HESILRIGE, Sir Arthur (1601-61), of Noseley, Leics.

Background and early career

The Hesilriges of Noseley probably took their name from the village of Hazelrigg, seven miles south of Berwick-upon-Tweed in Northumberland. Hesilrige’s ancestors had represented that county at Westminster on several occasions in the fourteenth century, having won royal favour in the wars against the Scots and built up an extensive estate that included property near Newcastle. In the early fifteenth century the family had acquired by marriage the manor of Noseley, twelve miles from Leicester, and by the Tudor period it had become their principal residence.88Nichols, Leics. ii. 740-1; W.G.D. Fletcher, ‘The early history of the fam. of Hesilrige, of Noseley’ (Trans. Leics. Arch. Soc. vii), 281-90; Farnham, Thompson, ‘Noseley’, 228-9; Hodgson, ‘Eslington’, 11-21.

Hesilrige would assert in 1659 that he had been ‘bred a puritan’, although at what point in his life he first received this godly grounding is not clear.89Burton’s Diary, iv. 77. His father, Sir Thomas Hesilrige, was described as a man of ‘great temperance and sobriety’, but there is no firm evidence that he was a puritan in the sense of desiring further reformation in religion.90J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry (1984), 49; D.R. Costa, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige and the Development of the Civil War in England (to 1645)’ (Oxford Univ. DPhil. thesis, 1988), 15. The details of Hesilrige’s education shed little light on this matter. He attended Westminster school – where he was possibly a contemporary of the future regicide Thomas Scot I* – before being admitted to Magdalene College, Cambridge, which was not known as a particularly puritan establishment.91Ath. Ox. iii. 578. As a student at Gray’s Inn during the early 1620s he may well have attended sermons by the inn’s lecturer, the puritan divine Richard Sibbes, and would certainly have rubbed shoulders with many godly gentlemen and future parliamentarians. That he, or at least his father, was sympathetic to men of godly stamp can perhaps be inferred from his marriage in 1624 to a daughter of the ‘moderate puritan’ Thomas Elmes, a Northamptonshire deputy lieutenant.92J. Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts: the Diocese of Peterborough 1603-42’ (Birmingham Univ. PhD thesis, 1989), 28, 124, 161. The marriage settlement required Sir Thomas Hesilrige to settle ‘the best part of my lands’ upon Arthur.93HEHL, Hastings manorial, box 53, item 6, f. 127.

Hesilrige’s emergence as an opponent of royal policies can be traced to his father’s attempt to secure his return for Leicester to the first Caroline Parliament, in 1625. Sir Thomas himself had been returned for Leicestershire to the Parliaments of 1614 and 1624 – probably with the backing, or at least approval, of the county’s lord lieutenant Henry Hastings, 5th earl of Huntingdon, who had appointed Sir Thomas one of his deputy lieutenants by 1618 at the latest.94HP Common, 1604-1629, ‘Sir Thomas Hesilrige (Haselrigge)’. In April 1625, Sir Thomas recommended Arthur to Leicester corporation as one who, ‘being willing to adapt himself for the service of his country, is desirous to become a scholar in the best school of Christendom for knowledge and experience (the Parliament House of England)’.95Leicester Bor. Recs. iv. 220. Unfortunately for the Hesilriges, the Leicester election ended up pitting Arthur against Huntingdon’s elder brother, (Sir) George Hastings†, and although Hesilrige was soundly beaten on a poll and had probably not set out to challenge the Hastings interest in seeking a seat, he and his father’s electoral pretensions cost them the lord lieutenant’s favour. Later that year, Huntingdon deprived Sir Thomas of his office as a deputy lieutenant and Hesilrige of his place as a captain of horse in the Leicestershire trained bands. Removed from his most prestigious office and now ‘despised’ by Huntingdon, Sir Thomas emerged as a leading critic of the earl’s administration in Leicestershire and as a gentleman not afraid to resist Caroline policies in the interests of the county. Both Sir Thomas and Elmes were loan refusers in 1627 and were summoned before the privy council to answer for their temerity. After Sir Thomas’s death in 1630, Hesilrige would continue and deepen this commitment to resisting the unwarranted impositions of the crown and its local agents – his antagonism towards the government perhaps heightened by Charles’s willingness to pardon the killer of Hesilrige’s brother in a duel that year.96HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir Thomas Hesilrige (Haselrigge)’; APC 1628-9, pp. 262-3, 318; Cogswell, Home Divisions, 43, 93-4, 192-4. Appearing before the privy council in 1632 after Huntingdon had reported him for refusing to pay military charges, Hesilrige compounded his offence by insulting one of the earl’s deputy lieutenants, for which he was briefly imprisoned. When he resumed his defiance over military charges, in 1635, Huntingdon had him brought before the council again, and on this occasion he was not only imprisoned (for about six months, on and off) but also removed from the Leicestershire bench.97CSP Dom. 1631-3, pp. 445-6, 521; 1635, p. 604; Cogswell, Home Divisions, 197-200, 213-17; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 25, 33. Predictably, Hesilrige was among those Leicestershire gentlemen who resisted the collection of Ship Money during the later 1630s.98CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 543; Cogswell, Home Divisions, 233. In between his bouts with Huntingdon and the privy council he was fined £100 for unwarrantable enclosure of land in Leicestershire, and he was called before the court of high commission – probably in connection with his failure to maintain a clergyman at Noseley, preferring instead to appropriate the parish tithes and keep a ‘puritan’ household chaplain.99E403/3041, f. 155; CSP Dom. 1634-5, p. 532; 1635, p. 199; SP16/535/26, ff. 54v, 65. He also clashed with Laud after the archbishop had granted an allowance to the vicar of Noseley out of the Hesilrige’s lay impropriation. His resentment at Laud’s presentation of one John Bassett to the rectory in 1638 brought him once again to the attention of the council.100PC2/51, f. 27; E331/Canterbury/10 (9 Nov. 1638); Works of Laud, iv. 184; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 547.

Hesilrige had contemplated visiting the continent in the early 1630s – probably to avoid further harrassment from the Caroline authorities, but also, perhaps, to commune with godly English exiles in the United Provinces. In July 1633, the privy council granted Hesilrige and the Jersey physician Aaron Guerdain passes to travel abroad for three years.101PC2/43, f. 78v; Al. Cant. ‘Aaron Geurdain’. But whereas Guerdain duly left England for the continent, Hesilrige seems to have stayed put and, in the summer of 1634, married a sister of the Warwickshire puritan peer and future parliamentarian grandee Robert Greville†, 2nd Baron Brooke. Brooke was a founding member of the Providence Island Company – a colonising venture, established in 1629-30, that brought together many of the nation’s foremost godly figures, including Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, John Pym*, Oliver St John* and Sir Gilbert Gerard*.102CSP Col. 1574-1660, p. 123. In 1632, Saye, Brooke, Pym, John Hampden* and several other godly gentlemen associated with the Providence Island circle became members of a syndicate to promote a new colony on the Connecticut River: Saybrook.103A.P. Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans (New Haven, 1914), 83-4. It cannot be assumed that Hesilrige was among these original Saybrook patentees, as one authority has claimed.104Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’. However, there is near contemporary evidence to suggest that he had joined the syndicate before 1634, which would imply that his marriage to Brooke’s sister was a consequence of his entry into high-level puritan society rather than a contributory factor.105Docs. and Recs. Relating to the Province of New-Hampshire, i. 157; K.O. Kupperman, Providence Is. 1630-41 (Cambridge, 1993), 326. One early point of contact between Hesilrige and Lord Brooke’s circle may have been his father-in-law by his first marriage, Thomas Elmes, who has been described as a protégé of Pym and of the godly Northamptonshire gentleman and Saybrook patentee Richard Knightley†.106HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Richard Knightley’; Cogswell, Home Divisions, 193. At some point during the early 1630s, Hesilrige joined Saye, Pym, Hampden and John Crewe I* among the feoffees that Knightley appointed to administer a trust for his client, the puritan minister John Dod.107Oxford DNB, ‘John Dod’; Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts’, 16-17.

By mid-1635, Hesilrige was a member of the Saybrook patentees’ colonial offshoot, the Saybrook company, which included Saye, Brooke, Henry Darley*, Henry Lawrence I* and Hesilrige’s contemporary at Gray’s Inn and future son-in-law, the Northumberland gentleman George Fenwick*.108Winthrop Pprs. (Mass. Hist. Soc. 1943), iii. 198-9; Newton, Colonising Activities, 177. Among the godly notables also involved in this venture were Sir William Boynton*, Sir William Constable*, (Sir) Henry Vane II* and the Congregationalist divines Philip Nye and Hugh Peters.109Supra, ‘Sir William Boynton’; ‘Sir William Constable’; infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II; Newton, Colonising Activities, 178, 180. Hesilrige, Boynton, Constable and Lawrence seriously considered emigrating to Saybrook in the mid-1630s – and, in anticipation of their coming, Fenwick, Vane II, Peters and John Winthrop junior crossed the Atlantic to oversee the establishment of the colony – only to abandon the idea in 1637.110Supra, ‘Sir William Boynton’; ‘Sir William Constable’; ‘George Fenwick’; infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Winthrop Pprs. iii. 209; Cliffe, Puritan Gentry, 202-3; Denton, Only in Heaven, 29; Kupperman, Providence Is. 328; Oxford DNB, ‘John Winthrop (1606–1676)’; ‘Hugh Peter [Peters]’. To add to the practical difficulties involved in transplanting to the New World, a royal proclamation was issued in May 1637, prohibiting transatlantic emigration without a licence. The outbreak that year of the Covenanter rebellion in Scotland may also have influenced Hesilrige’s decision to remain in England.111H.R. Engstrom, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige and the Saybrook Colony’, Albion, v. 166-7.

Early parliamentary career, 1640-1

A royalist pamphlet published in 1644 alleged that Hesilrige had been at the centre of a nationwide puritan conspiracy against the crown during the late 1630s.

For what purpose else did Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Mr Pym sojourn two years together with Mr Knightley, so near the habitation of the good Lord Saye [at Broughton Castle, near the Oxfordshire-Northamptonshire border]? To what end held they correspondence with the discontented party in the country and took such pains in canvassing for knights and burgesses (when this present Parliament was called) in most counties?112[P. Heylyn], The Rebels Catechisme (1644), 25 (E.35.22).

This account probably exaggerated Hesilrige’s importance in the counsels of Warwick, Saye, Brooke, Pym and their circle – the group that spearheaded English opposition to the personal rule. Nevertheless, it is almost certain that he was complicit in their designs. Pym is known to have stayed with Hesilrige at Noseley on at least one occasion during the late 1630s, while Hesilrige himself was apparently a regular guest at the Knightleys’ residence at Fawsley – one of the main rendezvous for the ‘discontented party’.113Cat. of Original MSS and Historical Corresp. Formerly Belonging to John Pym (1934), 39; Clarendon, Hist. i. 242-4; Ath. Ox. iii. 59-60, 73; Denton, Only in Heaven, 30.

Hesilrige put his experience as a member of this network, and his hard-earned reputation as a godly patriot, to good use in the Leicestershire election campaign for the Short Parliament early in 1640. Determined to challenge Huntingdon’s efforts to secure the return of his son Henry Hastings and his protégé Sir Henry Skipwith, Hesilrige joined electoral forces with another prominent figure in the anti-Hastings camp: the godly Leicestershire peer Henry Grey*, 1st earl of Stamford.114Supra, ‘Leicestershire’. Between them, Stamford and Hesilrige were said to have ‘laboured almost every man through the whole country [i.e. county]’ and received promises’ of support.115HEHL, Hastings corresp., box 16, HA 5558; Cogswell, Home Divisions, 262. One Leicestershire gentleman, a self-declared defender of ‘slandered authority’ against the forces of ‘popularity’, claimed that Stamford had ‘sent messengers to divers towns’ in the county ‘to request the freeholders to choose Sir Arthur Hesilrige a knight of the shire’.116SP16/458/110, f. 213v. On election day, 17 March 1640, the Leicestershire freeholders returned Hesilrige and Henry Grey, Lord Grey of Ruthin, in that order.117C219/42/1/146. That the serving county sheriff was Hesilrige’s politically sympathetic neighbour, William Halford, may well have counted in his favour, although there is no evidence that there had been any pressure from the Hastings camp for a poll.118Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 44. Hesilrige’s one recorded speech in the Short Parliament was an apparently brief interjection in a debate on 23 April about whether to proceed first with the redress of grievances or the voting of supply. Like Pym, he seems to have favoured consulting with the Lords on the issue of grievances as a matter of priority.119Infra, ‘John Pym’; Aston’s Diary, 41-3. He received only one appointment in the Short Parliament – to a committee set on 3 May to receive petitions concerning double returns.120CJ ii. 18b.

Hesilrige and Ruthin were returned for Leicestershire again in the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640. After the election, one of Huntingdon’s deputy lieutenants was driven to complain that in electing Hesilrige the voters ‘had chosen a man ... who had more will than wit, and that it was to the disparagement of the county’ – remarks for which the Commons sent him to the Tower.121CJ ii. 43a; Procs. LP i. 31, 41, 45, 425; Northcote Note Bk. 25; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 38; Cogswell, Home Divisions, 272. Hesilrige’s career as a Parliament-man began relatively slowly given the prominence he was to assume at Westminster in subsequent years. Between the opening of the Long Parliament and the 1641 autumn recess he was named to 46 committees and one conference management team; served twice as a messenger to the Lords; and once as a teller (in a minor division concerning a private bill).122CJ ii. 91b, 248b, 251a, 251b; LJ iv. 356a, 358b. That he was assigned so few positions of great trust or of a sensitive nature before 1642 is not surprising, perhaps, given his inexperience as an MP and his somewhat aggressive and headstrong temperament. Edmund Ludlowe II*, who came to know him well, would describe him as ‘a man of disobliging carriage, sour and morose of temper, liable to be transported with passion, and to whom liberality seemed to be a vice’, although he acknowledged ‘the rectitude and sincerity of his intentions’.123Ludlow, Mems. ii. 133. Hesilrige’s taste for political confrontation is confirmed by his 278 tellerships during the period 1640-60 – the highest number of any Parliament-man in the civil-war era. But his boldness and fervency proved to have their political uses, particularly in the service of the parliamentary leadership at Westminster in 1640-1 – a group dubbed ‘the junto’ – which was headed by his long-standing confederates Warwick, Saye, Brooke, Pym and Hampden. Like other members of this group, Hesilrige harboured a deep dislike of personal monarchy and its local agents such as the earl of Huntingdon. Hesilrige’s early parliamentary career was observed by Edward Hyde*, the future earl of Clarendon, who described him as ‘an absurd, bold man, brought up by [i.e. a protégé of] Mr Pym, and so employed by that party [the junto] to make any attempt’.124Clarendon, Hist. i. 300. Hyde placed Hesilrige with George Digby*, Sir Gilbert Gerard* and William Strode I* in the category of Commons-men who ‘observed and pursued the dictates and directions’ of the junto in 1640-1 ‘according to the parts which were assigned to them, upon emergent occasions’.125Clarendon, Hist. i. 250. Writing after the Restoration, Hyde accorded him a somewhat more significant place in the junto’s counsels, recalling that Pym, Hampden and Hesilrige and ‘two or three more’ had frequented Pym’s lodgings near the palace of Westminster, ‘where they transacted much business and invited thither those of whose conversion they had any hope’.126Clarendon, Life, i. 74-5.

A significant proportion of Hesilrige’s committee appointments during the early months of the Long Parliament were concerned with reforming the ‘abuses’ of the personal rule, punishing their authors and promoting godly religion. Thus he was named to committees for investigating the prerogative courts; to receive petitions against the Laudian bishops; and for abolishing superstition and idolatry while advancing ‘the true worship of God’.127CJ ii. 28b, 44b, 46b, 50b, 54b, 56a, 84b, 91a, 95a, 97a, 99a, 101a, 105b, 114a, 119a, 129a, 136b, 181b, 205b, 230b, 251a; H.R. Engstrom, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige: the forgotten knight of the Long Parliament’, Albion, viii. 323-5. Following the House’s vote on 7 December that Ship Money was illegal, Hesilrige was one of 16 Members appointed to attend the judges and inquire as to what pressure they had been under from the crown to rule in favour of the levy.128CJ ii. 46b. The next day (8 December), he reported Justice Sir Francis Crawley’s insistence that he had never been solicited or threatened by the crown regarding Ship Money, and ‘nor [had] any of the judges to his knowledge’.129Procs. LP i. 513, 517, 520, 521; Northcote Note Bk. 42. On 12 and 14 December, he was added to sub-committees of the ‘grand committee for religion’ that were charged with settling a preaching ministry and receiving complaints from ministers who had suffered at the hands of the Laudian church authorities.130CJ ii. 54b; Procs. in Kent 1640 ed. Larking, 98. His motion on 14 December that the committee to examine the prerogative courts also consider the miscarriages of Huntingdon’s deputy lieutenants in Leicestershire resulted in the setting up of a new committee to investigate the conduct of the lord lieutenants and their deputies generally.131CJ ii. 50b; Procs. LP, i. 588. The next day (15 Dec.), the committee, at Hesilrige’s prompting, summoned five of the earl’s deputies to answer for their conduct during the personal rule.132HMC Cowper, ii. 269; Cogswell, Home Divisions, 278. He was equally forthright that month (December 1640) in defending political allies, speaking repeatedly in support of the return for Sudbury of the godly Suffolk gentleman, and friend of John Winthrop junior, Brampton Gurdon† – the committee of privileges having ruled in favour of Sir Robert Crane.133Procs. LP i. 489-90, 511, 518; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Brampton Gurdon’. Hesilrige was an influential member of the committee and was prepared to overlook electoral irregularities and precedents (in which he was apparently well versed) in the cause of seating politically-reliable Members.134Bramston, Autobiog. 160-1; Procs. LP vi. 472; D’Ewes (C), 126; PJ ii. 273; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 55-6. If his appointments before the late April 1641 are any guide, he showed little interest in the state of the English and Scottish armies encamped in northern England after the second bishops’ war, or in the financial resources and machinery needed to maintain them. Nevertheless, he pledged a total of £1,200 towards securing City loans for paying these forces, ‘which’, he claimed in 1659, ‘he felt [the want of] yet’.135Procs. LP i. 229; ii. 620; Burton’s Diary, iii. 84.

Hesilrige made no known contribution to the prosecution of Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford until 10 April 1641, when, on the floor of the House – with the trial against the earl faltering – he suddenly ‘drew out of his pocket a bill, supposed to have been prepared before that day, for the earl’s attainder and punishment by death’.136CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 540. This coup de théâtre was either prompted or supported by the Yorkshire Member Sir Philip Stapilton – a close ally of the junto peer Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex – who opined that proceeding via a bill of attainder was ‘the shortest and the best way’.137Infra, ‘Sir Philip Stapilton’; Procs. LP iii. 501. Hesilrige’s dramatic introduction of this bill has plausibly be interpreted as evidence of a split within the junto between the ‘Bedford House group’ (Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford, Pym and Hampden) and Warwick, Essex, Brooke and their immediate circle. Despite his intimacy with Pym and Hampden, Hesilrige was almost certainly closer to his brother-in-law, Lord Brooke. Indeed, Hesilrige and his family were living in part of Brooke House, Holborn, by the winter of 1641 at the latest. Warwick, Brooke, Essex – and evidently Hesilrige – belonged to the more militant wing of the junto, which regarded Strafford as too dangerous to live, even if executing him would jeopardise a settlement with the king. It was very probably one of the lawyers allied to these militant junto-men who drafted the bill that Hesilrige brandished on 10 April.138Adamson, Noble Revolt, 242-4, 510, 625. On 23 April, Hesilrige was one of several Members who raised objections to the speech that Bedford’s son-in-law, George Digby, had delivered the day before against the bill of attainder.139Procs. LP iv. 77.

Hesilrige seems to have acted as the junto’s cat’s-paw again on 4 May 1641, when he initiated a debate in the House that the Lords should be asked ‘to join with us to move his Majesty for the putting away of evil counsellors and placing others in their place’. His motion, which found ‘divers’ seconders and was ‘well allowed’, seems to have stopped short of demanding a parliamentary role in selecting senior ministers of state, although that was probably the import of his words.140Procs. LP iv. 193; A. Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War (1985), 56; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 294-5, 414, 422. When the Commons’ gallery, where he customarily sat, collapsed suddenly on 19 May, he clung to a carved angel on the ceiling of St Stephen’s chapel, prompting a good deal of derisive comment that such a ‘stiff, precise man [i.e. one of the godly]’ should clutch at ‘superstitious’ relics.141Procs. LP iv. 467; Univ. of Minnesota Lib. Ms 137 (Peyton diary), p. 121; D’Ewes (C), 126; Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, 27-8; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 333.

Hesilrige’s religious sympathies were to the fore a week or so later in staging another piece of political theatre in the Commons – Sir Edward Dering’s presentation on 27 May 1641 of a bill for the ‘utter abolishing’ of the episcopal order from the Church of England. Asked to reprise his accustomed role as the junto’s instigator of radical initiatives, Hesilrige had used Dering – who sat next to him in the House – as a stalking horse. Hesilrige had reportedly conferred with Vane II and Oliver Cromwell* about the bill, although it is likely that Brooke and other grandees were also complicit in this design, which was intended, in part, to satisfy the Covenanters of the junto’s commitment to godly reformation.142Supra, ‘Sir Edward Dering’; Procs. LP iv. 605; E. Dering, A Collection of Speeches (1642), 3, 62-3 (E.197.1); Clarendon, Hist. i. 314; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 328-9. The bill was referred to a committee of the Whole, where Hesilrige fulminated against the bishops as ‘enemies to the commonwealth and ... to our liberties and peace, as witness the episcopal war [the bishops’ wars]’. For 1,300 years, he claimed, the bishops had been subverters of the state, and he implied that the only people who had a good word for them were ‘either papist or popishly affected’.143Procs. LP v. 112, 115, 117. But with too little support in the House, or from the committee’s chairman, Hyde – whom Hesilrige pronounced his ‘enemy’ – the bill withered and died.144Infra, ‘Edward Hyde’; Clarendon, Hist. i. 364. With the episcopate helping to frustrate the passage of reformist legislation through the Lords, Hesilrige figured prominently in the campaign initiated in the Commons in July to impeach thirteen bishops accused of promoting the new Canons and other Laudian innovations.145CJ ii. 230b, 251a, 251b; LJ iv. 358b.

As well as being employed by the junto (in Hyde’s words) ‘like the dove out of the ark, to try what footing there was’, Hesilrige served as one its fiercest attack dogs – a role he performed to conspicuous effect in the summer of 1641.146Clarendon, Hist. i. 365. He demanded action against Catholic popish peers in protecting their co-religionists; denounced Henry Wilmot* and the other army plotters; insisted that Digby’s various offences against the House warranted his exclusion from Parliament; sought to expedite the impeachment of the Laudian prelate John Cosin; and urged exemplary punishment against the ship-money judges.147Procs. LP iv. 744; v. 38, 321, 331, 386, 445, 482; vi. 73, 95.

Hesilrige’s boldest intervention in the Commons in the summer of 1641 was on 22 June, when he interrupted a debate concerning the ‘brotherly assistance’ to the Scots with news of a ‘great treason discovered in Scotland’ against the junto’s leading ally there, Archibald Campbell*, 8th earl of Argyll – a plot in which the king was heavily implicated.148Procs. LP v. 275, 279, 281, 287; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 334-5. Hesilrige and his junto colleagues used this revelation to push their agenda on several fronts; and first and foremost to prevent or delay the king’s planned journey to Scotland, which they feared would give Charles an opportunity to suborn discontented elements in the English and Scottish armies in northern England. Several of Hesilrige’s appointments that summer were consistent with the desire of the junto, and indeed most Parliament-men, to pay off and disband the armies in northern England.149CJ ii. 165a, 172b, 239a, 248b; LJ iv. 356a. Secondly, the junto exploited this conspiracy to strengthen its relations with Argyll’s party in Scotland. But its most ambitious use of Hesilrige’s revelations on 22 June was to build momentum at Westminster for what would emerge as the Ten Propositions – a series of proposals for (among other things) disbanding the armies, placing the trained bands under the command of ‘faithful and trusty’ commanders, and punishing the authors of the plot against Argyll and other popish conspirators. Hesilrige was named to a committee established on 28 June to confer with the Lords concerning the propositions – and in debate he revived his motion of 4 May, arguing forcibly for adding stipulations to effect the ‘removal of evil counsellors and putting good in their place’. The ‘chief cause’ of the army plots, he insisted, was ‘wicked counsel’ at court.150CJ ii. 184b-185b, 190b; Procs. LP v. 300, 331; Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, 56; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 313; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 335-7, 414, 690. On 9 August, he returned to this theme, joining other junto-men in bemoaning the presence of ‘ill counsellors’ and threatening to obstruct the bill for tonnage and poundage unless the king appointed their own nominees for high office and agreed to root-and-branch religious reform. He was ‘grieved at heart’, he said, at the recent addition of three peers (all future royalists) to the privy council, especially ‘now that we so much desire good councillors’, and backed calls for the appointment of (the future parliamentarian) William Cecil*, 2nd earl of Salisbury as lord treasurer.151Procs. LP vi. 318, 322; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 358; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 340. That same day (9 August), he came out strongly in favour of the junto’s proposal for the appointment of a custos regni during the king’s absence in Scotland.152Procs. LP vi. 321; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 339, 340.

On 19 August 1641, Hesilrige and the godly Northamptonshire Member Zouche Tate departed the Commons without leave upon some ‘discontent (as is conceived)’, whereupon the Houses ordered them to attend its service forthwith, ‘but they proceeded in their journey nevertheless’.153CJ ii. 263b; Diurnall Occurrences (1641), 342 (E.523.1). It has plausibly been conjectured that they departed Westminster in discontent at the Commons’ failure to observe its own resolution of mid-August to revive the bill against episcopacy, which had foundered in Hyde’s committee.154Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, i. 99-100; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 82. Hesilrige’s sudden departure from the House was probably the sole reason for his failure to secure appointment to the Recess Committee* in September. At about the time the Houses adjourned, a polemicist for the king’s party identified Hesilrige with Pym, Hampden and other junto-men in the Commons who ‘all conspicuously have conspired together against the king’.155HMC Salisbury, xxiv. 227; Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, 128.

The road to civil war, 1641-2

Despite Hesilrige’s increasingly high profile in the Commons from the summer of 1641, there was little change in the pattern of his parliamentary appointments in the year preceding the battle of Edgehill, in October 1642. Between the re-assembling of Parliament after the autumn 1641 recess, and his departure from Westminster in September 1642 to serve as a captain of horse in Parliament’s main field army, he was named to 54 committees, served as teller in three divisions and was sent twice as a messenger to the Lords.156CJ ii. 339b, 348a, 496a, 499a, 509b; LJ iv. 480b, 674a. Again, he was assigned no duties of great trust in terms of chairing important committees, drafting orders and legislation, or transacting business between the two Houses. He was named first to, or reported from, only three committees during this period, and it is not clear that he chaired any of them.157CJ ii. 446a, 447a, 471b; PJ ii. 9.

Hesilrige’s main roles in, and value to, the junto remained those of a fearless champion of radical reform and of the suppression, indeed extermination, of its opponents. Determined, like his fellow junto-men, to undermine the king’s majority in the Lords and thereby clear the path for further assaults upon the royal prerogative, he backed a bill introduced by Gerard on 21 October to ‘debar the prelates from having any voice in Parliament, and other clergymen from exercising secular offices’. Hesilrige ‘brought his proofs out of Timothy 2:2 [where Christ’s true servants were identified as ‘gentle unto all men ... in meekness instructing those who oppose them’] and also the practise of Christ and his apostles and all their ancient councils’.158D’Ewes (C), 25; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 417. On 25 October, he secured a Commons order that the committee for prosecuting Archbishop Laud should proceed in preparing the case against him, ‘for that it would [give] great satisfaction to the people’.159CJ ii. 294b; Diurnall Occurrences, 384. The next day (26 October), with the House having reactivated impeachment proceedings against the 13 bishops, Hesilrige dismissed Hyde’s attempt to prevent the charge against the accused prelates being one of treason. He was equally keen to inflict harsh punishment on the judges and the army plotters; and in December he pushed hard for the execution of seven condemned Catholic priests whom the king wished to reprieve.160CJ ii. 297b, 339b; D’Ewes (C), 39, 42, 258, 260, 270, 273; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 428.

Hesilrige was a leading combatant in the factional struggles at Westminster during November and December 1641 between the junto and the nascent king’s party – a conflict exacerbated by the outbreak of the Irish rebellion late in October. On 2 November – the day after news of the rebellion reached Westminster – Hesilrige was named to a committee for arranging a City loan to help suppress the rebels and to a bicameral standing committee on Irish affairs.161CJ ii. 302a. But for some reason he appears to have contributed very little to the House’s proceedings for the rest of that month. Having either absented himself from the House, or remained silent, during the heated debates on the Grand Remonstrance, he re-surfaced on 30 November, when he moved that the impeachment of the 13 bishops be expedited, and received appointment to a committee for presenting the Remonstrance to the king.162CJ ii. 327a; D’Ewes (C), 212, 217. A more pressing problem for Hesilrige than securing the Commons’ assent to the Remonstrance was that of securing the Lords’ assent to legislation for placing the junto and its Scottish allies at the forefront of the campaign to suppress the Irish rebellion. On 3 December, he was named to a junto-dominated committee that threatened the royalist majority in the Lords with a de facto parliamentary coup unless it agreed to pass the bills sent up to them ‘for the preservation of the kingdom’ – a euphemism for control of the kingdom’s armed forces.163CJ ii. 330b; D’Ewes(C), 228; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 438; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 459. Hesilrige addressed this problem in dramatic fashion on 7 December by introducing in the Commons a bill for placing the nation’s armed forces under the command of a lord general and lord admiral. The names of these new commanders were left blank in the bill, but it is very likely that Hesilrige and his junto confederates intended the first office for the earl of Essex and the second for either Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland or the earl of Warwick. This thinly-disguised attempt to transfer control of the militia and navy from the king to the Houses was designed not only to weaken Charles’s power, but also to strengthen the junto’s hand in the military preparations against the Irish rebels. Several junto-men spoke in support of the bill, notably Oliver St John, whom Hyde credited with being its author. But the king’s party raised a great cry to have it thrown out; and Sir John Culpeper scored a palpable hit by expressing surprise ‘that the gentleman in the gallery [i.e. Hesilrige] ... should bring in such a bill, having so often complained of the exorbitant power of the deputy lieutenants in his country [i.e. Leicestershire]’. Even the godly Sir Thomas Barrington thought the bill ‘too unlimited and arbitrary’; and it had foundered before the end of the month.164D’Ewes (C), 244-5; Verney, Notes, 132; Clarendon, Hist. i. 365-6; Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, 165-6; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 435; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 460-1.

