PIERREPONT, William (c.1607-78), of Thoresby Hall, Notts., Tong Castle, Salop, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, St Giles-in-the-Fields, Mdx.

Known to contemporaries as ‘wise William’, Pierrepont was generally accounted one of the greatest orators and statesmen of the civil war era. Lucy Hutchinson, who was not often given to praising men of different political principles from her husband Colonel John Hutchinson*, thought him ‘one of the wisest councillors and most excellent speakers’ in the Long Parliament.53Hutchinson Mems. ed. Firth, 93; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 213. Oliver Cromwell* referred to him as his ‘wise friend’, and both he and his successor Richard* numbered Pierrepont among their closest advisers.54Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 678; Whitelocke, Mems. iv. 289; CCSP iv. 116, 146. The diarist Samuel Pepys† was not exaggerating when he described Pierrepont in the 1660s as ‘the celebrated sage of that time both out of and in Parliament’.55Samuel Pepys’s Naval Mins. ed. J. R. Tanner (Navy Recs. Soc. lx), 400. And Bishop Gilbert Burnet would reminisce that Pierrepont ‘knew the laws and understood the interests and constitution of this nation beyond most I ever knew. He was likewise a man of great form and method, and as to the discreet and cautious part of wisdom, I thought him one of the most extraordinary men I ever saw’.56Supplement to Burnet’s History of My Own Time ed. H.C. Foxcroft (1902), 77. But although Pierrepont was clearly one of the period’s political heavyweights, physically he was weak and unprepossessing. He suffered badly from gout, taking several leaves of absence from the House for the recovery of his health.57CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 718; CJ iv. 109b, 624a; v. 559b. And if royalist pamphleteers can be credited, he had a hunched back.58Mercurius Elencticus no. 15 (1-8 Mar. 1648), 114 (E.431.15); no. 21 (12-19 Apr. 1648), 160 (E.436.9); Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 12 (13-20 June 1648), sig. M2 (E.448.17). His most important political association, certainly during the 1640s, was with the parliamentary Independents. His complicity in their design to establish what amounted to an oligarchic republic was entirely consistent with his own aristocratic lifestyle, which involved lavish spending and maintaining a ‘very fine coach and liveries’ complete with gentlemen attendants, footmen and grooms and a porter outside his London residence.59Mems. of the Verney Fam. ii. 311.

Background and early parliamentary career

Pierrepont was the second son of an earl and had the pedigree to match. The Pierreponts traced their descent back to the Conquest and had established themselves at Holme (subsequently named Holme Pierrepont), a few miles to the east of Nottingham, by the early fourteenth century.60Thoroton, Notts. i. 178; Vis. Notts. (Harl. Soc. iv), 55; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1055; BHO Court of Chivalry website, 353. Members of the family had been returned for Nottinghamshire or Nottingham since the early fifteenth century – a tradition continued by Pierrepont’s father, who represented the county in 1601, and by his elder brother Henry†, who sat for Nottingham in 1628.61HP Commons 1386-1421; HP Commons 1509-1558; HP Commons 1558-1603; HP Commons 1604-1629. Pierrepont’s principal residence was Thoresby Hall, Nottinghamshire, which his father settled on him in 1633. Assessed at 43 hearths in the 1660s, this was evidently a formidable establishment and dwarfed the houses of all but the region’s wealthiest aristocrats.62Notts. Hearth Tax ed. Webster, 52. Through his mother he also owned lands in Huntingdonshire and Lincolnshire, and by his marriage he acquired an extensive estate in and around Tong Castle, in Shropshire.

It was in Shropshire that Pierrepont first made his mark on public life, serving as sheriff of the county in 1637-8. He seems to have been diligent in collecting Ship Money, despite encountering considerable resistance from the county’s taxpayers.63M. D. Gordon, ‘The collection of ship-money in the reign of Charles I’, TRHS ser. 3, iv. 161; CSP Dom. 1637-8, pp. 266, 423. His activities as a

Ship Money sheriff did no lasting harm to his standing in the county, for the Shropshire gentry selected him in March 1640 to represent them in the forthcoming Parliament, and he was duly returned (probably in first place) on election day.64Supra, ‘Shropshire’; Belvoir, Original Letters, Members of the Long Parliament, PZ.1, f. 23. Pierrepont was named to four committees in the Short Parliament – including the committee of privileges (16 April) – but made no recorded contribution to debate.65CJ ii. 4a, 4b, 9a, 18b.

In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, Pierrepont was returned for the Shropshire borough of Much Wenlock, which lay about ten miles south west of Tong Castle. Whether this represented a consolation prize after losing a contest for one of the shire places is not clear.66Supra, ‘Shropshire’. Although he had little experience as a Parliament-man, he quickly established himself as one of the House’s most trusted and skilful managers of business. Between November 1640 and the September 1641 recess, he was named to 13 teams for managing or reporting from conferences and to approximately 40 committees and served as a messenger to the Lords on six occasions.67CJ ii. 103b, 110b, 112a, 118b, 126a, 137b, 139b, 153a, 159a, 167b, 175b, 219a, 220a, 242a, 243b; LJ iv. 183b, 213b, 238b, 323b, 324b, 346b. Reference to him as a ‘reticent’ Commons-man before 1642 is clearly mistaken.68A. Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, 244.

A number of Pierrepont’s early appointments and (usually brief) interjections in debate place him among the more reform-minded MPs in the House – a group intent on punishing the king’s ‘evil counsellors’ and on entrenching the power of Parliament in order to prevent any future recourse to what Pierrepont termed ‘arbitrary and tyrannical government’. Named on 10 November to a standing committee for drawing together and presenting all evidence of the ‘deplored state of the kingdom’ (also known as the ‘committee of twenty-four’), he was also included on ad hoc committees for investigating monopolies and the proceedings of the judges in relation to Ship Money and for addressing other perceived ‘abuses’ of the personal rule of Charles I.69CJ ii. 25a, 30a, 34b, 43a, 46b, 52b, 84b, 92a, 134a, 136b, 137b, 190b, 191a; Procs. LP i. 483, 496, 512, 516, 518-19, 658; iv. 549, 554, 677; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 21. He favoured a tough line against the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) and was involved in his prosecution both as a messenger to the Lords and as the principal manager of a conference on 22 April 1641 for justifying the bill of attainder.70CJ ii. 98a, 103a, 103b, 126a; Procs. LP ii. 727; iv. 64; Harl. 6424, f. 49v. Lucy Hutchinson claimed that he was instrumental in securing the passage on 6 May of the ‘act of continuance’ – legislation hurriedly introduced in the wake of a plot to free Strafford from the Tower – which stipulated that Parliament could not be dissolved without its own consent. Pierrepont was one of three men added to a committee on 6 May specifically to draft this bill and was appointed a messenger later that day to carry it up to the Lords.71CJ ii. 136b, 137b; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Firth, 93-4. On 8 May, he reported from a conference that the Lords had passed the bill of attainder against Strafford and now desired the Commons’ assistance ‘for the speedy bringing of him to execution’.72CJ ii. 139b, 140a; Procs. LP iv. 281. Later that month, Pierrepont was assigned the task of presenting to the Lords the articles of impeachment against Sir Robert Berkeley – one of the judges who had found in favour of the king in the John Hampden* Ship Money trial of 1637-8.73CJ ii. 154a, 198a. When the articles against Berkeley were read at a conference on 6 July, Pierrepont delivered a speech condemning the judge for endeavouring to

subvert the fundamental laws of this realm and to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government ... This judge did advise to such a government, as future kings here might exercise the highest tyrannies and the subjects want the benefit of restraints known to the most slavish eastern nations ... This judge assisted in causing the miseries we suffered in the [court of] star chamber and the [privy] council table. He denied the known rights which he ought to have granted us to stop our grievances in the ecclesiastical courts.74Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 325, 326, 327.

Conveniently overlooking his own involvement in the collection of Ship Money, Pierrepont refuted the argument from necessity that had been used by the crown and some of the judges to justify the levy. ‘Unlimited power’ to make laws and impose taxes can only rest upon ‘common consent’, he contended, and that could only be obtained through Parliament.75Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 326, 328. He continued to manage the case against Berkeley until the spring of 1642, when the trial stalled in the Lords (Berkeley was not sentenced until September 1643).76CJ ii. 297b, 298a, 499b, 681a, 504a, 504b, 562b, 571a, 572b; LJ iv. 681a; v. 52b, 66a, 81a; D’Ewes (C), 48, 49.

Pierrepont was also part of the Commons’ team that spearheaded the campaign in 1641 to curb the authority of the bishops and of the clergy in general. Several of his early committee appointments suggest that he was unhappy with the direction in which Archbishop William Laud and his acolytes had taken the Church of England.77CJ ii. 84b, 99a, 101a, 119a, 129a, 438a, 510b. And while there is no evidence that Pierrepont favoured root and branch reform, the establishment of ‘moderated’ or primitive episcopacy may have held some appeal for him – hence, perhaps, his motion on 7 May 1641 for clarification that the Protestation committed the swearer to upholding the doctrine of the Church of England, as opposed to its ‘discipline’.78Procs. LP iv. 249; J. Walter, Covenanting Citizens (Oxford, 2016), 62. A preference for some kind of compromise between episcopacy and Presbyterianism would be consistent with his admiration for Archbishop James Ussher, the great champion of such a scheme in the early 1640s. Like Ussher, Pierrepont seems to have been a doctrinal Calvinist.79Add. 4777, f. 69v. But he also shared the puritans’ hostility towards the political authority and pretensions of the ‘great men of the clergy’. Late in May 1641, he headed a six-man team to report a conference with the Lords on a bill for restraining the bishops and other churchmen ‘intermeddling’ in secular affairs.80CJ ii. 159a, 165b. And he was named first to a committee set up on 3 June for countering the Lords’ objections to a clause in this bill for removing the bishops’ votes in Parliament.81CJ ii. 165b. The next day (4 June), he reported nine reasons why the bishops should be deprived of their votes, including

That several bishops have, of late, much encroached upon the consciences and liberties of the subjects ... Because the whole number of them is interested to maintain the jurisdiction of bishops, which hath been found so grievous to the three kingdoms that Scotland hath utterly abolished it and multitudes in England and Ireland have petitioned against it ... Because the bishops being lords of Parliament, it settleth too great a distance between them and the rest of their brethren in the ministry, which occasioneth pride in them, discontentment in others and disquiet in the church.82CJ ii. 167a; Procs. LP iv. 718-19, 724, 726.

