MOORE, John (c.1599-1650), of Bank Hall, Walton-on-the-Hill, Lancs.

Background and early career

Moore’s ancestors had settled at Liverpool by the early thirteenth century and had held office in the borough on numerous occasions since 1246.41VCH Lancs. iii. 37; Liverpool in King Charles the Second’s Time ed. W. F. Irvine (Liverpool, 1899), xiii-xiv; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 1-2, 40. Two members of the family had represented Liverpool in the Parliament of 1307, but the Moores do not appear to have supplied any further MPs for the borough until the return of Moore’s father, Edward Moore, in 1625.42HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Edward Moore’; VCH Lancs. iii. 37. Nevertheless, by the late sixteenth century they were the largest property holders in Liverpool, owning 55 burgage tenements and the highly lucrative lease of the town’s horse mill and windmill. Their main residence was at Bank Hall, situated on the town’s northern border in what is now the Kirkdale area of Merseyside.43Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 1, 2, 24-5, 33.

The Moores had aligned themselves with the Stanleys, earls of Derby – the most powerful family in the north west under the Tudors and early Stuarts – serving them as stewards, comptrollers and receivers. Although Edward Moore did not occupy any formal position in the Stanley household, he occasionally performed services for the family and enjoyed their patronage. His warm relations with the Stanleys strengthened his status as Liverpool’s leading landowner and municipal office-holder during the early seventeenth century. In addition to his four terms as the town’s mayor, he was also a Lancashire magistrate and served as sheriff of the county in 1620-1.44HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Edward Moore’; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 2, 3, 40-4, 55, 56. Despite his firmly Protestant convictions and his zeal in prosecuting Catholic recusants, there is no evidence that he was a puritan in the sense of identifying with the cause of further reformation in the Church of England.45HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Edward Moore’; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 59, 61, 63.

John Moore began his public career very much in his father’s shadow. He was added to the bench in about 1624 – probably with the backing of William Stanley, 6th earl of Derby – and was elected mayor of Liverpool in October 1632 (a month before his father’s death en route home from London).46Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 49, 69-70. Like his father, he seems to have found little difficulty in combining the roles of alderman and the town’s principal private landlord. He certainly attended corporation meetings reasonably regularly in the early and mid-1630s.47Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 84. On the other hand, his failure or inability to honour the terms of several loans he took out with the corporation and its members put his relationship with his fellow town fathers under some strain during the 1630s. Fortunately for the corporation and his position within it, the bulk of the £4,000 or so in debts that he ran up during the 1630s were contracted with outside parties.48LC4/202, ff. 87v, 205, 230; Lancs. RO, DDK/471/70, 75-6; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 100, 101, 103, 105.

The assertion that Moore ‘led the opposition in Liverpool to the first levy of Ship Money in 1634’ is an overstatement.49‘John Moore’, Oxford DNB. Early in 1635, he was one of only two senior members of the corporation who opposed a municipal order ‘that if any suit or trouble’ be brought against the mayor or other officeholders in collecting Ship Money in Liverpool, ‘that defence thereof shall be made at the general costs of the whole town’. Whether Moore opposed this order on financial grounds or out of a principled objection to Ship Money itself is impossible to determine. In September, however, he approved another order for levying £30 in the town ‘according to an agreement made ... by the high sheriff’ – which was very probably a reference to Liverpool’s Ship Money quota.50Chandler, Liverpool, 183, 184. Again like his father, he was a firm Protestant, although before the civil war he demonstrated few, if any, of the traits and connections associated with puritanism. Indeed, one of his friends during the 1630s has been identified as the episcopalian clergyman, and client of Archbishop William Laud, Alexander Ross (or Rose).51Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 107; ‘Alexander Ross’, Oxford DNB.

