ABBOT, George II (1604-49), of Caldecote and Baddesley Ensor, Warws.

Much confusion and doubt have surrounded the identity of this Member, summarised in his entry in Old DNB. He has been described as a clergyman, muddled with George Abbot I*, and even associated with George Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury. The author of the Old DNB entry did much to correct these many misapprehensions, but left a number still to be rectified. Contrary to the assertion there, George Abbot was not the son of Sir Thomas Abbot of Easington in the East Riding of Yorkshire, nor his grandson: no mention of any Sir Thomas Abbot is recorded in Shaw’s Knights of England. Similarly, the Victoria County History article on Easington does not record a family of that name settled there at any period.10VCH Yorks. E. Riding, v. 24.

In fact, George Abbot was the son of a minor gentleman of York, who on 27 April 1603 had married Joan Penkeston. She was the daughter of Aleyn Penkeston, who was evidently of some consequence in the city parishes of St Michael le Belfry and St Mary Bishophill Junior. Neither George Abbot, the MP’s father, nor his grandfather Penkeston were freemen of York.11Register of the Freemen of the City of York. Vol. II: 1159-1759 ed. F Collins (Surtees Soc. cii). The modest patrimony bequeathed by Aleyn Penkeston to his grandson was at Cornborough, in the parish of Sheriff Hutton in the North Riding, suggesting this as the place of origin of the Penkestons.12PROB11/207, f. 405v. George Abbot, father of the MP, had served, or was in service at the time of his death, to a Mr Pickering of York, and was thus probably following a mercantile calling. He was of good enough standing in the city to request on his deathbed that a sermon be delivered at his funeral by Dr William Goodwin, chancellor of York cathedral, and later dean of Christ Church and vice-chancellor of Oxford University.13Borthwick, will of George Abbot, pr. 30 Jan. 1608. The MP's grandfather, another George Abbot, was a yeoman farmer, of Whitwood in the parish of Featherstone, near Pontefract. His family was connected in various generations with the Shillitos, of the same parish, and while his son George moved to York to a career in commerce, his other sons remained yeomen and were often called upon as jurors at the West Riding quarter sessions.14Borthwick, will of George Abbot, pr. 29 July 1619; R.J. Shillito, 'The Shillitos of the West Riding of Yorkshire', Miscellanea (Thoresby Soc. xxvi), 282-310; W. Riding Sessions Records Vol. II. Orders 1611. Indictments 1637-1642 ed. J. Lister (Yorks. Arch. Soc. liv), 61, 185, 271, 366. A family with which the Abbots were connected was that of Pickering. Michael Pickering of York married George Abbot the MP's great-aunt, Isabel Abbot. Their daughter, Elizabeth, in 1629 married Thomas Bourchier, younger brother of Sir John Bourchier*.15Dugdale’s Vis.Yorks. i. 306; Vis. Yorks. 1585, 1612 ed. J. Foster (1875), 281, 630; Thoresby, Ducatus Leodiensis, 211. In his will, George Abbot the MP bequeathed his house at Cornborough, after the days of his mother and stepfather, to Elizabeth Bourchier, whom he described as ‘cousin’. Thus behind the yeoman and minor gentry background of his immediate family, George Abbot was connected with lesser scions of more distinguished Yorkshire gentry, beyond the confines of the city of York itself. Both parental families settled in York from elsewhere in the county, remaining outside the civic hierarchy, but nevertheless with enough status for Abbot's Penkeston grandparents to have been buried in the high choir of the church of St Michael le Belfry after they died.16St Michael le Belfry, York, par. reg. (9 Oct. 1630, 27 Apr. 1642).