Pierrepont was part of the conference-management team that the Commons sent to the Lords that same day to deliver these arguments.83CJ ii. 167b. When the bill for disabling clergy from exercising temporal power finally passed the Houses in early 1642, he was named second to a committee for drawing up reasons to persuade Charles to give it his royal assent.84CJ ii. 419a.

Another of Pierrepont’s priorities in the House was the supply of the English and Scottish armies in northern England. In November 1640 and again in March 1641, he pledged £1,000 towards securing City loans to pay the troops, and he was named to several committees for this purpose – one of which, set up on 25 March, he reported from and may well have chaired. 85CJ ii. 31b, 107a, 113a, 117a, 143a, 238b; Procs. LP i. 228, 231, 235; ii. 628, 654; iii. 468; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 213. He also reported several conferences in March and April on raising additional revenue for the armies and relieving the ‘extremity and sufferance’ of the soldiers and of their reluctant hosts.86CJ ii. 109b, 110b, 111a, 112a, 113a; Procs. LP iii. 83, 498. As the financial situation worsened, he urged the House to consider the desperate expedient of coining the kingdom’s plate.87Procs. LP iv. 692. The army plots and the ruinous cost of supplying the forces in the north indicated but one course of action, and during May and June he was named to several committees and conference teams for paying off and disbanding the armies.88CJ ii. 152a, 153a, 172b, 175b. His thinking on this issue was probably coloured by the fears of the parliamentary ‘junto’ that the king might use his journey to Scotland in August 1641 to build a party for himself among the English or Scottish armies.89Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 360. This may account, at least in part, for Pierrepont’s several assignments to the Lords in July and August – either as a messenger or a conference manager or reporter – concerning initiatives to provide for the kingdom’s (and the parliamentary leadership’s) security while Charles was in the north. He was closely involved, for example, in the Commons’ efforts to ensure that the Lords did not vote for a recess before the disbandment had been completed and to appoint a custos regni in the king’s absence.90CJ ii. 220a, 220b, 227a, 242a, 243b; LJ iv. 323b, 346b; Procs. LP vi. 51, 244; Harl. 6424, f. 84. By the end of the opening session of the Long Parliament, Pierrepont apparently enjoyed the trust of the junto and was probably well known to several of its members. His London residence by December 1642, at the latest, was ‘over against’ the mansion in Holborn of Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, which served as one of the junto’s unofficial headquarters before the civil war.91Bodl. Nalson II, f. 229v; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 54-5, 139. In 1653, Warwick would name his ‘much honoured friend’ Pierrepont as one of the executors of his will.92PROB11/276, f. 246.

The Militia Ordinance and the outbreak of civil war

Pierrepont seems to have been relatively inactive at Westminster during the last three months of 1641 – at least by the standards he had set before the recess. He was named to only five committees in this period, three of which concerned Parliament’s increasingly fraught relations with the king.93CJ ii. 297b, 302a, 357b, 360b, 365a. He may have chaired, and certainly reported from, a committee set up on 2 November to treat with the City for another loan.94CJ ii. 302a, 303b. And he was appointed to conference teams to discuss correspondence from the king in Edinburgh and the outbreak of the Irish rebellion.95CJ ii. 295a, 301a. But it was not until the king’s attempted arrest of the Five Members on 4 January 1642 that he seems to have hit full stride again at Westminster – certainly his work-rate in the Commons increased dramatically after the 4th. Indeed, the six months between early January 1642 and his appointment seven months later as a commissioner to Shropshire were among the busiest in his entire parliamentary career.96PJ i. p. xxii. During this period, he was named to ten conference-management teams and over 50 committees and served on 17 occasions as a messenger to the Lords and twice as a teller.97CJ ii. 372a, 406b, 419a, 421a, 423a, 428a, 431a, 433b, 434a, 438b, 468b, 501a, 503b, 504a, 507b, 508a, 508b, 533a, 536a, 537b, 561b, 562b, 571b, 572b, 578a, 589a, 611a, 626b; LJ iv. 507a, 572b, 577b, 583b, 586b. 587b, 592b, 681a, 694a; v. 3b, 10a, 52b, 65a, 66a, 87a, 114b. The king’s actions on 4 January evidently alarmed him deeply, and over the next three weeks he was named to a series of committees for securing the safety of Parliament and vindicating its privileges.98CJ ii. 369a, 370a, 379b, 385a, 394a. On 12 January, he reported from a committee set up earlier that day to review various security issues, and he was a messenger to the Lords to request their assistance in summoning Sir John Byron, the lieutenant of the Tower, to attend the Houses.99CJ ii. 372a; PJ i. 41, 47.

Pierrepont’s most important appointment in the early weeks of 1642 – and arguably, of his entire parliamentary career – came on 14 January, when he was named first to a committee, which he chaired, to consider heads for putting the kingdom into a posture of defence.100CJ ii. 379b. The next day (15 Jan.), he reported from this committee a proposal that MPs nominate ‘such noble persons as they think fit to be appointed lord lieutenants in the several counties’.101CJ ii. 381a. This proposal, of which the Commons approved, represented the first official step on the road to the introduction of the Militia Ordinance early in March.102PJ i. 67, 105. Ten days later (25 Jan.), Pierrepont’s committee was ordered to frame reasons as to why the Lords should join the Commons in requesting the king that the militia be put ‘into such hands as Parliament may confide in’.103CJ ii. 393b. Without waiting for the Lords’ assent, the Commons set up a committee (25 Jan.) – to which Pierrepont was named – for petitioning Charles that the kingdom’s strongholds and militia be vested in persons recommended to him by both Houses.104CJ ii. 394a; PJ i. 172. Pierrepont reported this petition to the Commons, headed the delegation that presented it to the king and, on 31 January, reported Charles’s (hostile) response.105CJ ii. 395b, 399a, 405a; PJ i. 194, 232-3. Barely had the House time to digest the king’s refusal of its petition, when Pierrepont reported from his committee an order for allowing the two Houses to officer, muster and deploy the kingdom’s militia on their own authority – in other words, the first draft of the Militia Ordinance.106CJ ii. 406a; PJ i. 229. This assault on what Charles regarded as a ‘principal and inseparable flower of the crown’ was justified by Pierrepont on the grounds that

there hath been of late a most dangerous and desperate design upon the House of Commons, which we have just cause to believe to be an effect of the bloody counsels of papists and other ill-affected persons, who have already raised a rebellion in the kingdom of Ireland; and, by reason of many discoveries, we cannot but fear they will proceed not only to stir up the like rebellion and insurrection in this kingdom of England, but also to back them with forces from abroad.107CJ ii. 406a.

After making his report, Pierrepont was appointed to carry this order up to the Lords.108CJ ii. 406b.

The task of drafting the Militia Ordinance, nominating lord lieutenants for each county, steering the legislation through both Houses and of justifying it to the king and kingdom was undertaken largely by Pierrepont and his committee. The first major obstacle in his path was opposition among the peers. On 8 February 1642, Pierrepont managed a conference with the Lords at which, ‘after a preamble of the bloody and dangerous practices of the papists against the Parliament... he declared the necessity of putting the militia of the kingdom... into such hands as might be confided in’.109CJ ii. 421a; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 277; Fletcher, Oubreak, 244-5. The next day (9 Feb.), he reported reasons to be offered to the Lords justifying the terms of the draft ordinance. Among the arguments he advanced was that ‘his Majesty hath had ill advice, though we hope of better ... and may thereby encourage ill-affected persons; so that this ordinance, provided with so much care for the preservation of his Majesty and the kingdom, may prove effectual’.110CJ ii. 422b. The Militia Ordinance kept Pierrepont busy for much of February, March and April either as a committeeman, conference-manager, messenger to the Lords, or reporter to the Commons.111CJ ii. 409a, 420a, 421a, 422b, 423a, 427b, 428a, 431a, 432b, 433b, 434a, 461a, 465a, 468b, 469b, 478b, 508a, 533a, 536a, 537b, 550b. His other Commons’ assignments that spring and summer including drafting a number of Parliament’s petitions and declarations in its ‘paper skirmishes’ with the king – notably, in relation to ‘the grounds of law and necessity’ behind the Militia Ordinance – and securing Hull and removing its magazine to London.112CJ ii. 426b, 438b, 468b, 469b, 484b, 508b, 525b, 531a, 533a, 549a, 550b, 562b, 571a, 629b, 635b, 637a, 638b; PJ i. 348, 398. He was also among the group of MPs who managed initiatives in the House for enlisting Scottish forces to suppress the Irish rebellion and for preserving a ‘brotherly affection’ between England and Scotland.113CJ ii. 400a, 419a, 451b, 503b, 504a, 513b, 582a, 601a, 813a.

Many of Pierrepont’s employments at Westminster during the first half of 1642 place him close to the junto and indicate his support for its policy of coercing the king into submission. Yet Pierrepont did not consistently align with the most militant element in the Commons – as he demonstrated on 1 April, when he was a teller against disabling from sitting the future royalist Henry Killigrew for questioning the legality of parliamentary ordinances.114CJ ii. 507b; PJ ii. 116. One of the opposing tellers in this division was the leading ‘fiery spirit’ Henry Marten. Nevertheless, Pierrepont generally supported tough measures against perceived ‘delinquents’ and was not above using evidence of their alleged crimes for propaganda purposes.115CJ ii. 573a; PJ ii. 300, 318-19. He also took a dim view of backsliding on the part of fellow Members, serving as a teller on 16 June in favour of requiring MPs who were absent without leave to make their excuses to the House before they could resume their seats.116CJ ii. 626b; PJ iii. 87. If his appointments and activities during the spring and summer are any guide, he was closely involved in Parliament’s efforts to procure money for the army of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, secure Lincolnshire and the northern counties for Parliament and to execute the Militia Ordinance.117CJ ii. 572b, 587a, 588a, 589a, 602a, 611a, 617b, 629b, 630a, 638b, 663b, 675a; LJ v. 114b. He himself pledged to contribute two horse and £100 in cash or plate to advance the war effort; and he duly supplied Essex’s commissary with two horses and armed riders valued at £52.118SP28/131, pt. 3, f. 3v; PJ iii. 467. Named to a committee on 31 May for adding five propositions to what would become the Nineteen Propositions, he received further appointments on 23 and 28 June for justifying what Sir Edward Hyde* termed those ‘articles of deposition’. Yet Parliament’s proposals did not seem ‘unreasonable’ to Pierrepont, and he was dismayed that the king chose to regard them as ‘a mockery’.119CJ ii. 596a, 637a, 643a; PJ iii. 123; Verney, Notes, 181; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 170.