Hesilrige’s repeated and audacious attacks upon the pillars of personal monarchy earned him a place among the six junto-men targetted by the king early in January 1642 for impeachment on charges of high treason. Besides Hesilrige they were Lord Mandeville (the future 2nd earl of Manchester), Denzil Holles, Pym, Hampden and Strode I. Hyde thought that the ‘reputation and interest’ of Hesilrige and Strode were too negligible ‘to do any mischief otherwise than in concurring in it’, and that they ‘gained credit and authority by being joined with the rest, who had indeed a great influence’.165Clarendon, Hist. i. 506. But royal counsels by late December 1641 were dominated by Lord Digby, who apparently took Hesilrige more seriously than Hyde did.166Clarendon, Hist. i. 485; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 486, 488-9, 491-2. Moreover, Hesilrige had doubtless made himself even more odious to Digby by joining the assault in the Commons on 28 December against another prominent ‘evil counsellor’ – Digby’s father, the 1st earl of Bristol.167Add. 64807, f. 20v; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 479. In the impeachment articles, which were delivered to the Houses on 3 January, the accused were charged with a variety of crimes aimed at depriving the king of his ‘regal power’, including that of conspiring with the Scots to bring down the personal rule.168LJ iv. 501a; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 490-1. Hesilrige was present in the House the next day (4 January) when the king came to arrest the accused Members, but, forewarned of his approach, they left their seats and hid in the nearby court of king’s bench.169Burton’s Diary, iii. 93; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 497. A pamphlet that purported to be a speech that Hesilrige had given in the Commons – in one version, on 5 January – clearing himself of the charges against him was almost certainly bogus.170Sir Arthur Haslerigg His Speech in Parliament (1642, E.199.53); Sir Arthur Haslerig His Speech in Parliament the Fifth of Ianuary Last (1642), 2-5; D’Ewes (C), 379. During the accused Members’ brief absence from Parliament, the Commons voted that the impeachment articles against them were unjust, illegal and a breach of parliamentary privilege.171CJ ii. 373b, 374a, 374b; D’Ewes (C), 388. The accused Members had re-joined their parliamentary colleagues, to ‘great plaudity’, by 8 January; on 10 January, Charles abandoned his capital.172D’Ewes (C), 399.

Hesilrige’s tally of parliamentary appointments and speeches during the early months of 1642 was insufficient to place him among the dozen or so most active and prominent Commons-men.173PJ i. p. xxii. In January, for example, he was named to only two committees – although one of these was to a new body for naval affairs and would evolve in August into the Committee of Navy and Customs – and seems to have said little of substance in the House before the end of that month.174CJ ii. 375b, 402b; PJ i. 82, 236. On 28 January, he joined other MPs in condemning the king’s bedchamber man James Stuart, 1st duke of Richmond for having proposed that Parliament should adjourn for six months; although his demand that Richmond ‘be removed from the king’s person’ would have achieved nothing other than to antagonise Charles still further – which was perhaps Hesilrige’s intention.175Add. 64807, f. 39. In a debate on 31 January concerning the king’s evasive answer to a Commons’ petition to the king, requesting that the kingdom’s strongholds and militia be vested in persons recommended to him by both House, Hesilrige declared, somewhat melodramatically, that ‘before [next] Monday we know not when any of us shall be alive’ and therefore urged the Commons to ‘send another petition to the king that if the malignant party do not remove themselves the wise council must do it’.176Add. 64807, ff. 41v-42. His remarks were probably intended to endorse the first draft of what would become the Militia Ordinance, which was reported that day by William Pierrepont.177Infra, ‘William Pierrepont’. But Hesilrige’s speech was deemed too insignificant to merit recording by most of the parliamentary diarists – as was that of 11 February in which he observed that Parliament should prioritise political reliability before godliness when selecting new lord and deputy lieutenants.178PJ i. 346. Measured in terms of appointments and activity in the House, his contribution to the great work of giving life to the Militia Ordinance was relatively limited. On 24 March, he served as a teller in a minor division concerning the nomination of a Lincolnshire deputy lieutenant; on 26 March, he carried up to the Lords the Commons’ nominees for lord lieutenant in several counties; and on 28 March, he was named to the committee of both Houses to suppress the Kentish petition, which posed the first overt challenge to the Militia Ordinance.179CJ ii. 496a, 499a, 501a; LJ iv. 674a; T.P.S. Woods, Prelude to Civil War 1642 (Salisbury, 1980), 52.

As for his part in Parliament’s ‘paper skirmishes’ with the king, Hesilrige was named to eight or so committees between January and September 1642 for drafting parliamentary declarations and responding to royal communications. The most high-powered of these committees was that appointed on 30 May, consisting of Hesilrige, Pym, Hampden, John Glynne, Nathaniel Fiennes and Henry Marten, to prepare a declaration ‘that may show how dangerously the privileges of Parliament have been broken of late, even at this time when the king professeth to rule by law’. However, there is little to suggest that Hesilrige was directly involved in penning any of this propaganda material.180CJ ii. 420a, 531a, 543b, 562a, 583b, 594a, 652a, 711a. He was entrusted with reporting from just one of these committees (on 8 March), and then only because – as he explained to the House – Sir William Lewis, ‘who sat in the chair and should have made this report’, was presenting a parliamentary declaration to the king at Newmarket.181CJ ii. 471b; PJ ii. 9. On 26 April, he was added, upon his own motion, to the principal committee for drafting rejoinders to the king’s messages and was ordered to ‘take care of that business’. But there is nothing to show that he acted on this order.182CJ ii. 508b, 543b; PJ ii. 121, 227. He received just one appointment relating to the stand-off between Charles and Sir John Hotham* at Hull that spring;183CJ ii. 531a. and the drive thereafter to fund and mobilise forces against the king seems to have occupied very little of his time at Westminster.184CJ ii. 534b, 586a.

Hesilrige was named to only two important standing committees in 1642: the Committee for Examinations* and the 27 May committee of both Houses for the defence of the kingdom.185CJ ii. 375b, 589a. Significantly, however, he was omitted from the committee that really mattered when it came to mobilising for war – the 4 July Committee of Safety*. Looking at his parliamentary career in during the first six months of 1642 it is tempting to conclude that once the junto had won its battles with the king for control of the Lords and of the war effort in Ireland – as it had by mid-January – and had begun to assume the more constructive role of a governing party, it had little use of Hesilrige’s services as a political incendiary.

Hesilrige’s withdrawal from the front-line of Parliament’s battle with the king in 1642 did not alter his convictions. He apparently remained keen to punish Archbishop Laud and to proscribe political opponents – as on 25 February, when he urged ‘all committees that hath anything against my lord mayor [of London: the future royalist Sir Richard Gurney] may present them to the committee for London, for he [Hesilrige] thinketh him not fit to govern so great a city’.186CJ ii. 448b, 492b, 556b, 598b; PJ i. 470-1. His desire to secure London for the parliamentary cause may in part explain the occasional interest he took in commercial issues during the first half of 1642.187CJ ii. 429b, 461a; PJ i. 276. But it was the interlinked causes of godly reformation at home and the suppression of the Irish rebellion that seem to have exercised him most during this period. The speech that he purportedly gave on 21 February 1642, and which was later published, in support of the bill against clerical pluralism may well have been another fabrication. Many Members ‘spake to several particulars’ in the draft bill against pluralities that was reported in the House on 17 February.188PJ i. 402. But the published speech addressed the bill’s successful passage through both Houses and concluded with the request that it be presented to the king for his royal assent. Genuine or false, however, this publication identifies Hesilrige closely with measures for purging the church of worldly clerics and ‘superstitious ceremonies’ and investing Parliament with ultimate authority in disposing of church livings.189Sir Arthur Haselrigg His Speech in Parliament Concerning the Bill Passed against Plurality of Livings (1642).

Hesilrige was named to, and probably active on, most of the committees set up in February, March and April 1642 to suppress innovations in religion, promote a preaching ministry and to lay the foundations for what would become the Westminster Assembly.190CJ ii. 438a, 476b, 496b, 510b, 527a, 541b; PJ ii. 126. On 12 April, upon his own motion, he was ordered to return the House’s thanks to Simeon Ashe (Brooke’s household chaplain) and another godly divine Cornelius Burges for their sermons on the last fast day.191CJ ii. 523a; PJ ii. 155. His zeal for godly reformation probably accounts, in part, for his regular appointment to committees for prosecuting the war in Ireland and suppressing the perceived Catholic fifth column in England.192CJ ii. 365a, 420a, 447a, 493b, 563a, 588a; PJ i. 432; ii. 104. In April he pledged £1,000 on the Irish Adventurers’ Act and presented a petition from the adventurers, claiming that the king’s intention to go to Ireland had deterred investors and requesting that Parliament press Charles to return to Westminster instead.193PJ ii. 178-9; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 564; Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 183; J.R. MacCormack, ‘The Irish Adventurers and the English civil war’, Irish Historical Studies, x. 50. Hesilrige, Cromwell and Robert Reynolds were the only Commons-men who subscribed to the 1642 Sea Adventure to Ireland – a naval campaign against the rebels in which Hesilrige invested £600.194J.P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (1865), 443.

Hesilrige the soldier, 1642-3

In June 1642 the Commons sent Hesilrige and Ruthin down to Leicestershire to assist the earl of Stamford in executing the Militia Ordinance.195CJ ii. 604b; Cogswell, Home Divisions, 283. With a £500 war chest from Parliament and instructions to secure the magazine at Leicester, seize ‘disaffected persons’ and mobilise the Leicestershire trained bands, the two men played a prominent – if not entirely successful – part in the struggle with the Hastings interest that summer for control of the county’s military resources.196CJ ii. 630b, 660b, 664b, 668a, 670a; LJ v. 147b-148a, 195a, 202b-203a, 208a; PJ iii. 98-9, 141, 148, 155, 197; Truths from Leicester and Notingham (1642, 669 f.6.57); Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 669; Nichols, Leics. iii. app. iv. 22, 27; Cogswell, Home Divisions, 286. Hesilrige returned to the House briefly in late June to report on developments in Leicestershire and was named to committees on 30 June and 5 July for impeaching Henry Hastings and his confederates for ‘high misdemeanours’.197CJ ii. 641a, 645b, 652a. Hesilrige had probably returned to London by 30 July, when he was commissioned as a captain of horse in Parliament’s field army under the earl of Essex.198SP28/1A, f. 295. That August, he supplied the lord general’s commissary with 16 horses, worth an estimated £200, and a further five by July 1643 worth £68 – in all, one of the largest such subscriptions made by any Commons-man. In addition, his brother Thomas donated two horses, with riders, valued at £41.199SP28/131, pt. 3, ff. 70, 70v, 119, 131.

On 1 September 1642, the House granted Hesilrige leave of absence in order to attend his military duties; and three days later, he and his troop joined a rendezvous of Essex’s forces at Northampton.200CJ ii. 748a; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 385. The chaplain to his troop was the godly Newcastle minister William Morton; the cornet was Hesilrige’s Leicestershire client, the future regicide Thomas Horton.201Reliquiae, 42; Denton, Only in Heaven, 41-2; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 140; Oxford DNB, ‘Thomas Horton’. On 7 September, Hampden and other senior army officers dispatched Hesilrige to the earl of Essex with news of ‘insolencies’ committed by the soldiery, ‘which are fitter to be related by a friend then to be read by an enemy, as they may be should they be committed to paper’.202Bodl. Tanner 63, f. 153. Hesilrige fought alongside Stapilton at the battle of Edgehill in October 1642 and seems to have given a good account of himself, for all Holles’s later claims to the contrary.203Speciall Newes from the Army at Warwicke since the Fight (1642), sig. A3 (E.124.33); The Two Speeches of the Lord Wharton, Spoken in Guild-Hall (1642), sig. A3v (E.127.27); Reliquiae, 43; D. Holles, Mems. (1699), 11-12; Denton, Only in Heaven, 43-6; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 142-3. He had returned to Westminster by 7 November, when he was named to a nine-man committee dominated by army officers and ‘fiery spirits’ for assisting the earl of Warwick to list volunteers for his ‘running army’ to defend London.204CJ ii. 838a; A Perfect Diurnall of the Passages in Parliament (7-14 Nov. 1642), sig. Xv (E.242.12). Two days later (9 November), he was made a committeeman to raise cavalry to serve under Warwick.205CJ ii. 841a; C. Thompson, The Earl of Warwick’s “Running Army” (Wivenhoe, 1999), 21. He seems to have spent much of November recruiting his own troop of horse, for which he received the full backing of the Commons and the lord general.206CJ ii. 857b, 861a. However, he was present in the House on 21 November to participate in a debate on Charles’s message defending his attack upon London and expressing a willingness to entertain ‘just propositions of peace’. Like Vane II, Hesilrige urged Parliament not entertain such overtures until it was in a position of strength.207Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Add. 18777, f. 64. ‘What will the people think of it?’, he asked

They will not bring in money. For after the last speech of accommodation our [foot] companies grew thin because they were in hope of peace. Now seeing the condition the kingdom is in and the necessity of taking away of those ill men which are about him [the king], he [Hesilrige] thought fit not to send proposition[s].208Add. 18777, f. 64v.

On 22 November, he joined other fiery spirits in defending Henry Marten from criticism of some ‘bold and irreverential expressions’ he had uttered against the king.209Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; Harl. 164, f. 106. The next day (23 November), he was ordered to attend the lord general and urge him to lose no opportunity to attack the enemy and particularly the royalists who had seized Farnham Castle, Surrey (which Sir William Waller* would invest and take a few days later).210CJ ii. 860b; Adair, Roundhead General, 50.

In response to the royalist offensive in Wiltshire late in 1642, the lord general placed Hesilrige in command of one of the four regiments of horse that he sent to assist Waller in securing the region for Parliament; and on 1 February 1643, Hesilrige was appointed Waller’s lieutenant-general of horse and de facto second-in-command.211SP28/252, pt. 1, f. 212; W. Waller, Vindication of the Character and Conduct of Sir William Waller (1793), 15; Adair, Roundhead General, 50, 57. Hesilrige and Harbert Morley* took part in Waller’s capture of Chichester early in 1643 – receiving the thanks of the House for their efforts – after which Hesilrige oversaw the plundering of the cathedral’s church plate.212CJ ii. 929a; Thomas-Stanford, Suss. in Great Civil War, 57, 60; Denton, Only in Heaven, 48. Back in London by early February to raise another regiment of horse for Waller, Hesilrige was named to a committee for sequestering the estates of Parliament’s enemies (3 February).213CJ ii. 953b; Adair, Roundhead General, 55. On 8 February, he and other war-party adherents opposed giving an immediate response to a peace-party initiative in the Lords to advance negotiations with the king, arguing that ‘the House of Commons had ability enough to consult amongst themselves and not to receive direction by the votes of the Lords’.214Harl. 164, f. 291v. After a month or more campaigning with Waller in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, he returned to Westminster in mid-April to deliver a progress report and to receive the thanks of the House for their ‘good service’.215CJ iii. 51a; LJ vi. 4b-5a; Add. 31116, p. 88; Mercurius Aulicus no. 16 (16-22 Apr. 1643), 203 (E.100.18); J. Vicars, God on the Mount, or a Continuation of Englands Parliamentary Chronicle (1643), 292-3 (E.73.4); Adair, Roundhead General, 60, 68; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 153-8. He then remained in London until mid-June, during which time he was named to six committees and was a teller on a minor, and apparently non-partisan, division (20 May). Most of his parliamentary activity in these weeks was focused on raising money and troops for Waller’s army – both by public subscription and by mulcting delinquents – and bolstering Parliament’s forces in London and Yorkshire.216CJ iii. 57a, 61a, 76a, 77b, 78a, 81a, 89a, 94a, 98a, 109b; LJ vi. 19a; SP28/7, ff. 537-43; SP28/264, f. 292; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 159-65. On 6 June, he took the vow and covenant.217CJ iii. 118a.

In mid-June 1643, Hesilrige returned to Waller’s army in the west country and brought with him the civil war’s only full regiment of cuirassiers, whose formidable, articulated armour earned them their nickname: the ‘Lobsters’. He had recruited this new regiment in London and from troops that had served in the Midlands under his recently-deceased brother-in-law, Lord Brooke – among them, captains Samuel Gardiner* and John Okey*.218Supra, ‘Samuel Gardiner’; infra, ‘John Okey’; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 88-9; Adair, Roundhead General, 73; Denton, Only in Heaven, 60-5; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 166, 167. Hesilrige did ‘excellent service’ during Waller’s narrow victory at Lansdown on 5 July, suffering pike wounds to his thigh and arm in the process. However, his deployment of the Lobsters may have contributed to Waller’s resounding defeat at the battle of Roundway Down eight days later, in which he was ‘sorely wounded’ and lucky to escape with his life.219Harl. 165, f. 137; Add. 31116, p. 126; Mercurius Aulicus no. 28 (9-15 July 1643), 366 (E.59.3); Vicars, God on the Mount, 379; Ludlow, Mems. i. 55; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 99; Adair, Roundhead General, 81, 83, 92-3; Denton, Only in Heaven, 72-82; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 172-3, 176-9. Hesilrige was a brave and conscientious soldier, willing, if necessary, to sustain large numbers of troops out of his own pocket without thought of recompense.220SP28/252, pt. 1, f. 212. But the fact that he ‘delighted all in horse’ – in the words of one of his officers, John Birch* – did not necessarily qualify him as a skilled cavalry commander.221Military Mem. of Col. John Birch (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, vii), 14. He arrived in London overland from Portsmouth early in August, having escaped the west country by sea from Bristol, but does not appear to have attended the Commons before 19 August.222Certaine Informations no. 29 (31 July-7 Aug. 1643), 224 (E.64.7); CJ iii. 212a; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 182.

War-party grandee, 1643-4

Hesilrige did not merely survive Parliament’s military disasters of mid-1643 – he used them to establish himself as one of the grandees of a reconfigured war party (the core of which would later form the Independent party). This faction, led by Northumberland and Saye in the Lords and by St John, Vane II and Hesilrige in the Commons, was determined to leash in Parliament’s power-hungry but now eirenic lord general and push for absolute victory followed by a dictated settlement that would leave Charles little better than a puppet monarch. Hesilrige’s addition to the Committee of Safety in November 1643, to the Westminster Assembly in January 1644, and his appointment to Parliament’s new supreme executive the Committee of Both Kingdoms* in February, attest to his emergence in this period as a front-rank politician.223CJ iii. 299b, 357b, 391b, 392b; LJ vi. 294a, 367b, 430a. His growing influence during the second half of 1643 owed much to his importance as Waller’s chief spokesman at Westminster, but also to the war party’s recognition that Essex was no longer to be relied upon and that it must nurture alternative military resources. Central now to its plans for defeating the king were the large Scottish army secured by the Covenant treaty and the new armies of the eastern and southern associations under the earl of Manchester and Waller respectively. Hesilrige proved adept at exploiting the war party’s distrust of Essex in order to rebuild Waller’s command after Roundway Down and – in the process – to lever himself into power at Westminster. Waller had Hesilrige very much in mind when he later wrote that the ‘heartburnings and jealousies’ between himself and Essex were ‘noticed in some sort by the Parliament; and there were those who fomented our discord for their own advancement. Some whom I at that time commanded ... were not wanting to misrepresent and to inflame on either side’.224Infra, ‘Sir William Waller’; Waller, Vindication, 13-14, 16; H. Cowley, The Poetry of Anna Matilda (1788), 120-1, 123. This was also the belief of Waller’s friend, Sir Simonds D’Ewes*.225Harl. 165, ff. 179, 266.

Between Hesilrige’s return to Westminster after Roundway Down and his rejoining Waller in the field in March 1644, he was named to 55 committees and three conference management teams; served as teller in nine divisions; and was appointed as a messenger to the Lords once.226CJ iii. 236a, 289b, 294a, 302a, 308b, 346b, 359a, 370a, 391b, 411a, 422a, 424b, 427a; LJ vi. 346a, 445b. It was apparently during this period that he discovered his relish for the necessarily divisive and partisan duties that went with being a teller. His several appointments to strengthen the war effort both regionally and at national level and his evident keenness to levy and extend the excise tax, indicate that his commitment to the war effort was by no means confined to rebuilding Waller’s army.227CJ iii. 257b, 276b, 278b, 289b, 298b, 309b, 310b, 320a, 322b, 340b, 345b, 347a, 367a, 378b, 388b, 393b, 397b, 418b; Harl. 165, f. 267; Add. 18779, f. 16; CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 18, 38. Indeed, in mid-September he developed a belated – and, it seems, brief – interest in naval finance, chairing a committee to treat with the customs commissioners about a loan for the navy.228CJ iii. 239b, 243b. In this role, as in his work in relation to the excise, the House was exploiting what seems to have been the close connections he had forged (probably as a Saybrook and Irish adventurer) with some of the City’s leading financial administrators.229Pearl, London, 240; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 409; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 209-10, 222-3. On the other hand, he showed little obvious interest in Parliament’s military alliance with the Scots. He was not listed among those Commons-men who took the Solemn League and Covenant late in September. Moreover, his only significant appointment before 1644 in support of the Scots was his nomination with thirteen other MPs on 28 September to move the City about forming a committee to raise money for the Scottish army.230CJ iii. 258a. From these deliberations emerged the Committee for Scottish Affairs, which Hesilrige attended intermittently before its re-foundation in the summer of 1644 as the Committee for Compounding (CC).231Supra, ‘Committee for Compounding’; CJ iii. 286a; SP23/1A, pp. 9, 14, 16; SP46/103, ff. 95, 130, 134, 135.

Hesilrige’s poor showing in relation to the Scots contrasts markedly with his numerous assignments and speeches for raising military resources and political support for Waller.232CJ iii. 218a, 224b, 249a, 263a, 264a, 294a, 300b, 303b, 312a, 319b, 341a, 349a, 356b, 360a, 367a, 383b, 393a; Add. 18778, ff. 27v, 50v, 56; Add. 18779, f. 30; Harl. 165, ff. 243v-244, 250, 255v-256, 268; Harl. 166, f. 36v; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 32. On 1 September, he called for more troops to be sent to Waller, on the grounds that ‘if the lord general have a blow [suffer a defeat] we are in worse case then we were before’.233Add. 18778, f. 27v. He blew more strongly on the coals of the quarrel between Waller and Essex on 28 September, when he requested that 30 troops of horse be sent to Waller at Farnham, but added that ‘the general [Essex] is come to town, and the devil sows dissension among us; and nothing more can endanger us [than] there being dissension sown among our prime officers’. Having assured the House that Waller had ‘submitted himself to the lord general’, he moved successfully for a Commons delegation to attend Essex ‘to desire him to pass by what he hath conceived against’ his loyal subordinate – a speech that reveals Hesilrige at his most disingenuous: disclaiming against dissension and yet at the same time heightening it by pointing the finger of blame at Essex.234Add. 18778, f. 56. On 5 October, he headed, and reported from, a five-man delegation to inform the lord general of the Committee of Safety’s proceedings in raising horse for Waller’s and Hesilrige’s regiments by commission from another of Essex’s military rivals, the earl of Manchester.235CJ iii. 263a, 264a. His nomination to several committees in mid-October for the supply of Essex’s army may have been equally self-interested.236CJ iii. 276b, 278b. It is very likely that Hesilrige, like Waller, blamed Essex’s negligence – to put it no more strongly – for their defeat at Roundway Down, and thus he would have been anxious to ensure that the lord general could not plead lack of troops or money if he again tried to expose his parliamentary rivals to military ruin.237Cowley, Poetry of Anna Matilda, 123; Ludlow, Mems. i. 55. Hesilrige had already made clear to the House his opinion that the job of containing the king’s cavalry lay with Essex’s ‘now dispersed’ army, not Waller’s forces.238Add. 18778, f. 56. On 30 October, he clashed with Essex’s interest in the House as a teller in a division concerning the governorship of Portsmouth – an office held by commission from Essex that Hesilrige wanted bestowed upon Waller.239CJ iii. 294a; Harl. 165, f. 199; Mercurius Aulicus no. 44 (29 Oct.-4 Nov. 1643), 628 (E.75.37). The addition of Hesilrige and Sir Peter Wentworth to the Committee of Safety on 2 November was designed to strengthen the hand of the lord general’s critics at Derby House.240Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’; CJ iii. 299b; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 216. And certainly Hesilrige appears to have been ready to join other Parliament-men in using the committee to apply pressure to the lord general – specifically, in December, to have Essex move his army southwards to support Waller in resisting what the committee conceived was a major royalist thrust into Surrey.241Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’; CJ iii. 310b, 346b, 347a; LJ vi. 346a, 347; Harl. 165, ff. 250r-v. On 1 January 1644, Hesilrige applied a ‘new spark’ to that ‘long-continued flame and heart-burning’ between the two commanders when he complained that Essex had sent Waller an inadequate and therefore dishonorable commission as commander of the southern association. This initiated a ‘vehement debate’ in which St John and Wentworth criticised Essex ‘with great fervency’. When Stapilton – Essex’s greatest champion in the Commons – then implicitly denounced Hesilrige as an incendiary in this quarrel, Hesilrige demanded (unsuccessfully) that he be questioned for these words.242Harl. 165, ff. 266r-v.

Hesilrige’s opposition to the lord general and his adherents during the second half of 1643 extended well beyond his championing of Waller. Named to four committees in October and November concerning the newly-arrived French ambassador the Comte d’Harcourt, Hesilrige almost certainly shared the suspicions of his war party colleagues that this embassy was part of a design by the royalists, and supported by the Essexians, to use French influence with the Scots in order to avert a Covenanter invasion and to broker a soft peace in England.243Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; CJ iii. 266b, 275b, 316b, 325b; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, i. 271-2; M.P. Mahony, ‘The Presbyterian Party in the Long Parliament, 2 July 1644-3 June 1647’ (Oxford Univ. DPhil. thesis, 1973), 60-1. This concern may well have strengthened the war party’s determination to prevent the re-admission to the Lords of Essex’s cousin, the repentant turncoat Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland. Holland’s political rehabilitation would strengthen Essex’s party and facilitate its covert dealings with Harcourt and with Oxford.244Mahony, ‘Presbyterian Party’, 60-1. On 11 November, Hesilrige and Wentworth were majority tellers against asking the Lords to commit Holland – as opposed to a more forceful request, favoured by the war party, that he be sent specifically to the Tower. The opposing tellers were the Essexian grandees Holles and Stapilton.245CJ iii. 308b; Harl. 165, ff. 229v-230v. Hesilrige squared up to Holles and Stapilton again on 17 January 1644, this time as a minority teller with Vane II in favour of putting the question that Holland had been guilty of deserting Parliament.246CJ iii. 370a. Given Hesilrige’s prominence among those ‘blustering hate’ against Holland, his appointment with Stapilton three days later (20 January) to request Essex to compose the differences among Leicestershire’s parliamentarian leaders must have been a very uncomfortable assignment indeed.247Harl. 166, f. 32v; CJ iii. 372a. Essex’s grievances against Hesilrige would by then have included the latter’s attempt on 13 December to obstruct the council of war that the lord general had called to examine the loss of Bristol in July (in which, as a result of their defeat at Roundway Down, Waller and Hesilrige were implicated); and Hesilrige’s collaboration with St John and Vane II in exposing the Brooke and Lovelace plots over the winter of 1643-4 – the fall out from which served to embarrass Essex in particular.248Add. 31116, p. 200. Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; CJ iii. 358b, 359a, 360b, 378a; Harl. 165, f. 278; Juxon Jnl. 42.

But Hesilrige’s most telling blow against the lord general’s authority and political pretensions was as a leading supporter of the war party’s and the Scots’ initiative to create a new Anglo-Scottish executive to manage the war – the Committee of Both Kingdoms (CBK). On 7 February, he was a majority teller with Vane II in favour of retaining the 14 MPs nominated in an ordinance for establishing the CBK that had been drafted by Saye and St John in consultation with the Scots (the opposing tellers were the Essexians Holles and Sir William Lewis). Of the 14 Commons-men named – of whom Hesilrige was one – nine backed the Scottish alliance or were critics and/or enemies of Essex.249Supra, ‘The Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 391b, 392b, 395b; LJ vi. 430a; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 229-32. Hesilrige was reportedly very blunt in arguing for Essex’s subordination to the CBK, conceiving it ‘unfitting the general should have power in it; which hath so incensed him [Essex] that he again threatens to lay down his commission’.250Mercurius Aulicus no. 7 (11-17 Feb. 1644), 830 (E.25.27). Notwithstanding the committee’s establishment in mid-February, the lord general’s critics in the Commons (led by Vane II, St John, Hesilrige and John Lisle) still felt the need to have a vote passed on 20 March for affirming that Essex’s army ‘shall be subject to the orders and directions of both Houses in Parliament or the Committee of Both Kingdoms, according to the ordinance that doth establish that committee’. Hesilrige confided to D’Ewes that ‘he did not know whether it were better that the lord general had an army or not, for they [Essex and his troops] would obey nobody’.251Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 432b-433a; Harl. 166, f. 36.