Moore went to London in 1638 and seems to have remained there for much of the next two years. This sojourn in the capital was possibly linked to his partnership with two of his fellow officeholders as owners of the merchantman William and Thomas, which, though based in Liverpool by the early 1640s, appears to have been involved at some point before then in the trade between London and Barbados. This commercial venture probably swallowed up some of the money that Moore borrowed during the 1630s.52Chandler, Liverpool, 320, 373; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 81, 88. Although he attended Liverpool corporation on at least one occasion in March 1640 – the month in which the town returned James Lord Cranfield and John Holcrofte in the elections to the Short Parliament – his name is not visible among the signatories to the election indenture.53Supra, ‘Liverpool’; C219/42/2/142; Chandler, Liverpool, 266. Why Moore apparently did not stand for election on this occasion is unclear – although one possible explanation is that he did not wish to oppose the electoral patronage of James Stanley†, Lord Strange (who would succeed as 7th earl of Derby in 1642). Moore was on very close terms with Lord Strange, who had stood as godparent to his eldest son Edward.54Moore Fam. Pprs. ed. Brownbill, 183. In August 1640, in the midst of his efforts to raise money in Lancashire for the second bishops’ war, Lord Strange wrote to Moore, thanking him for acting on his behalf in some unspecified capacity and assuring him that ‘in [me] shall you find ever a true assured loving friend’.55Infra, ‘Sir Gilbert Hoghton’; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 88-9. In 1644, Moore would be described as ‘one who, heretofore, hath eaten much bread in Lathom House [one of the Stanleys’ main residences in Lancashire]’.56Mercurius Aulicus no. 16 (14-20 Apr. 1644), 943 (E.45.10).

Parliamentary diarist

Having chosen two outsiders to represent them in the Short Parliament, the Liverpool townsmen returned a third – the Welsh courtier Sir Richard Wynn – and Moore in the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640. Moore probably owed his return largely to the strength of his own interest as an alderman and local landowner.57Supra, ‘Liverpool’.

Four gentleman with the surname Moore, or More, returned to the Long Parliament – John Moore, Poynings More, Richard More and Thomas Moore. The less than scrupulous manner in which clerk of the Commons distinguished between these MPs would, ordinarily, have made it impossible even to outline John Moore’s early career at Westminster with any great accuracy. Moore stood out from this crowd, however, in keeping a parliamentary diary during his first two years in the House and possibly beyond, although only those note-books covering the periods 19 November to 10 December 1640, 13 February to 16 August 1641 and 12 January to 28 February 1642 appear to have survived.58Harl. 164, f. 36; Harl. 476, 477, 478, 479, 480, 541, ff. 62-118v; Procs. LP i. pp. xxxix-xli; PJ i. p. xiii; ii. pp. x-xi. His tendency to note when he was named to committees or served as teller not only helps to determine which of the references in the Journals to ‘Mr Moore’ apply to him but also confirms that on the vast majority of occasions on which the clerk used this title he was referring to the diarist.

The source of Moore’s inspiration for keeping a parliamentary diary was very probably the man he sat next to in the Commons – the self-professed ‘principal note-taker in the House’, Sir Simonds D’Ewes.59PJ i. pp. xv, 491, 494, 512; Harl. 165, f. 119v. The two MPs were – or, more likely, became – close friends and collaborated in adding to, or copying from, each other’s texts (as, occasionally, did John Rushworth*) and in taking notes during the other’s absence: ‘in fact, it would appear that D’Ewes and Moore acted as a team, consciously cooperating with each other to produce an accurate record’.60Harl. 165, ff. 110, 119v; D’Ewes (N), pp. xi, xii; PJ i. pp. xv-xvi, 46, 79, 252-3, 292, 327, 501. It was D’Ewes who acquired most of Moore’s note-books – possibly in the summer of 1643, when Moore left London for Lancashire – and preserved them for posterity.61PJ i. p. xvi.

Rather than edit or embellish his text afterwards, as D’Ewes often did, Moore largely confined himself to taking rough notes during debates, which he sometimes supplemented with material copied from the draft Commons journals. Occasionally he highlighted his own contribution to debate. But, unlike D’Ewes, he rarely disclosed his own views on matters under discussion in the House.62PJ i. p. xvi; ii. pp. xii, 53; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 92, 99. When the two men took opposing sides in a debate on 1 July 1641 over the largely procedural question of whether to retain the word ‘liberties’ in a bill for abolishing the prerogative court of star chamber, D’Ewes referred in passing, and rather condescendingly, to the arguments of his opponents on this occasion and then included his own speech on the matter. Moore, on the other hand, gave equal treatment to those for and against and concluded simply by noting that he was a minority teller with Denzil Holles in the division that settled the issue.63CJ ii. 195b; Procs. LP ii. 437-8, 447-8. In general, Moore provided a factual account of the House’s proceedings, and in many instances, it has been argued, his entries ‘reflect better coverage and perceptivity than those of D’Ewes’.64PJ i. p. xvi.