Pierrepont’s collaboration with the junto was highlighted by his appointment to the Committee of Safety* on 4 July 1642.120CJ ii. 651b. The Commons’ contingent on this new bicameral executive was made up almost exclusively of leading junto-men – John Pym, Nathaniel Fiennes I, Denzil Holles and Hampden – prominent hardliners like Marten and MPs with close connections to the earl of Essex. Much of the committee’s work would relate to the pay and recruitment of Essex’s army, and it thus began life as a vehicle for those at Westminster determined to confront the king from a position of maximum military strength.121Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’. Pierrepont, however, would be among the less active members of the committee, and his inclusion on it did not prevent the House from sending him and two other MPs into Shropshire in late July to oversee the execution of the Militia Ordinance and secure the county for Parliament.122CJ ii. 686a; L. Glow, ‘The Committee of Safety’, EHR lxxx. 313. Despite opposition from the county sheriff and ‘a great rabble of mean people’, Pierrepont and his colleagues succeeded in reading out the Ordinance in Shrewsbury and in rallying Parliament’s supporters in the area.123LJ v. 296b-270a. However, the king’s arrival in Shrewsbury with his army in September put paid to their mission and ensured that Shropshire would remain in royalist hands for virtually the duration of the war.

Pierrepont’s return to the House in September 1642 signalled his support for Parliament in what the majority in both camps conceived would be a limited conflict decided by a single battle. Even so, his decision to side with Parliament was not a foregone conclusion. Whereas his younger brother Francis* emerged as one of Nottinghamshire’s leading parliamentarians, both his father and elder brother Henry became royalists. Given his apparent lack of enthusiasm for wholesale godly reform, it seems likely that his allegiance was determined primarily by a continuing lack of trust in Charles as a law-abiding monarch. Between his return to the House at some point before mid-September 1642 and the collapse of the Oxford Treaty (in which he served as one of the parliamentary commissioners) in mid-April 1643, Pierrepont was once again among the most active figures in the Commons. He was named to approximately 25 committees in this period, helped to manage, or reported from, 11 conferences, was appointed a messenger to the Lords four times and served as teller in five divisions.124CJ ii. 771a, 798b, 814a, 824a, 833b, 845b, 858a, 897b, 905b, 910b, 933a, 936b, 941a, 958a, 983b, 999a; iii. 3b; LJ v. 406a, 414a, 432a. Until the battle of Edgehill, on 23 October, he apparently remained willing to countenance the use of force to bring the king to heel. Most of his appointments in the weeks before the battle related to initiatives for raising troops and money, including a scheme for creating a reserve army from the City and adjacent counties to be commanded by the earl of Warwick. Similarly, he was named on 18 October to a high-powered committee for maintaining friendly relations with the Scots, of whom Pym and his allies entertained hopes as military auxilliaries against the king.125CJ ii. 774a, 774b, 777b, 805a, 812b, 813a, 814a; LJ v. 406a, 414a. A petition to the king that Pierrepont had helped to steer through the House in September may have spoken to his own fears, for it accused Charles of intending ‘by conquest to establish an absolute and illimited power’.126CJ ii. 771a, 798b. One of only two reports that Pierrepont is known to have made from the Committee of Safety was on 18 October and concerned a letter that the committee had drafted, and which he subsequently carried up to the Lords, ordering the counties adjoining London to mobilise their trained bands, ‘knowing the destruction of our religion, laws and liberty would follow if the king’s army, consisting of papists and all sorts of malignants ... should prevail’.127CJ ii. 796b, 813a; LJ v. 414a; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 23.

Peace-party grandee, 1642-4

The tenor of Pierrepont’s appointments changed markedly after the inconclusive carnage at Edgehill on 23 October 1642. Like many other MPs, it seems he had supported the raising of an army under the earl of Essex only because he believed the royalists would be crushed at the first time of asking and Charles forced to accede to Parliament’s terms. After Edgehill, however, the Houses were faced with the awful prospect of a long drawn out civil war that would threaten both property and the established order; and to some MPs and peers – including Pierrepont – this was unacceptable. Although he continued to receive appointments related to advancing the war, or at least defending Parliament’s quarters, the main thrust of his activities in the House into the spring of 1643 was aimed at securing a swift, negotiated settlement.128CJ ii. 841a, 882b, 890b, 891b, 909a, 945b, 971a; Bodl. Tanner, f. 376.

Following a Commons’ vote early in November 1642 to re-open negotiations with the king, Pierrepont was among the five-man delegation, headed by Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, that Parliament sent to Charles with an offer to treat for peace.129CJ ii. 833b, 834a, 840b, 844a, 845b; LJ 432a. Even the king’s attack on Brentford, which the Houses regarded as an act of duplicity, could not overcome the momentum for peace at Westminster.130LJ v. 451b-452a. On 21 November, Pierrepont was a majority teller in two divisions in favour of considering a message from the king defending his actions and expressing a willingness to entertain ‘just propositions of peace’. The opposing tellers included the war-party men Sir Henry Mildmay, Sir Henry Vane II and William Strode I.131CJ ii. 858a. In the debate the next day (22 Nov.) on the king’s message, Pierrepont emerged as a leading spokesman for the peace interest in the Commons. Convinced by the Edgehill campaign that force of arms was not the answer, he argued that ‘one battle cannot end the matter. The king will not fight with us, and we must come to propositions in the end’.132Add. 18777, f. 66v. He refuted the demands being made by Vane II and other militants that the king surrender his ‘great men’ as a precursor to any peace: ‘we desire not all delinquents nor all estates’, Pierrepont insisted, ‘but only some for example’. He even rejected a proposal made by his fellow convert to the pro-accommodation camp Denzil Holles that a settlement should include at least a gesture towards reform of the church.133Add. 18777, f. 67. His retreat from the bellicose stance he had adopted in the summer was noted by several contemporaries, among them the parliamentary diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes.134HMC Portland, i. 89.

Mr [Denzil] Holles, Mr [Bulstrode] Whitelocke, Mr Pierrepont and Mr [John] Glynne amongst others who had formerly been very opposite against an accommodation ... did now speak earnestly for it ... Mr Pierrepont’s elder brother the Lord Newark was on the king’s part [and] was in question to be ruined as a delinquent.135Harl. 164, f. 99.

Pierrepont’s desire for an accommodation was perhaps quickened by the fact that most of his own estates in Shropshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire now lay under royalist control.

Pierrepont was at the forefront of the peace initiative begun in December 1642 when the Lords drew up detailed propositions for an accommodation with the king. He helped to manage or report four conferences on the propositions in December and January and was named to several committees for amending them in line with debates in the Commons.136CJ ii. 897b, 903a, 911a, 933a, 935a, 936b, 941a. On 29 December, he was a minority teller with the crypto-royalist Edmund Waller against excepting other leading royalists besides George Lord Digby* from pardon under the terms of the propositions.137CJ ii. 905b. An attempt by the war party on 3 January 1643 to frustrate the peace process by endeavouring to introduce a ‘national association’ with the Scots sparked a debate on the malign influence of the papists in which Pierrepont argued that the best way of suppressing popery was ‘the planting of a religious ministry’ and putting the laws against Catholics in execution.138Add. 18777, ff. 112-113; CJ ii. 913a. He was supported by Holles, who argued that ‘the best means of peace is to suppress those which hinders it’.139Add. 18777, f. 113v. Pierrepont was part of the delegation that presented the propositions to the king at Oxford early in February, and he made several reports to the Commons concerning the king’s less than fulsome response.140CJ ii. 945a, 957b, 958a. By this stage the debate on the propositions had shifted to the question of whether king and Parliament should disband their armies before a treaty or after it.141Add. 18777, ff. 145v-158. The argument here was not over mere technicalities, but a bitter dispute between those genuinely committed to seeking an accommodation and those determined to stiffen Parliament’s terms to the point where they were sure Charles would reject them. Pierrepont and other members of the peace interest urged the necessity of treating before disbanding, for they were convinced that disbandment before a treaty – as Pym and other ‘violent spirits’ urged – was ‘preposterous’ and ‘was to propose an impossibility against the making of peace’.142Harl. 18777, f. 157v; Harl. 164, ff. 294, 295v, 296v, 300, 301v, 302; Harl. 1901, f. 58v; Mercurius Aulicus no. 7 (12-18 Feb. 1643), 85-7 (E.246.39); no. 8 (19-25 Feb. 1643), 95 (E.246.41); CSP Ven. 1642-3, p. 215. On 28 February, Pierrepont and Holles were majority tellers against including two Commons votes on disbanding the armies in a message to the king concerning the timing and venue of the treaty.143CJ ii. 983b.

Late in February 1643, Pierrepont was appointed to the parliamentary delegation, headed by his ‘great friend’ the earl of Northumberland, to treat with the king at Oxford.144CJ ii. 985a; Supplement to Burnet’s History ed. Foxcroft, 77. Following the king’s demand on 6 March for amendments to the terms of the cessation accompanying the treaty, Pierrepont returned to Westminster and, on 11 March, was a minority teller in favour of altering the propositions in accordance with Charles’s wishes.145CJ ii. 991b, 999a; Harl. 164, f. 322v. According to his fellow commissioner Bulstrode Whitelocke*, Pierrepont ‘acted his part [in the Oxford Treaty] with deep foresight and prudence and was exceeding courteous to his fellow commissioners’.146LJ v. 688a, 689, 692a, 700a-701b, 710a; vi. 5b-7a; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 201. This assessment was shared by Hyde, who referred to Pierrepont as ‘of the best parts and most intimate with the earl of Northumberland’ – an intimacy that persisted until the earl’s death in 1668.147PROB11/328, ff. 157v-158v; Clarendon, Life, i. 152; Supplement to Burnet’s History ed. Foxcroft, 77. It was Pierrepont who suggested to Hyde that the king be persuaded to confer on Northumberland his former office as lord high admiral. If the king could be induced to gratify the earl in this particular, thought Pierrepont, there was a possibility that he and his fellow commissioners would be able to prevail with both Houses to rest satisfied with this concession alone

so that a peace might suddenly be concluded. But, as he did not despair even of that, he did believe that so many [at Westminster] would be satisfied with it, that they would from hence take occasion to separate themselves from them [the war party], as men who would rather destroy their country than restore it to peace.148Clarendon, Life, i. 153.