Although Hesilrige attended the CBK on a regular basis during the first half of 1644, he was not one of its most prominent members in terms of his activity and assignments at Derby House; and it would appear that he made no more than a dozen or so reports from the committee during its four-year existence.252Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 587b, 588a, 197a, 224a, 259a; iv. 137a, 481a, 560a, 561a; Harl. 166, ff. 178, 208. Even as he rubbed shoulders at Derby House with Essex during February and March, he re-joined the attack upon the lord general in the Commons. On 19 February, he and St John attempted to obstruct an ordinance for recruiting Essex’s army; he was named (according to Walter Yonge*, at least) to a committee set up on 26 February for revising the earl’s officer list; and on 11 March, he and Vane II were majority tellers in favour of adding Colonel Francis Marten to this list contrary to the lord general’s wishes.253Harl. 166, f. 15; Add. 18779, f. 68; CJ iii. 424b. The 26 February committee – like the four-man body to which Hesilrige was named on 8 March for preparing an establishment (rates of pay) for Essex’s army – was part of a series of measures designed to tighten parliamentary control over the lord general’s command.254Infra, ‘Robert Scawen’; CJ iii. 419b. During the first half of March he partnered St John twice as a teller and made common cause with Vane II and Edmund Prideaux I in debate, in the war party’s efforts to reject amendments made by the Essexian majority in the Lords to the ordinance establishing the southern association, of which Waller was the designated military commander.255CJ iii. 422a, 423a, 427a; Harl. 166, f. 32; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 237-8.

On campaign, 1644

Hesilrige left London late in March 1644 to join Waller and his army near Winchester; and on 29 March, he fought in the victory at Cheriton – apparently in a subordinate role to Essex’s cavalry commander Sir William Balfour. The Lobsters acquitted themselves well in this battle; allegations of cowardice later levelled against Hesilrige by his political opponents do not ring true.256Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 1 (28 Mar.-4 Apr. 1648), sig. A4 (E.434.17); Clarendon, Hist. iii. 337; Military Mem. 180; Adair, Roundhead General, 144; Denton, Only in Heaven, 92-4; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 241-2. Having quickly returned to Westminster, he delivered a lengthy report on the battle to the Commons on 2 April.257CJ iii. 444a; Harl. 166, f. 42v; Add. 18779, f. 87; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 241-2. His parliamentary career during the next eight months – that is, until early December – was punctuated by at least three spells on campaign with Waller’s army in what would prove to be the decisive phase of his political feud with the lord general. During this period he was named to 17 committees and three conference management teams and served as a teller in five divisions.258CJ iii. 458b, 483b, 539b, 574a, 588a, 599a, 614a. In the six weeks after Cheriton he evidently worked hard at Derby House, on the floor of the Commons and in committee, and probably as a member of several parliamentary delegations to the City, to ensure that Waller did not lack for resources or adequate military support. He was quick to demand that Essex support Waller when it seemed that the royalists were concentrating their forces against him in April; and equally swift in frustrating a request from Essex for Waller to support him against a possible royalist offensive in May.259CJ iii. 451a, 454a; Harl. 166, ff. 50v, 61v; Add. 18779, f. 103v; CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 91, 92, 94, 98, 122, 123, 136, 139, 145; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 243-4. As a teller and in debate he collaborated with St John and Vane II that spring in attempting to curb the lord general’s military and political authority and to renew and further empower the CBK (the first ordinance for which lapsed in May). His place on the committee was assured when, on 22 May, the Commons revived and passed the ‘omnipotent’ CBK bill that the Lords had sent down in February.260Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 458b, 483b, 490b, 504a; Harl. 166, ff. 36v, 48v, 64; Mahony, ‘Presbyterian Party’, 88, 90, 98.

Another front in Hesilrige’s conflict with the Essexians opened late in 1643 as a result of a quarrel that he helped to foment between the commander of the East Midlands Association, Thomas Lord Grey of Groby* (the earl of Stamford’s son) and leading members of the Leicestershire and Rutland county committees. Although Grey of Groby would later emerge as a noted political radical, at this stage in the war he was an ally of Essex, like his father, and enjoyed the support of the lord general’s friends at Westminster. In February and March 1644, Hesilrige and his war-party friends clashed repeatedly with Stapilton and other Essexian MPs over whether Grey of Groby or the county committee was most to blame for Leicestershire’s woes. Hesilrige claimed that Grey of Groby’s soldiers had ‘utterly ruined and destroyed’ Leicestershire and demanded either that they be properly paid or that they leave the county altogether.261CJ iii. 372b; Harl. 166, ff. 10, 31, 34; Bodl. Tanner 62, f. 459; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 247-57, 265-7. Hesilrige appeared to have obtained the upper hand in his struggle when, on 9 May, the House ordered him to bring in an ordinance for raising forces in Leicestershire and remodelling the county committee.262CJ iii. 486b. Reported by Hesilrige on 27 May, this draft ordinance omitted a number of Grey of Groby’s supporters from the county committee and gave it a ‘vast power’ to raise sufficient taxes and troops to wage war independently of his command. Hesilrige’s handiwork was criticised by Grey of Groby and Sir Martin Lister, whereupon the House recommitted the ordinance, but voted to accept all of Hesilrige’s nominees to the county committee. Nevertheless, Grey of Groby and his allies succeeded in having several of Hesilrige’s critics, including Lister, added to the committee established by his ordinance – which passed both Houses on 10 July.263CJ iii. 507b, 556b; LJ vi. 627b-628a; Harl. 166, ff. 65v, 67; Add. 31116, p. 280; J. Richards, The Life and Times of Thomas, Lord Grey of Groby (2000), 152-3; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 256-7, 292, 294-5. But the irascible Stamford played into Hesilrige’s hands in May 1645 by assaulting him upon the public highway and denouncing his allies on the Leicestershire committee – and particularly Hesilrige’s ‘creature’, the future regicide Francis Hacker* – as ‘rogues and base fellows’. The Commons initiated impeachment proceedings against Stamford for attacking one of its Members, but the case against him foundered in the Lords.264Supra, ‘Henry Grey, 1st earl of Stamford’; ‘Francis Hacker’; CJ iv. 150b, 152b, 188a; LJ vii. 462; Harl. 166, ff. 212r-v; Add. 18780, ff. 23v, 24v-25; Add. 31116, pp. 421, 422, 433-4.

Hesilrige joined Waller’s army late in May 1644 as it combined with the lord general’s in endeavouring to encircle Oxford (before taking to the field again, Hesilrige commissioned Edmund Ludlowe as a major in the Lobsters).265Ludlow, Mems. i. 89-90. In their letters to the CBK early in June, Waller and Hesilrige were critical of Essex in allowing a ‘flying army’ commanded by the king to escape Oxford.266Harl. 166, ff. 71, 83-4. However, they accepted the logic of the lord general’s consequent instructions that they and their mobile army pursue the king northwards while Essex himself marched southwards to relieve Lyme and then the west country.267Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 206, 214; M. Wanklyn, The Warrior Generals (New Haven, 2010), 97. It was probably in an effort to justify this controversial decision to the CBK and the House that Hesilrige returned to Westminster on 8 or 9 June. Yet when called upon in the Commons to give an account of his and Waller’s proceedings, Hesilrige – conveniently ignoring the fact that he had acquiesced in Essex’s plan – ‘related all against [the] lord general’.268Add. 31116, p. 286; Harl. 166, f. 71. His lobbying against Essex may well have hastened votes and orders by the Commons and the CBK on 11 June for reversing the earl’s orders and authorising Waller to proceed into the west.269CJ iii. 526a; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 226. Hesilrige’s hand may also be visible in an ordinance (read on 15 June) for raising horse and foot for Waller’s projected western association; and in the establishment of a committee (to which Hesilrige was named) on 28 June – the day before Waller’s defeat by the king at Cropredy Bridge – with an extensive brief to recruit, pay and provision his army.270Infra, ‘Robert Scawen’; CJ iii. 532b, 544b. A few days later he left Westminster to re-join Waller’s shattered forces in pursuit of the king, but lack of pay and reinforcements soon obliged them to abandon the chase.271CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 307, 326-7, 347, 352.

In mid-July 1644, Hesilrige arrived unexpectedly back at Westminster to explain his and Waller’s failure to pursue the king and to resume his vilification of Essex.272Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; Harl. 483, f. 80v; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 358. According to Holles

Hesilrige posted up to London, breathing out nothing but ruin and destruction to the earl of Essex, spoke it out in the hearing of several persons, that he would ruin him, or be ruined himself. His malice and violence was so great at the Committee of the two Kingdoms [the CBK], where he and his party were prevalent, that a report was thence brought down to the House of Commons, by which Sir William Waller was taken off from following the king, and by that means the king was left at liberty to bend his whole force for the west after my lord of Essex.273Holles, Mems. 24-5.

On 20 July, Hesilrige was forced to defend himself in the Commons against royalist reports that he had preferred articles of treason against Essex.274Harl. 166, f. 99. His apparent success in dissuading the CBK from ordering Waller’s army to move westwards in support of Essex angered the Essexians in both Houses. In mid-August, Waller (who had also returned to Westminster by this point), Hesilrige and their friends tried their best to obstruct Commons’ resolutions to the effect that Waller’s army should march to Essex’s assistance in the west country.275Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; Harl. 166, f. 106; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 369. In the midst of these maneuverings in the Commons and at Derby House, Hesilrige assisted Prideaux and William Ellys in tackling resistance by the Essexian peers to an ordinance introduced in April for establishing a court martial, independent of the lord general’s authority, to try Captain John Hotham* and other parliamentarian apostates.276CJ iii. 470a, 574a, 588a; Harl. 166, f. 106; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 263-4. He also clashed with the Essexians that summer over Irish policy and in joining other war party grandees late in August to insist that the Elector Palatine, the king’s nephew, depart England as soon as conveniently possible.277CJ iii. 599a, 612b, 614a; Harl. 166, ff. 108, 111v; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 265. When news of the lord general’s defeat in Cornwall early in September reached the Commons it was greeted by Hesilrige with ‘laughing and jeering’.278Harl. 166, f. 113. Besides his obvious contempt for Essex, Hesilrige may have felt a certain grim satisfaction in having paid back the lord general (for the defeat at Roundway Down) in his own coin.

The debacle in Cornwall in September 1644 required Waller and Hesilrige to return to the field and to work with Essex, Manchester and other senior officers in amalgamating Parliament’s main field armies into a single consolidated force that would bring the king to battle before he pushed too far eastwards.279Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 268-72. Early in October, Vane II and St John attempted to have Essex’s army placed under the command of Major-General Philip Skippon*, ‘and so draw all power to Waller and Hesilrige’, but without success.280Harl. 166, f. 128v; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 235; Juxon Jnl. 59. Nevertheless, Waller and Hesilrige would no longer be subject to Essex’s strategic oversight, for the CBK collectivised military decision-making in a council of war – consisting of Essex, Manchester, Waller, Hesilrige and Cromwell, among others – that would be answerable to Derby House.281Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’. At the second battle of Newbury, late in October, Hesilrige reportedly did ‘very good service’, although the evidence suggests that Waller’s and Cromwell’s cavalry were poorly led and ineffective.282Manchester Quarrel, 51; Wanklyn, Warrior Generals, 134-5. Speaking in the council on 10 November on whether to attack the king’s army as it withdrew from Donnington Castle, Hesilrige urged caution. The royalist army was too strong, he warned, and in the event of a parliamentarian defeat, the king would ‘draw a great party to himself ... and would be able to go to the very gates of London, and we had no means to shun it or keep him back’. Perhaps the most revealing words he spoke that day was his statement that Charles’s army ‘was a great deal more true unto him than our’s was’.283Manchester Quarrel, 68-9. This has been taken simply as a comment on the low morale of Parliament’s troops after weeks of hard service in the field, but it may well have expressed a deeper, more political concern. Like Cromwell – who also advised against giving battle – Hesilrige would have been well aware of recent revelations at Westminster of political disaffection, indeed treachery, among Essex’s senior officers.284J. Adamson, ‘The triumph of oligarchy’, in Parliament at Work ed. C. Kyle, J. Peacey (Woodbridge, 2002), 119-21. And Cromwell, especially, had good reason by this stage to doubt Manchester’s commitment to seeking the king’s utter defeat. Thus neither man would have had any faith that Essex and Manchester could be trusted either to push for absolute victory or to secure the kind of stringent, dictated settlement that they thought should follow it. A decisive victory over the king’s army in November would simply enhance the peers’ power to conclude a moderate settlement, while a heavy defeat would open the way to the kind of soft peace proposed by the Lords in August 1643, perhaps brokered by Essex. Only once Parliament’s armies had been new modelled – a process already in hand at Derby House – and Essex and other eirenic generals replaced by more committed officers, could Cromwell, Hesilrige and their allies feel confident of pursuing the war to a favourable conclusion. The council sent Hesilrige back to Westminster to explain its decision not to engage the king’s army at Donnington – a duty he performed with gusto in the Commons on 14 November.285CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 116; CJ iii. 696a; Holles, Mems. 27-8. His career as a cavalry commander was now over; his work as a factional leader in Parliament was about to enter its most intense phase since the opening of the Long Parliament.

Independent grandee, 1644-7

Hesilrige remained at Westminster more or less continuously during the two and half years or so between his return to the Commons in mid-November 1644 and the Presbyterian counter-revolution of July 1647. During that period he was named to approximately 135 committees and seven conference management teams and served as a teller in 102 divisions.286CJ iv. 81a, 95b, 100a, 261b, 547b, 583a, 592a. In 89 of these divisions he was paired as teller with staunch supporters of new modelling Parliament’s armies and resisting further Scottish intervention in English affairs. His most common partner in the division lobbies, with 44 joint tellerships, was Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire. His second most common partner was Cromwell, with seven. As these figures make abundantly clear, Hesilrige was a leading member of the Independents – the faction that coalesced during the second half of 1644 as the war party grandees abandoned their Scottish allies and pushed instead for victory through English force of arms; for toleration of ‘orthodox’ Congregationalists; and for the imposition of a rigorous, Anglocentric settlement upon the king. Discarded by their erstwhile friends, the Scots patched up their differences with the Essexians late in 1644 in common support for a negotiated settlement that endorsed the establishment of a coercive, Scottish-style Presbyterian church in England and Ireland. Among the leaders of this Presbyterian faction by mid-1645 was Hesilrige’s closest wartime colleague, Sir William Waller. Hesilrige’s apparent indifference to Waller’s last campaign in the west, early in 1645, may well be a sign of their growing estrangement.287Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 300-2.

Hesilrige’s report on 14 November 1644 of the council of war’s decision not to engage the king’s army at Donnington did not satisfy the Commons, which ordered a thorough investigation into the entire Newbury campaign.288Harl. 483, f. 142v; Add. 31116, p. 351; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, ii. 79. After what seems to have been a few weeks out of the political fray, he joined the ranks of Essex’s and Manchester’s enemies in the House early in December.289CJ iii. 711b; Harl. 166, f. 168v. Nevertheless, when he testified before the committee to investigate the Newbury campaign, his criticism of Manchester’s pusillanimous generalship apparently stopped short of Cromwell’s accusation that the earl was opposed to defeating the king on principle.290Manchester Quarrel, 97, 98; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 151, 156-7. Anxious to maintain a strong powerbase in London in the likely event of a showdown with the nascent Presbyterian interest, Hesilrige, on 19 December, reported an updated version of an ordinance that St John had introduced a year earlier for ensuring that the City radicals retained a majority in London’s common council. Perhaps anticipating opposition from the Essexians in the Lords, the Commons turned this draft legislation into an order of the House.291CJ iii. 729a; Add. 31116, p. 204; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 295-6. Hesilrige was a parliamentary patron of the godly municipal leaders Aldermen Isaac Penington* and John Fowke.292Harl. 166, f. 177; Juxon Jnl. 57-8; Oxford DNB, ‘John Fowke’.

Hesilrige made his most important contributions to the work of new modelling not, it seems, at Derby House, but in the Commons, where he received nearly a dozen appointments during the early months of 1645 – as a committeeman, conference manager and teller – for pressuring the Lords into passing the necessary legislation and for recruiting and supplying the New Model army.293CJ iv. 31b, 42b, 52a, 53b, 59b, 64b, 81a, 84b, 91b, 95b; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 205; Harl. 166, f. 181. On 19 February, he and three other Commons-men (Wentworth, Alexander Rigby I and Sir Thomas Widdrington) were appointed to request that the officer nominated as general of the new army, Sir Thomas Fairfax*, attend the House to receive his command.294CJ iv. 53b. It is likely that Hesilrige was consulted by Fairfax when selecting officers for the New Model, although his recommendation of Ludlowe for a commission in Fairfax’s army was unsuccessful.295Ludlow, Mems. i. p. xx; M. Wanklyn, ‘Choosing officers for the New Model army, Feb. to Apr. 1645’, Jnl. of the Soc. for Army Historical Research, xcii. 118-19.

Hesilrige’s status as an Independent grandee was confirmed on 31 March with his appointment to the Army Committee*.296LJ vii. 294a. Established to ensure that Fairfax’s army was properly paid and supplied, this new standing committee was composed almost exclusively of the New Model’s leading supporters in both Houses. Hesilrige was one of the most active members of the Army Committee, which made use of his expertise in procuring horses in order to find mounts for Fairfax’s cavalry.297Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; SP28/140, ff. 276, 385; Ludlow, Mems. i. 90. In addition, the Commons periodically enlisted his services to raise money for the New Model, to ensure the efficient collection of the assessment, and to reward and thank Fairfax for his services to Parliament.298CJ iv. 59b, 186a, 299a, 360a, 472b, 483b, 738a. Hesilrige’s experience in military administration secured his appointment in June 1645 to a standing committee to contract for powder, match and bullet and to oversee the ordnance office (the efforts of Hesilrige and friends to secure a place in the ordnance office for his brother Thomas ultimately proved unsuccessful).299CJ iv. 178b; v. 267; LJ vii. 478a; Add. 18780, f. 58; SP28/30, f. 279; WO47/1, ff. 46v, 106; D.E. Lewis, ‘The Office of Ordnance and the Parliamentarian Land Forces 1642-8’ (Loughborough Univ. PhD thesis, 1976), 46-7. And in October he would be among a contingent of mostly Independent MPs added to the Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports* that had been set up in April. In contrast to the Army Committee, however, the Admiralty Committee was dominated by the Presbyterians, which probably explains why Hesilrige and other Independents were not among its most assiduous members.300Supra, ‘Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports’; LJ vii. 624b.

Hesilrige received only one appointment in relation to the Self-Denying Ordinance that, in April 1645, deprived him of military command and required his presence at Fairfax’s headquarters to help disband Waller’s army.301CJ iv. 100a, 118a, 119a; Harl. 166, ff. 205v-206. His involvement that spring and summer in the CBK’s and the Commons’ efforts to raise money for the Scottish army was part of a larger parliamentary initiative to bring these forces southwards in order to provide cover while the New Model took shape.302CJ iv. 137a, 173b, 186a, 223b; Harl. 166, f. 208; Add. 31116, p. 446. The House all but ignored allegations sponsored by Essex and other Presbyterian grandees that Hesilrige had overlooked warnings of Leicester’s vulnerability prior to the royalists’ sacking of the town late in May. In fact, he had apparently done his best to shore up Leicester’s defences that spring, and he doubtless attributed the town’s loss to the Scots’ failure to march south.303CJ iv. 163a; LJ vii. 405b; Harl. 166, f. 215v; Add. 18780, ff. 23v, 29; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 490, 515, 529, 553; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 315-16.

In the aftermath of Fairfax’s victory at Naseby in June 1645, Hesilrige, St John, Vane II ‘and other grandees of that party’ took the offensive in the Commons against those of their Presbyterian opponents implicated in the so-called Savile affair.304Whitelocke, Diary, 171-2. But he was ‘justly reproved’ on 28 June after trying to excuse the ill treatment of the royalist troops captured at Naseby as an act of God rather than negligence on the part of the committee for prisoners, of which he was a member.305CJ iv. 177b; Harl. 166, f. 222v. The ordinance he reported on 4 September to collect charitable donations for the townspeople of Leicester contained (according to D’Ewes) ‘some very unfit clauses ... as that men’s names should be set down and how much they gave’.306CJ iv. 263b; Harl. 166, f. 261. Hesilrige and Grey of Groby resumed their rivalry in November during canvassing for the Leicestershire recruiter election. ‘The trust is great’, Hesilrige informed the voters, ‘and if you apprehend I have been faithful to you, I entreat such a companion [at Westminster] may be added to me as will draw [i.e. pull] in the yoke and not hinder’. In the event, it was Hesilrige’s interest that prevailed on election day (20 November), with his nominee, Henry Smyth, defeating Grey of Groby’s, Thomas Beaumont*. The election of Peter Temple for Leicester on 17 November – when both Hesilrige and Grey of Groby were in temporary residence in or near the town – may also have represented a victory for Hesilrige.307Supra, ‘Leicester’; ‘Leicestershire’; infra, ‘Peter Temple’; Bodl. Rawl. D.116, pp. 18-19.

Hesilrige emerged in the autumn of 1645 as a prominent opponent of continuing Scottish intervention in English affairs. On 1 October, he and Vane II were minority tellers in favour of a motion that would effectively have transferred control of the Northern Association army from Sednham Poynts (a Presbyterian sympathiser) to the parliamentary Independents – with the ultimate objective, it seems, of turning it into a regional defence force against the Scots.308CJ iv. 296a; Harl. 166, f. 267; D. Scott, ‘The ‘northern gentlemen’, the parliamentary Independents, and Anglo-Scottish relations in the Long Parliament’, HJ xlii. 361, 371. In a debate on 6 October concerning Parliament’s efforts to have the Scottish army besiege Newark, Hesilrige was apparently the first Commons-man to declare openly in the House that the Scots should withdraw from England altogether. He proposed that the Commons should request the Scots to return home ‘because we cannot pay them any longer. And if they continue where they now are, the country about Newcastle ... will rise against them. Which if it should so fall out we cannot maintain them against the country, nor the country against them’.309Add. 18780, f. 136v. A profound distrust of both Charles and the Scots probably underlay much of his involvement in 1645-6 in thrashing out the terms of the Newcastle peace propositions – which were conceived as a means of imposing a settlement on the king that would destroy Scottish ambitions for a ‘Covenanted uniformity’ between the kingdoms.310CJ iv. 365a, 471b, 478b, 491a, 545, 553b, 576a, 576b, 583a, 584b, 587a, 592a; Scott, ‘Northern gentlemen’, 365-70. A Commons’ resolution that the propositions include a provision for granting Hesilrige an estate worth £2,000 a year in acknowledgement of ‘his many great and faithful services to the kingdom’ did not make it into the finished text.311CJ iv. 360b. Although he was named on 5 December 1645 as a commissioner to reside with the English and Scottish forces besieging Newark – whose principal task was to supply and police the pay-starved and ill-disciplined Scottish army – it is not at all clear that he acted on this commission.312CJ iv. 366b, 374a-375a; LJ viii. 43b-44a. He was certainly back in the House by 7 January 1646, when he was named to an Independent-dominated committee to pressure the Scots into reducing the size of their army.313CJ iv. 399b; Scott, ‘Northern gentlemen’, 362.

Hesilrige and Evelyn were tellers in February 1646 for those Commons-men who resented the Scots’ treating with the ‘Covenant-engaged’ faction in the City.314CJ iv. 449a; Juxon Jnl. 101-4. And in April he and Evelyn were tellers for retaining several of the more controversial clauses in a declaration (drafted by an Independent-dominated committee) to counter Scottish claims that Parliament had reneged on the Covenant and was intent on altering the fundamental constitution in church and state.315CJ iv. 507b, 508 512b, 513a-514b. The task of overseeing the printing and distribution of this declaration was specifically referred to Hesilrige, Evelyn and two other MPs.316CJ iv. 512b, 513a. The lengthy reports that Hesilrige made from the CBK on 20 March and 1 June 1646, detailing the oppressions of the Scottish army in northern England, were another important contribution to what the Scots commissioners rightly perceived as an Independent-led campaign to destroy the Covenanting interest in England.317CJ iv. 481a, 560a; Add. 31116, p. 520; Scott, ‘Northern gentlemen’, 360-5. Holles was adamant that Hesilrige and other leading Independents were keen to use such reports as a pretext for sending the New Model into northern England in order to drive the Scots out of the kingdom by force.318Holles, Mems. 60; Scott, ‘Northern gentlemen’, 371-2. As a teller with Evelyn on 14 May and with Marten on 27 June, in divisions relating to the Newcastle propositions, he sought to assert the principle that the Scots had no ‘interest and judgement in the matter of ordinance and propositions which concern this kingdom [England] only’.319CJ iv. 545, 590b; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 57. On 14 August, he was a teller with Evelyn against giving a second reading to an ordinance for punishing the publishers of scandalous pamphlets against the Scots or their army.320CJ iv. 644b. So great was his antipathy towards the Scots that he was prepared to turn a blind eye to the persecution of puritan separatists in Cumberland and Westmorland by Richard Barwis* and his crypto-royalist allies so long as this group acted as a bulwark against Scottish encroachment in the region.321D. Scott, ‘The Barwis affair: political allegiance and the Scots during the British civil wars’, EHR cxv. 852, 853-4. In exposing Barwis’s group as a front for delinquents and former royalists, the separatists – as Hesilrige saw it – had combined with the Scots ‘to drive on their wicked design...to the prejudice of the state’.322[J. Musgrave], Another Word to the Wise (1646), unpag. (E.323.6); Yet Another Word to the Wise (1646), 34-5 (E.355.25).

Hesilrige’s perception by 1645 of a Scottish design against England’s national interest was informed by his hostility towards the Scots’ brand of clericalist Presbyterianism. That he maintained a strong interest in godly reformation is evident from his addition to the Westminster Assembly early in 1644 and his occasional participation in its debates.323Mins. and Pprs. of the Westminster Assembly 1643-52 ed. C. Van Dixhoorn, D.F. Wright (Oxford, 2012), ii. 243. It is possible, too, that he was active on the Committee for Plundered Ministers*, although there is no record of his formal addition to this body or his attendance at its meetings.324W. Powell, Newes for Newters (1648), epistle ded. (E.474.8). Several of his committee appointments in the mid-1640s suggest that he favoured some form of parish-based, national Presbyterian church.325CJ iv. 9b, 218a, 553b, 719b. But there were limits to the amount of authority he was prepared to see vested in the ministry. In September 1644, at the London residence of the Scots commissioners, he and Vane II had argued ‘mightily’ against the clauses in the Assembly’s draft ordinance for ordaining ministers that ‘ordination is an ordinance of Christ’ and that ‘ministers are set over people in the Lord’.326G. Gillespie, Notes of Debates and Procs. of the Assembly of Divines and other Commrs. at Westminster, ed. D. Meek (Edinburgh, 1846), 67. On 15 October 1645, he was a teller with another pro-army MP, John Crewe I, for giving a second reading to a proviso (proposed by William Ashhurst) in the ordinance for excluding scandalous persons from the sacrament that would allow a minister, ‘with the consent of the eldership and approbation of the classis’, to exclude persons guilty of ‘notorious sin’ as long as Parliament was informed about the matter. Intended to secure a compromise acceptable to all sides in the House, Ashhurst’s proviso succeeded in splitting its Erastian majority, for all four tellers were opponents of clericalist Presbyterianism. Although Hesilrige and Crewe won this division, and the proviso was given its second reading, the House then rejected it and stuck to the line that presbyteries could suspend communicants only for offences specified in the ordinance.327Supra, ‘William Ashhurst’; infra, ‘Zouche Tate’; Add. 18780, f. 143v; CJ iv. 308b-309a. Hesilrige’s next tellership, on 24 October, saw him partner Evelyn in favour of removing from the ordinance for the ordination of ministers a requirement that ordinands take the Covenant.328CJ iv. 319a. Revealingly, it was Hesilrige and his fellow pro-army MP Edmund Prideaux I who were appointed on 3 April 1646 to thank the prominent Congregationalist divines Stephen Caryl and Hugh Peters for their recent sermons to mark public thanksgiving for the success of Fairfax’s army in the west country.329CJ iv. 499b. Later that month, Hesilrige and Henry Marten, supported by Evelyn of Wiltshire, spearheaded efforts in the Commons to assert Parliament’s authority against the clericalist claims of the Westminster Assembly. On 16 April, the two men were put in charge of a committee to examine the breach of parliamentary privilege inherent in the Assembly’s petition to Parliament of 23 March; and they were almost certainly responsible in large part for the ‘narrative’ that this committee drew up, and which Hesilrige reported on 18 April, affirming that as ‘the supreme judicatory’, Parliament ‘hath jurisdiction in all causes, spiritual and temporal’.330CJ iv. 506a, 511a, 513, 514b, 518a, 518b. On 21 May, he was a minority teller with Evelyn against re-considering Parliament’s votes to vest ultimate authority when it came to excluding scandalous persons from the sacrament not in presbyteries but lay commissioners. The majority tellers were the Presbyterian grandees Holles and Lewis.331CJ iv. 552a. Hesilrige’s and Marten’s attempt late that August to prevent the Commons passing the ordinance for the ordination of ministers also ended in defeat.332Harington’s Diary, 34.

Hesilrige’s belief in a Scottish design against English interests doubtless redoubled in the spring of 1646 with the king’s flight to the Scots’ army at Newark. Ironically, Hesilrige and other leading Independents had helped to drive Charles to this desperate expedient by foiling his attempts in April to secure more favourable peace terms by suborning parliamentarian officers (notably, Henry Ireton*) at the siege of Oxford.333CJ iv. 523a, 524b. Early in May, Hesilrige was instrumental in drafting an order of both Houses declaring that anyone who concealed the king from Parliament would be ‘proceeded against as a traitor to the commonwealth, forfeit his whole estate and die without mercy’.334CJ iv. 531b, 532a. And after news of Charles’s flight to the Scots had reached Westminster on 6 May, he joined other Independents in trying (unsuccessfully) to pressure the Scots and their English allies into handing over the king for incarceration in Warwick Castle.335CJ iv. 540a, 547b, 548b. His tellerships, and most of his committee appointments, during May, June and July placed him in the front line of the Independents’ struggle to hold their increasingly confident enemies in the City and at Westminster in check.336CJ iv. 531b, 540a, 545, 547b, 548b, 552a, 555b-556a, 558b, 561b, 567b, 570b, 573b, 576b, 584a, 590b, 592a, 601a, 615b, 617a, 622b, 624a. The Independents’ grip on the Commons remained strong enough to secure a vote on 8 July, authorising the CC to pay Hesilrige the £6,663 he claimed he was due ‘for any service to Parliament’ (the Presbyterian-dominated Committee of Accounts* had computed this figure at £5,096).337CJ iv. 607; SP28/252, pt. 1, ff. 212, 216.

