii. 955b.

Wray seems to have spent the spring of 1643 in Lincolnshire, assisting Sir Christopher Wray and Ayscoghe in trying to defend the county against the earl of Newcastle’s royalist forces.111CJ iii. 20b. But the experience of defeat does not appear to have inclined him more towards a peaceful solution to the war as it seems to have done his colleagues.112Supra, ‘Sir Edward Ayscoghe’; ‘Sir Christopher Wray’. Nor is there any sign that his allegiance to Parliament was shaken by the attempted defection of his kinsmen the Hothams (Captain John Hotham* had married one of Wray’s daughters) in June.113CJ iii. 146a. Indeed, he seems to have been on good terms that summer with a particular object of the Hothams’ scorn, Oliver Cromwell*, and with Cromwell’s patron (and Wray’s first cousin) Edward Montagu 2nd earl of Manchester.114Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 242-4. Moreover, he had no sympathy for those MPs and peers whose distaste for the war and the prospect of Scottish intervention prompted them to neglect or abandon the parliamentary cause.115Harl. 165, ff. 141v, 228v. He took the Solemn League and Covenant late in September, and on 10 October he was sent as a messenger to the Lords with a request that the peers do likewise, ‘which will be an encouragement to the whole kingdom’.116Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 480; CJ iii. 271b; LJ vi. 251b. But though he approved of the Covenant, his continuing patronage of the Erastian Presbyterian divine Thomas Coleman suggests that he did not favour the jure divino Presbyterianism of the Scots.117CJ iii. 222b, 612a; iv. 224b, 236a, 290b; Harl. 165, f. 160. In December, Wray was among the ten prominent Commons-men who served as pall-bearers at the funeral of the Anglo-Scottish alliance’s principal architect, John Pym.118Perfect Diurnall no. 21 (11-18 Dec. 1643), 165 (E.252.11).

Wray’s involvement in the House’s proceedings seems to have tailed off after 1643. He was named to 14 committees in 1644, a mere four in 1645 and none at all in 1646.119CJ iii. 360a, 457a, 470b, 489a, 536b, 568a, 579b, 626a, 626b, 655b, 668b, 688b, 713a; iv. 130a, 155b, 238a, 263b. If these appointments are any guide, he continued to support the House’s efforts to supply its forces and to sustain the war effort. But he showed greater concern for the plight of his son-in-law Captain Hotham than did the likes of Cromwell and his friends, moving on 4 June 1644 that Hotham ‘might have justice done him either in being released out of the Tower or in being brought to a speedy trial’.120Add. 31116, pp. 283-4. And like his half-brother Sir Christopher Wray, Sir John was no friend to the Eastern Association officer Colonel Edward King, who was allied in 1644 with Cromwell and the earl of Manchester and a fierce critic of the militarily incompetent Lord Willoughby.121Supra, ‘Sir Christopher Wray’; Add. 31116, p. 283; C. Holmes, ‘Col. King and Lincs. politics, 1642-6’, HJ, xvi. 457-61, 470. On 6 November, the House ordered the two Wrays and Irby to take the names of – and thus implicitly to censure – a group of petitioners from Lincolnshire who were complaining against ‘most of the commanders, committees and persons of authority in that county’, but also demanding that Colonel King be continued as governor of Boston.122CJ iii. 688b; Harl. 166, f. 153a; Add. 31116, p. 342; Holmes, ‘Col. King’, 470. Defending the Eastern Association seems to have been of more concern to Wray than the work of new modelling Parliament’s armies – a process in which he played no discernable role.123CJ iii. 655b; iv. 178a, 196b.

Wray was granted leave of absence on 4 May 1646 and thereafter seems to have abandoned his seat entirely.124CJ iv. 531a. Between October 1647 and September 1648 he was repeatedly declared absent at the call of the House and excused as sick.125CJ v. 330a, 348b, 543b; vi. 34a. He remained active in local government, however, and in December 1647 he was appointed with several other Lincolnshire MPs to collect the county’s assessment money.126SP28/198, f. 129; CJ v. 400b. Although he was not secluded at Pride’s Purge and would retain his offices in local government thereafter, he did not seek admittance to the Rump. A puritan to the last, he arranged for the publication in 1651 of a manuscript on millenarian ideas by the deceased godly minister Robert Parker.127Cliffe, Puritan Gentry, 206-7. Wray died late in 1655 and was buried at Glentworth on 31 December.128Dalton, Wrays of Glentworth, ii. app. p. 15. No will is recorded. His eldest son, Sir John Wray, 3rd bt., represented Lincolnshire in the first protectoral Parliament.