In effect, Pierrepont and Northumberland were colluding with leading royalists in an effort to isolate the war party and its allies and close the middle ground in English politics. But the king could not be persuaded to trust Northumberland and rejected both Pierrepont’s secret offer and Parliament’s official propositions. The treaty ended in deadlock in mid-April, after which Pierrepont reported to the Commons on the commissioners’ proceedings at Oxford and was named to a committee for drawing up a declaration justifying the two Houses’ sincerity in striving for a settlement.149CJ iii. 50a, 58a. Pierrepont’s conduct in the Oxford treaty prompted the king to offer him a leading role in his counsels if he would desert Parliament, which was probably not the first time that Pierrepont had been courted by the royalists.150Letters of Henrietta Maria ed. M.A.E. Green (1857), 196.

The collapse of the Oxford treaty led to a corresponding drop in Pierrepont’s work-rate at Westminster. Between early May and late November 1643, he was named to only seven committees – a record that almost certainly reflects his growing despondency at the continuation of the war.151CJ iii. 73a, 78a, 80b, 82b, 86a, 100a, 107a. His eirenic disposition is clear from his only tellership during this period (2 June), when he and John Selden were majority tellers against authorising the fiery spirits Sir Henry Mildmay and Henry Marten to break into and search the treasury of Westminster Abbey if the dean and prebends refused them entry.152CJ iii. 112b. It is also revealing that at some point in the late spring of 1643, Edmund Waller* felt confident in disclosing to Selden and his guests Pierrepont and Whitelocke at least the broad outlines of his plot to betray London to the king. If Whitelocke can be credited, the three men ‘inveighed so much against anything of that nature as baseness and treachery ... that he [Waller] was almost persuaded himself to give it over’.153Whitelocke, Diary, 147; Add. 31116, pp. 109-10. In the event, the plot itself was betrayed, and Pierrepont was among those who took the vow and covenant pledging to support the fight against the king ‘so long as the papists now in open war against the Parliament shall by force of arms be protected from the justice thereof’.154CJ iii. 118a. The next day (7 June), Pierrepont and Selden were among the MPs named to Parliament’s ecclesiastical talking-shop, the Westminster Assembly, and on 1 July, the two men opposed a motion made in the assembly for holding a fast day. They reminded the divines that ‘they were restrained by the ordinance of Parliament to debate of nothing but what they had particular direction for from the two Houses’.155CJ iii. 119b; Harl. 165, f. 105v. In the Commons, Pierrepont continued his efforts to promote a negotiated settlement, collaborating with Holles and the peace interest in the Lords to secure a vote for sending propositions to the king.156Harl. 165, ff. 125, 145v. Granted a fortnight’s furlough on 17 June, he was allowed further leave on 28 July to attend the burial of his father, who had been killed by a royalist cannon-ball while a prisoner on board a parliamentarian ship.157CJ iii. 131b, 184b. The frustration of the Lords’ August 1643 peace initiative can only have added to Pierrepont’s gloom, for it removed a major obstacle to a military alliance with the Scots, which threatened to plunge England into a protracted conflict involving all three Stuart kingdoms. On 24 August, he took another leave of absence – this time to put his affairs in order following his father’s death and, as it emerged, in preparation for his own withdrawal to the continent.158CJ iii. 217a.

But if the prospect of winning the war with Scottish help was unacceptable to Pierrepont, his desire to go into voluntary exile on the continent was equally unacceptable to a majority in the Commons. On 8 November 1643, Oliver St John brought in a petition from Pierrepont requesting permission to go overseas ‘because he could not yet satisfy himself to take the Covenant [the Solemn League and Covenant]’ – which one parliamentary diarist attributed to Pierrepont’s support for episcopacy.159Add. 31116, p. 180; Add. 18778, f. 84. The Lincoln’s Inn lawyer and ally of St John, Samuel Browne

did publicly testify on his behalf; that as he had been faithful to the Parliament, so he would still continue, although he had not wanted invitations from the other side [the king’s party]. That he was willing to yield up his estate for the service of the Parliament and did only desire a competency to be allowed him out of it for the support and maintenance of himself and family.160Harl. 165, f. 224v.

The ensuing debate resulted in a division in which those opposing Pierrepont’s request prevailed by one vote.161CJ iii. 304b. Whitelocke portrayed this division as a non-partisan affair – the House being ‘so desirous of his [Pierrepont’s] assistance, being a gentleman of great wisdom and integrity, that they gave him a friendly denial’.162Whitelocke, Mems. i. 225. However, the identity of the tellers indicates that this was very much a party-political issue. The tellers in favour of Pierrepont’s request were the war-party grandees and architects of the Solemn League and Covenant Sir Henry Vane II and Oliver St John, who were evidently eager to see one of their leading opponents withdraw from the House.

Unwilling to defy Parliament, and perhaps persuaded by his friends in the House, Pierrepont overcame his scruples regarding the Covenant (which he took on 22 December 1643) and resumed his seat.163CJ iii. 349b. None of his eight committee appointments between late November and early February 1644 suggest that he had undergone any profound political transformation in the aftermath of Parliament’s alliance with the Scots or the king’s cessation with the Irish Catholic ‘rebels’ – although this last development may have eased his conscience about taking the Covenant.164CJ iii. 321a, 329a, 333a, 355a, 366a, 376a, 387b, 390b. D’Ewes believed that the war-party grandees nominated Pierrepont and Sir Philip Stapilton to the Committee of Both Kingdoms (CBK) in February 1644 as ‘decoys to make the matter seem the better, being men without exception’.165CJ iii. 391b, 392b; Harl. 166, f. 7. Yet by ‘men without exception’ D’Ewes evidently did not mean politically neutral, for Stapilton was a leading member of the earl of Essex’s anti-Scottish, pro-peace interest, which suggests that Pierrepont was regarded likewise. That he continued to be aligned with the more peace-minded element in the House can be inferred from his tellership on 2 March with one of Essex’s leading supporters, Sir William Lewis, in favour of releasing the former peace-party grandee Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire, who had been imprisoned by the Commons the previous year for holding secret communication with the king.166CJ iii. 414a. The opposing tellers were the war-party men William Strode I and Edmund Prideaux I. Similarly, when the CBK was renewed in May 1644 on the basis of a draft ordinance that the Lords had sent down to the Commons back in February – which had vested such wide-ranging powers in the committee that it had to be replaced with a toned-down version – Pierrepont moved that a new ordinance be drawn up ‘to regulate and limit the exorbitant power set down in this ordinance we had passed’.167LJ vi. 542b; CJ iii. 504a; Harl. 166, f. 64v. This was very much in tune with the thinking of Essex and his allies, who resented the authority given to the committee over military affairs and in framing new peace proposals.

Pierrepont in transition, 1644-5

Yet Pierrepont had never been one of the earl of Essex’s confidants, and during the second half of 1644 he would figure prominently in efforts to curb the Essexians’ influence in Parliament’s military affairs and in setting the agenda for settlement. By that spring, Pierrepont apparently recognised the necessity of Scottish military assistance, which meant satisfying at least some of the Covenanters’ demands for a ‘strict union’ between England and Scotland. His committee appointments, his work in liaising with the Lords and his activities on the CBK all make clear that he was intimately involved in drafting and steering through the Houses what would emerge as the Uxbridge peace propositions – the locus classicus or key expression of Scottish covenanting confederalism.168Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 428b, 458b, 460b, 472b, 594a, 597a, 669a, 670b, 686a, 686b, 690a, 690b, 691a, 692a. Similarly, by mid-1644 he evidently had few qualms about subordinating Essex’s command to the authority of the CBK, or about channelling resources to rival armies under the Scots, Edward Montagu†, 2nd earl of Manchester and Sir William Waller*.169CJ iii. 525b, 541b, 542b, 544b, 553a, 582b, 602b, 621a, 644b, 658a; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 18. A high proportion of the 18 reports that Pierrepont made to the Commons from the CBK in 1644, and of his eight appointments to conference-management teams and his five as a messenger to the Lords, related to the maintenance of Parliament’s armies and the implementation of military strategy.170CJ iii. 411b, 458b, 459a, 460b, 472b, 473b, 525b, 541b, 542a, 553a, 565a, 582b, 583b, 594a, 597a, 599a, 602a, 614b, 641a, 644a, 644b, 658a, 669a, 686a, 686b, 690a, 690b, 691a, 692a, 710b, 728b; LJ vi. 610a. In mid-June, the CBK teamed him with the war-party MPs St John and John Crewe I on a sub-committee for ordering the earl of Essex to quit his march westwards and resume the siege of Oxford – which the lord general answered by accusing the committee of tactical naivety and ignorance of the military situation on the ground.171Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 227, 228. On 1 August, Pierrepont was a majority teller in favour of passing a peace proposition that would require the king to relinquish his prerogative powers over Ireland to the English and Scottish Parliaments, which – as D’Ewes noted – was ‘extreme high... and impossible to be granted’.172CJ iii. 575b; Harl. 166, f. 101. The defeated tellers were Essex’s allies Robert Reynolds and Walter Long, who were anxious for a soft peace with the king in order to re-establish an exclusively English authority in Ireland.173Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. ix, f. 27. Later that same month, Pierrepont joined several of the war-party grandees in attempting to deter the elector palatine, the king’s nephew, from prolonging his stay in England. On 31 August, he reported what D’Ewes described as ‘a most sad (and almost inhumane) message to be sent to the prince elector [that in] ... plain words almost desired him to be gone out of the realm’.174CJ iii. 612b, 613b, 614a; Harl. 166, f. 111v. That same day (31 Aug.), he was a majority teller with the war-party grandee Sir Arthur Hesilrige in favour of informing the elector that the shorter his stay in England the better. Pierrepont was then appointed to carry this resolution up the Lords and to the committee for delivering it to the elector himself.175CJ iii. 614a, 614b, 615a.

The issue that heralded, and may in part have caused, Pierrepont’s final break with the peace interest and his emergence as a leading figure among those soon to be labelled the Independents was Essex’s defeat at Lostwithiel, in Cornwall, early in September 1644. The attack on the lord general and his command began in the CBK on 23 September, when Pierrepont and four leading anti-Essexians – Northumberland, William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, St John and Crewe – were appointed a sub-committee to investigate ‘the late loss in the west’.176CSP Dom. 1644, p. 529; J. Adamson, ‘The triumph of oligarchy’, in Parliament at Work (Rochester, New York, 2002) ed. C. Kyle, J. Peacey, 116. On 27 September, Pierrepont, St John and Crewe reported the sub-committee’s findings to the Commons, describing how one of Essex’s officers, Colonel John Boteler, had entered into clandestine negotiations with the king and that Stapilton had received a copy of the resulting propositions and had communicated them to Holles and other Essexian Parliament-men but had failed to inform the House itself.177Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 641a; Harl. 166, ff. 125-6; Adamson, ‘The triumph of oligarchy’, 119, 121. After delivering this report, Pierrepont moved, successfully, for the re-admission to the House of Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire and of the latter’s uncle Sir John Evelyn of Surrey.178Harl. 166, f. 125v. D’Ewes would later claim that Evelyn of Wiltshire had secured his readmittance only by promising to work with the Independents – and certainly Evelyn would waste little time in joining the grandees of that faction.179Infra, ‘Sir John Evelyn II’; Harl. 165, f. 157.