A climacteric moment in the battle between the two parties in 1646 came on 31 July, when Hesilrige partnered first Cromwell and then Evelyn as a teller in two divisions in which they narrowly defeated an initiative by Holles and Stapilton to send six of Fairfax’s regiments over to Ireland, in what was widely perceived as an attempt ‘to weaken or rather dissolve the army’.338CJ iv. 631b-632a; Juxon Jnl. 131. This defeat convinced the Presbyterian grandees that dismantling the New Model was not feasible until the Scots army had quit England. Hesilrige was among the leading Commons-men who negotiated the terms and conditions for this Scottish withdrawal and – as a teller with Evelyn in five divisions in August and September – sided with those in the House who wanted the Scots gone as quickly and as cheaply as possible.339CJ iv. 647b, 655b, 659a, 663a, 665a. The urgent necessity of raising money to pay off the Scots may well account for his increasingly regular attendance at the CC from mid-August 1646;340CJ iv. 650b-651a; SP23/3, pp. 215, 382. although his appointments throughout the mid-1640s indicate his general keenness to mulct delinquents.341CJ ii. 953b; iii. 76a, 109b, 397b; iv. 261b, 445b, 613a, 650b, 665a, 708a; v. 8b.

Hesilrige’s appetite for the role of teller lent him the aspect of the Independent grandees’ standard-bearer during the autumn and winter of 1646 as they fought the Presbyterians over a range of contentious issues: the custody of the great seal; disbanding regional forces; tendering the Covenant to the people; and (most controversial of all) the terms on which the Scots should hand over the king to Parliament.342CJ iv. 675a, 675b, 687b, 690a, 691a, 696b, 700b, 725a, 726b, 730a; v. 3b, 12a, 20b, 24a, 25a, 27b, 30a, 34b, 42b, 45a, 46a. From these tellerships it is evident that Hesilrige, like Cromwell, opposed Presbyterian proposals for introducing a ballot box on Commons’ votes relating to grants of money or office (a measure that would have undermined the Independent grandees’ political patronage system).343CJ iv. 690a. Secondly, he was against consulting the Lords before informing the Scots that Parliament alone had the right to dispose of the king’s person.344CJ iv. 730a; The Answer of the Commons Assembled in Parliament, to the Scots Commrs. Pprs. (1646, E.365.2). Thirdly, he discounted complaints from the Covenant-engaged citizens that the New Model army was full of sectaries and should therefore be swiftly disbanded.345CJ v. 25a; To the Right Honourable the Lords Assembled in [the] High Court of Parliament (1646, E.366.14). Finally, he and Cromwell were willing to permit lay preachers to expound the Scriptures.346CJ v. 34b.

Hesilrige remained at Westminster during the first half of 1647, fighting a desperate rearguard action as a teller with Evelyn of Wiltshire, Pierrepont and other Independents against the Holles-Stapilton interest and its drive to remodel and disband the army and to consolidate its powerbase in London.347CJ v. 73b, 90a, 91a, 108a, 117b, 127b, 131b, 132b, 143b, 155a, 162a, 197a; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 24-5, 28, 29, 57. An early sign of the Independents’ waning strength in the Commons was their defeat in a division on 5 January – in which Hesilrige was one of the minority tellers against Holles and Stapilton – for placing Charles under army control.348CJ v. 42b; Mahony, ‘Presbyterian Party’, 347-8. Challenging Holles and Stapilton again on 8 March, Hesilrige and Evelyn were tellers against a motion that Fairfax’s officers should conform to Presbyterian church government as established by Parliament, but lost the division by 28 votes. Hesilrige suffered a particularly crushing defeat on 27 April in opposing a motion that those soldiers who refused to serve in Ireland should be disbanded with only six weeks arrears of pay. He and Sir Michael Livesay lost this division to Stapilton and Glynne by 114 votes to 7.349CJ v. 155a. He was defeated again on 4 May, when he and Evelyn were tellers against the House’s disapproval of a petition addressed to the Commons as the ‘supreme authority of the nation’ by the London radicals.350CJ v. 162a. During a brief period of official leave of absence in late May he attended the Army Committee at Guidhall and, with Evelyn of Wiltshire and Vane II (among others), signed warrants relating to the pay of Cromwell and Ireton and their troops.351CJ v. 186b; SP28/49, ff. 498, 501, 515; C. Hoover, ‘Cromwell’s status and pay in 1646-7’, HJ xxiii. 711, 714. It was also at this time that he collaborated with Cromwell and other senior officers in the dispatch of a cavalry force under Cornet Joyce to secure the king at Holdenby.352Clarke Pprs. i. pp. xxx-xxxi. When later confronted by Holles in the Commons with evidence of his complicity in Joyce’s proceedings, he denied all knowledge of the matter – which was probably true only to the extent that he had had no prior knowledge of Joyce’s removal of the king from Holdenby to army headquarters.353Add. 31116, p. 624.

Hesilrige’s attendance at the Army Committee in June and July 1646 (often in the company of Evelyn of Wiltshire), and appointments and tellerships in the Commons during those months, place him at the forefront of the Independents’ exploitation of the Presbyterians’ disarray after losing custody of Charles.354CJ v. 210a, 210b, 214a, 226a, 229a, 233b, 235b, 238b, 244b, 253b, 254a; SP28/49, ff. 522-39. Thus on 14 June he was sent to Derby House to obtain evidence sent from France of a Presbyterian design to invite the Scots to invade England again; and that same day he was instrumental in defeating a Presbyterian proposal for bringing the king nearer to London.355CJ v. 210a; Clarke Pprs. i. 135. The day after the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster on 26 July, Ludlowe consulted with Hesilrige and other Commons-men as to ‘what was fittest to be done in this juncture ... [and] we resolved to betake ourselves to the army for protection, Sir Arthur Hesilrige undertaking to persuade the Speaker to go thither, to which he consented...’.356Ludlow, Mems. i. 161-2; Clarke Pprs. i. 218-19. Hesilrige was among the signatories to the 4 August ‘engagement’ of these fugitive Members 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’.357LJ ix. 385b.

Proscribing the Presbyterians, 1647-9

Hesilrige displayed the best and worst sides of his character in the period between the collapse of the Presbyterian ‘counter-revolution’ early in August 1647 and assuming his seat in the Rump in February 1649: the worst side, in the eagerness with which he hounded the defeated Presbyterians; the best side, in his willingness to assume the heavy, indeed hazardous, responsibility of governing Newcastle and the northern counties in the face of a serious breakdown in relations between England and Scotland. Between early August 1647 and his departure northwards in March 1648 he was named to 21 committees and two conference management teams and served as teller in 46 divisions.358CJ v. 406a, 436b. His partner in the case of 20 of these tellerships was Evelyn of Wiltshire.

Having returned to Westminster on 6 August 1647 with the other fugitive Members, Hesilrige immediately resumed his role as the Independents’ teller-in-chief in divisions on appointing Fairfax as Constable of the Tower, vindicating the army, repealing the legislation passed during the Presbyterian counter-revolution, and proscribing those Members complicit in the ‘visible, insolent and actual force upon the Houses’ of 26 July.359CJ v. 269a, 270a, 271a, 279a, 280a, 290b, 295a. Yet although the army was now in control of London, the Presbyterians remained in a majority in the Commons and thus won most of these divisions, much to Hesilrige’s resentment. After losing one such vote on 9 August, he ‘stood up and said that some sat there that ought not to sit ... [and] that it was the desire of the commonwealth that such should be put out, and that it should be remembered unto them in due time’.360HMC Egmont, 443-4. Clement Walker* claimed that Hesilrige warned that ‘some heads must fly off’, and that if Parliament would not preserve the kingdom then ‘they must look another way for safety’ – meaning the army, where radical elements were demanding a purge of the Houses.361[C. Walker], Hist. of Independency (1648), 49 (E.463.19). Hesilrige was a leading member of the ‘close committee of examinations’ – a bicameral sub-committee of the 6 August committee to investigate the force upon the Houses – which was invested with quasi-judicial powers by ordinance and which the Independents employed to discover and interrogate the principal actors in the counter-revolution. He was particularly prominent, both as a member of this sub-committee and as a teller, in securing the expulsion from the House of two such actors, Edward Bayntun and John Glynne.362CJ v. 269a, 273a, 290b, 295a; LJ ix. 385b-386a; Bodl. Clarendon 30, f. 51; [Walker], Hist. of Independency, 53-4, 59, 60. In September he was a teller in several divisions in favour of impeaching various other Presbyterian activists of high treason.363CJ v. 316b, 317b.

On the critical question of whether to continue negotiating with Charles following his stated preference in September 1647 for the Heads of Proposals over the Newcastle Propositions, Hesilrige sided with his fellow Independent grandees against a faction of radical Independents that was opposed to any further treating with the king. On 23 September, the familiar pairing of Hesilrige and Evelyn were majority tellers in favour of seeking a settlement with the king on the basis of the Heads (once they had been turned into parliamentary propositions). The opposing tellers were the radical Independents Wentworth and Marten.364CJ v. 314b. The question of what form of church government and worship would be enshrined in this projected settlement seems to have been Hesilrige’s prime concern, or at least would account for most of his committee appointments and tellerships in relation to the propositions. It was his name that headed a committee set up on 6 October for preparing a proposition ‘concerning the settlement of the Presbyterian government; and ... the exemption of such tender consciences as cannot conform to that government’; and on 14 October, he was a teller with Evelyn for the small majority in the House that favoured including a clause in this proposition that would allow individuals to absent themselves from public worship if they could show ‘reasonable cause... or that they were present elsewhere to hear the word of God preached or expounded unto them’.365CJ v. 327b, 333a. Similarly, on 1 November he was a teller for the majority that favoured an amendment made by Lords, stipulating that tithes should be paid only to conformable ministers ‘unless it be by the consent of the present incumbent’ – thereby creating a loophole for the public maintenance of non-separating Congregationalist ministers.366CJ v. 348a; LJ ix. 506b; Gardiner, Constitutional Docs. of the Eng. Rev. 345. At the same time, he and his fellow Independent grandees St John and Samuel Browne were willing to allow the Calvinist episcopalian Archbishop James Ussher to preach at Lincoln’s Inn, contrary to the wishes of less tolerant godly Members.367CJ v. 393b. Hesilrige’s other principal concern during the last quarter of 1647 seems to have been raising money to satisfy army arrears of pay, for which he was willing to sanction the sale of church lands on a large scale, against the wishes of those Members anxious to preserve these resources for the Presbyterian public ministry.368CJ v. 339a, 340a, 344a, 356b, 394a. He and Pierrepont apparently ignored a Commons’ order of 15 November for drafting an answer to a paper from the Scot commissioners demanding a personal treaty with the king. Reporting from Derby House on 23 November, however, Hesilrige apprized the Commons of the Scots commissioners’ refusal to join with Parliament in presenting the revised propositions to Charles.369CJ v. 359b, 363a, 367a; LJ ix. 512, 540b. His final tellership of 1647 was on 24 December, when he and Ludlowe represented the majority in favour of ordering Thomas Rainborowe* to repair to his charge as vice-admiral of the navy.370CJ v. 403b. The next day (25 December) Hesilrige and four other Independents were appointed managers of a conference to justify a Commons’ vote for dispatching Rainborowe to sea as commander of the navy’s winter guard.371CJ v. 406a. Hesilrige’s support for Rainborowe in the House was not reflected in his attendance record at the Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports, which was extremely poor.372ADM7/673, pp. 290, 341, 452.

On 30 December 1647, the Commons approved Fairfax’s ‘sudden and unexpected’ grant of a commission to Hesilrige as governor of Newcastle, ‘for such reasons as are not convenient to be made public’.373CJ v. 410b; ‘Boys Diary’, 154; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 949. One of those unstated reasons may well have been the fact that the acting governor of the town was Robert Lilburne*, who was a brother of the grandees’ bugbear, the Leveller leader John Lilburne. Hesilrige was also given command of Robert Lilburne’s mutinous regiment of foot, which would later form the garrison at Newcastle.374Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 459, 535. Hesilrige professed to the House that he had no ambition to resume his military career, ‘being now more disabled for service than before, but inasmuch as this was thrown upon him, he wished to serve them faithfully as before and carry his life in his hand for their service’.375‘Boys Diary’, 154. According to John Lilburne, his brother had been ‘privately undermined and worm-eaten out of his governorship’ by Hesilrige.376J. Lilburne, A Just Reproof to Haberdashers-Hall (1651), 3 (E.304.17). Certainly Hesilrige was not appointed on the strength of his interest in the region, for although he owned property in Northumberland and had ancestral ties to the north-east he was accounted ‘a stranger in that country [sic]’.377J. Musgrave, A True and Exact Relation (1650), 3 (E.619.10). But however he had landed this prestigious position it represented a major vote of trust in him by Cromwell and other army leaders, especially given the marked deterioration in relations between Westminster and Edinburgh since the summer.

Before leaving Westminster in March 1648 to take command at Newcastle, Hesilrige was evidently determined to consolidate the Independents’ power in the kingdom, both against the king and the Presbyterians. Speaking in the Commons on 3 January it was he who introduced the proposal for the vote of no addresses – the Independents’ response to Charles’s rejection of the Four Bills in favour of the Engagement with the Scots. ‘We have yielded so much in the City and kingdom’, he declared, ‘because we have acted upon tottering and unsteady principles and foundations, and it is now high time to act vigorously to save ourselves. I conclude that this House resolve to make no further application to the king, nor receive further addresses from him...’. This proposal received the immediate backing of Sir Thomas Wroth, Pierrepont, Cromwell and Henry Ireton.378‘Boys Diary’, 155-6; [Walker], Hist. of Independency, 71-2; OPH xxii. 444. In the two division on whether to pass such a vote, Hesilrige and Evelyn were majority tellers in favour.379CJ v. 415b. Named with Evelyn, Prideaux and Nathaniel Fiennes as reporters of a conference on 18 January concerning Leveller agitation in London, Hesilrige reported allegations to the Commons that John Lilburne and John Wildman* were conspiring against Cromwell and Ireton.380CJ v. 436b; ‘Boys Diary’, 157-8. Resuming his prosecutorial role against the Presbyterians, he moved on 27 January that the House revive its impeachment of seven peers implicated in the July 1647 counter-revolution; and over the next two days he was a teller with Evelyn, Wentworth and Sir William Masham in six divisions for expediting proceedings against them.381CJ v. 445a, 448a, 448b; ‘Boys Diary’, 158. Two weeks later (11 February), he and Wentworth were majority tellers in favour of passing a declaration justifying the vote of no addresses.382CJ v. 462a. In a series of debates late in February over the wording of a parliamentary declaration to the Scots, vindicating the House’s proceedings, he was a teller in nine divisions – on the majority of occasions in favour of an Erastian church settlement with toleration for tender consciences.383CJ v. 471b, 472b, 473a; ‘Boys Diary’, 162-3; A Declaration of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament Concerning the Papers of the Scots Commissioners (1648, E.432.1). Early in March he and Evelyn were tellers in three divisions for the majority that favoured giving parliamentary approval to the 4 August 1647 engagement of the fugitive Members.384CJ v. 479a, 489a. Walker claimed that St John, Hesilrige ‘and many more, when they perceived difficulty in passing it [the question for approving the engagement], began to skirmish with their long sword again’ and to insist that ‘they must give content without doors (meaning, to the army) as well as within’.385[Walker], Hist. of Independency, 83. His last tellership for nearly a year was on 13 March in favour of continuing a debate on the articles of impeachment against the London aldermen Thomas Adams* for his part in the July 1647 counter-revolution.386CJ v. 494b.

Hesilrige may well have left Westminster for Northumberland by the time the two Houses passed an order on 31 March 1648, adding him and his future son-in-law George Fenwick to all committees and sequestrations commissions in the four northern counties.387CJ v. 505b; LJ x. 132b; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 1 (28 Mar.-4 Apr. 1648), sig. A4. Hesilrige’s party on the journey north probably included not only Fenwick but also the New England minister George Downing*, who was to become either Hesilrige’s chaplain or secretary that spring. Hesilrige and Downing shared close links with the New England puritans and in particular, perhaps, with Hugh Peters.388Infra, ‘George Downing’. A conscientious and resolute commander, Hesilrige worked with Major-General John Lambert*, Colonel John Bright*, Major George Smithson* and other parliamentarian officers to defend the northern counties against royalist uprisings and Scottish invasion during the second civil war.389Infra, ‘George Fenwick’; Leics. RO, DG21/275/c-j; CJ v. 544b, 550b, 554b, 625a, 670b; A Letter from Sir Arthur Hesilrige to the Honorable William Lenthal Esq (1648, E.451.25); Sir Arthur Hesilrige’s Letter to the Honorable Committee of Lords & Commons at Derby-House (1648, E.458.26); CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 17-18, 244; Mems. of the Great Civil War ed. Cary, i. 397-9, 410-11, 413-15, 419-2; Denton, Only in Heaven, 141-52; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’. Cromwell secured the appointment of Hesilrige as governor of Berwick and Carlisle following the two towns’ recapture that autumn.390SP28/260, f. 494; Moderate Intelligencer no. 186 (5-12 Oct. 1648), 1687 (E.467.16); The Moderate no. 15 (17-24 Oct. 1648), 126 (E.468.24); Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 418; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 662. And Hesilrige and Lambert were Cromwell’s two principal companions on the latter’s diplomatic mission to Edinburgh early in October.391Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 29 (10-17 Oct. 1648), sigs. Rrv, Ss2v (E.467.38); Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 422, 432. Cromwell’s lenient treatment of the Scots after the second civil war obliged him to refute concerns being voiced among leading Independents that he and ‘Sir Roger’ (his nickname for Hesilrige) had ‘turned Presbyterian’.392Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 676-7. ‘Sir Roger’ was clearly Hesilrige, not John Lambert as Abbott concluded.

Hesilrige’s remark in 1659 that the Newport treaty had been supported by Parliament-men ‘of great worth’ is too slender a basis for claiming that he, too, had favoured the negotiations.393Burton’s Diary, iii. 96; B. Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2012), 282. On returning from Scotland, Hesilrige would remain at Newcastle until February 1649, and he was therefore absent from the House during Pride’s Purge and the trial and execution of the king. Allegations made after his death in 1661 that he had welcomed the revolutionary events of 1648-9 cannot be treated as reliable evidence.394CJ viii. 298a-299a. It is perhaps noteworthy that petitions to Parliament were organised in County Durham and Newcastle in the autumn of 1648, denouncing the Newport Treaty and demanding ‘full and exemplary justice ... upon the great incendiaries of the kingdom’. Even Hesilrige’s own deputy-governor Paul Hobson endorsed one such petition.395Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke ms CXIV, f. 98; The Moderate no. 14 (10-17 Oct. 1648), 115-16 (E.468.2); Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 28 (3-10 Oct. 1648), sig. Pp6 (E.466.11); CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 113; Mems. of Ambrose Barnes ed. W.H.D. Longstaffe (Surt. Soc. l), 351-2; Oxford DNB, ‘Paul Hobson’. But more revealing still is Hesilrige’s failure to return to London before the regicide. It was not until early February 1649 that he ventured back to Westminster, giving as his reason for ending his self-imposed exile in the north ‘some extraordinary occasions in relation to the garrison [at Newcastle]’.396The Moderate no. 30 (30 Jan.-6 Feb. 1649), 296 (E.541.15). He entered his dissent to the 5 December vote – that the king’s answer to the Newport propositions were an acceptable basis for settlement – on 15 February, having already received his first committee appointment in the Rump (12 Feb.), been voted onto the Rump’s first council of state (14 Feb.), and resumed his attendance at the Committee for Compounding.397PA, Ms CJ xxxiii, p. 698; CJ vi. 138a, 141a; SP23/5, f. 61v.

Securing the Rump, 1649-51

Hesilrige was regarded by contemporaries as one of the foremost statesmen of the new commonwealth – a view endorsed by modern authorities.398Worden, Rump Parl. 66-7, 183; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’. Whitelocke and other contemporaries would not have hesitated to place him among the ‘juncto’: the group of leading politicians at Westminster and Derby House that shaped government policy.399Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls II) no. 9 (12-19 June 1649), sig. I3v (E.560.19); Worden, Rump Parl. 183. Oliver St John would refer to Vane II and ‘Sir Roger’ in 1651 as the ‘well-head’ of the regime; and it would be alleged in 1659 that Hesilrige had endeavoured in 1652-3 ‘to make himself and Sir Henry Vane the great Hogen-Mogens [the Dutch term of address to their States-General] to rule the commonwealth’.400Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 48; Burton’s Diary, iv. 222. Hesilrige was elected to all five of the Rump’s councils of state; and, given his relatively high placing in terms of the votes cast at conciliar elections, he was evidently among the most respected figures in the House.401CJ vi. 532a; vii. 42a, 220a. He was an active member of the Committee for Compounding; put in the odd appearance at the Army Committee – which disbursed £12,000 to him in March 1649 for the supply of the northern garrisons; and he occasionally reported from the Committee of Navy and Customs during 1649-50.402CJ vi. 167a, 170a, 389a, 401a; vii. 59a; SP23/5, ff. 61v, 86; SP28/59, f. 110.

Yet statistical analysis of Hesilrige’s parliamentary career in the period 1649-53 does not entirely bear out the picture sometimes painted of him as one of the ‘joint rulers of the Rump’ (the other member of this supposed duumvirate being Thomas Scot I).403Worden, Rump Parl. 183. His influence at Westminster and at Derby House was undoubtedly impaired by the long periods of absence he was obliged to take as governor of Newcastle and the four northern counties. Thus he was absent from the House between June and October 1649; May 1650 and January 1651; June and October 1651; and August and October 1652. As a consequence of these absences his tally of approximately 83 committee appointments in the Rump was poor compared with those of Marten, Scot, Vane II and Thomas Chaloner. For largely the same reason his attendance record at the council of state was an undistinguished one; and he delivered only 20 or so reports from Derby House in the period 1649-53 (Scot and Vane II each delivered more than three times that number).404CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. lxxv; 1650, p. xli; 1651, p. xxxv; 1651-2, p. xlvii; 1652-3, p. xxxiii; CJ vi. 151b, 183b, 197a, 205b, 351a, 357a, 386a, 396b, 541b, 547b, 550b, 554b, 572b, 579a, 581b; vii. 84b, 85b, 90a, 249a. Even when he was in London, his assignments and committee appointments at Derby House indicate that his workload there was substantially lighter than that of John Bradshawe, Scot I and Vane II, to name but three councillors. The only conciliar standing committees to which he was regularly appointed were those to liaise with senior army offices and to oversee the ordnance office.405CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 346, 382; 1650, p. 19; 1651, pp. 66, 67; 1651-2, pp. 43, 284, 306; 1652-3, p. 2. Only in the spring of 1649, it seems, did he shoulder some of the council’s weightiest business.406CJ vi. 183b, 199a, 205b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 17, 18, 20, 25, 26, 52, 103, 148, 346, 360, 368, 381, 382, 397, 402, 405, 422. He was named in first place to 12 committees in the Rump itself and probably chaired at least six, including important committees for regulating and improving the composition process (12 March 1649), settling the government and holding new elections (1 May), and for reforming the law (4, 9 December).407CJ vi. 162a, 164a, 167b, 169a, 175b, 177a, 180a, 183b, 185b, 199a, 324b, 325b, 328b, 330b, 343a, 346b, 357a, 386b, 387b, 393b, 395b, 403b, 575b; vii. 139a, 251a, 261b. In addition, the drafting of several major pieces of legislation was assigned solely to his care.408CJ vi. 199a, 365b, 374a, 387a, 390a, 545a; vii. 103b, 123b.

Only Henry Marten, with 119 tellerships in the Rump, exceeded Hesilrige’s own total of 85 – statistics that confirm both men’s standing in the House, as well as their taste for confrontation. On closer examination, however, Hesilrige’s tellerships suggest that he may have suffered more than most leading Rumpers from the lack of a stable core of close parliamentary allies. Of his 33 partners as a teller in the Rump, only three served with him on more than four occasions: Denis Bond (five divisions), Sir John Danvers (six divisions) and Marten (five divisions). This pattern contrasts markedly with the close relationship that Hesilrige and Evelyn of Wiltshire had forged as tellers during the later 1640s. Seven of the 11 Rumpers who served as teller with Hesilrige on four or more occasions can be classified as noted opponents of reform and sectarian religious tendencies – namely, Bond, Danvers, Francis Allein, John Fielder, Sir William Masham, William Purefoy I and Bulstrode Whitelocke. But they were hardly the stuff of which strong political powerbases were made. Moreover, several of his more regular partners as teller also featured among his more regular opponents. Thus Marten was his adversary in 13 divisions, Sir Henry Mildmay and Vane II in 12, Masham in ten, Danvers in eight and Bond in six. Lacking the administrative flair of Scot and Vane II (‘I find myself unfit for accounts’, he would declared in 1659), or the broad political vision of Chaloner and Marten, Hesilrige seems to have owed his status as one of the Rump’s grandees largely to his great renown and experience at Westminster; his well-deserved reputation as a formidable disputant in the House; and, not least, to his intimacy with Cromwell.409Burton’s Diary, iii. 311.

After taking his seat in the Rump in February 1649, Hesilrige quickly emerged as a standard-bearer for those Rumpers who favoured an ‘oligarchic, quasi-aristocratic’ commonwealth that would ‘salvage as much as possible from the ancient constitution in the aftermath of regicide’.410S. Kelsey, ‘Constructing the council of state’, PH xxii. 240; Kelsey, ‘The foundation of the council of state’, in Parliament at Work ed. Kyle, Peacey, 131. Given his absence from the House in January, it is no surprise that he was among those councillors who refused to take an oath of office registering approval of ‘all that was done concerning the king [i.e. the king’s trial and execution] and kingship and for taking away the House of Lords and against the Scots’ invasion [in 1648]’.411CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 9; Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 537. On 19 February, he was a majority teller in favour of referring consideration of this ‘engagement’ to the councillors themselves, most of whom were also non-subscribers.412CJ vi. 147a. When, on 22 February, Cromwell presented the House with a revised version of the oath, from which all mention of the trial and regicide had been removed, Hesilrige and Masham were majority tellers against re-introducing a retrospective clause.413S. Barber, ‘The engagement for the council of state’, HR lxiii. 47, 56. Nevertheless, his willingness to swear loyalty to a ‘republic without king or House of Peers’ indicates that he now endorsed the principle of the supremacy of the Commons. And his evident misgivings concerning the king’s trial and execution did not preclude his nomination to committees in February for preparing declarations vindicating the Rump’s actions since late 1648 and denouncing a paper from the Scots commissioners that contained ‘much scandalous and reproachful matter against the just proceedings of this Parliament’.414CJ vi. 143b, 150b, 151a. On 7 March, he was named in second place on a bill for abolishing kingship, to which was referred a bill for abolishing the House of Lords.415CJ vi. 158a. But he cannot be identified in the active core of any of these committees. He was far more conspicuous in seeking punishment for some of the leading instigators of the second civil war, serving as a teller in seven divisions during the first half of March in which he consistently represented those opposed to any show of mercy.416CJ vi. 158b, 159b, 160a, 165a.

Hesilrige’s priority during his early months in the Rump seems to have been the implementation of a ‘two-edged’ strategy – which he and Ireton have been credited with devising – for appeasing the army and suppressing the Levellers.417Worden, Rump Parl. 193. The desire to channel more money towards the soldiery probably accounts in large part for his appointments in the Rump that spring for the sale of crown property and for improving the machinery of composition, sequestration and the taking of public accounts.418CJ vi. 154a, 160b, 162a, 167b, 175b, 177a, 205b. Added on 12 March to a committee on a bill concerning delinquents, he chaired this body in its deliberations for the ‘better regulating’ of compositions ‘for the advantage of the state’. And on 14 March and 2 April, he delivered major reports from this committee, proposing guidelines for the trial and punishment of delinquents exempted from pardon and for the sequestration and fining of those who wished to compound for their offences.419CJ vi. 162a, 164a-165b, 169a-170a, 177a; J. Lilburne, The Legal Fundamental Liberties of the People of England (1649), 20 (E.567.1). As chairman of the committee concerning delinquents and as an active member of the CC he made numerous reports to the House in 1649-50 concerning individual cases at Goldsmiths’ Hall and on the rules governing compositions.420CJ vi. 210a, 213b, 214a, 349b, 358b, 386a, 386b, 387a, 387b, 395b.