By February 1609, George Abbot’s childhood in York had been brought to an abrupt end. First, his father died in November 1607, and in January 1609, when Abbot was still under five years of age, his mother remarried. Her choice was William Purefoy I*, of Caldecote, north Warwickshire.17St Martin Coney St. York par. reg. (8 Nov. 1607); St Michael le Belfry, York par. reg. (1 Jan. 1609). She and her young son may not immediately have journeyed south to Purefoy’s home, since Abbot’s will, made 40 years later, showed signs of some recollection, albeit hazy, of York and its topography. But despite his later bequest to the petty school in the parish of St Mary Bishophill Junior, he is unlikely to have been educated there, nor is there reason to associate him with the individuals of his name recorded as having attended Oxford or Cambridge Universities. It is more probable that his formative years were spent at Caldecote, where he was educated privately. There is no record of Abbot’s ever having married, or having participated in local government before 1640. His life seems instead to have been devoted to private study, and the greatest influence on him outside his family was Richard Vines, minister of Caldecote from 1630, and Abbot’s spiritual mentor.18Oxford DNB, sub Vines. Vines and Abbot were of similar age, and were evidently good friends.19PROB11/207, f. 405v; G. Abbot, The Whole Book of Psalms Paraphrased (1650), Dedication sig. A3. It was probably as a result of Vines’s influence that Abbot made his ‘first entrance into the school of Christ’, after a spiritual conversion. Previously, his studies had been unfocussed – he had a collection of books on medicine – but with Vines’s guidance, Abbot began to study for a purpose.20PROB11/207, f. 405v; Abbot, The Whole Book of Psalms Paraphrased, sig. A3, A4. His first book was published in 1640, having passed the scrutiny of the episcopal licensing authority on 14 June 1638. The Whole Booke of Job Paraphrased is concisely described by its title.21G. Abbott, The Whole Booke of Job Paraphrased (1640). Its pages consist of parallel texts of the Authorised Version of Job and Abbot’s commentary on it, verse by verse. There is nothing polemical or sectarian in its content, and it represents more than anything else the meditations of the author on the text. Abbot dedicated his work to William Purefoy, whom he had often heard remarking on the need for a popularising paraphrase of the Bible. His dedication introduced a persistent false trail for biographers of Abbot and Purefoy to follow. Abbot described the latter as his father-in-law, by which was meant stepfather: only recently has a commentator noted that Abbot could not have been the husband of a daughter of Purefoy.22A. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warws. 1620-1660 (Cambridge, 1987), 175 and n. 24.

The year that Abbot’s book on Job was published, he first represented Tamworth, in the Short Parliament. His election was not uncontentious. He and Sir Simon Archer were elected by the two bailiffs and the 21 capital burgesses alone. The exclusion of the commonalty from the selection process provoked 87 inhabitants to petition Parliament to recover what they considered their ancient right to elect parliamentary burgesses.23C.F. Palmer, Hist. of the Town and Castle of Tamworth (Tamworth, 1845), app. p. xxvii. Abbot made no mark on the assembly, which did not sit long enough for the complaint of the Tamworth men to be pursued, but the fact that he was not re-elected to the November Parliament suggests that the commonalty may have made headway in their campaign against the Tamworth oligarchy. At the time he was first elected at Tamworth, Abbot was described by the petitioners as a ‘sojourner at Caldecote’, and although he had a house and lands at Baddesley Ensor, presumably settled on him by Purefoy, he never seems to have lived anywhere other than at his mother’s home.24PROB11/207, f. 405v. Returning to his studies, in 1641 Abbot brought out another book, this one again dedicated to his stepfather. It had evidently been some years in the making, as Abbot tells us that he had written it before books which were published in 1636 and 1637 made their appearance.25G. Abbot, Vindiciae Sabbathi (1641), dedication, n.p.; C. Dow, Innovations Unjustly Charged (1637); P. Heylyn, The History of the Sabbath (1636). It was much more combative than the first book, its author perhaps emboldened to publish by the times, and empowered by the breakdown of censorship. Arguing that observance of the sabbath was a bulwark against ‘the plot of the times', Abbot developed a vigorous case against Laudianism. The ‘patrons of impiety’, as he called the church hierarchy and its lay supporters, were intending by their attacks on sermons and sabbath observance to reduce ‘godliness to a form, and all things (but episcopacy) from ius divinum to ius humanum’.26G. Abbot, Vindiciae Sabbathi (1641), dedication, n.p. Although the author defended the ‘fools as they call puritans’ against the aspersions of the Laudians, he was at pains to make it clear that he was no champion of ‘nonconformists’ (separatists), but only of ‘conscionable’ ministers, preaching twice a day, or lecturers.27Abbot, Vindiciae Sabbathi, 72. The minister and prolific religious writer Richard Baxter thought well of Abbot's defence of the sabbath.28Cal. Baxter Corresp. i. 247.

On the outbreak of civil war, William Purefoy I was immediately active on the side of Parliament, and Abbot was bound to be drawn into the same allegiance, no doubt viewing political events through the same lens as his stepfather. William Dugdale listed Abbot among those who implemented the Militia Ordinance in Warwickshire at the start of the war.29Northants. RO, FH 4284. Thus Abbot's commitment to Parliament predated the incident on 28 August 1642 that was a traumatic test of whether the scholarly Abbot could rise to playing the man of action. In Purefoy’s absence, Caldecote was surrounded by 18 troops of horse under Princes Rupert and Maurice. Only Abbot’s mother and her servants were in the house with him, and Abbot, with five other men and two women, managed to stave off the royalists. In later years, Richard Vines noted that the incident occurred on a Sunday, and developed the conceit that Abbot's defence of the sabbath was thus a military, as well as a literary one.30LR9/131: Edmund Bateman to Francis Phelipps, 5 Sept. 1642; Special Passages and Certain Informations no. 4 (30 Aug.-6 Sept. 1642), 30-1 (E.115.21); A True Relation of Prince Robert his Forces (1642), 1-3 (E.116.6); A Continuation of Certain Speciall and Remarkable Passages (30 Aug. - 6 Sept. 1642), 5-6 (E.116.8); Abbot, The Whole Book of Psalms Paraphrased, sig. A4. In some accounts, Rupert was sufficiently impressed by Abbot’s conduct that he offered him a commission in his regiment.31[J. Vicars], God on the Mount (1643), 155-7 (E.73.4); Dugdale, Warws. ii. 1099.