During the autumn of 1644, Pierrepont was one of the most assiduous attenders of the CBK, where he played a leading role in a series of initiatives that would lead to the wholesale ‘new-modelling’ of the parliamentarian armies.180CSP Dom. 1644, p. 545; 1644-5, pp. 20; Adamson, ‘The triumph of oligarchy’, 116-17, 119, 122. His identification with the nascent Independent interest probably strengthened in response to the rapprochement between the Scots and Essex’s party late in 1644. One of the defining characteristics of Pierrepont’s parliamentary career after Edgehill had been opposition to Scottish intervention in English affairs (his involvement in drafting the Uxbridge propositions thus represents a major aberration in that respect). In December, he came out strongly in support of self-denying – a thinly disguised initiative for removing Essex and other pro-Scots commanders – and was named to several high-powered committees and conference teams to bring in the necessary legislation and to counter objections from Essex’s party in the Lords.181CJ iii. 718b; iv. 11b, 13b, 14b; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 508. It was Pierrepont who carried the first draft of the Self-Denying Ordinance up to the Lords on 21 December and who informed the peers on 13 January 1645 that delay in passing the ordinance ‘would not only prove dangerous, but destructive’.182CJ iii. 728b; iv. 17b, 18a; LJ vii. 135b; PRO31/3/76, f. 42. A parliamentary delegation to the Scottish Parliament early in 1645 that Pierrepont helped to organise, was regarded by the Scots commissioners as an underhand design by St John, Vane II and others ‘who profess to be our friends’ to gather potentially damaging intelligence in Edinburgh.183CJ iv. 7b, 9b; LJ vii. 123b; Biog. Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen ed. R. Chambers, T. Thomson (1875), ii. 401.

Pierrepont’s assignments in the House and reports from the CBK during the last few months of 1644 and into early 1645, point to his central role in preparations for the Uxbridge treaty.184CJ iii. iii. 691a, 697a, 710; iv. 7b, 9b, 34b, 35a, 35b, 36b, 37a; LJ vii. 122a; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 203, 273. But although he was a parliamentary commissioner to present Parliament’s terms to the king, and was part of its negotiating team at the treaty itself, his demeanour at Uxbridge suggests that he no longer put much faith in peace talks as a way to end the war. 185CJ iii. 697a, 710; iv. 24a; LJ vii. 143a; HEHL, EL 7777. According to Hyde, who was one of the royalist negotiators

Pierrepont and [John] Crewe, who were both men of great fortunes and had always been of the greatest moderation in their counsels and most solicitous upon all opportunities for peace, appeared now to have contracted more bitterness and sourness than formerly and were more reserved towards the king’s commissioners than was expected and in all conferences insisted peremptorily that the king must yield to whatsoever was demanded.186Clarendon, Hist. iii. 497-8.

After the collapse of the Uxbridge treaty late in February, Pierrepont returned to the House and was named to several committees and conference teams concerning the establishment of the New Model army and for prevailing with the Lords to pass Sir Thomas Fairfax’s* officer list.187CJ iv. 69b, 73b, 77a, 95b, 96b. He was also named to a committee and conference team for pushing through the self-denying ordinance.188CJ iv. 88a, 100a. Correspondence published in the royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus in February identified Pierrepont as a confederate of Cromwell, Hesilrige, St John, Vane II and other war-party grandees on the CBK and noted that the Scots had ‘withdrawn their intimacy’ from this group and had ‘joined in seeming confederacy and compliance’ with the Essexians ‘to advance the Presbyterial government’.189Mercurius Aulicus (23 Feb.-2 Mar. 1645), 1392-3 (E.273.13). When the Lords – endeavouring to satisfy the Scots – sent down a draft ordinance to the Commons on 10 March for empowering the Presbyterian ministry to exclude ‘scandalous persons’ from the sacrament, Pierrepont and Samuel Browne supported Selden in speaking against ‘this vast power which the Lords had so rashly conferred on the ministers’.190Harl. 166, f. 183. On 25 March, the CBK established a sub-committee, consisting entirely of Independents – Philip 4th Baron Wharton, Pierrepont, Vane I or II, Hesilrige, Crewe and St John – to consult with Fairfax and Philip Skippon* as to ‘what general officers and others shall be necessary for the army of the new model’.191SP21/8, p. 162. And six days later, on 31 March, Pierrepont’s emergence as an Independent grandee was formally recognised with his appointment to the Committee for the Army* – an ‘outrageously partisan’ body composed almost exclusively of the leading supporters of the New Model in both Houses.192Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; LJ vii. 294a; Adamson, ‘The triumph of oligarchy’, 123. He would be among the committee’s more assiduous members during the New Model’s first six months in the field, but he then seems to have put in very few appearances until the spring of 1648, when he re-emerged among the more active attenders.193Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’.

Independent grandee, 1645-7

After months of hectic parliamentary activity, Pierrepont was granted leave of absence on 12 April 1645 for the recovery of his health, and it is tempting to assume that his weakened constitution was largely responsible for the relative lull in his parliamentary career during the remainder of that year.194CJ iv. 109b. Despite standing back from the political fray that spring, he continued to lend his support to policies favoured by the Independents – notably, bringing the Scottish army southwards to cover for the fledgling New Model (and subsequently to invest Hereford) and sending commissioners to Scotland to demand the restitution of the English garrisons in Scottish hands.195CJ iv. 154a, 188b, 189a, 194b, 198a. Moreover, in June the Presbyterian polemicist and London minister James Cranford named Pierrepont among a group of prominent Independents that had allegedly been treating with the royalists for the surrender of parliamentary garrisons. This was true to the extent that Pierrepont had been named with Viscount Saye, St John and Crewe to a CBK sub-committee set up on 12 April for holding secret talks with leading royalists – although not to surrender parliamentary garrisons, but to secure the yielding of Oxford (and any other susceptible royal garrison) and to investigate who, at Westminster, was secretly supplying the privy council with weekly intelligence of Parliament’s plans. This sub-committee was reconfirmed early in May – this time composed of Saye, St John and Crewe, but without Pierrepont — with a narrower brief to consider plans for suborning royalist forces and ensuring their defection to Parliament.196Supra, ‘John Crewe I’; M. Mahony, ‘The Savile affair’, PH vii. 218. In a deposition to the committee investigating the ‘Savile affair’ (involving the alleged conspiracy surrounding Thomas Savile†, 1st Viscount Savile) – of which Pierrepont himself was a member – Pierrepont maintained that ‘he did not know that his name was in the first order concerning the sub-committee’ and that ‘he was never acquainted with any meeting of the sub-committee’.197PA, Main Pprs. 30 June 1645 (deposition no. 23); CJ iv. 167a. He made similar assertions on the floor of the House on 17 July.198Harl. 166, f. 219; Add. 18780, f. 77; Add. 31116, p. 429. However, he admitted that he had been ‘several times at the Committee of Both Kingdoms when two several orders were made concerning the sub-committee’.199PA, Main Pprs. 30 June 1645 (deposition no. 23). And Viscount Saye would later imply that Pierrepont had been present at the first meeting of the sub-committee in April.200[W. Fiennes], Vindiciae Veritatis (1654), 91 (E.811.2). But the Commons was satisfied of Pierrepont’s innocence and pronounced Cranford’s allegations ‘false and scandalous’.201CJ iv. 213a. Pierrepont was evidently not interested in making political capital out of the Savile affair, warning one of the Presbyterian MPs implicated in the controversy, Bulstrode Whitelocke, that it was possible his enemies in the House were preparing further accusations against him, which Whitelocke regarded as the action of a ‘true friend’.202Whitelocke, Diary, 177. Granted leave of absence for a month on 28 July, Pierrepont does not appear to have returned to Westminster until September.203CJ iv. 223a.

The only trend evident in Pierrepont’s rather patchy record of Commons’ activity and appointments during the last four months of 1645 – when he named to only fifteen committees and served just once as a conference-reporter and messenger to the Lords – is the growing opposition at Westminster, spearheaded by the Independents, to continuing Scottish intervention in English affairs.204CJ iv. 271a, 273a, 274b, 275a, 276a, 300b, 312a, 317a, 330a, 340a, 348a, 355a, 365a, 366b, 369b. Pierrepont’s brother Francis signed almost every letter that the committee of the Northern Association at York sent to Parliament from July 1645, complaining about the depredations of the Scottish army and asking that it be removed from the region.205Supra, ‘Francis Pierrepont’. Such letters were regarded by the Presbyterian leader Denzil Holles as part of an orchestrated campaign by the Independents to ‘embitter men’s spirits’ against the Scots and their English allies.206Holles, Mems. (1699), 46-7; D. Scott, ‘The ‘northern gentlemen’, HJ xlii. 359-60. At Westminster, Pierrepont was named to several committees that autumn for pressuring the Scots into removing their army from the northern counties and surrendering their garrisons on English soil.207CJ iv. 273a, 274b, 317a, 340a. On 13 November, he was a majority teller with Vane II in favour of setting a specific date for the Scots to relinquish their garrisons – the opposing tellers were the Presbyterian grandees Holles and Stapilton.208CJ iv. 341b. Dissension between the Scots and the Houses spilled over into the CBK during the winter of 1645-6 over the question of Parliament’s response to letters from the king requesting a personal treaty. A majority of the English contingent on the committee – and in particular Pierrepont, St John, Sir William Armyne and Samuel Browne (all Independents) – were determined to refuse any such request and to persist with a policy of what amounted to a dictated settlement. The CBK was also at the centre of the bitter row that broke out between the Scots and their enemies at Westminster early in 1646 as a result of information reported to the committee from its agents in France concerning secret talks between the Scots and the French for restoring the king. The members of the CBK most closely involved in revealing this intelligence were the familiar trio of Pierrepont, St John and Crewe.209Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iv. 421a, 422a.