The delinquents whose cases Hesilrige was keenest to expedite in the spring of 1649 were John Lilburne and other prominent Levellers. ‘King Oliver ... his cousin Prince Arthur’, Ireton, Prideaux and Colonel Thomas Pride* headed the pack of Rumpers and army officers that hunted ‘for matter of accusation’ against the Levellers that March and April.421Lilburne, Just Reproof, 5; Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls II) no. 4 (8-15 May 1649), sigs. Dv, D2 (E.555.14); Mercurius Militaris no. 3 (1649), 30-1 (E.554.13); [C. Walker], Anarchia Anglicana (1649), 197-8 (E.570.4); C. Sydenham, An Anatomy of Lieut. Col. John Lilburn’s Spirit and Pamphlets (1649), 9-11 (E.575.21); D. Massarella, ‘The Politics of the Army 1647-60’ (York Univ. DPhil. thesis, 1977), 216-17. It was Hesilrige who reported to the Rump on 11 April concerning the council’s proceedings in imprisoning Lilburne and his confederates.422CJ vi. 183b. A bill that he reported (possibly from the council) on 1 May – the day that a revised version of Lilburne’s Agreement of the People was published – defining defiance of the Rump and council either in print or by deed as treasonable, was intended primarily as a stick with which to beat the Levellers.423CJ vi. 199a; A. and O. ii. 120-1; Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls II) no. 3 (1-8 May 1649), sig. Cv (E.554.12); Mercurius Militaris no. 3 (1649), 26; Continued Heads of Perfect Passages no. 3 (27 Apr.-4 May 1649), 21 (E.529.30). That same day (1 May), he also reported a bill for settling the government of the commonwealth, which – so the newsbooks claimed – ‘doth much vindicate them [the Rump] from that false aspersion of malignants and others that would possess the people that the Parliament intend to sit always and engross all power into their hands’.424CJ vi. 198a, 199a; The Impartial Intelligencer no. 9 (25 Apr.-2 May), 73 (E.529.29); Continued Heads of Perfect Passages no. 3 (27 Apr.-4 May 1649), 20. This was rightly perceived as a major initiative of the ‘junto’, but whether the bill itself was largely Hesilrige’s handiwork or the product of the council or one of the Rump’s committees is not clear.425Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls II) no. 3 (1-8 May 1649), sig. C2v. The House referred the bill to a committee of MP-councillors and to the specific care of Hesilrige and the arch-republican Thomas Chaloner.426CJ vi. 199a. Among the documents that Hesilrige reported from the council on 9 May was the new treason act and a declaration ‘for putting a period to this Parliament’.427CJ vi. 205b. Complementing his role in containing the Rump’s radical opponents, Hesilrige helped prepare a bill that spring for prohibiting ministers preaching against the state or otherwise meddling with ‘matters of government’.428CJ vi. 175b, 183b. In the weeks before he left Westminster for Newcastle late in May or early June, a persistent rumour began circulating in the northern brigade that Cromwell intended to send its commander, Lambert, to Ireland in order to replace him with Hesilrige.429Add. 21417, f. 129; Add. 21418, f. 228; H. Reece, The Army in Cromwellian England 1649-60 (Oxford, 2013), 40; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 233.

On returning to Westminster in October 1649 after a five-month tour of duty as governor of Newcastle, Hesilrige once again involved himself in initiatives for settling and securing the commonwealth.430CJ vi. 297a, 313a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 205, 220, 253, 346; The Impartiall Intelligencer no. 15 (6-13 June 1649), 119 (E.530.37). By March 1650 he had been named to four committees for introducing and tendering the Engagement; and on 2 November 1649, he was added to the committees for legal reform and for ‘the settling of the succession of future Parliaments and regulating their elections’, which had been set up in mid-May with Vane II as chairman.431CJ vi. 210a, 313a, 318a, 321b, 326b, 370b. Hesilrige’s appointment with Sir William Monson on 4 December as joint-chairmen of a revived committee for legal reform has been seen as a victory for the conservative interest in the Rump and, specifically, as a check upon the radical reformism of Marten and his allies.432CJ vi. 328b; Worden, Rump Parl. 219. There is certainly no evidence that Hesilrige used his position on this committee to promote far-reaching changes to the legal system. Appointed chairman of another committee on 11 December, with a remit to prepare legislation for ‘rectifying any ... proceedings in law for the good of the people’, he confined his attention to bringing in an uncontroversial bill for abolishing writs of error.433CJ vi. 330b, 348a, 357a; Worden, Rump Parl. 219. Nevertheless, after reporting this bill on 4 February 1650, he was a minority teller with Marten in favour of widening its scope to include orders and injunctions of the courts of equity.434CJ vi. 357b.

The majority of Hesilrige’s work in committee and as a teller between late 1649 and the summer of 1650 concerned the sale of crown and church lands and sequestered estates; the management of public revenues; and the mulcting and suppression of delinquents. He made his first report to the House after returning from Newcastle on 11 January, when he presented a bill for prohibiting Catholics and royalists from residing in London. He was particularly active in his familiar role as a conduit between Goldsmiths’ Hall and the House, reporting on individual cases in the CC and further proposals for regulating the composition process.435CJ vi. 330b, 335a, 343a, 346b, 348a, 349b, 358b, 366b, 369b, 383b, 386a, 386b, 387a, 390a, 393b, 400a, 400b, 401b, 402a, 402b. And he was instrumental in drafting legislation in April for transferring the work and powers of the CC from MPs to a seven-man commission.436Supra, ‘Committee for Compounding’; CJ vi. 386b, 387b, 395b. Indeed, according to John Lilburne it was Hesilrige’s ‘huge, zealous, long speeches’ in the House that persuaded his fellow Rumpers of the need to replace the CC and its network of county sequestrations committees with a commission. Lilburne would subsequently accuse some of the new commissioners of ‘captiving [sic] their understandings to the tyrannical will of Sir Arthur Hesilrige’.437Supra, ‘Committee for Compounding’; Lilburne, Just Reproof, 1, 38.

Having apparently done little during his first year in the Rump to advance the work of godly reformation, Hesilrige made a major contribution to this cause by procuring and reporting, on 1 March 1650, a bill for propagating the Gospel in the four northern counties.438CJ vi. 180a, 199b, 336a, 365b, 374a; C. Sydenham, Hypocrisie Discovered in its Nature and Workings (1654), epistle ded. (E.1504.3). In a division that day (1 March) on whether to give this bill a third reading, Hesilrige and Thomas Harrison I were tellers for the majority that favoured its immediate passage into law.439CJ vi. 374a. The bill empowered commissioners – of whom Hesilrige was one – to settle godly ministers and eject those adjudged to be scandalous.440Severall Procs. in Parl. no. 23 (28 Feb.-7 Mar. 1650), 312-14. On 29 March, he was added to perhaps the Rump’s most formidable body for enforcing godly orthodoxy, the committee for regulating the universities, although two years later he spearheaded efforts to abolish this body – possibly as part of a comprehensive overhaul of the state church proposed by the Independent divine and chaplain to Cromwell, John Owen*.441Supra, survey vol. section vii; CJ vi. 388b; vii. 124a. Hesilrige election to the second council of state in February 1650 was a foregone conclusion, but once again he cut a relatively insignificant figure at Derby House.442CJ vi. 362a, 386a, 396b; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 2, 18, 60, 67, 85, 111.

With the threat of Scottish invasion looming in the spring of 1650, Hesilrige returned to Newcastle, where he entertained Cromwell in July ‘with much gallantry, and they kept a fast to pray for a blessing upon their expedition into Scotland’.443The Perfect Weekly Account (10-17 July 1650), 531 (E.777.26); Whitelocke, Mems. iii. 219; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 281-2. It is likely that he endorsed the declaration that Cromwell and his council of officers sent to the Scots that month, defending the regicide and the abolition of the House of Lords (‘always apt enough to join with kingly interest’), confirming toleration for Presbyterians and all other truly godly people and expressing abhorrence at the ‘detestable blasphemies and heresies lately broken out amongst us’.444Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 282-9. In August he was authorised by the Rump and the council to raise and command a reserve force to support Cromwell and guard his rear as he advanced northwards.445CJ vi. 454a; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 256, 258, 268, 276; Mercurius Politicus no. 9 (1-8 Aug. 1650), 143 (E.609.5). Hemmed in by Scottish troops near Dunbar by early September, Cromwell wrote to Hesilrige, urging him to ‘get together what forces you can ... Send to friends in the south to help with more. Let [Sir] H[enry] Vane [II] know what I write’.446Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 314-15. In the aftermath of the victory at Dunbar on 3 September, Cromwell ordered Hesilrige to send forces northwards to help secure Edinburgh and Leith, and consigned to his custody 5,000 Scottish prisoners of war.447Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 326-7, 331-2, 336. Writing to the council in October, Hesilrige insisted that ‘there was never the like care taken for any such number of prisoners that were ever in England’, though he admitted that 1,600 had perished in his custody, mainly from disease.448Mercurius Politicus no. 23 (7-14 Nov. 1650), 376-8 (E.616.1). After his own death in 1661 it was alleged that he had ‘used the Scots prisoners taken at Dunbar in such barbarous and horrid manner that they perished for hunger and were not admitted to have any relief’.449CJ viii. 298b. Late in 1650, Thomas Scot and his ‘bosom and most endeared friend’ Hesilrige were dispatched to the army in Scotland, where they evidently conversed at length with Cromwell on matters of military supply.450CJ vi. 527b; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 17, 126; Whitelocke, Mems. iii. 280; J. Lilburne, A Defensive Declaration of Lieut. Col. John Lilburn (1653), 5 (E.702.2). He had returned to the House by 23 January 1651, when he was named to a committee on an amendment to the bill for the sale of delinquents’ estates.451CJ vii. 527a.

Hesilrige was named to a mere ten committees during 1651, which was a meagre haul, even allowing for his absence in the north on active service from late June to October.452CJ vi. 527a, 528b, 544b, 565b, 569b, 574b, 575b, 581a; vii. 46b, 58b. The only piece of legislation assigned to his care during 1651 was a bill for prohibiting the export of clay, tin and lead.453CJ vi. 545a. That he remained a figure of consequence in the Rump is clear from his re-election to the council of state in February and again in November.454CJ vi. 532a; vii. 42a. And his appointments in and reports from Derby House make evident his involvement in supplying the commonwealth’s armed forces, particularly Cromwell’s army in Scotland.455CJ vi. 547b, 554b, 572b, 581b; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 64, 66, 67, 77, 98, 107, 126, 135-6, 184, 224. On 27 May, he reported news from the council concerning Cromwell’s ‘relapse and present indisposedness’, whereupon the House voted that their commander-in-chief should return to England until his health had improved.456CJ vi. 579a.

Hesilrige’s 19 tellerships during 1651 indicate his continued commitment to harsh measures against delinquents, as well as the limits of his tolerance, both religious and political.457CJ vi. 552a, 555a, 566a, 585a, 587a, 588b, 589a. In several divisions on 31 January concerning the religious radical and bugbear of the clerical interest, John Fry*, Hesilrige and Armyne represented those Rumpers keen to punish him for his attacks upon the ‘chaffy and absurd doctrine’ of the Trinity, which Fry saw merely as ‘a device to increase the power of the clerics’.458CJ vi. 529b; Worden, Rump Parl. 261; S. Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2010), 164-5. The most prominent of Fry’s defenders was Vane II, whose friends among the New England separatists believed that Hesilrige and George Fenwick, ‘and all the friends they can make in Parliament and council, and all the priests, both Presbyterian and Independent’, were leading the campaign in the Rump against the introduction of wide-ranging religious toleration.459Lttrs. of Roger Williams ed. J.R. Bartlett (Providence, 1874), 255. Hesilrige would be named to both of the committees set up on 10 February 1652 in response to a petition from John Owen and his clerical friends, urging tougher action against radical sectarian and heterodox beliefs, and the more effective propagation of the Gospel.460CJ vii. 86b. Equally determined to impose a relatively narrow definition of political orthodoxy, Hesilrige was a majority teller with Armyne on 11 March 1651 in favour of empowering the council to purge the commonwealth’s garrisons and forts of all those who had refused to take the Engagement.461CJ vi. 547b. His own first loyalty was to the Rump, as distinct from the council of state – in which he was never a leading participant and which he seems to have regarded as a potential source of arbitrary power. Thus on 1 May he and Marten – the period’s foremost critic of ‘courtly’ and unrepresentative authority – were tellers in favour of a motion that the council’s executive orders be signed by at least five councillors (it was not unusual for John Bradshawe, the council’s president, to issue such orders under his signature alone).462Supra, ‘John Bradshawe’; infra, ‘Henry Marten’; CJ vi. 569a.

Rule in the north, 1648-52

In August 1651 the council of state ordered Hesilrige to raise forces in northern England to help resist a Scottish invasion. ‘We know your power in those counties’, the council informed him, ‘and desire you in this exigency to put it forth to the utmost’.463CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 306-7, 359, 385, 398-9. He had returned to Westminster by the beginning of October, but scarcely figured in the proceedings of the House between then and mid-January 1652. His only significant appointment during these months – besides his election (probably in absentia) to the council of state in November – was his nomination on 26 December to the committee for setting up the Hale commission on legal reform.464CJ vii. 58b. It was probably no coincidence that his uncharacteristically low profile in the Rump during the finals months of 1651 preceded the denouement at Westminster of his feud in the north (and in print) with the Lilburne family and its allies.

Although Hesilrige had been a political ally of the Lilburnes before the civil war, he seems to have anticipated trouble from them on replacing Robert Lilburne as governor of Newcastle late in 1647: ‘they are stiff, obstinate men’, he is said to have declared, ‘and opposed old Sir Henry Vane [Vane I] and Sir William Armyne and in time will oppose me’.465Lilburne, Just Reproof, 3-4. George Lilburne* – the head of the family – and his associates had used their predominance on the County Durham committee during the mid-1640s to secure possession of several delinquents’ collieries; and by 1647 they enjoyed outright possession of the Lambton and Harraton mines – the latter alone reputedly worth £3,000 a year.466Infra, ‘George Lilburne’; Musgrave Muzl’d, or the Mouth of Iniquitie Stoped (1651), 15 (E.625.11); Lieut. Colonel J. Lilburn Tryed And Cast (1653), 4-5 (E.720.2); W. Dumble, ‘The Durham Lilburnes and the English Revolution’, in The Last Principality ed. D. Markham (Nottingham, 1987), 231-2, 233; Dumble, ‘Government, Religion and Military Affairs in Durham’, 165-6. Ill-feeling between Lilburne and the equally acquisitive and power-hungry Hesilrige did not take long to surface. Lilburne resented Hesilrige’s purchase in March 1648 of the manor of Bishop Auckland from the trustees for the sale of bishops’ lands and opposed his decision that summer to raise money for the war effort in the north by increasing the excise upon coals (a highly unpopular measure with Londoners during the bitter winter of 1648-9).467Lilburne, Just Reproof, 4; [Walker], Anarchia Anglicana, 151; Dumble, ‘The Durham Lilburnes’, 232; ‘Government, Religion and Military Affairs in Durham’, 154, 155. John Lilburne’s breach with Hesilrige was closely connected with this developing feud in the north. On 5 March 1649, Hesilrige and Fenwick were added to the Northern Committee*, to which the Rump referred allegations made by John Blakiston* and others of George Lilburne’s complicity with the royalists.468CJ vi. 155b; J. Lilburne, A Letter of Lieutenant Colonel John Lilburns, Written to Mr. John Price of Colemanstreet London (1651), 3-4, 8-12 (E.626.19). Having quickly assumed the chair of this committee, Hesilrige was approached by John Lilburne with counter-accusations against some of Blakiston’s northern patrons, notably Sir Henry Vane I and his son Sir George Vane. Lilburne had recently enjoyed Hesilrige’s favour in the matter of the reparations he was owed for his sufferings during the personal rule and hence accounted him a ‘familiar friend’ and expected him to proceed against the Vanes accordingly.469CCC 1917-20; Lilburne, Legal Fundamental Liberties, 19, 20; A Letter of Lieutenant Colonel John Lilburns, 4; Just Reproof, 5; A Preparative to an Hue and Cry after Sir Arthur Haslerig (1649), 34, 35, 37-8 (E.573.16). Instead, Hesilrige ignored Lilburne’s charges and (as noted above) threw himself into the Rump’s efforts that spring to suppress the Levellers – a campaign that gave him an ideal opportunity to move against Lilburne’s family in the north, having declared in the House that ‘there was never an one of the Lilburnes ... fit or worthy to be a constable in England’.470J. Lilburne, The Picture of the Councel of State (1649), 15 (E.550.14).

As part of this offensive against the Lilburnes, Hesilrige stepped up his drive to reform and remodel parliamentarian administration in the northern counties, and he doubtless made good use in this regard of his very first appointment in the Rump, on 12 February 1649, when he was teamed with Vane I and Blakiston to nominate JPs for County Durham. On 2 March, moreover, Hesilrige, Blakiston and the Vanes were among those appointed to a new commission for compounding with delinquents in the four northern counties. Hesilrige himself had become an active member of the County Durham committee by early 1649 and also chairman of the county’s committees for militia and sequestrations; and by the summer of 1649, he and his allies dominated local government in the north-east.471CJ vi. 138a, 153a; SP18/1/23, f. 32; Lilburne, Preparative to an Hue and Cry, 33, 37-8; Just Reproof, 5; Musgrave, True and Exact Relation, 12; Dumble, ‘The Durham Lilburnes’, 236-7; ‘Government, Religion and Military Affairs in Durham’, 128, 159-62. Backed by the County Durham committee, Hesilrige and George Fenwick seized Harraton colliery in October 1649 on the pretext that the sequestration order issued against it in 1644 had never been lifted. Hesilrige subsequently conveyed the colliery to a group of his close military associates, among them Colonel Francis Hacker and Major Jeremiah Tolhurst*.472CJ vii. 71b; Anon., The True State of the Case of Josiah Primatt (1651), 5; Lilburne, Just Reproof, 8-11, 14, 19; Recs. of the Cttees. for Compounding...in Durham and Northumb. ed. R. Welford (Surt. Soc. cxi), 393; Dumble, ‘The Durham Lilburnes’, 233; ‘Government, Religion and Military Affairs in Durham’, 166. At Westminster, he could apparently rely on Henry Neville* and other colleagues on the Committee for Compounding to help him harry the Lilburnes and their allies.473SP23/153, p. 255.

George Lilburne was powerless to prevail against his enemies, but his nephew John was only too eager to open a new front in his pamphlet war against the Levellers’ oppressors by denouncing Hesilrige’s administration in the northern counties.474Lilburne, Preparative to an Hue and Cry. Hesilrige was defended in print by one of the Rump’s salaried propagandists, the Independent minister Cuthbert Sydenham.475Sydenham, Lilburn’s Spirit and Pamphlets; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 195-6. But he soon acquired another outspoken critic – the northern radical John Musgrave, who had upbraided him in print during the mid-1640s for shielding Barwis from prosecution. In a meeting arranged through his former regimental chaplain, the Independent minister John Canne, Hesilrige tried to reach ‘a right understanding’ with Musgrave, but to no avail.476J. Musgrave, Musgraves Musle Broken, or Truth Pleading against Falshood (1651), 1 (E.626.26); Lilburn Tryed And Cast, frontispiece; A. Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains (Woodbridge, 1990), 108; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 192-3. Late in 1650, Musgrave published a pamphlet accusing Hesilrige of all kinds of ‘exorbitancy and oppressions’ and claiming that ‘since he became ruler of the north, hath got an estate in lands there worth eight or ten thousand pounds per annum – part by oppression, but the most of it by buying the Common-wealth’s lands at far undervalues; the surveyors being such who durst not displease him’. But Hesilrige’s chief crime in Musgrave’s eyes was that of advancing gentlemen and ministers in the northern counties who were ‘malignant, scandalous and such as be opposite to the Engagement’ – among them Thomas Cholmley*, Thomas Craister*, Ralph Delaval* and Sir Wilfrid Lawson*.477Musgrave, True and Exact Relation, passim. Certainly Hesilrige’s most notable protégé in Cumberland, Charles Howard*, was of doubtful allegiance to Parliament before the later 1640s. It was probably with Hesilrige’s blessing, and certainly with that of his deputy-governor of Carlisle, Colonel Thomas Fitch*, that Howard and Lawson secured the return of Lord Howard of Escrick for the city in April 1649. Similarly, the council of state almost certainly consulted Hesilrige over its appointment of Howard as sheriff of Cumberland in the autumn of 1649.478Infra, ‘Charles Howard’; supra, ‘Carlisle’. With Bradshawe’s help, Musgrave obtained a hearing before the council on 23 January 1651, but after examining his allegations the attending councillors – who included Hesilrige himself – concluded ‘that it does not at all appear that Sir Arthur Hesilrige has broken the trust reposed in him by council or made any failure in any of the particulars, but that the imputations are false and scandalous...’.479Musgrave, True and Exact Relation, 18, 40; [J. Price], Musgrave Muzl’d, or the Mouth of Iniquitie Stoped [sic] (1651), 5-6 (E.625.11); SP25/16, pp. 61, 64-5, 73; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 21, 23. Given leave by the council ‘to take such course as he shall think fit’ for vindicating himself, Hesilrige commissioned one John Price, a member of John Goodwin’s gathered congregation in London, to publish a pamphlet rebutting Musgrave’s and Lilburne’s allegations. The evidence cited by Price in Hesilrige’s defence included a statement witnessed by Thomas Scot and several orders of the Committee for Plundered Ministers, upholding the proceedings of Hesilrige and his fellow commissioners for propagating the Gospel in the northern counties. Musgrave and Lilburne, in turn, published pamphlets refuting Price’s work and making further allegations against Hesilrige.480SP25/16, p. 73; [Price], Musgrave Muzl’d; Musgrave, Musgraves Musle Broken; Lilburne, A Letter of Lieutenant Colonel John Lilburns.

The pamphlet war against Hesilrige entered its most intense phase during the second half of 1651, culminating in November and December.481J. Hedworth, A Copy of a Letter Written the Third of September 1651 (1651); To the Supream Authority of this Nation the Parliament of the commonwealth of England. The Humble Petition of John Hedworth of Harraton (1651); The Oppressed Man’s Out-cry (1651); J. Musgrave, The Humble Addresse of John Musgrave to the Supreme Authority, the Parliament of the Common Wealth of England (1651); Lilburne, Just Reproof; To Every Individuall Member of the Supream Authority of the Parliament of the commonwealth of England (1651, E.647.7); Anon, True State of the Case of Josiah Primatt (1651). Late in November, Lilburne delivered copies of his latest anti-Hesilrige pamphlet to every to member of the Rump;482Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke ms XX, f. 58v; Lilburne, To Every Individuall Member. and on 23 December a printed petition declaiming against Sir Arthur was presented to the House by the London leatherseller and partner of George Lilburne in the Harraton colliery, Josiah Primatt. Primatt begged the House for relief from Hesilrige’s ‘oppression and tyranny’, claiming that Sir Arthur had taken possession of Harraton by mere force and had then used his influence with the commissioners for compounding to prevent a fair hearing of the case. John Wildman* was one of the petition’s co-authors, and it was spread around the Palace of Westminster on the 23rd by Lilburne, who doubtless took great pleasure in handing copies to the Speaker, Hesilrige, Fenwick and as many other Rumpers as he could manage. After inquiring into the circumstances surrounding the petition’s publication, the House referred its further consideration to a ‘very great committee’, which would spend many hours discussing the matter.483CJ vii. 55, 71b-72a; Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke ms XX, ff. 78v, 79; J. Primatt, To the Supream Authority of this Nation, the Parliament of the commonwealth of England (1651, 669 f.16.36); Dumble, ‘Government, Religion and Military Affairs in Durham’, 169-70. Primatt had taken this highly risky step because he had failed to obtain justice (as he saw it) from the commissioners for compounding. The commissioners had not been entirely satisfied as to the legality of Hesilrige’s proceedings, but had apparently given way in the face of his repeated urgings ‘to keep possession of the collieries for the state’. In their final ruling on the Harraton dispute before 23 December, they had advised all the parties involved in the case to take their course at law (a proposal that Hesilrige himself had suggested).484SP23/26, p. 262; CCC 2128, 2129; Anon, True State of the Case of Josiah Primatt, 7-8; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 149-50; Dumble, ‘Government, Religion and Military Affairs in Durham’, 167-8. A significant number of Cromwell’s subordinates attending the council of officers at Whitehall disliked what they regarded as this abuse of political power by Hesilrige and were therefore angry that the Rump had decided to judge the case itself.485Worden, Rump Parl. 282-3. But the Rump was undaunted, and when it divided on 6 January 1652 on whether to investigate the ‘plotting, contriving, printing and publishing’ of Primatt’s petition, the tellers in favour, Purefoy and John Fielder, defeated Marten and Thomas Westrowe by 41 votes to 13.486CJ vii. 64a. The committee reported on 15 January, prompting a division on whether to shut the doors in order to debate its findings in greater secrecy. Bond and Fielder were the tellers in favour, defeating Marten and Vane II’s close friend, Thomas Lister.487CJ vii. 71b. The House then voted down Primatt’s petition section by section, declared it ‘false, malicious and scandalous’ and ordered that he be imprisoned and fined £3,000 and pay a further £2,000 to Hesilrige in damages. Lilburne, too, was fined £3,000, ordered to pay £2,000 in damages to Hesilrige (plus a further £2,000 to the commissioners for compounding) and banished from the commonwealth.488CJ vii. 72a-73b, 74b. Lilburne was not permitted to defend himself – and very few Rumpers were willing to do so – and was condemned only, it seems, for the unstated offence of having publicly maligned a Parliament-man and the commissioners for compounding.489Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke ms XXII, f. 10. It appears that the Rump had seized upon Lilburne’s folly in staking the outcome of his family’s feud with Hesilrige upon a trial of strength at Westminster to remove this thorn in its side once and for all. Many army officers were reportedly ‘much troubled’ at Lilburne’s ‘grievous’ punishment; and thousands of his radical and sectarian admirers in London petitioned the Rump to recall its votes against him, which ‘was very ill resented by the House...[as] too bold and insolent’.490CJ vii. 475a; Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke ms XXII, f. 12v; To the Supreame Authority the Parliament of the Common-wealth of England, the Humble Petition of Many Well Affected People (1652, 669 f.16.37); Faithful Scout no. 54 (23-30 Jan. 1652), 418-19 (E.793.20); A Declaration of the Armie Concerning Lieut. Collonel John Lilburn (1652), 3 (E.654.11); Worden, Rump Parl. 283; Dumble, ‘‘Government, Religion and Military Affairs in Durham’, 171. The council of state was equally emphatic in its support of Hesilrige, appointing him its president for a month on 26 January.491CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 119.

The Rump’s support for Hesilrige in January 1652 acknowledged the fact that his rule in the northern counties was more public-spirited than his radical critics would allow. It may also have expressed recognition that he was not the covetous, unprincipled tyrant that Lilburne and Musgrave painted him. Rather than accept the damages owed him by Lilburne, for example, he reportedly worked with the radical trio of Henry Marten, George Joyce and Hugh Peters to settle the exiled Leveller’s affairs in County Durham to the contentment of Mrs Lilburne as well as her husband’s hard-pressed tenants. Indeed, in trying to sort out this business, Hesilrige was said to have been ‘at great trouble and charge out of his own purse, but never received one penny out of Mr Lilburne’s estate’.492CJ vii. 608a; Burton’s Diary, iii. 68; A True Narrative Concerning Sir Arthur Haslerigs Possessing of Lieutenant-Colonel John Lilburnes Estate in the County of Durham (1653); Denton, Only in Heaven, 166-71. This was not entirely consistent with the version of events given by Mrs Lilburne, who later asserted that Hesilrige had relinquished her husband’s estate only after Cromwell had persuaded him to do so.493CSP Dom. 1658-9, pp. 260-1. There is certainly no denying that Hesilrige and his associates were, like the Lilburnites, none too scrupulous in making good their claims to forfeited and sequestered estates.494Dumble, ‘Government, Religion and Military Affairs in Durham’, 172-5, 202; C.S. Boswell, ‘Plotting Popular Politics in Interregnum England’ (Brown Univ. PhD thesis, 2008), 40-1. His acquisition of almost £20,000 in church lands in the north-east was achieved through a mixture of financial and bureaucratic chicanery, extensive borrowing and by the ruthless exploitation of his new properties and tenants.495I. Gentles, ‘The sales of bishops’ lands in the English revolution, 1646-60’, EHR xcv. 584, 590-1, 596. But his administration in the north, though it certainly bore down hard upon the region’s papists and delinquents, has been adjudged relatively competent and efficient compared with the quality of parliamentary governance in several of the northern counties before he arrived on the scene.496Cttees. for Compounding...in Durham and Northumb. ed. Welford, 55; Howell, Newcastle, 346; Reece, The Army in Cromwellian England, 153; Dumble, ‘Government, Religion and Military Affairs in Durham’, 128, 142, 163-4, 171-2. He was also adept, it seems, in exploiting the market in forfeited estates to help bind the region’s parliamentarian gentry more closely to the commonwealth’s interest. His partners in purchasing the castle and adjoining property in Newcastle from the trustees for the sale of crown lands in 1651 included Ralph Delaval*, Sir John Fenwick*, William Fenwick*, Robert Mitford*, Henry Ogle* and Sir Thomas Widdrington.497C54/3571/14. Musgrave’s allegation that Hesilrige advanced Presbyterian clerics is true to the extent that Hesilrige’s administration was marked by an emphasis on cooperation between Presbyterian and Congregationalist clergymen. But the charge that he also favoured ‘malignant’ ministers is contradicted by what is known of the workings of the commission for propagating the Gospel in the northern counties and by the praise his handling of religious affairs in the north earned from some of the region’s leading Congregationalist divines (one of whom, Samuel Hammond, served as his chaplain in the late 1640s and early 1650s).498Berwick RO, B1/10, f. 185v; Sydenham, Hypocrisie Discovered, epistle ded.; Calamy Revised, 245; Howell, Newcastle, 234-7, 246; Howell, Puritans and Radicals in North England (Lanham, MD, 1984), 139; Oxford DNB, ‘Samuel Hammond’; ‘Cuthbert Sydenham’; ‘Thomas Weld’; Dumble, ‘Government, Religion and Military Affairs in Durham’, 236, 243.

Crucially, Cromwell seems to have set little store by the radical barrage against Hesilrige; even Thomas Chaloner – whose tastes and temperament were very far removed from those of Hesilrige – was inclined to dismiss Musgrave’s ‘pragmatics’.499Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 43. The cooperative relationship in the north between Cromwell and Hesilrige was exemplified in their common support for a scheme proposed by some of the County Durham gentry for the establishment of a university at Durham as a ‘pious and laudable work and of very great use for the northern parts’. On 18 June 1651, Hesilrige reported to the Rump from the committee for removing obstructions on the sale of bishops’ lands, outlining a proposal to endow the university from property formerly belonging to the Durham dean and chapter. But no further progress was made on the scheme before the Rump’s dissolution in 1653.500CJ vi. 589b; vii. 130a; Dumble, ‘Government, Religion and Military Affairs in Durham’, 301-2.