In fact, Abbot played no further part in the war in a military capacity, but was active as a committeeman on behalf of Parliament. On 31 December 1642, he was named a commissioner in the nascent Association for Staffordshire and Warwickshire, in which the 2nd Baron Brooke (Robert Greville†) was commander-in-chief of the regiment, and he was appointed to further Warwickshire committees, for sequestration and assessment. With Purefoy, Thomas Willughby* and Godfrey Bossevile*, Abbot opposed the command of the 2nd earl of Denbigh (Basil Feilding) over the Association, and petitioned Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex against Denbigh's officers in Coventry.32LJ vi. 321b. A recent historian of the Warwickshire county committee, as it became, notes Abbot's prominence in the body, measured by the frequency of his signature on its warrants.33Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warws. 360-3. He was particularly active from October 1644 to December 1645, and it must have been his visibility in this arena, as well as his relationship to the ubiquitous Purefoy, that ensured his election at Tamworth in a recruiter election on 2 October 1645. By that time he had become a burgess of Tamworth, to overcome the scruples of the townsmen voiced in April 1640.34C219/43/3/63.

As an established theological writer of broadly Erastian Presbyterian persuasion, Abbot was a natural choice for service on important committees addressing thorny questions in rebuilding the state church. On 15 May 1646, he was added to the Committee of Plundered Ministers, the most important vehicle for reorganising and funding the parish ministry, and on 3 June was made a commissioner for determining scandalous offences, which vested in him and his colleagues the power of turning away individuals from the Lord's Supper.35A. and O.; CJ iv. 545b, 562b. Similarly, later in the year, he was appointed to the committee given the task of publishing a state-approved Bible and Greek Old Testament.36CJ iv. 695a. These must have been the committees he found most congenial and dearest to his heart. Among his committee appointments during 1646 were, in the spring and summer, one working on an ordinance to settle lands on the minister Hugh Peter (here he served with another Warwickshire Presbyterian MP, Sir John Burgoyne) and one to consider the wrongful seizure of the property of Sir John Cambridge.37CJ iv. 525a, 571b. In August, with three other MPs, he was deputed to oversee the reduction of the army in Staffordshire, to remove two garrisons and a fort in the county and to send disbanded troops to Ireland, a task which, as a political Presbyterian sympathiser, he might have been perfectly willing to undertake.38CJ iv. 633b.

Abbot had four committee appointments in October, and was one of five managers for the Commons in a conference with the Lords on the separate issues of settlement with the Scots and the management of the great seal.39CJ iv. 694b, 696a, 701b, 710b. On 2 November, he was named to a committee considering allowances to bishops, who by this time were all out of office, and the following day was one a group of six appointed to meet the Lords once more about the great seal.40CJ iv. 712a, 714a. His colleagues on this last body were eminent Members (Samuel Browne, John Wylde, Sir Henry Vane II, Edmund Prideaux I and Sir Robert Harley), suggesting that Abbot was tipped for great things, and the composition of the committee seemed nicely judged in terms of political balance. But just over a week later, Abbot was given leave to go the country, a victim of chronic ill-health which persisted through three calls of the House over two years.41CJ iv. 720a; v. 543b; vi. 34b. In fact, he never returned, and died at Caldecote on 21 February 1649. In his will, he left bequests for preaching ministers at Baddesley Ensor, Caldecote and York, and for schools at Baddesley and York. He specified that the schools should use John Ball's Short Catechism, first published in 1615 and much reprinted subsequently. The book was thus perhaps known to him from childhood, and its author was approved by Richard Baxter, among other puritan divines.42PROB11/207, f. 405v; J. Ball, A Short Catechisme (1615, BL, C.175.i.39); Oxford DNB, sub John Ball. The tomb his mother erected in his memory preserved the story of his defence of the house; Richard Vines was left to write the dedication of Abbot's last, posthumous book and declare it the MP's only posterity.43Dugdale, Warws. ii. 1099.