Pierrepont’s Nottinghamshire connections as much as his tough stance towards the Scots may well have recommended him to the House in December 1645 as a commissioner to reside with the English and Scottish forces besieging Newark.210CJ iv. 366b. Before departing Westminster for the midlands, he was ‘very careful in procuring supplies’ for the Scottish army – an illustration of his willingness to put the public interest before narrow party concerns.211Add. 37978, f. 46v. The commissioners’ principal task was to supply and police the pay-starved and ill-disciplined Scottish army in order to prevent any ‘plundering, robbing or spoiling’ of the Newark area.212CJ iv. 374b-375a; LJ viii. 43b-44a. But for all their efforts to keep the armies in pay they could not prevent the ‘oppression[s] of the soldiers, who now in divers parts tax and levy what they please upon the country’.213LJ viii. 121a, 136, 348; Bodl. Tanner 59, f. 42; Nalson XIX, f. 366. Pierrepont and several other commissioners also relayed news of ‘troubles’ in Cumberland, where one Scottish commander had warned the countrymen to ‘look to themselves and line their banks well, for he would be with them [i.e. attack them]’.214Bodl. Tanner 59, f. 170. At the conclusion of the siege of Newark early in May 1646, the commissioners praised the English forces for their ‘fidelity, courage and good discipline’, but were pointedly silent about the conduct of the Scottish army.215LJ viii. 310a. Late in May, Pierrepont delivered a series of reports concerning the commissioners’ proceedings and detailing the ‘divers outrages’ committed by the Scottish army, after which he and the rest of the commissioners were thanked by the Commons for their ‘great industry, faithfulness and judgement’.216CJ iv. 554b, 558a, 558b, 559a; Add. 31116, p. 542. His reports on the Scots prompted the House to set up a committee on 9 June, to which he was named, for preparing a declaration relating the House’s ‘complaints and jealousies’ against the Scottish army.217CJ iv. 570b. Most of his appointments over the summer of 1646 were concerned with finalising the Newcastle peace propositions, and here, too, his hostility to Scottish intervention was evident.218CJ iv. 576a, 584b, 586b, 587a, 604a, 622b, 623b. On 13 June, he was a minority teller with Evelyn of Wiltshire against considering an ‘expedient’ sent from the Lords – where Essex’s party was now in the ascendant – for rendering the proposition on the militia more palatable to the Scots.219CJ iv. 576a. And during July, he was named to three conference-management teams for resisting attempts by the Presbyterian interest and the French ambassador to advance a settlement on less uncompromising terms.220CJ iv. 606b, 613b, 624a. On 22 July, he was granted another leave of absence for the recovery of his health and, again, does not seem to have returned to the House until the autumn.221CJ iv. 624a.

Pierrepont was at the centre of the Independents’ efforts during the autumn and winter of 1646 to send home the Scottish army and to dictate the terms on which the English Parliament would take custody of the king. Four of his seven appointments as a messenger to the Lords between October and December were to expedite business relating to the withdrawal of Scottish forces from England.222CJ iv. 679b, 694a, 708b, 722a, 730b; v. 3a, 20a. And he was also named to four ad hoc committees on this matter – two of which he reported from and may have chaired.223CJ iv. 663a, 673b, 721a, 722a; v. 1b, 18a, 19a. Well versed by now in the politics of accusation and brinkmanship that had come to characterise Anglo-Scottish relations, he was the natural choice when the Commons was looking for a spokesman in October to inform the Scots commissioners of the sufferings caused by their forces in the northern counties.224CJ iv. 711b. He presumably thought the £400,000 earmarked to pay off the Scottish army a price worth paying, although as an episcopalian he was probably less happy that this huge financial outlay would be met by the sale of bishops’ lands. Nevertheless, he was appointed to a conference team on an ordinance for this purpose and was named to the standing committee to oversee the sale.225CJ iv. 721b.

The departure of the Scots was a relatively uncontentious issue compared with the wrangling over the disposal of the king. The Independents’ preference for keeping Charles in custody until he accepted a dictated settlement sounded to the Scots more like a deposing of the king than his proper disposal. They were keen that Charles be allowed to come to London to conclude a personal treaty – which the Independents resisted on the grounds that once in London he would be able to dictate his own terms of settlement. Pierrepont was named first to, and probably chaired, a committee set up on 24 September 1646 to press Parliament’s claims for custody of the king, reporting a week later (1 Oct.) from the CBK on the Scots commissioners’ readiness to debate the matter.226CJ iv. 675a, 679a, 679b, 692b. He and three other leading Independents – Evelyn of Wiltshire, Thomas Chaloner and Nathaniel Fiennes I – were appointed on 29 October to prepare an answer to the Scots commissioners’ conditions for surrendering Charles, and a month later (26 Nov.) he reported a declaration refuting the Scots’ right of a ‘joint interest’ in the king’s person while he remained on English soil.227CJ iv. 708b, 729a, 729b. It was Pierrepont who drafted this declaration, which amounted to a comprehensive rebuttal of the Covenanters’ programme for a confederal union between the two kingdoms.228The Answer of the Commons Assembled in Parliament to the Scots Commissioners Papers (1646, E.365.2); Vox Veritatis (1650), 15 (E.616.6); [Fiennes], Vindiciae Veritatis, pt. 2, 77. He would continue to feature in the Commons’ proceedings regarding the terms of the king’s disposal to within a few days of the Scots commissioners handing Charles over to Parliament late in January 1647.229CJ v. 30a, 33a, 39a, 65b, 66b.

Pierrepont’s hostility to Scottish covenanting confederalism was evident in another of his policy portfolios at Westminster – namely, Irish affairs. During 1645 and 1646, he established himself as one of the CBK’s experts on Irish matters and as an important point of contact between Parliament’s executive and its representatives and allies in Ireland.230CJ iii. 599a, 644a; iv. 15a, 109a, 276a, 352a, 368b, 409a, 439b, 599b, 693a, 694a, 710b; Several Letters of Great Consequence (1646), 7-8 (E.322.32); HMC Egmont, ii. 339. At some point during the mid-1640s, he wrote a ‘dissertation on Ireland’ in which he attributed the outbreak of the 1641 Irish Rebellion primarily to what he saw as the degeneracy of the Catholic Old English, claiming that they had deliberately undermined the efforts of the Protestant New English to promote ‘civility and legal peace’ among the Gaelic Irish.231Add. 4777, ff. 45-80. It was not ‘religion or any religious affection’ that had motivated the Old English to rebel, he maintained, but rather their preference for the ‘savage … and tyrannous customs always used among the Irish’.232Add. 4777, f. 69. In the context of the factional struggle during 1645-7 for control of Parliament’s Irish policy, this was a highly partisan reading of events in Ireland. The most powerful figure among the Old English was the king’s lord lieutenant of Ireland, James Butler, 1st marquess of Ormond, who, by 1646, was on close political terms with the Presbyterian grandees at Westminster. The Independents, on the other hand, favoured a New English clique centred upon the earl of Northumberland’s nephew Philip Sidney*, Viscount Lisle, who had been appointed Parliament’s lord lieutenant early in 1646. Using Lisle’s lieutenancy, the Independents hoped to destroy not only the political power of the Old English but also the pretensions of the Scots to a joint interest in the rule of Ireland.233Supra, ‘Irish Committees’; J. Adamson, ‘Strafford’s ghost’, in Ireland from Independence to Occupation 1641-1660 ed. J. Ohlmeyer (Cambridge, 1995), 128-59. Pierrepont signalled his support for this policy on 9 June 1646, when he was appointed to press the Lords to pass an ordinance allowing Lisle to raise troops for the service of Ireland.234CJ iv. 570a. Likewise, on 25 September, he was a majority teller with Sir William Armyne against a proposal to provide £40,000 for Parliament’s armies in Ireland, in what seems to have been an effort to concentrate resources on Lisle’s projected campaign in Munster rather than share them with the Scottish and British forces in Ulster and Connaught (the defeated tellers were the Presbyterian grandees Holles and Stapilton).235CJ iv. 677a. The following month, Pierrepont was named to the Committee for Irish Affairs at Derby House* – a sub-committee of the CBK – which was to become Parliament’s primary executive body and the Independents’ main instrument in promoting Lisle’s lieutenancy.236Supra, ‘Irish Committees’; CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 726. Pierrepont continued to support the Independents’ Irish agenda into 1647, serving as a messenger in February to carry up orders relating to Parliament’s demand that the Scots surrender Belfast and authorising Lisle to exercise martial law.237CJ v. 74b, 76b.

Pierrepont and the army, 1647-8

Pierrepont’s statesmanlike deportment and moderation in religion seems to have rendered him more acceptable in the eyes of his Presbyterian opponents than some of his Independent confederates – notably, Hesilrige and Vane II. He was apparently respected by the Presbyterians’ Irish allies, even though they acknowledged that ‘he was one of the chiefest that furthered those of late [i.e. Lisle and his supporters], supposing it best for the public’.238HMC Egmont, ii. 384, 400, 435. Equally, there are signs that he remained on good terms with some of the Presbyterian grandees. His petition for the cancellation of his elder brother’s composition fine of £7,467 in recompense for his own losses in Parliament’s service – which, with the destruction of his estate at Tong Castle by the royalists, he put at above £13,000 – was granted late in March 1647 at a time when the Presbyterians were in the ascendant in both Houses.239CJ v. 119b; LJ ix. 93b, 94b-95a. The next day (23 Mar.), he was appointed to a conference team with four Presbyterians concerning the New Model army’s quartering in the Eastern Association.240CJ v. 121a. He also continued to attend meetings of the Derby House Committee even after the Presbyterians seized control of it early in April.241CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 726-37; SP 21/26, pp. 53, 170. It was reported late in April that he and several other leading Independents attended the Commons infrequently as a result of the Presbyterian ascendancy.242Bodl. Clarendon 29, f. 204. Yet the very next day (30 Apr.), he was appointed a messenger to the Lords, and during May he was named to four committees, one of which – to prepare reasons for demanding the withdrawal of Scottish forces from Ulster – he was named to first, and probably chaired.243CJ v. 157b, 162b, 167b, 170b, 174a; LJ ix. 160b. On 14 May, he was included on a conference team to present these reasons to the Lords.244CJ v. 172b.