Defending the Rump, 1652-3

With the security of the northern counties effectively assured by Cromwell’s victory at Worcester in September 1651, and with the Lilburnites beaten into submission five months later, Hesilrige was freer to concentrate on affairs at Westminster and Whitehall. Nevertheless, he seems to have spent much of August and September 1652 in the north-east, and he made no recorded appearances in the Rump during December.501Mercurius Politicus no. 116 (19-26 Aug. 16 Aug. 1652), 1823 (E.674.17). Moreover, his tally of 22 committee appointments and no more than six reports from Derby House during the period from mid-January 1652 to April 1653 was not particularly impressive.502CJ vii. 84b, 85b, 90a, 249a. Similarly, he was entrusted with the drafting only two (minor) pieces of legislation.503CJ vii. 103b, 123b. His 37 divisions during this period say more about his confrontational political style than his diligence as a Parliament-man. During October and November, he and Fenwick attended the committee that the Rump convened to negotiate with deputies sent from the shires and burghs of Scotland about finalising the terms of the new Anglo-Scottish commonwealth.504CJ vii. 189b; SP 25/138, pp. 3-64 (calendared in CSP Dom. 1651-2; 1652-3). Otherwise, however, his engagement at Westminster with the problems that Scotland, or Ireland, presented to the Rump was apparently minimal.

Hesilrige seems to have assumed more prominence in the commonwealth’s diplomatic and foreign affairs during 1652 and regularly attended the council committee for trade and foreign affairs, to which he was named in December 1651. But little can be deduced from his relatively infrequent assignments in these policy areas, beyond his approval for sending ambassadors to Spain early in 1651.505CJ vi. 541b; SP25/131, passim; SP25/132, pp. 31, 47, 70, 73, 79; SP25/133, pp. 10, 14, 33; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 368; 1651, pp. 53, 58; 1651-2, pp. 67, 283. He was certainly not the major figure in trade and foreign affairs that Chaloner, Marten, Scot and Vane II were. The conviction he expressed in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament in 1659 that fighting the Dutch in the early 1650s had been justified on grounds of self-defence does not constitute proof that he had been part of the group associated with Chaloner and Scot that had been ‘deeply committed’ to war in 1652 and had favoured an aggressively mercantilist foreign policy.506Burton’s Diary, iii. 458; Gardiner, Hist. commonwealth and Protectorate, ii. 180; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 551; Woolrych, commonwealth to Protectorate, 285. Indeed, he would declare in 1659 that ‘I had no hand ... in making war, nor the Dutch peace’.507Burton’s Diary, iv. 364. Nor can too much be read into his appointment with Marten, Scot and two other Rumpers on 1 June 1652 to draft an act for holding a day of public fasting and humiliation to seek God’s blessing upon the Rump’s military counsels and armed forces.508CJ vii. 137b. His only major contribution – if that, indeed, is how he saw it – to the Rump’s war with the Dutch was his work in maximising state revenue through mulcting delinquents and the sale of forfeited estates. These issues, and the management and improvement of state finances in general, accounted for a significant proportion of his committee appointments, reports and tellerships in 1652-3 – as they had done since 1649.509CJ vii. 76b, 86a, 95a, 96a, 106b, 112a, 115a, 128a, 138b, 144a, 148b, 151a, 151b, 154b, 158b, 159a, 191b, 206b, 213a, 214a, 218a, 248b, 250b, 254a.

Perhaps the first signs of Hesilrige’s future breach with Cromwell emerge early in 1652 in relation to the act of general pardon and oblivion, which was intended, in part, to limit the financial exploitation of delinquents. Hesilrige consistently aligned with – and was a teller in five divisions for – those Rumpers who opposed the endeavours of Cromwell and his army colleagues, as well as of Marten and elements of the radical press, to make the terms of the act as generous as possible to the royalists. In three of these divisions one of the opposing tellers was Cromwell himself.510CJ vii. 76b, 86a, 95a, 96a; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 27-8. And Hesilrige and Cromwell clashed again a few months later over the nominations to a commission for the relief of royalists granted amnesty under the army’s articles of war.511CJ vii. 129b. In a series of divisions between March and mid-November concerning the cases of individual royalists and exemptions or additions to a bill for the sale of forfeited estates, Hesilrige was invariably a teller for the opponents of leniency. One of the opposing tellers in three of these divisions was Cromwell’s son-in-law, Lieutenant General Charles Fleetwood.512CJ vii. 106b, 144a, 148b, 151a, 151b, 153a, 206b, 213a, 214a, 218a. Distrust of anything that smacked of regal authority, particularly when exercised by army officers, may well have informed Hesilrige’s collaboration with Marten in May 1652 to prevent the renewal of Cromwell’s commission as lord lieutenant of Ireland, leaving his designated successor, John Lambert*, with the inferior rank of commander-in-chief and a good deal of resentment.513Supra, ‘John Lambert’; CJ vii. 134a, 134b.

Hesilrige’s election in sixth place to the fifth council of state, on 24 November 1652, confirmed his enduring popularity in the Rump.514CJ vii. 220a. But although he was associated with the House’s efforts in January and February 1653 to revive the issue of legal reform and to proceed against corruption in high places, his stock among the army’s officers – like that of the Rump generally – would fall that winter.515CJ vii. 249a, 253b, 257a. He almost certainly earned the army’s enmity on 11 February, when he was majority teller for setting aside a bill for poor relief.516CJ vii. 258a. And he may well have done so again on 23 February in reporting amendments to the controversial bill for a ‘new representative’ – an initiative that the army suspected was intended to delay or altogether frustrate the Rump’s dissolution. Although he had not been formally named to the committee set up in September 1652 to consider this bill and had played no discernible role in formulating the new representative since the spring of 1649, he seems to have dominated the House’s discussions on the subject early in 1653.517CJ vii. 261b, 268a, 273b; Worden, Rump Parl. 338; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 43, 54-5. Ominously, against this background of deteriorating relations between the Rump and the army, Hesilrige’s tellership on 10 March in favour of continuing a debate on the Dutch war (to what purpose is not clear) pitted him once again against Cromwell.518CJ vii. 266b. On the other hand, his support later that month for restricting the franchise in future elections to the owners of a real or personal estate worth £200 or more, was perceived as an attempt to curry favour with the army.519CJ vii. 273b; Worden, Rump Parl. 158-9; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 55.

By this point, Hesilrige was apparently spending much of his time in the country, and in the three weeks before the Rump’s dissolution he attended only three meetings of the council of state (on 13, 14, 15 and 20 Apr. 1653) and received just one appointment in the House – to a minor committee on 19 April.520CJ vii. 280a; CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. xxxii; Ludlow, Mems. i. 357; Burton’s Diary, iii. 98; Worden, Rump Parl. 338; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 66. That evening (19 Apr.), at a meeting between senior officers and twenty or so the ‘best Members of Parliament’, Hesilrige (or so he claimed in 1659) ‘bore my testimony’ against a scheme mooted by Cromwell for the Rump’s dissolution and the establishment of an interim government until a new Parliament could be elected: ‘I told them the work they were about was accursed. I told them it was impossible to devolve this trust’. Cromwell, however, received what he thought were assurances from ‘two or three of the chief ones, [indeed] the very chiefest of them [probably Vane II]’ that they would persuade the House to suspend further debate on the bill for a new representative pending further discussion by the council of officers concerning the proposed interim government. Not surprisingly, the Rump perceived this resolution as an ultimatum, and attempted – possibly at Hesilrige’s prompting – to rush through the bill the next day (20 April), but hastily amended (or so it has been conjectured) in order to perpetuate itself until at least November and to allow for the manipulation of the subsequent elections in such a way as would undermine the interests of the army and the Saints.521Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke ms XXV, f. 10; Clarke Pprs. iii. 1-2; Burton’s Diary, iii. 98; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 63-5, 68-102. Cromwell’s response was swift, for that same day (20 April) the army forcibly dissolved the Rump. A royalist report of the dissolution recounted hearsay that Cromwell had singled out Hesilrige for reproach.522CCSP ii. 200. But Hesilrige’s name is absent from eye-witness accounts of events in the House. If Ludlowe can be credited, Hesilrige, Scot and Bradshawe were among the councillors at Derby House who defiantly asserted the Rump’s supremacy when informed by Cromwell and other army leaders on 20 April that Parliament had been dissolved and the council with it.523Ludlow, Mems. i. 357. Hesilrige later claimed that after the dissolution he had been ‘sent for by a pursuivant, but had the good luck not to be imprisoned’.524Burton’s Diary, iv. 156. His response in the immediate aftermath of the Rump’s demise was apparently confined to empty bluster and – so it was alleged – joining other former Rumpers in promoting a City petition to Cromwell, denouncing the dissolution.525Bodl. Clarendon 45, ff. 485v-486; Worden, Rump Parl. 340; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 124.

Defying the protectorate, 1653-8

Cromwell and his advisers handled Hesilrige with care in the year or so after the fall of the Rump – perhaps worried by the disruption that might follow his sudden removal from power in northern England. In May 1653 he was forced to relinquish his state lodgings at Hampton Court and Whitehall.526Staffs. RO, D593/P/8/2/2 (Langley lttrs.), 24 May 1653. But he retained his offices as a magistrate and commissioner for oyer and terminer in the Midlands and the northern counties. More significantly, he kept his place as governor of Newcastle (not to be confused with the office of governor of the Newcastle merchant adventurers), although he was put under pressure that autumn to account for his expenditure of public money since taking charge in the north.527Add. 78196, f. 17; SP28/260, f. 494; CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 594.

In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in July 1654, Hesilrige was returned not only for Newcastle but also Leicester, where he had defeated Grey of Groby, Hacker and other candidates on a poll.528Supra, ‘Leicester’; ‘Newcastle-upon-Tyne’. Early in August, Vane II received news that Hesilrige had been in County Durham the past fortnight and had been elected for Leicester and Newcastle ‘against his will and ... seems to be in great straits what to resolve on as to the juncture of affairs: whether to act in Parliament or to keep out’.529SP18/74/10. f. 28; CSP Dom. 1654, p. 286. On 11 August, the mayor of Newcastle informed the corporation that Hesilrige had ‘accepted of being chosen burgess’ for the town.530Tyne and Wear Archives, MD.NC/2/2, p. 217. But by September he had opted to sit for Leicester. He was included on the list of Members approved by the protectoral council; and on 4 September – the day after Parliament had assembled – he was named to a seven-man committee to draft a declaration for holding a day of public fasting and humiliation.531CJ vii. 366a; Severall Procs. of State Affaires no. 258 (31 Aug.-7 Sept. 1654), 4093 (E.233.22). On 5 September, he was named to the committee of privileges, of which he was made chairman, and on the floor of the House he proposed that settling religion should precede any discussion of the protectoral settlement. ‘Establish one good form [of religion] in England’, he reportedly urged the House, ‘and suppress all the sects’. This proposal has been seen as a cynical ploy by the ‘tolerationist’ Hesilrige to ‘win over the Presbyterians to republicanism’.532CJ vii. 366b; Perfect Diurnall no. 248 (4-11 Sept. 1654), 3808 (E.233.25); OPH xx. 334; Gardiner, Hist. commonwealth and Protectorate, iii. 181-2. Yet there is little reason to doubt his hostility to certain forms of sectarianism by the mid-1650s – and in particular to the Quakers, who were beginning to challenge his own work and that of his clerical friends in settling godly religion in the north-east.533Howell, Newcastle, 235-7, 256-8; Puritans and Radicals, 101-2, 128-53. His appointment as a Cromwellian ejector for six counties the previous month had been no mere compliment.534A. and O. ii. 969, 972. Indeed, a more charitable interpretation of his words on 5 September would suggest that they were an attempt to revive John Owen’s 1652 proposals for introducing a Trier and Ejector system and legally enforceable limits of what constituted Christian orthodoxy.

In a debate the next day (6 Sept. 1654) on the protectoral settlement, Hesilrige threw off any pretence he may have had to woo moderate opinion, by joining Bradshawe, Scot and other former Rumpers in denouncing Cromwell’s office as supreme magistrate and pressing strongly for the proposition that ‘the government should be in Parliament of the people of England’ and that alone.535Burton’s Diary, i. p. xxv; ii. 395; Ludlow, Mems. i. 391. In a preparatory skirmish to this assault on the government, Hesilrige and Scot were minority tellers in favour of a motion to the effect that words uttered in Parliament should not be actionable under the terms of any Act or ordinance for treason.536CJ vii. 367a; Burton’s Diary, i. p. xxiii. Hesilrige was among those ‘eminent assertors of the liberty of their country’ who withdrew from the House in mid-September in conscientious refusal to sign the Recognition pledging to be true and faithful to Cromwell and the protectoral government.537Ludlow, Mems. i. 392; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 86. ‘Knowing the privileges [of Parliament], that no power without doors could make an oath, I went away, and divers more gentlemen [did likewise]’.538Burton’s Diary, iii. 100. Having thus announced himself as one of the protectoral regime’s ‘principal opposers’, Hesilrige was removed from office as governor of Newcastle.539Add. 78196, f. 17.

Despite his alleged complicity in John Wildman’s republican plot against the protectorate early in 1655, Hesilrige was unmolested by the government and retained most of his local offices.540TSP iii. 147. In June of that year it was rumoured that he was ‘coming up to London to plead with sundry other persons of wealth against the taxes as now levied, which is just as [John] Hampden* did about Ship Money’.541Nicholas Pprs. ii. 323. Anxious to preserve his business interests in the north east, he requested admission in August 1655 to the Newcastle Hostmen: the cartel that controlled much of the region’s coal trade. The company duly laid aside its ruling against admitting non-residents of Newcastle on the grounds that Hesilrige ‘during the time he was governor here did and performed many acts of love and favour to this town and hath ever since been and still continues ready and willing upon all occasions to promote and advance the interest and welfare of this corporation’.542Tyne and Wear Archives, GU.HO/1/1, p. 16. His title to several of the sequestered properties he had taken possession of during his time as governor of Newcastle was contested after 1653 – particularly in the case of the manor of Eslington, in Northumberland, where he resorted to threats and violence to uphold his claim. When one of the manor’s tenants informed him that he would ‘beg to my lord protector ... for law against him’, Hesilrige is said to retorted, ‘my lord protector! My lord kiss my arse!’543Stowe 972, ff. 23-4; C6/161/43; Mercurius Politicus no. 420 (10-17 June 1658), 602 (E.753.6); Howell, Newcastle, 192; Hodgson, ‘Eslington’, 23; Boswell, ‘Plotting Popular Politics’, 43-4, 47-8. In the summer of 1657, in defiance of several court rulings against his claim to Eslington, he assembled approximately 200 of his Northumberland adherents – among them Captain Henry Ogle and some of the officers of Berwick garrison – to terrorise the manor’s tenants into submission.544Boswell, ‘Plotting Popular Politics’, 46-7. Hesilrige’s legal team during the mid-1650s included Sir Thomas Widdrington.545C6/161/43.

Hesilrige stood as a candidate in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656 and was credited by Robert Lilburne with having incited the people of County Durham and Northumberland against returning ‘swordsmen’, supporters of the major-generals, or anyone on the government’s payroll.546TSP v. 296. It was doubtless in an effort to frustrate his election that the protectoral council summoned him down to Whitehall early in August.547Clarke Pprs. iii. 69. But although Newcastle corporation demurred at electing a well known opponent of the protectorate, Leicester corporation showed no such discretion and returned Hesilrige a second time.548Supra, ‘Leicester’; TSP v. 296. He was duly refused admittance to the House by the protectoral council and subsequently joined Fenwick and other excluded Members in a letter to the Speaker, ‘signifying that they were all chosen to serve their countries [sic], but that they were kept out [of the Commons] by soldiers and so prayed to be admitted’.549TSP v. 453; Burton’s Diary, iii. 100-1.

Hesilrige, Hacker, Marten and Okey were allegedly among the 80 or so men who ‘constantly met’ as members of the ‘commonwealth Club’ that Wildman set up in Covent Garden in 1657.550SP29/41/32, f. 98; CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 86. Yet notwithstanding his well-advertised hostility to the Cromwellian regime, ‘Arthur Lord Hesilrige’ was reportedly among the members of the Cromwellian ‘Other House’ who attended Cromwell’s investiture in June 1657 as protector under the Humble Petition and Advice.551J. Prestwich, Prestwich’s Respublica (1787), 6. In October, he was added to the Leicestershire and Oxfordshire commissions for removing scandalous ministers, and he was among the parliamentarian grandees who were summoned in December to attend the Other House for the second session of Parliament.552SP25/78, p. 193; HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 504, 522; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 31-2. But if Whitehall was under the impression that he would conform to the new protectoral constitution, it soon found otherwise, for when he turned up at Westminster on 25 January 1658 he insisted on taking the oath of recognition and assuming his seat in the Commons (along with many other excluded Members), ‘notwithstanding his writ of summons to the Other [House] and without ever waiting on his Highness [Cromwell] to excuse it’.553TSP vi. 757; Burton’s Diary, ii. 346-7; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 32-3. After taking the oath ‘very valiantly and openly, especially the latter part relating to the privileges of the people (“of England”, which he added)’, he took a seat close to the Speaker’s chair; although, as Thomas Burton* noted, he had already been in the gallery ‘a good while’, conferring with Scot and other Members.554Burton’s Diary, ii. 347.

Following the appointment of a committee on 28 January 1658 (to which Hesilrige was named) for informing Cromwell that the House would give immediate and serious consideration to the issues raised in his speech at the opening of the second session, Hesilrige spoke in support of a motion that the House put aside all private business for a month.555CJ vii. 589a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 375-6. Seizing on this opportunity to scrutinise and criticise the protectoral settlement, he warned his fellow Commons-men that ‘It is not building this or that House that will do. Unless your foundations be sure, I assure you it will not do your work’. For solid parliamentary foundations, he referred them to the Long Parliament and the Rump and to the ‘great things’ they had achieved. The motion to exclude private business for a month was put to the question, and in the subsequent division, Hesilrige and Thomas Lister were majority tellers in its favour.556CJ vii. 589a.

Much of the House’s time for the remainder of the session would be taken up with debating what ‘the old commonwealth party’ – otherwise known as the ‘commonwealthsmen’ – headed by Hesilrige and Scot, identified as the most vulnerable aspect of the Petition and Advice: the constitutional status of the Cromwellian Other House.557Add. 22919, f. 11v; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 97-8, 190; Worden, God’s Instruments, 305-6. On 29 January 1658, Hesilrige took issue with Cromwell’s referral of financial business to both Houses, insisting that ‘it is the undoubted, inherent right of the Commons to have the business of money wholly and absolutely communicated to this House’.558Add. 22919, f. 11v; Burton’s Diary, ii. 380. Later that day he and other commonwealthsmen seconded a proposal by Scot that the question of how to style and transact proceedings with the Other House be referred to the more open arena of a committee of the whole House.559Burton’s Diary, ii. 392. He also took Scot’s line in implying that by re-establishing the Lords with a coordinate legislative power, the Commons would become accountable for the blood that had been shed during the civil war – including that of the king – to secure parliamentary sovereignty, by thus causing it to have been shed in vain. It was a matter of such ‘great weight and importance’, he argued, that ‘it may very well be two months debate’.560Burton’s Diary, ii. 392-3. To style the Other House the House of Lords, as some Members evidently wished, was a slippery slope, he argued: ‘The Commons of England will quake to hear that they are returning to Egypt, to the garlic and onions of ... a kingdom’.561Burton’s Diary, ii. 402-3. When this debate resumed on 2 February, he spoke at length about ‘how useless and pernicious the House of Lords was. The saint-like army, who were not mercenary, were sensible of those grievances’. Again, he urged (and again, unsuccessfully) that the matter be debated in a committee of the whole House, and he was seconded by Lister.562Burton’s Diary, ii. 406-7. The next day (3 Feb.) he attempted to start another hare for his fellow republicans to run down, by moving that the Commons declare whether it was proposing to restore the old House of Lords or to apply that name to the Other House.563Burton’s Diary, ii. 424. After further lengthy debate the House divided on whether to refer the matter ‘touching the appellation of the Other House’ to a committee of the Whole; but even with the backing of more moderate Members the commonwealthsmen could not prevail against the court interest.564CJ vii. 591b; Burton’s Diary, ii. 435, 437. When the Speaker then made the mistake of asking the House’s permission to admit two messengers sent down from the ‘Lords’, Hesilrige, Scot and their allies launched another lengthy attack upon the other House as a threat to English liberties and an instrument of ‘slavery’.565Burton’s Diary, ii. 437, 439, 440-1. Scot was attempting to speak to the appellation issue again the next day (4 February) when the Speaker informed the House that Black Rod was at the door, at which Hesilrige declared ‘What care I for the Black Rod? ... the gentleman [Scot] ought to be heard’.566Burton’s Diary, ii. 462. With Cromwell on the brink of dissolving Parliament, this may have well have been a delaying tactic by Hesilrige in order to allow time for the presentation of an anti-protectorate petition to the Commons, ‘as the supreme authority’, from London’s gathered congregations. Cromwell and Secretary John Thurloe* saw this petition as part of a design by leading commonwealthsmen to suborn the army in the cause of restoring the Rump – and certainly Hesilrige and his republican allies would welcome this petition when it was presented to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament a year later.567Clarke Pprs. iii. 135-6, 138-9; TSP vii. 269, 617; Burton’s Diary, iii. 288-9; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 456; ‘Letters concerning the dissolution of Cromwell’s last Parliament, 1658’ ed. C.H. Firth, EHR vii. 107; Worden, God’s Instruments, 306-7. On 4 February, the protector dissolved Parliament.

Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, 1659

In the weeks before the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, ‘divers’ commonwealthsmen met privately to consult about ‘what would be most proper for them to do in case any of them should be elected to serve in the approaching assembly’. After ‘mature deliberation’ they resolved that ‘if they should be fairly chosen and that no unjust or dishonourable thing were required of them, they should accept the employment’. This republican caucus apparently included all of those generally identified as the leaders of the ‘commonwealth party’ – namely, Hesilrige, Ludlowe, Scot, Vane II and Henry Neville.568Ludlow, Mems. ii. 50; TSP vii. 550, 588, 605; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 120. In the event, Hesilrige was re-elected for Leicester early in January 1659.569Supra, ‘Leicester’.

By the time the new Parliament assembled late in January 1659, it was being reported that Hesilrige and other prominent ex-Rumpers were in the process of patching up their differences with Lambert and a group of republican officers in common opposition to the protectorate.570TSP vii. 605, 660; Burton’s Diary, iii. 96; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 112. Hesilrige certainly used the fact that he sat next to Thomas 3rd Lord Fairfax in the House as a prop to demonstrate his sympathy for the army and its material interests.571Burton’s Diary, iii. 48, 56, 96; iv. 253. He was also vocal in demanding the release of the republican and Fifth Monarchist sympathiser Major-General Robert Overton, whose imprisonment by Protector Oliver without charge or trial was decried by the commonwealthsmen as a prime example of Cromwellian arbitrary government.572Burton Diary, iii. 45; iv. 152, 154, 156, 159. ‘Wherefore have we an army kept up, but that we may enjoy our liberties?’ Hesilrige asked, adding ‘I see no cause of lessening this army. I am against it.’.573Burton’s Diary, iv. 306. But his professed reverence for the army did not extend to its Cromwellian commanders, whom he lambasted in the House as agents of tyranny. Moreover, he diverged from many senior army officers, whether disaffected or loyal to the regime – and indeed from many of his fellow republicans – in his preference by the late 1650s for a Presbyterian church settlement. ‘A moderate Presbytery [is] the best’ form of church government he reportedly told the House in 1659.574Burton’s Diary, iv. 336; D. Hirst, ‘Concord and discord in Richard Cromwell’s House of Commons’, EHR ciii. 342. Hyde would describe him as ‘perfectly Presbyterian’ by this point, which is consistent with Hesilrige’s desire for Edmund Calamy rather than John Owen to preach the opening fast sermon of Richard Cromwell’s Parliament.575Clarendon, Hist. vi. 148; Burton’s Diary, iii. 12.

Hesilrige seems to have enjoyed the opening days of the new Parliament, as he endeavoured to educate and impress the younger Members with his ‘easy mastery’ of parliamentary procedure (some of which he cheerfully made up on the spot).576I. Roots, ‘The tactics of the commonwealthsmen in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament’ in Puritans and Revolutionaries ed. D. Pennington, K. Thomas (Oxford, 1978), 287, 288, 296; Hirst, ‘Concord and discord’, 345, 353. Long-winded and pompous though he could be, he was regarded by the House, and clearly regarded himself, as very much the elder statesman. Indeed, his sense of self-importance as a Parliament-man was so assured that it tipped over at times into genial self-mockery.577Burton’s Diary, iv. 76, 149, 348; Hirst, ‘Concord and discord’, 343. Named in second place to the committee of privileges on 28 January, he also considered himself an expert on due electoral process, expounding confidently on the propriety of Neville’s election for Berkshire and the irregularities surrounding the disputed returns of Henry Cary*, 4th Viscount Falkland and several other Members.578CJ vii. 594b; Burton’s Diary, iii. 22, 23, 24-5, 50, 65, 348, 369; iv. 42; Hirst, ‘Concord and discord’, 345. In all, he was appointed to 14 committees in this Parliament, including those for settling a learned and pious ministry in the north counties; for the enfranchisement of County Durham; and to draw up an impeachment against William Boteler* for his conduct as a Cromwellian major general.579CJ vii. 594b, 600a, 600b, 610a, 614b, 622b, 623a, 623b, 627a, 632a, 637a, 644b. He also chaired at least one session of the House’s standing committee for trade – although he preferred, where possible, to have Thomas Scot perform that role.580CJ vii. 642b; Burton’s Diary, iv. 379. In all but one of his ten tellerships he partnered either fellow republicans (Neville and Scot) or the government’s crypto-royalist critics (Falkland, Sir George Boothe, William Brereton and Sir Horatio Townshend).581CJ vii. 603b, 607a, 607b, 609a, 611b, 615b, 621b, 639b, 644a.

As the perceived head of the commonwealth party in the House, Hesilrige spoke frequently and sometimes at great length.582Burton’s Diary, iii. 35. One of his speeches lasted a full two hours and was followed by another from Scot lasting an hour. Both men had plenty to say, but both were also employing the commonwealthsmen’s tactics of stringing out the House’s proceedings so that the court party ‘might not be able to drive so furiously’ and in order to gain time ‘to infuse good principles’ into those many Members who were new to Parliament.583Henry Cromwell Corresp. ed. Gaunt, 447-8; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 55-6; Roots, ‘Tactics of the commonwealthsmen’, 287, 290-1; Hirst, ‘Concord and discord’, 353. The tactical need to build ‘a broad party of support in the Commons’ required Hesilrige and his republican friends to declare or intimate their support for keeping Richard in power, provided his authority was bounded by Parliament. Hesilrige insisted that he was not against single-person rule, merely against ‘that monster, prerogative’.584Burton’s Diary, iv. 77; Worden, God’s Instruments, 307-8. Other commonwealthsmen made similar claims, but few of their hearers were convinced. They ‘pretend that they are for a single person, and this single person’ [i.e. Richard Cromwell], wrote Andrew Marvell*, ‘but without negative voice, without militia, not upon the Petition and Advice but by adoption and donation of this House, and that all the rights of the people should be specified and endorsed upon that Donation. But we know well enough what they mean’.585Add. 22919, f. 78; Poems and Lttrs. of Andrew Marvell ed. H.M. Margoliouth (Oxford, 1971), ii. 307.

Hesilrige’s first major speech was on 1 February 1659 in response to Thurloe’s presentation to the House of the bill to recognise Richard Cromwell’s title as lord protector. ‘This is not seasonably offered now’, he insisted; the House should refer the bill to a ‘committee of grievances’ to examine whether the protectorate’s constitutional foundations were sound, before proceeding to the ‘great works’ of building on the legacy of ‘that victorious Parliament’ – i.e. the Rump. Although he professed to honour Protector Richard, remarking, patronisingly, that ‘I never knew any guile or gall in him’, nonetheless Protector Oliver had ‘promised an account of our treasure, army and navy. We must have an account of them’.586Burton’s Diary, iii. 26-7, 104; Roots, ‘Tactics of the commonwealthsmen’, 292. In a further attempt to delay the bill’s passage through the House he moved that its second reading be postponed for a week and that every Member be supplied with a copy.587Burton’s Diary, iii. 30, 31; Roots, ‘Tactics of the commonwealthsmen’, 293. While agreeing with Neville on 2 February that the negative voice (parliamentary veto) and command of the militia ought properly to rest with the Commons, he again urged that all discussion of constitutional matters should be deferred until the armed forces had been provided for and the protectoral regime had given a ‘just account’ of its proceedings.588Burton’s Diary, iii. 34-6. He reiterated this plea at greater length on 3 February – at once seeking to curry favour among the officers and to remind them of past errors by declaring that Parliament had ‘the best army in the world’, and that he was ‘very sorry they were in want. It was not so in the time of the commonwealth’. By way of remedy he proposed that a committee be appointed ‘to consider how the condition of our affairs stands, especially with reference to our army and navy, and to consider how our money and our treasure stands’.589Burton’s Diary, iii. 56-8. Ignoring this renewed attempt to create a forum for criticism of the protectorate, the House instead ordered the admiralty and treasury commissioners and the Army Committee to report their accounts and the state of the military establishment.590CJ vii. 599b. In seeking to deflect objections on 5 February 1659 to Ludlowe sitting without having taken the protectoral oath of allegiance, Hesilrige made his first reference to the Scottish and Irish Members in the House.591Burton’s Diary, iii. 71. The commonwealthsmen objected to their presence partly because they regarded them as Cromwellian placemen and lobby fodder, but also as a filibustering tactic to impede the passage of the bill of recognition.