But there is little to suggest that Pierrepont’s allegiance to the Independents wavered during the Presbyterian ascendency in 1647. On 20 May, for example, he was a minority teller with Evelyn II against having the common hangman burn a pro-army petition presented from the London radicals to the Commons as the supreme authority in the nation.245CJ v. 179b. The opposing tellers were the Presbyterian grandees Holles and Sir Walter Erle. And having been granted leave on 25 May, he did not depart Westminster before serving as a minority teller with Hesilrige on 3 June – after news had reached Westminster of the army’s seizure of the king at Holdenby – against paying off the soldiers as quickly as possible, in what was clearly a desperate act of appeasement by the Presbyterians.246CJ v. 182a, 197a. He had returned to the House by 23 July, when he and other Independent MPs were tasked with preparing a declaration against the Presbyterian ‘engagement’ of the London apprentices and watermen, which Parliament condemned as ‘tending to the embroiling the kingdom in a new war’.247CJ v. 254a; LJ ix. 354b; Juxon Jnl. 161. The Presbyterian grandee Sir John Maynard* claimed that Pierrepont was among the group of leading Independents responsible for the Heads of Proposals – the terms of settlement that the army presented to the king in July 1647.248Beinecke Lib. Osborn fb155, f. 239. That Pierrepont was a member of the Independents’ ‘cabinet council’ would become a commonplace among political commentators over the next year, and it was apparently in 1647-8 that he forged a strong and enduring friendship with Cromwell.249Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 17 (4-11 Jan. 1648), sig. R4 (E.422.17); no. 12 (13-20 June 1648), sig. M4 (E.448.17); no. 14 (27 June-4 July 1648), sig. O3v (E.450.27); Mercurius Elencticus no. 15 (1-8 Mar. 1648), 114; [J. Wildman*], Putney Proiects (1647), sig. F3 (E.421.19); Windsor Projects and Westminster Practices (1648), 4 (E.442.4); [C. Walker*], An Appendix to the Hist. of Independency (1648), 10 (E.463.20); Baillie, Lttrs. and Jnls. iii. 16; Hamilton Pprs. ed. S. R. Gardiner (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xxvii), 174.

Pierrepont and his brother Francis were among those MPs who fled to the protection of the army following the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster on 26 July 1647 and who signed their ‘engagement’ of 4 August, in which Fairfax and his men were eulogised for their ‘Christian, noble and public affection to the good, peace and prosperity of this kingdom and ... faithfulness to the true interest of the English nation’.250LJ ix. 385b. On returning to Westminster with the army early in August, Pierrepont was named to three committees for repealing the legislation passed by the Houses during the absence of the Speaker and the other fugitive Members.251Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 755; CJ v. 271b, 278a, 279b. In mid-August, Murrough O’Brien, 1st earl of Inchiquin – lord president of Munster and an ally of the Westminster Presbyterians – wrote to Pierrepont, pleading supplies for his army and defending himself against those ‘causeless and malicious enemies’ who had poisoned the Independent grandees against him: ‘I hope that you and all other persons of honour will suspend censure upon me until you have heard me’.252HMC Egmont, ii. 447. Pierrepont was reportedly ‘much unsatisfied’ that Inchiquin had purged Lisle’s supporters from his officer corps; yet according to one of the earl’s correspondents, ‘he values you and will see that you have honourable conditions’.253HMC Egmont, ii. 437, 477. On 21 August, Pierrepont was granted further leave of absence and did not return to the House until mid-October.254CJ v. 281a, 330a, 336a.

The course of Pierrepont’s political career during the last months of 1647 and into 1648 was shaped in large part by what the Independents regarded as two acts of treachery – the king’s flight from Hampton Court in November (contrary to his parole) and the subsequent negotiations between him and the Scots commissioners that resulted in the Engagement. The king’s refusal to accept the Heads of Proposals would not have endeared him to Pierrepont, who on 6 November was appointed to a conference-management team to justify several amendments to the proposals, including a clause insisting that Charles was ‘bound in justice and by the duty of his office to give his assent to all such laws as by the Lords and Commons, in Parliament, shall be adjudged to be for the good of the kingdom and by them tendered unto him for his assent’.255CJ v. 352b. The day after the king’s flight from Hampton Court on 11 November, Pierrepont was named first to a committee to investigate this incident.256CJ v. 357a. Although he served as a messenger to the Lords on five occasions between November 1647 and the spring of 1648, his most important appointments during this period were to committees.257CJ v. 358a, 403a, 457a, 466b; LJ ix. 647b. As a member of the CBK and various ad hoc committees set up in November and December, he was involved in framing Parliament’s answers to letters from the Scots commissioners reiterating their claims to a joint interest in negotiating with the king for the settlement of the kingdoms.258CJ v. 359b, 367a, 385a, 404a. He also worked to keep the New Model army united and well paid in anticipation of what he and his friends feared would be a war with the Scots.259CJ v. 367a, 396a, 403a; Vox Veritatis, 15; Whitelocke, Diary, 203.

With the king’s rejection of Parliament’s Four Bills in favour of a military alliance with the Scots (the Engagement), the Commons voted on 3 January 1648 that no further addresses should be made to him. Pierrepont was more inclined to envisage problems with this policy than solutions.260D. Underdown, ‘The parliamentary diary of John Boys, 1647-8’, BIHR xxxix. 155. Nevertheless, that same day (3 Jan.), he was named to a high-powered committee for preparing a declaration justifying the House’s proceedings.261CJ v. 416a. The royalist newsbook Mercurius Elencticus identified Pierrepont and Sir Henry Mildmay as the ‘chief’ members of this committee – although most of the drafting was done by Fiennes – and villified Pierrepont as ‘that whimpering cricket that looks like a rat on the lip of a milk bowl; a thing bred out of filth and superfluity of ill humours, the corruption of whose mind only entitled him to the dignity of a louse’.262Mercurius Elencticus no. 12 (9-16 Feb. 1648), 81. Immediately after the vote of no addresses, the Commons established Pierrepont and his fellow English members of the CBK as a new executive body, the Derby House Committee* (DHC).263CJ v. 416a. During the first half of 1648, Pierrepont was the most active member of this committee, which was instrumental in mobilising and maintaining Parliament’s army and navy during the second civil war. His work on the DHC was complemented by the renewed interest he took that spring in the business of the Army Committee.264Supra, ‘Derby House Committee’; ‘Committee for the Army’. His prominence at Derby House contrasts with his profile in the Commons, where he received less than a dozen appointments between January and 15 May, when he took another leave of absence due to ill health.265CJ v. 416a, 417a, 457a, 464b, 466b, 541a, 543b, 558b, 559b, 649a; LJ ix. 647b; x. 119a, 343a.

Westminster represented something of a second front for the Independent grandees during the early months of 1648 – their main focus was on trying to re-open negotiations with the king. This, of course, constituted a breach of the vote of no addresses, and therefore they had to proceed with as much secrecy as possible. Nevertheless, a deal with Charles, ideally on the basis of the Heads of Proposals, represented their best hope of undermining the Engagement and preserving unity within their own camp. In April, a correspondent of the Scottish Engager leader William Hamilton, 1st earl of Lanark, reported that for most of the previous week

Mr Pierrepont, Mr St John, Evelyn [II] and young [i.e. Nathaniel] Fiennes were absent from the House and met the Lord Saye at Wallingford, where they debated their condition and concluded it necessary to entertain a treaty with his Majesty, thereby (if possible) to disengage him from the Scottish interest ... which, if it succeed, then they intend to patch up a peace ...266Hamilton Pprs. ed. Gardiner, 174; Mercurius Elencticus no. 22 (19-26 Apr. 1648), 167 (E.437.10).

Whitelocke recorded hosting a dinner at his Buckinghamshire residence late in March for Pierrepont, St John, Evelyn and the governor of Wallingford.267Whitelocke, Diary, 210; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 95-6.

It was against this backdrop of clandestine overtures to the king, that Pierrepont, Vane II and other Independent grandees voted with the Presbyterians on 28 April 1648 in declaring that the House would not alter ‘the fundamental government… by king, Lords and Commons’ and for re-opening official negotiations with the king on the basis of the Newcastle Propositions.268CJ v. 547a; Hamilton Pprs. ed. Gardiner, 191. By highlighting their commitment to a traditional settlement on terms approved by both kingdoms, the Independent grandees consolidated their informal alliance with the anti-Engager Presbyterians at Westminster and gave the Engagers’ enemies in Scotland strong grounds to challenge the projected invasion of England. The parliamentary commissioners sent to Scotland in January – ostensibly, to inform the Scots of Parliament’s desire to maintain peace between the two kingdoms – were to provide money and encouragement to the anti-Engagement faction; and on this score they received their orders (or so it was alleged) from Viscount Saye, Pierrepont and St John.269Supra, ‘William Ashhurst’; Bodl. Clarendon 34, f. 38v; HMC Hamilton Supplementary, ii. 72; ‘Mr Thomas Reade’s Relation’ ed. C. H. Firth, Scottish Hist. Soc. xliv. 295.

Pierrepont was a leading member of the team at Derby House that liaised with Cromwell and other army officers during the second civil war and its aftermath.270Supra, ‘Derby House Committee’; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 643, 645, 646, 648. In the Commons, many of his appointments during the summer and autumn of 1648 concerned Parliament’s dealings with the king and the Scots. In June and July, he was named to several committees either for justifying Parliament’s proceedings towards settling a peace, or its endeavours to maintain a good correspondence between the kingdoms.271CJ v. 610b, 614a, 643b. On 19 August, he and Evelyn II were reportedly instrumental in securing a resolution allowing the king to summon persons from Scotland to advise with him on Scottish affairs in the forthcoming treaty at Newport.272CJ v. 675a. But according to one royalist commentator this was merely a case of the two men hedging their bets, for news of the victory at Preston had not yet reached Westminster and they had received intelligence that Cromwell’s army was outnumbered by the duke of Hamilton’s forces: ‘for these [Pierrepont and Evelyn] are of the cabinet at Derby House and know more of affairs abroad than the common vote-drivers of the faction in the House’.273Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 21 (15-22 Aug. 1648), sig. Bb2 (E.460.21). On 24 August, Pierrepont was appointed to a conference-management team for explaining why the Commons could not agree with the Lords’ vote for allowing the Scots a seat at the negotiating table in Newport.274CJ v. 681b.