It was Hesilrige who broke the silence after the second reading of the bill, on 7 February 1659, delivering ‘a very long harangue’ on ‘what we have been, what we are, and what we shall be’ that ranged from the Saxon Heptarchy through to the introduction of the Humble Petition and Advice in 1657. He lavished praise on the Rump and its achievements and asserted the principal that ‘the original of all power [is] in the people, and the government being dissolved, [it] diverts again to the people’. From the havoc wreaked by the army in purging Parliament and shattering the ancient constitution, the Rump had established the commonwealth and the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and had thereby ushered in an era of unprecedented national power and prosperity – only to be discarded for the protectorate and the manifold evils of government by a single person.592Burton’s Diary, iii. 87-105; Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, pp. 96-102; W.A.H. Schilling, ‘The Parliamentary Diary of Sir John Gell, 5 Feb.-21 Mar. 1659’ (Vanderbilt Univ. MA thesis, 1961), 25-32; Worden, God’s Instruments, 282; Roots, ‘Tactics of the commonwealthsmen’, 297-9. The Instrument of Government ‘had not its original from the people’, he insisted, ‘a Recognition was made without doors [outside Parliament] to bind those within’.593Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 29. Similarly, the Petition and Advice had no constitutional authority because the exclusion of many Members from the second protectoral Parliament in 1656 had rendered it ‘a forced Parliament’.594Burton’s Diary, iii. 101. He concluded by professing his willingness to submit to rule by a single person if that were ‘thought best to be accountable to the people for maladministration’. However, he evidently did not think it would be ‘thought best’. Nor did this carefully-worded concession to the Cromwellian constitution contradict his insistence that Parliament ‘cannot set up any power equal to the people, either in one person, or another House. We are trusted with no such power’. Whether he perceived any tension between this admission that the supremacy of the Commons was circumscribed by the fundamental sovereignty of the people, and his subsequent assertion that ‘the people care not what government they live under, so as they may plough and go to market’, seems unlikely.595Burton’s Diary, iii. 101-2, 105; iv. 236; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 224. He covered some of the same ground again, and at length, on 8 February; and though he conceded that the majority of Members were in favour of rule by a single person, he declared himself ‘not satisfied’. The chief magistrate must ‘still be accountable’, and thus Hesilrige and other commonwealthsmen moved repeatedly that before the bill be committed ‘it is most necessary first to declare the people’s rights, the fundamental rights’.596Burton’s Diary, iii. 141-2, 149, 193, 194, 229, 230, 232; Roots, ‘Tactics of the commonwealthsmen’, 302, 303, 305.

The debate on the bill of recognition climaxed on 14 February 1659, when Hesilrige opened the day’s proceedings with a denunciation of the protectorate’s financial mismanagement, and particularly its failure to keep the armed forces adequately supplied: ‘In five years we have had greater maladministration than in five hundred years before’.597Burton’s Diary, iii. 256-60; Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, pp. 120-1; Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 67-9; Roots, ‘Tactics of the commonwealthsmen’, 306. In the wrangling that day over the wording of a question confirming that the bill would recognise Richard as protector, Hesilrige suggested ‘constitute’ and ‘appoint’ in place of ‘recognise’ and ‘acknowledge’. ‘I see it likely to go against us’, he admitted, ‘yet I would make as much of a bad matter as I can’.598Burton’s Diary, iii. 278, 279. The House divided on whether ‘recognise’ should stand in the bill, with Hesilrige and Neville as minority tellers for the noes. The commonwealthsmen then attempted to word the main question in such a ways as to prescribe limitations in the bill upon the protector’s powers, but Hesilrige and Neville were minority tellers again on whether to put the question in favour of making the necessary additions.599CJ vii. 603b; Burton’s Diary, iii. 282, 285; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 455-6; Roots, ‘Tactics of the commonwealthsmen’, 307. In the event, the House voted that it be part of the bill to recognise Richard as lord protector and chief magistrate, whereupon Hesilrige is reported to have declared ‘you have at one blow given away our liberties and set up a family that we must maintain at a vast charge ... It is such a burthen that the people will not be able to bear’.600Clarke Pprs. v. 278. As a sop to the republican interest, it was further resolved that additional clauses would be added to the bill before its committal as would bind the protector’s power and secure the privileges of Parliament and the liberties of the people.601CJ vii. 603b; Burton’s Diary, iii. 287; Roots, ‘Tactics of the commonwealthsmen’, 307-8. During the debate on these additional clauses on 17 and 18 February, Hesilrige and other commonwealthsmen pushed hard for a vote that would deny the protector a negative voice and vest legislative authority solely in the Commons, but they were again defeated.602Burton’s Diary, iii. 316-17, 329-30, 334, 341, 345; Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, p. 122; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 159. One of the few positives that Hesilrige could take from the debates on the bill of recognition was the close working relationship he had forged with Vane II; the two men seconding each other’s motions and sometimes following up one another’s speeches.603Burton’s Diary, iii. 149, 194, 303, 327, 346, 366, 369, 452, 546; iv. 109, 270, 314, 347, 348, 472; V.A. Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger (1970), 212.

On 21 February 1659, after Secretary Thurloe delivered a long report on foreign affairs, requesting money to send a fleet to the Sound, Hesilrige followed Vane, Scot and other commonwealthsmen in questioning not only the government’s foreign policy commitments (in supporting Sweden against Denmark) but also in exposing what they saw as a design to inveigle one million pounds for a ‘pretended war’ that would increase the power of the protector.604Burton’s Diary, iii. 376-97, 401; Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, p. 126; S. Bethel, A True and Impartial Narrative of the Most Material Debates and Passages in the Late Parliament (1659), 7-8 (E.985.25); Rowe, Vane, 213-14. Speaking to this issue on 23 February, Hesilrige praised Vane’s handling of naval affairs under the Rump, which he saw as evidence that the Commons and its committees were capable of directing the fleet. To leave such matters to the protector and his council, he argued, was implicitly to acknowledge an unlimited authority in the single person.605Burton’s Diary, iii. 442-3; Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, pp. 150-1. He returned to this theme the next day (24 Feb.), urging the House not to ‘engage in a bloody war, or in the expense of millions of money’, until it had established what he perceived was its sovereignty in foreign policy matters. These politic considerations aside, he thought that war to preserve English mercantile interests in the Baltic or against the Dutch was ungodly and immoral: ‘We ought not, for any fleshly advantage, to buy dominion with blood ...War ought to be very just and undertaken upon godly principles and scripture grounds, which will nowhere justify the taking another man’s right. Let us make a war upon scripture principles, viz. defensive’. By the same reckoning he criticised Protector Oliver’s war against the Spanish and the seizure of Jamaica as ‘costly and dishonorable’. ‘I do not think Antichrist must come down by the fleshly sword ... but by the spirit’.606Burton’s Diary, iii. 452, 457-9; Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, pp. 143-4. Keen to string out this debate for as long as possible, Hesilrige and Scot were minority tellers against bringing in candles (in effect, for postponing the debate); and Hesilrige and Neville were subsequently minority tellers when the House later divided on whether to refer the ‘preparing and putting to sea a considerable navy for the safety of this commonwealth and the preservation of the trade and commerce thereof’ to the protector.607CJ vii. 607a, 607b. Hesilrige was evidently not convinced by a position paper sent to him at about this time, arguing the case for allying with the Swedes against the Danes and the Dutch for the preservation of the Protestant cause.608Leics. RO, DG21/286.

With the debate on foreign affairs concluded in the court party’s favour, the focus of contention shifted to the vexed question of the Cromwellian Other House. On 1 March 1659, Hesilrige joined Vane and other commonwealthsmen in questioning whether those who ‘call themselves peers ... have any foundation to sit by the [Humble] Petition and Advice’.609Burton’s Diary, iii. 567-9; Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, p. 159. And at the end of this debate he was a minority teller with Neville against a motion that the next day the House should discuss the proposition that it would transact with the persons in the Other House as a House of Parliament.610CJ vii. 609a. On 4 March, he declared his support for ‘another House’ of some kind so long ‘as the Commons of England may bound them and approve them’, although this again was a tactical move – a denial of his republican unicameralism in order to better carry moderate opinion and to prolong debate.611Burton’s Diary, iv. 13, 77. On 8 March, he pleaded his desire for settlement, and even for a single person, before launching an attack on the Cromwellian peers as ‘persons that have two swords, two strings to their bows [i.e. military and civil authority]; persons that have torn Parliaments out and pulled your Speaker out of the chair’. He professed he would rather have the parliamentarian peers of the 1640s restored than recognise the Other House, replete as it was with swordsmen and dependents of the single person: ‘I do wish with all my soul we might have those ancient lords, such as depend upon themselves, so that we might be secured against the old line [the Stuart monarchy]’.612Burton’s Diary, iv. 78-9, 81-2; Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 183-5. And he recalled in glowing terms how the earl of Northumberland and other peers had stood firm for Parliament in 1648.613Burton’s Diary, iv. 78. But though he declared that he would ‘vote for the [old] peers with all my heart’, he would not do so in such a way as would recognise the Other House, and thus he was a minority teller against making an addition to the main question (for transacting with the Cromwellian lords as a House of Parliament) that would have preserved the old peers’ ‘privilege of being duly summoned to be Members of that House’.614CJ vii. 611b.

The commonwealthsmen managed to postpone the putting of the main question on the Other House by raising the issue of whether the Scots and Irish Members had a right to sit.615Burton’s Diary, iv. 87-8. Hesilrige, Scot and their friends took up this point the next day (9 March 1659). ‘Is it fit that those that have no right or foundation should legify [sic] amongst us?’, asked Hesilrige, for ‘by the same rule that 60 are brought in now, 300 may be brought in next time’.616Burton’s Diary, iv. 95, 106, 108. The commonwealthsmen were all too aware that these 60 interlopers, as they saw them, added greatly to the voting strength of the court party. For much the same reason, Hesilrige and other republicans were angry that the protector had cancelled the spring assizes and thereby allowed the ‘lobe-robe men’ to attend the House – a group that the republicans also identified with the protectoral interest.617Burton’s Diary, iii. 326; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 121. Having urged on 18 March that the Scots Members withdraw from the House, Hesilrige was a minority teller against putting a question to this effect – as were Lambert and Vane II when the House divided on the main question.618CJ vii. 615b-616a; Burton’s Diary, iv. 174. The next day (19 March), he denounced the protectoral union and the Petition and Advice by which the Scots and Irish Members were summoned to attend the House as acts of ‘private counsel’ and mere reason of state.619Burton’s Diary, iv. 195-8; Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 247-9. After losing a vote on 21 March on whether the Scots Members should continue to sit in the House, Hesilrige and Neville moved that ‘the legality of the Irish Members’ be debated.620Burton’s Diary, iv. 219. But after he and other commonwealthsmen failed in their attempts on 23 March to secure an adjournment, the House passed a vote confirming the Irish Members’ right to sit.621Burton’s Diary, iv. 242-3. There are signs that Hesilrige’s time-wasting tactics and self-righteous appeal to English liberties were beginning to grate badly with several Members by late March. One of the Boscawen brothers ‘spoke very reproachfully’ of Hesilrige’s lordly proceedings in the Rump; and Boothe referred sarcastically to his ‘tender-heartedness’ in decrying the transportation of royalist prisoners into de facto slavery in the Caribbean. Boothe recalled the fate of those Scottish prisoners in Hesilrige’s custody after Dunbar who had also been ‘sent to the Barbadoes against their consent’.622Burton’s Diary, iv. 221-3, 271-2; G. Bate, Elenchus Motuum Nuperorum in Anglia (1685), 106.

The debate on the Other House resumed on 28 March 1659, and at the end of that day, Hesilrige and Boothe were minority tellers against the main question, for transacting with the Cromwellian lords as a House of Parliament, that the commonwealthsmen had obstructed on 8 March.623CJ vii. 621b. By this point the republicans were beginning to weary of the unequal struggle against ‘the court strain in the House of Commons’ and were using increasingly intemperate language to vent their frustration.624Nicholas Pprs. iv. 89; Burton’s Diary, iv. 294-5. Hesilrige and Vane grew particularly heated on 31 March following the second reading of a bill for settling the excise revenues on the protector for life. Vane equated this bill with ‘tyranny and slavery’, while Hesilrige professed amazement at how it had been introduced ‘without your command ... brought in instead of a redress of our grievances ... We go from step to step to forget what belongs to the liberties of the people’.625Burton’s Diary, iv. 313, 314-15. The commonwealthsmen were equally affronted early in April by the title and wording of a declaration from ‘both Houses’ appointing a day of fasting and public humiliation, and inviting magistrates to suppress ‘blasphemies and damnable heresies’. But whereas Vane criticised the declaration primarily as an ‘imposition upon consciences’, Hesilrige focused on its constitutional implications:

It is an impossible thing to take the Other House into your legislature ... You may give them what power you please, but a legislative authority you cannot give them ... I had rather have it desired of his Highness to set forth a proclamation ...626Burton’s Diary, iv. 329, 335-6, 343; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 62-3.

He expressed satisfaction that radical religious opinions were ‘not so rife as eight or ten years ago. I hope they will every day be fewer’. And he specifically condemned Quakerism while voicing a somewhat naive optimism that the people would accept ‘moderate Presbytery’ without the Commons having to impose upon their consciences.627Burton’s Diary, iv. 336. The House’s vote to accept this declaration prompted another angry outburst from Hesilrige – this time directed at the Speaker for having attended the protectoral court, ‘which you ought not have done. You are the greatest man in England’. Both Vane and Neville ‘laboured to excuse’ Hesilrige for what most Members considered ‘a piece of rashness and indiscretion in him’.628Burton’s Diary, iv. 346-8. The declaration occasioned further dispute on 14 April, when Hesilrige was a minority teller in favour of having the MP who carried it up to the Other House return immediately to the Commons without waiting for an answer. On suffering yet another defeat, Hesilrige lamented that ‘he had the worst luck in telling of any man’.629CJ vii. 639b; Burton’s Diary, iv. 427.

With London full of angry soldiers by mid-April 1659, Hesilrige and his allies in the Commons defended the proceedings of the general council of officers in its defiance of Whitehall and its plans to have Parliament appoint Richard commander-in-chief.630Clarke Pprs. iii. 211-12; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 65; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 164. On 18 April, as the Commons debated how to bring the army to heel, Hesilrige urged a more conciliatory course in the light of rumours that Whitehall was courting the army by offering new commissions to various officers and by dissolving Parliament and settling some other course for paying the soldiery

I would have you also to court them by providing them pay. Before you pass any vote that implies to make his Highness general, consider whether you will have one general or several persons. Go upon that which will draw the affections of the army after you.631Burton’s Diary, iv. 450, 455, 458; TSP vii. 661.

He then warned the House that siding with the protector in this ‘great struggling’ for control of the armed forces would lead to ‘ill consequences’. He therefore took the unusual step – for a commonwealthsman – of advising the Commons ‘to take in the Other House in this great business, lest you pass a vote [for making Richard commander-in-chief] that may destroy posterity ... Let us have a conference with the Other House and some members of the army, to understand the bottom of this’.632Burton’s Diary, iv. 455.

The readiness of leading republicans to placate the army, or disaffected elements within it, was probably motivated in large part by fear of military intervention against Parliament. Still smarting at the forcible dissolution of the Rump six years earlier, Hesilrige and his allies may yet have regarded the Commons – even as constituted in April 1659 – as the best instrument for securing a more republican form of government.633Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 165; Hirst, ‘Concord and discord’, 355-6. Their courting of the army may also have been linked to the secret overtures that Charles Fleetwood*, John Disbrowe* and other disgruntled Cromwellian officers had made to Hesilrige and Vane late in March, using Ludlowe as a go-between. Hesilrige and Vane had declined a meeting with the officers, but had assured them ‘that when they saw it seasonable, they would be ready to assist them in all things tending to the public service’.634Ludlow, Mems. ii. 63-5; TSP vii. 659; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 61.

This entente between the republicans and the Wallingford House group (Fleetwood, Disbrowe and their confederates) was seen by some contemporaries, and has been interpreted since, as a conspiracy to bring down the protectorate.635Clarke Pprs. v. 285; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 500, 505-6; Hirst, ‘Concord and discord’, 355-6. Yet it cannot be discounted that the commonwealthsmen hoped rather to exploit army grievances in order to extract more favourable constitutional terms from Richard and the court party. The republicans were still fighting their corner in the House on 21 April 1659 and still maneuvering for tactical advantage, with Hesilrige serving as a minority teller to adjourn a debate on settling the armed forces as a militia under the immediate joint control of the protector and Parliament.636CJ vii. 644a; Burton’s Diary, iv. 472. The next day (22 April), he was appointed with Vane and three other Members to attend the protector to request payment to the House’s minister.637CJ vii. 644b. But this would be his last appointment under the protectorate, for that same day (22 April) Fleetwood, Disbrowe and those officers loyal to them forced Richard to dissolve Parliament. The majority of Commons-men refused to acknowledge this order and, with Hesilrige in the vanguard, exclaimed against the army’s proceedings and declared it ‘treason for any persons whatsoever to put force upon any Members of the House’.638[A. Annesley*], England’s Confusion, or a True and Impartial Relation of the Late Traverses of State in England (1659), 8-9 (E.985.1); Clarke Pprs. v. 290. After which they adjourned until 25 April, when Hesilrige and about 40 or 50 other Members attempted to resume their seats, only to find the door of the House ‘shut and guarded with soldiers’. On demanding admittance, Hesilrige ‘was denied by some of the soldiers, whereupon he told them he came to do his duty to his country, to sit in Parliament’. When the soldiers affirmed that they would have no Parliament, he replied ‘then you must expect no money’ and so departed.639Henry Cromwell Corresp. 507; Clarke Pprs. v. 287-8.

The restored Rump, 1659

Once it became clear that nothing but the recall of the Rump would satisfy the army, the senior officers abandoned their attempts to save the protectorate and sent a delegation, headed by Lambert, to hold talks with Hesilrige, Vane, Ludlowe and Richard Salwey. Several conferences took place at Vane’s house at which it was agreed to restore the Rump – although this decision was reached only after the four commonwealthsmen had debated, and laid aside, a proposal from the officers that ‘the government of the nation should be by a representative of the people and by a select senate’.640[Annesley], England’s Confusion, 9; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 74-7; Clarke Pprs. iii. 214; iv. 6-7, 8; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 69-71. The idea of a select senate of visible Saints and approved army officers held particular appeal for Lambert and Vane, but was disliked by Hesilrige, Scot and most other republican politicians.641A.H. Woolrych, ‘The good old cause and the fall of the protectorate’, Cambridge Historical Journal, xiii. 153-4. An important constituency in these army-commonwealth party negotiations were Joyce and other junior officers, with whom it was said that ‘Vane and Hesilrige have some influence’.642TSP vii. 666; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 536-7. Hesilrige was among the first of several former officers who had lost their places in the army since the early 1650s to be restored by Fleetwood and his colleagues to the command of a regiment.643Clarke Pprs. iii. 196; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 82; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 537, 540, 573. And by mid-May, according to Thurloe, ‘Hesilrige hath his command again in the north’, although there is no firm evidence of his re-appointment as governor of Newcastle, Tynemouth, Carlisle and Berwick before that autumn.644Add. 22919, f. 100; FSL, X.d.18, no. 16; Clarke Pprs. iv. 302-3.

Hesilrige was among the 20 or so Rumpers who solicited Lenthall on 6 May 1659 to resume his old post as Speaker.645[Annesley], England’s Confusion, 9; Massarella, ‘The Politics of the Army’, 541. And on 7 May, he was among the 40 or so Rumpers who took their seats in the restored Rump. As de facto leaders of the House it fell largely to Hesilrige and Vane to ensure the re-exclusion of William Prynne, who had managed to enter the Commons’ chamber before a guard of soldiers had been placed at the door.646W. Prynne, A True and Perfect Narrative (1659), 9-12 (E.767.1). Hesilrige was named that day (7 May) to four committees – for drawing up a declaration vindicating the recall of the Rump; to take account of those eligible to sit in the restored Commons; to attend Fleetwood and acquaint him with the House’s ‘good acceptance of the affections of the officers of the army to the Parliament’; and, with Fleetwood, Lambert, Vane, Ludlowe, Salwey and several others, to a ‘committee of safety’, which was given authority ‘to seize and secure such as might justly be suspected of any design to disturb the public peace, and also to remove such officers of the army as they should think fit and to fill their places with others, till the Parliament should take farther order therein’. This committee drew up the legislation for a new council of state, to which it handed the baton of executive government on 23 May.647CJ vii. 645a, 646a, 652b, 658a; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 79-80, 85; Clarke Pprs. iv. 9.

Hesilrige seems to have been the dominant figure on a seven-man commission that the Rump set up on 13 May 1659 to nominate officers for the ‘land-forces of this commonwealth’. He attended almost every meeting of this body over the next four months, was apparently its most regular chairman, and made at least 37 reports to the House relating to the nomination of officers and the issuing of army commissions in England and Ireland.648CJ vii. 650b, 651a, 680a, 681a, 682b, 683a, 685a, 693b-694a, 696a, 696b, 697b, 698a, 702a, 704a, 708b, 710b, 716a, 721a, 721b, 724a, 730a, 742a, 743a, 744b, 749b, 750a, 771a, 781a, 781b, 786b, 787a; SP25/127, passim; SP25/128, passim; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 88, 103; Reece, The Army in Cromwellian England, 201. This evidence, taken with Hesilrige’s fear of the soldiery imposing upon the people’s representative, is enough to throw doubt on his supporters’ claim that the ‘whole modellising of the army’ was the work of Fleetwood, Lambert, Disbrowe and Colonel James Berry*, who consistently outvoted their fellow commissioners Hesilrige, Vane and Ludlowe.649Declaration of the Officers of the Army Opened, 20-2. General George Monck* later referred to Hesilrige as ‘having had the chief hand in modelling the regiments’ under the restored Rump.650Clarke Pprs. iv. 303. Writing to Monck by the order of the House in June – in response to the general’s request that the Rump make no alterations to the officer corps in Scotland – Hesilrige justified the House’s new modelling of the armed forces on the grounds that it was of ‘high concernment for the settlement of the nations to [en]trust such as they are assured will be truly and really faithful to the Parliament and commonwealth’.651CJ vii. 677a, 680a; Clarke Pprs. iv. 16-17. The clearest demonstration of this policy was the stipulation that all officers receive their commissions from the Speaker rather than Fleetwood as commander-in-chief. Vane, Ludlowe, Salwey and other Rumpers tried to oppose this ‘ritualised subordination’ as unnecessarily provocative, but were over-ruled, and on 6 and 7 June, the Rump put Hesilrige in charge of overseeing the drafting of new commissions and of delivering them into the Speaker’s hands.652CJ vii. 673b, 674a; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 88-91; Mayers, 1659, 58; Reece, The Army in Cromwellian England, 199; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 574-5. The restored Rump’s ‘new moulding’ of the army would be denounced by the council of officers in October as divisive and politically-driven.653A Declaration of the General Council of the Officers of the Army (1659), 5-6 (E.1001.12).

Between May and mid-October 1659, Hesilrige was named to a total of 52 ad hoc committees in the House and served as a teller in eight divisions.654CJ vii. 671b, 674b, 683b, 704b, 707a, 712a, 785b, 790a. Almost a third of his appointments in the restored Rump related in one way or other to the management and improvement of the commonwealth’s revenues and to remodelling its judiciary, its military and financial executives and its militia forces.655CJ vii. 656b, 672b, 678a, 690a, 691a, 694b, 711a, 726a, 727a, 729a, 762a, 772a, 780b, 781b, 786b, 791b. As both a teller and committeeman he was closely involved in the selecting the commissioners for managing public revenues and in opposing the nomination of Miles Corbett and Ludlowe as commissioners for governing Ireland. Hesilrige probably disliked Corbetts’ radical religious sympathies, and, in the case of Ludlowe – who had recently been appointed commander-in-chief for Ireland – he was determined to uphold the formal separation of military and civilian authority.656CJ vii. 674b, 690a, 707a; Mayers, 1659, 167. The revival of some of Hesilrige’s former power in the north-east is suggested by the leading role he took, or was assigned, at Westminster in handling business relating to Newcastle, Northumberland and County Durham.657CJ vii. 673a, 681b, 687a, 698b, 701a, 706b, 780a.

That Hesilrige’s career in the Rump picked up not too far from where it had left off in 1653 is no great surprise. This time round, however, he showed a somewhat greater readiness to work through the House’s executive bodies – the committee of safety, the commission for nominating officers and the council of state, to which he was elected in first place on 14 May.658CJ vii. 654a. He attended the council on a regular basis between May and October 1659, served as president for two weeks in August, and made at least 15 reports from Derby House to the Commons, on matters ranging from the pay of the army and militia, to the government of Ireland and the state of the commonwealth’s relations with the Dutch republic and Sweden.659Bodl. Rawl. C.179, passim; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. xxiv; 1659-60, pp. xxiii-xxiv, xxviii, 117; CJ vii. 671b, 689b, 704b, 721a, 723b, 743a, 751b, 754a, 760b, 764a, 765a, 765b, 772b, 788b. Nevertheless, his tally of conciliar committee appointments was, once again, very modest compared with those of Scot, Vane and other leading councillors. The majority of his assignments at Derby House concerned the management and re-commissioning of the armed forces and securing the commonwealth against its enemies.660Bodl. Rawl. C.179, pp. 17, 37, 39, 42, 57, 92, 124, 192, 214; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 135, 157, 163, 164, 170, 177, 184, 214, 219, 223, 230. His conciliar appointments, or lack of them, suggest that he was content – as he had been in 1649-53 – to leave the handling of foreign affairs to Vane, Chaloner and those Rumpers most deeply interested in such matters.661Mayers, 1659, 121-2.

Hesilrige was at or close to the centre of many of the political disputes that periodically disrupted the various working relationships by which the restored Rump managed – at least until the autumn – to contain the tensions within its civilian and military leadership. On 14 July, the day after the House had passed a new act of indemnity, Lambert complained to Hesilrige that this legislation was of no account in that it left the army at the mercy of civilian authorities – a view later endorsed by the council of officers. ‘“You are”, said Sir Arthur, “only at the mercy of the Parliament, who are your good friends” “I know not”, said Lambert, “why they should not be at our mercy as well as we at theirs”’. This exchange clearly alarmed Hesilrige, for he confided to Ludlowe the next day that he now regretted having prevailed with Parliament to grant Lambert the command of two regiments.662Ludlow, Mems. ii. 100-1, 144; Declaration of the General Council, 5. Underlying this clash between the two grandees were important differences in constitutional and religious outlook. Lambert, like Vane and many army officers, favoured a republican constitution that would include a perpetual ‘select senate’ co-ordinate in power with the people’s representative.663Infra, ‘John Lambert’; ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 101. Hesilrige, too, seems to have recognised the need for constitutional reform in order to preserve the good old cause, but along lines that would ensure the balance of power rested firmly in the representative’s favour. In mid-July he informed his fellow councillor Archibald Johnston of Wariston* that

he was neither of Sir Henry Vane or Mr [Henry] Neville’s opinion anent [about] government, but for a successive Parliament, and they to choose a council as they do now and the elections to be by one of ten out of every parish, and these to meet in country [i.e. county] elections for choosing commissioners to Parliament, and these in Parliament to sit perpetually, but that every year one third part to go out and another third part to go in, and so in the council.664Diary of Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston ed. J.D. Ogilvie (Scottish Hist. Soc. ser. 3, xxxiv), 125.

It is evident from this synthesis of existing constitutional arrangements and James Harington’s model of republican government that Hesilrige was not the ‘unreconstructed’ Rumper, or unthinking supporter of ‘free’ elections, that he is sometimes portrayed.665G. Davies, The Restoration of Charles II (San Marino, CA, 1955), 145; Rowe, Vane, 225; J.G.A. Pocock, ‘James Harrington and the good old cause: a study of the ideological context of his writings’, JBS x. 42. One contemporary observer believed that he oscillated between the oligarchical republicans (Lambert, Vane, Salwey) and those who were ‘perfectly commonwealth’s men’, notably Ludlowe and Neville.666Clarendon SP iii. 484; Mayers, 1659, 46, 53, 233. And by October it was said that he had closed with Neville and ‘Mr Harrington’s cabal’ at Westminster, disagreeing with them only on the issue of senatorial rotation.667Mordaunt Letter-Bk. ed. M. Coate (Camden Soc. ser 3, lxix), 65. But regardless of his precise location on the republican political spectrum, it is clear that he perceived the executive or senate as the most problematic and potentially unrestrainable component in any new constitution rather than, as Lambert and Vane did, the people’s representative

Hesilrige was also at odds with the Vane-Lambert circle on the question of a religious settlement. Whereas Vane and the Lambertonians were committed to wide-ranging toleration and were broadly sympathetic to the sects, Hesilrige and his ‘party’ were ‘more for ordinances [church discipline] and against Quakers’.668Wariston Diary ed. Ogilvie, 139. There seems little doubt that Hesilrige’s praise of Vane – like his appeasement of the army – in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament had disguised a great deal of political calculation and expediency on his part. Nevertheless, the two men appear to have sustained the working relationship they had established in that Parliament until at least the early autumn of 1659, despite their obvious differences in thought and temperament and their occasional political clashes during the summer.669Clarke Pprs. v. 296; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 89; TSP vii. 704; Mayers, 1659, 232, 233.

Hesilrige collaborated with Lambert and Vane in August and September to help suppress Sir George Boothe’s royalist-Presbyterian rebellion and to punish and interrogate the insurgents.670CJ vii. 742a, 751b, 764a, 764b, 767b, 768a, 768b, 770a, 785b, 786a; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 147, 154, 170; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 111-12. But the response of the Rump’s leaders to Boothe’s rebellion would have the effect of exposing, and therefore widening, their divisions. When Fleetwood moved on 23 August that the House reward Lambert for his victorious campaign against Boothe’s forces by restoring him to his old rank of major-general, Hesilrige scotched this proposal and ‘prevailed with the Parliament to declare that they would not create any more general officers than those that were so already’. Rather than raise Lambert’s authority still higher, Hesilrige backed a vote for granting him £1,000 with which to buy a jewel as a mark of Parliament’s favour.671CJ vii. 766b; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 114-15; M. Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell and Restoration of Charles I (1856), i. 464; Mayers, 1659, 235.

The army’s increased confidence and assertiveness as a consequence of its victory were reportedly viewed by Hesilrige as part of a design to make Lambert the next lord protector.672Declaration of the General Council, 7-8; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 110; Mayers, 1659, 234-6. Reacting to evidence of disloyalty among the militia, and even at Westminster, that the rebellion had exposed, Hesilrige demanded the imposition of a new engagement ‘to be true, faithful and constant to this commonwealth, against any king, single person and House of Peers and every of them’.673CJ vii. 774a; Mayers, 1659, 231-2. Presented for subscription to MPs early in September, this oath provoked such strong words between Hesilrige and Vane that they nearly came to blows.674Wariston Diary ed. Ogilvie, 134, 135; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 207; Mayers, 1659, 231. Vane seems to have suspected that the oath would be used by Hesilrige and his friends as a means of purging Quakers and other supposedly disaffected elements from the army and public office.675Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 478; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 110; Mayers, 1659, 231-2. The engagement was referred on 6 September to a committee, to which Hesilrige was named in second place after Vane, and there it was allowed to die.676CJ vii. 774b; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 474; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 110. The engagement dispute deepened the commonwealth’s divisions such that ‘on major political and religious questions, members of the government began to cluster round opposite poles represented by Hesilrige and Vane’.677Mayers, 1659, 233. By late September, the French ambassador thought that the Rump and army were divided into two factions, ‘one of the true republicans who are reputed Presbyterians’ – of which he identified Hesilrige as the leader – ‘and the other of the Anabaptists and Millenarians, or Saints; [and] that the former party prevails in the Parliament and that the other ... has on its side the majority of the officers of the army’.678Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 482, 485-6. The ‘true republicans’, he claimed, favoured a settlement in which ‘the civil magistrate shall have a corrective power in matters of religion’.679Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 490.

Against this background of rising political tensions at Westminster, the Rump returned to the vexed question of the constitution, setting up a committee on 8 September – to which Vane and Hesilrige were again named in first and second place – ‘in order to the settlement of the government of this commonwealth’.680CJ vii. 775b. It was probably in an effort to influence this committee’s deliberation that Hesilrige brought a copy of the pamphlet, A Model of a Democraticall Government, into the House in September. This version of Harrington’s constitution proposed the establishment of a sovereign ‘assembly of a representative of the people’ that would delegate power to a rotating senate and would exclude and disenfranchise all royalists who had not given ‘signal testimony of their good affections’.681A Model of a Democraticall Government, Humbly Tendered to Consideration, by a Friend and Wel-wisher to this Common-wealth (1659, E.995.9); Mayers, 1659, 215. Vane and many army officers, on the other hand, were reportedly pushing for ‘a council of forty persons of their own way of thinking, who shall have entire authority in the state and a veto on the resolutions of the Parliament, under the pretext that if the people were at full liberty they would restore the king’.682Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 474-5; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 111-12.

Hostility between the two factions flared up again in response to a petition from Lambert’s forces in mid-September 1659, expressing frustration at the Rump’s failure to redress the army’s grievances since its restoration in May. The petitioners demanded, among other things, the establishment of a select senate and Lambert’s promotion to major-general. According to the army’s version of events, Fleetwood arranged a meeting with Hesilrige, Vane and Salwey in order to broach this petition without causing alarm or offence to Parliament: ‘But contrary to expectation and all ingenuity [honesty] ... the next day [22 Sept.], Sir Arthur Hesilrige informed the House of the said paper, representing that some dangerous design against the Parliament was on foot in the army and intentions to introduce a new government by setting up a single person’. As if this was not inflammatory enough, he moved (unsuccessfully) that Lambert be charged with high treason and sent to the Tower.683Baker, Chronicle, 655-6; Declaration of the General Council, 7-8; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 118, 124, 134-5; Wariston Diary ed. Ogilvie, 137-8; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 482-3; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 112-13; Mayers, 1659, 236-8. The next day (23 Sept.), ‘Hesilrige, Neville and their friends’ pushed for and secured a Commons vote that to appoint any more ‘general officers in the army’ was ‘dangerous to the commonwealth’.684CJ vii. 785a; Whitelocke, Diary, 532. However, on the question of whether the petition was ‘of dangerous consequence’, Hesilrige and Fleetwood were tellers for the noes, defeating Neville and Scot.685CJ vii. 785b. Resentment between the factions spilled over into the council of state early in October, with Hesilrige delivering a tirade against Vane, shouting ‘that he [Vane] would ruin the nation’ and desiring ‘never to come in the place where he was’. For his part, Vane confided to Johnston of Wariston that he suspected that a proposal to widen the Rump’s political base by holding recruiter elections was a design by Hesilrige for ‘settling the government as Sir Arthur would have it’. Hesilrige also carried this quarrel into the council of officers, where there were ‘high and hot debates between Sir Arthur Hesilrige, asserting the absolute power of Parliament, and the officers, asserting their being employed against arbitrary government in whatsoever’.686Wariston Diary ed. Ogilvie, 139; Clarke Pprs. v. 312; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 114; Mayers, 1659, 243, 244.

The Rump’s initially eirenic response to a petition presented to it from the council of officers on 5 October 1659 – which re-iterated the army’s demands of 13 May and vindicated the Derby petitioners – probably owed little to Hesilrige.687A True Narrative of the Proceedings in Parliament (1659), 4-8 (E.1010.24); Wariston Diary ed. Ogilvie, 139; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 114-15; Mayers, 1659, 244-8. Indeed, on 11 October, he ‘and his party’ gave great offence to the council of officers by rushing through an act that would make it treason to levy or collect taxes not imposed by Parliament and declaring void all legislation passed since April 1653 except that of the restored Rump. At a stroke, it seemed to the officers, Parliament had put pressure on the army to take free quarter and had weakened the foundations of the protectoral land and religious settlements in England and Ireland.688CJ vii. 795a; Declaration of the General Council, 11-14; True Narrative, 12-13; Whitelocke, Diary, 534; Mayers, 1659, 248. Then came the revelation that Lambert, Disbrowe and seven other officers had been canvassing signatures to the 5 October petition from army units throughout the three commonwealths – ‘an exercise in blatant military pressure’.689Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 115. The next day (12 Oct.), Hesilrige and his allies – emboldened by a secret offer of support from Monck in Scotland – led the Commons in voting to cashier the nine officers and vest supreme command in seven commissioners, among them Hesilrige, Ludlowe and Monck (but not Vane).690CJ vii. 796a; Declaration of the General Council, 14-15; Baker, Chronicle, 660; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 116; Mayers, 1659, 248-50. This was an open challenge to the disaffected officers and was taken as such. That evening, Lambert called out the regiments loyal to him – the majority – and surrounded the forces that Hesilrige and his allies had hastily deployed to defend Westminster. This ‘siege’ ended on 13 October, when the council of state ordered all soldiers to withdraw to quarters. The troops loyal to Hesilrige and his allies obeyed this command, but Lambert and Fleetwood effectively ignored it and their troops promptly took possession of the Parliament-House.691Supra, ‘John Lambert’; True Narrative, 19-20; Wariston Diary ed. Ogilvie, 144; Baker, Chronicle, 661; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 116-17; Mayers, 1659, 250-1. Hesilrige’s ‘rigid and inflexible spirit’, his suspicious mind and quick temper, combined with his unceasing determination ‘to prevent arbitrary power wheresoever he knew it to be affected and to keep the sword subservient to the civil magistrate’, had once again done much to precipitate the forcible dissolution of the Rump.692Ludlow, Mems. ii. 133-4, 144, 155-6; Reece, The Army in Cromwellian England, 214.

The collapse of the commonwealth, 1659-60

In the immediate aftermath of the restored Rump’s dissolution in mid-October 1659, Lambert, Vane and their confederates sought a compromise with Hesilrige’s faction that would allow the House to resume sitting on condition that it annul the anti-army votes of 11 and 12 October and redress the officers’ grievances. But meetings of the council of state on 14 and 15 October, Hesilrige, Scot and their allies strenuously asserted Parliament’s ‘absolute authority’ against suggestions that it should be limited for the good of ‘the cause’ and demanded an instant, unconditional restoration of the Rump – which was to place an insuperable barrier in the way of any settlement.693Wariston Diary ed. Ogilvie, 145-6; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 118-19; Mayers, 1659, 254-6. Shortly after the establishment of the committee of safety – or the ‘whim-wham committee of shifty’ as one of Hesilrige’s pamphleteer friends dubbed it – late in October, a group of former councillors of state began to meet privately to formulate plans against the new regime. Hesilrige, it was later alleged, was initially reluctant to join this conspiracy, fearing that ‘if he should raise forces in his county it might give occasion to the king’s party to arm and thereby hazard the whole cause; and that therefore it would be better to close with the army in all their exorbitancies than venture with so much danger to oppose it’.694Baker, Chronicle, 669-70. If Hesilrige had indeed been ‘in despair of doing anything’, he had regained his composure by 19 November, when he joined Scot, Harbert Morley* and six other councillors in a letter to Monck, pledging their solidarity with his stand against the committee.695Declaration of the Officers of the Army Opened, 42, 49; Clarke Pprs. v. 343; Baker, Chronicle, 673; Whitelocke, Diary, 546; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 143.

Early in December 1659, Hesilrige, his son Thomas, Morley and Valentine Wauton* secured Portsmouth and then sent letters to the lord mayor and militia commissioners of London, declaring for the restoration of the Rump and requesting their support. Troops were sent to besiege Portsmouth, but many defected to the defenders, allowing Hesilrige to raise the siege and march a strong force on London, where word of their coming helped Scot and other republican insurgents restore the Rump on 26 December.696Supra, ‘Matthew Alured’; infra, ‘Thomas Scot I’; Clarke Pprs. iv. 165, 166, 169-70, 187-8, 219, 220; The True Copys of Several Letters from Portsmouth (1659); TSP vii. 795; Baker, Chronicle, 676; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 157, 170, 183-4; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 146, 151, 153, 154-5; Reece, The Army in Cromwellian England, 213. Hesilrige, Morley and Wauton reached London on 29 December and were ‘received with so much seeming joy and loud acclamations that Sir Arthur was observed in particular to be so elevated that for some time after he could scarce discern his friends from his enemies’.697Ludlow, Mems. ii. 204. Whitelocke recounted seeing Hesilrige ‘very jocund and high’.698Whitelocke, Diary, 556. Hesilrige and his companions went straight to the Commons – although Hesilrige refused to enter until Vane had withdrawn – whereupon they were voted the thanks of the House and order was given for reimbursing their defrayments in defying the committee of safety.699CJ vii. 799a; Wariston Diary ed. Ogilvie, 164.

Hesilrige was the single most influential Commons-man during the eight weeks or so between the restoration of the Rump late in 1659 and the re-admission of the secluded Members on 21 February. On 31 December, he topped the poll in elections to a new council of state in which Vane, Lambert and their allies were overlooked in favour of a ‘phalanx’ of Hesilrige’s confederates. He attended 11 of the 26 sessions of this, the Rump’s last council and made at least two reports from Derby House to the Commons.700CJ vii. 800b, 838a, 846a; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. xxv; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 157. As ever, though, the main focus of his political activity was the Commons, where he had been appointed to 21 committees and four tellerships by mid-February.701CJ vii. 800b, 802b, 841a, 845b. His abiding concern to limit public life and political participation to those who shared his conception of the good old cause was reflected in his appointment to committees for imposing qualifications on future MPs and voters and to remodel the county benches and the commissions for managing the army, admiralty and the great seal.702CJ vii. 801a, 803a, 806a, 806b, 807a, 808b, 811a, 818a, 821a, 838b. Defining and purifying the political nation was always a greater priority for him, it seems, than reforming the constitution or the institutions of government. On 21 January, the House put Hesilrige and St John in charge of preparing a declaration that affirmed Parliament’s commitment to a republican constitutional settlement, ‘without a king, single person or House of Peers’, and to easing ‘the burdens of the nation as much as is consistent with the pressing necessities of the commonwealth’. But in asserting Parliament’s intention to uphold a godly, tithe-maintained ministry with ‘due liberty to tender consciences’, the declaration seemed to foreclose any prospect of radical religious reform or a widening of toleration. A draft version was reported to the House by St John – probably its principal author – two days later (23 Jan.) and, after long debate, ordered to be published.703CJ vii. 818a, 819; A Declaration of the Parliament Assembled at Westminster (1660, E.1013.24); Davies, Restoration, 262-3; R. Hutton, The Restoration (Oxford, 1985), 87.

Second to the Commons, Hesilrige’s main powerbase in the restored Rump was the interim committee for nominating officers that the House set up on 31 December 1659. Working on the principle that (in Hesilrige’s words) ‘God and man having owned them, they must employ those that would own them’, Hesilrige and his fellow committeemen Morley and Wauton steered the House in purging Lambert and his allies from the army and replacing them with their own or Monck’s adherents, including Alured, Okey, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper* and Thomas Sanders*. Hesilrige and Wauton were themselves commissioned as colonels of horse and Morley as a colonel of foot.704CJ vii. 801a, 805b, 808b-809a, 811b, 817b, 829a, 836b, 839a, 839b; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 204. As a result of this committee’s handiwork, claimed Ludlowe, ‘fifteen hundred old officers were removed from their commands’ – although the actual figure was probably nearer 500 – ‘and as many brought in to supply their places, who were for the most part either unknown to the soldiers, disaffected to the cause, or ignorant of military affairs’.705Bodl. Clarendon 68, f. 146; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 204-6, 209; Davies, Restoration, 261; Hutton, The Restoration, 86; Reece, The Army in Cromwellian England, 215-16. Hesilrige, Morley and Wauton were also instrumental late in December in persuading the City to drop a petition calling for a free Parliament.706CJ vii. 800b, 802a; R.R. Sharpe, London and the Kingdom (1894), ii. 362-3; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 157-8. Reporting on 2 January from a Commons’ deputation to the City, Hesilrige informed the house that the corporation had expressed a desire to ‘close with the Parliament ... and yield obedience to their authority’.707CJ vii. 802a.

But Hesilrige seems to have been less concerned by agitation in London for a free Parliament than he was by the potential for backsliding among his colleagues at Westminster. That same day (2 Jan. 1660), the House charged him with the task of bringing in an oath to be taken by MPs and councillors for renouncing the ‘pretended title of Charles Stewart and the whole line of the late King James and of every other person, as a single person, pretending ... to the crown of these nations’. Hesilrige was almost certainly the main instigator of this ‘oath of abjuration’, which was regarded as the strictest such oath that had ever been imposed and was ‘disliked by many’.708CJ vii. 801b; Baker, Chronicle, 678; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 163. After reporting the oath to the House the next day (3 Jan.), he ‘indulged in such very bitter language’ in defending it from criticism by John Hutchinson and other Members that the Speaker threatened to leave his chair.709CJ vii. 803a; CCSP iv. 519; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 222; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, ii. 329.

Yet even as he worked to drive this divisive oath through the House, Hesilrige attempted to extend an olive branch to the defeated Lambertonians, acting as a teller in two divisions on 2 January 1660 for including Lambert in a vote that all the soldiers in the ‘late defection and rebellion’ who submitted to Parliament before 9 January would be indemnified for their life and estate. The opposing tellers included Hutchinson and John Weaver.710CJ vii. 802b. Furthermore, Hesilrige quickly repented of his hostility to Vane’s presence in the Rump, striving hard, but unsuccessfully, to prevent the latter’s expulsion from the House on 9 January.711CJ vii. 806; Clarendon SP iii. 650; CCSP iv. 520; Rowe, Vane, 231. Indeed, according to one report ‘he wept when he saw he could not hinder it. He has much lost himself by appearing for Vane, as also for pressing the oath of abjuration’.712Bodl. Clarendon 68, f. 146. Hesilrige’s inability to bind up the wounds that the commonwealth party had inflicted on itself in September and October 1659 would prove fatal to the good old cause and, with it, his own political career. ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’, declared Ludlowe, ‘having parted with Sir Henry Vane and Major [Richard] Salwey, his most able and best friends, began to lose ground and all that he said in the House or elsewhere to go for nothing’.713Ludlow, Mems. ii. 211. By mid-January, Hesilrige reportedly faced resolute opposition from Cooper, Morley and Weaver – who, as leading figures in the ‘moderate party’, would all support the re-admission of the secluded Members in February – and had altogether lost the high spirits and confidence he had evinced in late December.714Clarendon SP iii. 650; CCSP iv. 524, 532.

Perhaps Hesilrige’s gravest political miscalculation during the Rump’s last hurrah of 1659-60 was his over-reliance on the military power of George Monck, whose bloodless defeat of Lambert late in 1659 had done much to bring down the committee of safety.715Ludlow, Voyce, 281. The first serious blow to Hesilrige’s confidence in Monck came on 30 January, when the House received a letter from the general – who had marched his army down as far as St Albans – proposing that all but two army regiments, including that of Hesilrige himself, should be ordered out of London in order to make way for his own forces.716Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 164-5. This proposal provoked a ‘long and violent’ debate, in which Hesilrige – speaking for the council of state – offered a compromise solution, ‘but nothing prevailed that he said against the general’s letter’.717CJ vii. 826b; Baker, Chronicle, 681. Hesilrige was inclined to dismiss this episode as an attempt by his enemies to ‘ensnare him ... thinking thereby to create a difference between him and Monck, wherein he had disappointed them by desiring their [the London regiments’] removal himself, contrary to their expectation, entering into a prolix commendation of Monck and assuring us that he was a person on whose fidelity they might safely rely’. But Ludlowe was not convinced

I conjecture it proceeded partly from an apprehension that things were already gone so far that he [Hesilrige] doubted whether he could put any stop to them; and partly from some sparks of hope that Monck could not be such a devil to betray a trust so freely reposed in him. For he kept a constant correspondence with Sir Arthur and in all his letters repeated the engagements of his fidelity to the Parliament, with expressions of the greatest zeal for a commonwealth-government.718Ludlow, Mems. ii. 212-13.

Monck would probably not have prevailed quite as easily as he did if Hesilrige had heeded Ludlowe’s advice to draw the English regiments to London in defence of the commonwealth.719Ludlow, Mems. ii. 224, 232; Reece, The Army in Cromwellian England, 219. The general later admitted that

no man was so capable to obstruct my designs as Sir Arthur Hesilrige, who had in his immediate command the government of Berwick, Carlisle, Newcastle and Tynemouth, with a regiment of foot and one of the best regiments of horse in the army and had an influence upon all the rest of the regiments in England...720Clarke Pprs iv. 302-3.

Hesilrige’s continuing faith in Monck is suggested by his nomination in first place to a committee set up on 31 January 1660 to bring in a bill for approving and justifying the general’s ‘late actings’.721CJ vii. 827a. Hesilrige, Scot and their ‘violent friends’ were elated by Monck’s willingness to obey orders from the council of state on 8 February to suppress renewed agitation in the City for a free Parliament. Coming into the House on 9 February, Hesilrige ‘broke out in the presence of divers Members into these expressions “All is our own, he [Monck] will be honest”’.722Ludlow, Mems. ii. 219; HMC Leyborne-Popham, 215. But their jubilation quickly turned to anger and suspicion when Monck asked for a respite of his orders, whereupon Hesilrige reported a proposal from the council for electing a new Common Council and was named in first place to a committee for that purpose.723CJ vii. 838a, 838b; Baker, Chronicle, 684-5; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 219-20; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 167-9. He reacted even more angrily on 11 February to what amounted to an ultimatum from Monck and his officers, protesting at the Rump’s favouring of ‘fanatics’ to the detriment of ‘the most conscientious and sober sort of men’ and demanding that it issue writs for holding new parliamentary elections. After winning a division that day in favour of the House proceeding to remodel the army’s command structure, Hesilrige was named to a new five-man commission for governing the army under Fleetwood as commander-in-chief – ‘at which Monck was noted to be discontented’, claimed Whitelocke, ‘and many judged it an act of no great present policy. But Hesilrige especially did drive on furiously.’724CJ vii. 841a; Baker, Chronicle, 686-7; Whitelocke, Diary, 569; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 220-1, 222-3; OPH xxii. 92-3, 98-103; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 170-2; Hutton, Restoration, 93-4.

Despite these events, Hesilrige continued to put faith in Monck’s protestations of loyalty to the Rump – although by early February 1660 it was widely believed that the general favoured a free Parliament – and was at pains to assure him that he had not been conferring with Lambert and Vane, for ‘neither have I had or will be persuaded to have any discourse with them’.725Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke ms CCLXVII, f. 102; Clarendon SP iii. 678-9; Clarke Pprs. iv. 260-1; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 224-5; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 174. Talks that Monck brokered on 14 February between some of the Rumpers and the Members secluded in 1648 seem to have made progress towards reaching a political compromise acceptable to both groups, prompting the general to invite Hesilrige, Scot and their allies to further discussions on 18 February.726Clarke Pprs. iv. 264; Davies, Restoration, 287. On 16 February, however, Hesilrige and Scot signalled their continuing commitment to a more exclusive political settlement by serving as majority tellers in favour of disenfranchising any voters who had subscribed to declarations calling for a free Parliament.727CJ vii. 845b; Clarendon SP iii. 682. When Hesilrige and other leading commonwealthsmen attended the meeting on 18 February, some of the secluded Members ‘reflected so undecently upon the proceedings of the Parliament since their exclusion’ that Hesilrige ‘lost all patience’ and walked out.728Baker, Chronicle, 687; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 228; Whitelocke, Diary, 570; Davies, Restoration, 288. Predictably, ‘Hesilrige, Scot and their party’ reacted with ‘great heat and discontent’ to Monck’s resolve on 21 February to re-admit the Members turned out at Pride’s Purge, and they informed him ‘that they would not join with the secluded Members or act any more’ in the House.729HMC Leyborne-Popham, 222; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 237; Davies, Restoration, 288. One of the House’s first orders after the re-admission of the secluded Members was to dissolve the commission appointed on 11 February for governing the army.730CJ vii. 847a. Hesilrige, Scot and other noted commonwealthsmen were dropped in elections to a new council of state on 23 February.

Hesilrige and his friends appear to have withdrawn from Parliament for about two weeks after the re-admission of the secluded Members on 21 February.731Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 223. With their power at Westminster visibly on the wane, Hesilrige ‘and the firebrands of that party’ were said to have instigated army agitation early in March in which Monck was confronted with calls from Okey and other officers to declare ‘against all single persons, particularly the king and his family, and for the settling of a free state’. But Monck was unmoved and ordered all officers to repair to their commands. Convinced that Hesilrige had ‘a principal hand in raising this spirit in the officers’, the council of state conducted ‘several examinations’ into his conduct, and on 6 March, the House summoned him to attend its service. But ‘standing up in his place’ in the House on 7 March, he denied the charge, and the matter was referred back to the council.732CJ vii. 864b, 866b; Nicholas Pprs. iv. 200-1; CCSP iv. 594; Baker, Chronicle, 694-5; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 241; Davies, Restoration, 298-300.

In response to Parliament’s repeal on 13 March 1660 of the oath of engagement, Hesilrige, Scot and ‘some other well-wishers to the commonwealth’ tried to persuade Monck to ‘take the dominion of the three kingdoms upon himself, than to have the king restored’. Hesilrige reportedly informed the general that ‘many of his friends were much troubled at the Parliament’s actions, which tended both to the ruin of him and all the good people of the nation, since it was evident that by what they had voted ... nothing was intended but the restitution of the king’. A republic, Hesilrige and his friends told Monck, was evidently ‘not agreeable with the disposition of the people, who are always bad judges of what is best for themselves. And therefore, since a single person was necessary, there could not be one fitter than he for that office’. To sweeten these offers, they promoted a bill for settling Hampton Court upon Monck and his heirs. But once again, Monck ‘would by no means hear more of these temptations’.733Baker, Chronicle, 693; Ludlow, Voyce, 89; HMC Leyborne-Popham, 225-6; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 194. Hesilrige’s last appointment, and final defeat, in the Long Parliament was on 15 March, when he was a minority teller for passing a bill to settle lands on Monck.734CJ vii. 877b. The next day (16 Mar.) Parliament dissolved itself. On 17 March, Hesilrige, Scot and other former MPs reportedly attended the parliamentarian grandee the earl of Manchester in an unsuccessful effort to persuade him and Thomas Lord Fairfax to resume their military commands in defence of the commonwealth.735CCSP iv. 616.

In a last desperate attempt to stem the royalist tide, Ludlowe, Scot and other former Rumpers prepared to rally the republican interest in the City and army against Monck and employed Slingisby Bethell* to engage Hesilrige in this design. But shortly before Bethell visited him, Hesilrige had himself attended Monck and been denied any assurance for his own or the commonwealth’s preservation. Thus Bethell found him ‘in a very melancholy and dejected posture, leaning his head upon both his hands and ... saying unto him “we are undone, we are undone”’.736Ludlow, Mems. ii. 251-2, Voyce, 101. Hesilrige had overcome his despondency sufficiently by mid-April to contest the elections at Leicester for the 1660 Convention. But his electoral prospects were ruined when 200 or so Leicestershire gentry rode into the town and warned the voters that ‘if they chose Hesilrige they would never spend more money there nor hold session and other meetings’, with the result that he was roundly defeated on a poll. Robert Wallop* was reported to have put up Hesilrige and Neville as candidates for Whitchurch, in Hampshire, but neither man was returned for this or any other borough.737HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Leicester’; ‘Whitchurch’; CCSP iv. 628; M. Coate, ‘William Morice and the Restoration of Charles II’, EHR xxxiii. 376.

Imprisonment and death, 1660-1

Perceiving that ‘all tended to the restitution of the king and that there would thereby ensue a ruin to his person, family and fortune’, Hesilrige attended Monck early in April 1660 and received assurances that if he promised to live quietly at home and do nothing to obstruct the king’s restoration, the general would undertake to secure his life and estate.738Clarke Pprs. iv. 303; CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 249; SP29/1/83, f. 159. It was perhaps on the strength of Monck’s promises to obtain royal clemency for him that Hesilrige pulled out of arrangements with Wallop and Nicholas Love* to take ship for the continent in April, ‘declaring he knew not anything he had done which he durst not justify’. When Wallop, too, decided to stay put, Ludlowe speculated their both men were reluctant to abandon their ‘great estates’.739Ludlow, Voyce, 281.

Finding himself under suspicion in the aftermath of Lambert’s abortive rising later in April (in which his son Thomas had taken part), Hesilrige wrote to Monck, asking that he inform the council of state

that I have neither directly nor indirectly done anything in opposition to the present authority settled by the Parliament in the council of state. Neither was I knowing in the least degree of the disturbance made by Lambert. I have always acted with the authority of Parliament, and never against it, and hold it my duty to submit to the authority of the nation and not to oppose it and have hazarded my all to bring the military power under the civil authority ... being secured by your lordship’s promise, I hope to end the remainder of my days in peace and quiet.740Clarke Pprs. iv. 268; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 259.

The Convention had other ideas, however, and on 16 June it voted that Hesilrige be exempted from the Act of Indemnity as to his estate; and, early in July, he and Vane were arrested on the ‘pretext that they had endeavoured to persuade divers officers of the army to form a party in order to oppose the present power’.741CJ viii. 63a; Whitelocke, Diary, 610; Ludlow, Voyce, 179; Mems. ii. 285, 289-90. Hesilrige was imprisoned in the Tower, from where he petitioned the king for a pardon, maintaining that he was

not in the least measure guilty of contriving, or so much as knowing of, his late Majesty’s death before it was past ... [that he] opposed Cromwell’s usurping to his utmost ... publicly affirming and declaring that if the nation had a king he ought to be the right king ... was against all usurpers and did therefore labour to bring the chief officers of the army under the power of the civil government by taking their commissions from the then Speaker ... That your petitioner assisted the Lord General Monck in keeping the officers in Scotland in their commands according to his [Monck’s] desire, who otherwise had been turned out of the army.742SP29/1/83, f. 159; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 8; Denton, Only in Heaven, 232-4.

When the Lords demanded that Hesilrige be exempted as to life as well as estate, the Commons debated his case at great length on 21-4 August. Many of his former parliamentary colleagues and enemies spoke in his favour, among them Annesley, Cooper, Boothe, John Birch, Prynne and Tolhurst, and much was made of Monck’s ‘engagement’ on his behalf. On 24 August, Sir Anthony Irby* and Gilbert Gerard* were majority tellers in favour of exempting him as to his life – to which the Lords assented.743CJ viii. 135a, 137b; LJ xi. 114a, 136b, 144a; OPH xxii. 444-5, 447, 451, 452; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 293.

Languishing in the Tower, his spirits weighed down (according to Ludlowe) by ‘sad and melancholic thoughts’ upon the disappointment of his hopes ‘in relation to the public good, and of his own particular concernments, and that ... he had been made use of by Monck to be greatly instrumental therein’, Hesilrige died on 7 January 1661.744Ludlow, Voyce, 281. He was buried at Noseley, where his monumental inscription refers to one ‘who enjoyed his portion of his life in the times of greatest civil troubles that ever this nation had. He was a lover of liberty and faithful to his country. He delighted in sober company’.745Nichols, Leics. ii. 748, 753.

Having heard evidence in July 1661 to the effect that Hesilrige had endorsed the regicide and the extinguishing of the Stuart royal line, the Commons voted him guilty of high treason and that his estate be forfeit to the crown. In addition, however, it was voted that the king be petitioned to restore the estate to Hesilrige’s children, ‘in pursuance of the Duke of Albemarle’s [Monck’s] engagement’. In consequence of petitions to the king from Parliament and from Hesilrige’s two surviving sons, the crown restored part of the estate to the family, granting the remainder on petition from one of Hesilrige’s challengers for the ownership of Eslington.746CJ viii. 298a-299a; SP29/59/17, f. 28; CSP Dom. 1661-2, pp. 249, 421, 479, 615. Hesilrige’s grandson was returned for Leicestershire in 1690.747HP Commons 1690-1715, ‘Sir Thomas Hesilrige’.