The ominous stirrings in the army at the end of the second civil war convinced Pierrepont and other Independent grandees of the necessity of a personal treaty with the king, even if it was on the basis of the Newcastle Propositions. Yet relations between the Independent grandees and the army’s leaders remained close. On 1 September, Cromwell wrote to St John and asked him to pass on his regards to Pierrepont, Evelyn II ‘and the rest of our good friends’.275Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 645. That same day (1 September), Pierrepont was named one of the treaty commissioners and spent most of the next three months negotiating with Charles on the Isle of Wight, earning the hostility of the pro-Leveller newsbook Mercurius Militaris in the process.276CJ v. 697a; LJ x. 492b; Bodl. Tanner 57, ff. 294, 310, 345, 382; Mercurius Militaris no. 2 (17-23 Oct. 1648), 15 (E.468.35); Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 1320, 1350. Pierrepont joined the other commissioners – who included Northumberland, Saye and Crewe – in trying to persuade the king to take the Covenant, arguing that it was compatible with the legislative power, ‘nay, was in favour of it’.277Desiderata Curiosa ed. F. Peck (1735), ii, lib. x. 5. Not that Pierrepont had grown any more fond of the Scots or of a covenanted settlement. Indeed, when Cromwell marched into Scotland in September to prop up the anti-Engager regime in Edinburgh, Pierrepont was in favour of conquering the entire country, which Cromwell thought feasible but ‘not Christian’.278Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 678. However, Pierrepont recognised that unless the king took the Covenant, the Westminster Presbyterians were prepared to resist a settlement as surely as were the radical Independents. The promise of high office in the restored court may also have quickened his efforts to secure agreement at Newport, but the king’s concessions were barely sufficient to satisfy a majority at Westminster let alone the army.279HMC Portland, i. 593. Cromwell professed wry amusement ‘concerning my wise friend’s [i.e. Pierrepont’s] opinion, who thinks that the enthroning the king with Presbytery brings spiritual slavery, but with a moderate episcopacy works a good peace’.280Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 677.

In response to the army’s seizure of the king early in December 1648 and its preparations for purging the Commons, the House set up a committee, to which Pierrepont was named in first place, for maintaining a good correspondence between Parliament and Fairfax and his officers.281CJ vi. 93b. On the day of Pride’s Purge (6 Dec.), Pierrepont and his committee wrote repeatedly and insistently to Fairfax, demanding the release of those MPs detained by the army, but to no avail.282CJ vi. 94a; W. Prynne*, A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members (1660), 17-18 (E.1013.22). Pierrepont was included (incorrectly) on one near-contemporary list of the secluded Members, and there can be no doubt that he was incensed at the army’s proceedings and ‘with the Members that sat [in the House] after the force upon them’.283A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669 f.13.62); Whitelocke, Diary, 226, 229. One newsbook reported on 11 December that ‘Pierrepont and some others have voluntarily deserted them [the Rumpers] and ... do this day put in their protests for themselves and in the names of all the rest [of the MPs] that are in restraint’.284Mercurius Elencticus no. 55 (5-11 Dec. 1648), 533 (E.476.4). William Prynne* – writing over a decade after the event – claimed that Pierrepont and Evelyn II were among a group of MPs who were allowed to take their seats in the purged House, where they tried for ‘many days’ to have ‘the so highly broken privileges and freedom of Parliament vindicated’. But ‘finding the force continued upon the House and secluded Members, they also withdrew and never sat since’.285Prynne, True State of the Secluded Members, 18. Unlike his brother Francis, Pierrepont refused to serve the commonwealth. The claim that he was still signing Army Committee warrants in March 1649 is incorrect, as is the assertion that the Rump ‘finally excluded’ him in January 1651.286Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 289; Worden, Rump Parl. 179, 251; ‘William Pierrepont’, Oxford DNB.

Pierrepont and the protectorate, 1654-9

One of Cromwell’s priorities following the establishment of the protectorate late in 1653 was to bring Pierrepont back into government: ‘the prime man the protector aims to get in [to the protectoral council] is Mr Pierrepont’.287TSP i. 755. Pierrepont consistently resisted such blandishments, although he repeatedly professed his respects and ‘most devoted, humble service’ to Cromwell.288TSP iv. 469; Nottingham Univ. Lib. Pw 1/377. Despite reportedly trying to avoid being elected to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, he was returned in first place for Nottinghamshire.289Supra, ‘Nottinghamshire’; TSP ii. 414. His influence in the county was undoubtedly considerable and had been augmented in 1653 with the marriage of his daughter Frances to Henry Cavendish†, a younger son of the civil war royalist general and Nottinghamshire grandee William Cavendish, 1st marquess of Newcastle. Pierrepont provided Frances with a marriage portion of £5,000 – and presumably paid a similar sum in 1655, when his daughter Grace married Denzil Holles’s nephew Gilbert Holles†, Lord Houghton, the scion of another Nottinghamshire aristocratic family.290Notts. RO, DD/P/6/1/16/60; DD/P/8/131. Unmoved by the honour of representing his home county at Westminster, Pierrepont received no committee appointments in the first protectoral Parliament and played no recorded part in debate, and it seems very likely that he never took his seat.

Pierrepont’s enthusiasm for the protectorate seems to have increased markedly with Cromwell’s swing away from the army and towards a more traditional settlement early in 1657. In February, it was reported that Pierrepont had been ‘often, but secretly, at Whitehall’ to advise with Cromwell on the kingship question; and according to Whitelocke he was part of the protector’s inner ring of advisers at this time – a group that also included Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle*), Oliver St John, Nathaniel Fiennes, Sir Charles Wolseley*, John Thurloe* and Whitelocke himself.291TSP vi. 37; Whitelocke, Mems. iv. 289; Whitelocke, Diary, 464; CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 80. Although he was disappointed by Cromwell’s refusal of the crown, Pierrepont approved sufficiently of the new constitution established under the Humble Petition and Advice to consult with the protector on the membership of the Cromwellian Other House.292TSP vi. 633; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 273. He was summoned to the Other House late in 1657 and given the title William Lord Pierrepont. But like Saye, Crewe and several other former grandees of the Long Parliament, he declined to attend any of its meetings, and nor did he offer any excuse for his absence.293HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 504, 522. Reports were circulating by March 1658 that ‘Pierrepont, St John and that faction’ had been sidelined by Cromwell.294P. Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge, 2004), 164. Pierrepont’s influence in Cromwellian counsels revived fully, however, following the succession of Richard Cromwell* in September 1658. Several commentators believed that Pierrepont, St John and Thurloe were Richard’s principal advisers, and certainly Pierrepont thought highly of the new protector.295CCSP iv. 116, 118, 146. Late in 1658, Pierrepont tried to persuade the Nottinghamshire regicide Colonel Hutchinson to serve under the protectorate, imparting to him ‘a very honourable design of... settling the state under this single person [Richard] and the hopes of felicity in such an establishment’. Pierrepont gave

many strong reasons why that family [the Stuarts] could not be restored without the ruin of the people’s liberty and all their champions ... and that the establishing this single person would satisfy that faction [the royalists] and compose all the differences, bringing [in] all of all parties that were men of interest and love to their country. 296Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 213.

With the fall of the protectorate in April 1659, Pierrepont apparently withdrew from national politics again and did not return to public life until early 1660. On 23 February, two days after the re-admission of the Members secluded at Pride’s Purge, he headed the Commons’ poll of those elected to the new council of state.297CJ vii. 849a. And although he apparently refused to attend the restored Long Parliament or the council on the grounds that the death of Charles I had effectively dissolved the former and thus rendered the latter illegal, he was a figure of considerable importance among the Presbyterian ‘cabal’ – a group of parliamentarian grandees centred around Northumberland, Holles and St John that was anxious to secure a conditional restoration of monarchy. Hyde’s correspondents believed that Pierrepont and St John would have preferred to restore Richard Cromwell rather than Charles II. Hyde himself described Pierrepont and St John as ‘impertinently violent against the king’.298Clarendon SP iii. 686, 693, 701, 705; CCSP iv. 592, 614, 617, 666, 674, 683; Mordaunt Letter-Bk. 95-6. Nevertheless, shortly after Charles landed in Dover late in May, Pierrepont, his nephew Robert Pierrepont† and his sons-in-law Viscount Mansfield and Lord Houghton joined other Nottinghamshire grandees in a congratulatory address to the king ‘for your so happy regaining at once both the affections and obedience of your people’.299SP29/1/42, f. 82.

Returned for the county in the elections to the 1660 Convention, Pierrepont and Houghton were listed by Philip, 4th Baron Wharton among those MPs likely to support a Presbyterian church settlement.300G.F.T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 339. Pierrepont engaged his interest for two candidates in the election at the Nottinghamshire borough of East Retford, but apparently without success.301Nottingham Univ. Lib. Pw 1/382. One of the Convention’s most influential voices on matters of supply, he persuaded the Commons to compensate the king for the abolition of feudal dues with an excise on liquor rather than a land tax. And true to his parliamentarian past, he was at the forefront of opposition to a new militia bill on the grounds that it afforded too much power to the crown. He also demonstrated his accustomed political courage in arguing against the imposition of the oath of supremacy on recusants and urging leniency for Vane II, Hutchinson, John Lambert* and Thomas Lister*.302Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 231; HP Common, 1660-1690. He himself secured a royal pardon in August 1660 and retained his place on the Lindsey and Nottinghamshire benches until his death.303Eg. 3539, ff. 41-4. In the elections to the Cavalier Parliament in 1661, he stood for Nottinghamshire again but was defeated by a combination of resurgent cavalier feeling and voter resentment at ‘the conjunction of several lords’ in his favour.304HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Nottinghamshire’.

Although Pierrepont conformed to the Church of England after the Restoration, he evidently enjoyed the trust of leading figures among the dissenting interest.305LMA, ACC/0446/ED/121, 360, 396; Bucks. RO, D-CE/M22; J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry Besieged (1993), 47. He also maintained his intimacy with the earl of Northumberland, who appointed him one of the trustees of his estates in Yorkshire and Cumberland in the early 1660s and one of the executors of his will in 1667.306PROB11/328, ff. 157v-158v. It was by virtue of these appointments that Pierrepont presented ministers to Percy livings in the two counties in the 1670s.307IND1/17007, f. 381; Clergy of the C of E database. Pierrepont died ten years after Northumberland, on 17 July 1678, and was buried ‘without any funeral pomp’ at Holme Pierrepont.308Life of Dugdale ed. Hamper, 140; PROB11/357, f. 281. In his will, he referred to his manors and lands in Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Huntingdonshire and Shropshire and to his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He charged his estate with annuities worth £600 and bequests of over £20,000. 309PROB11/357, ff. 281-2. One of his grandsons sat in the Lords as the 3rd earl of Kingston, while another, Evelyn Pierrepont†, represented East Retford in 1689 and 1690.310HP Commons 1660-1690.