Parliamentary career, 1640-2

Using Moore’s diaries in conjunction with the Journals it is clear that he was appointed to at least 30 committees in the opening session of the Long Parliament – that is, from November 1640 to September 1641. In addition, he was probably the ‘Mr Moore’ named to a further 13 committees in this period. A significant proportion of these 43 appointments fell into three broad categories. The first category was that of mercantile and maritime affairs – probably reflecting his interests as a ship-owner. On 5 December 1640, the Commons ordered that Moore ‘and all the merchants of the House’ be added to the committee to investigate monopolies, and he was included thereafter on committees on ‘securing of navigation’, the release of English captives held by the Barbary corsairs and to investigate the exactions of the customs officials.65CJ ii. 45b, 48b, 55a, 157a, 394a, 446a. On 23 February 1641, he presented a petition to the House from Lancashire – and principally, it seems, the county’s mercantile interest – complaining at the imposition by the crown of a two shilling excise upon every chaldron of coal sold there.66Procs. LP ii. 518-19. In the spring of 1642, he would serve as a teller in divisions concerning Parliament’s appointment of naval captains and the collection of taxes from London’s merchant community.67CJ ii. 474b, 509b.

The second category of committee appointments related to the reform of the perceived abuses associated with the court and prerogative rule since the late 1620s.68CJ ii. 75a, 82a, 87a, 91a, 114a, 157a, 191b, 201a, 253b. If Moore contributed at all to the prosecution of the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) it would have been largely in consequence of his addition on 29 January 1641 to the committee for drawing up the charge against the disgraced royal minister – and specifically, to investigate the commissions that the earl had granted to several Catholic noblemen to raise forces against the Scottish Covenanters.69CJ ii. 75b.

The third, and closely related, category concerned the prosecution of the Laudian episcopate and the suppression of popery.70CJ ii. 84b, 91a, 101a, 113b, 128b, 129a, 166b, 258a. Moore received his most important assignment in this area at a meeting of the Commons’ standing committee for religion, on 23 November 1640, when he was named to a sub-committee that was dominated by godly Members and was set up, in his own words, ‘to make an inquiry of the oppressions and sufferings of ministers by reason of any ... ecclesiastical proceedings whatsoever’. Between late November and mid-January 1641, he attended the committee and sub-committee on at least eight occasions.71Proc. LP i. 239-40, 260-1, 298-9, 345-6, 408-11, 445-6, 558-60; Procs. in Kent 1640 ed. Larking, 80, 81, 82, 96, 98. But if his (infrequent) contributions to debate during the opening session are any guide, he was worried less by the persecution of anti-Laudian ministers than by the threat to national security posed by the Catholics of Lancashire and Ireland.72Procs. LP ii. 290, 310. He was alert, also, to criticism of Parliament’s Erastian reformism, serving as a minority teller on 1 March with the godly Lincolnshire knight Sir John Wray in favour of sending the clergyman Dr Thomas Chafin to the Tower for publicly calling upon God to deliver the nation from ‘lay puritans and lay Parliaments’. As Moore’s diary reveals, he and Wray were tellers for the yeas, not the noes as the clerk of the Commons mistakenly recorded.73CJ ii. 94b; Procs. LP ii. 589; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 279.

What appears to have been Moore’s longest speech during the opening session of the Long Parliament occurred on 10 March 1641, when he rehearsed the arguments for what was evidently the prevailing opinion among MPs that ‘the legislative and judicial power of bishops in the House of Peers ... is a great hindrance to the discharge of their spiritual function, prejudicial to the commonwealth and fit to be taken away by bill’. In words that echoed those uttered earlier in the debate by Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland, he argued that ‘they being bred to be bishops, that then they are not fit to give votes to make laws for us; and if otherwise, then not fit to be bishops’. Moore’s speech was recorded only by himself. Neither D’Ewes nor any other parliamentary diarist even hinted at his involvement in this important debate.74CJ ii. 101a; Procs. LP ii. 701. He was followed, it seems, by John Pym, who opined that if the bishops ‘came in by Christ’s command, as I conceive they did not, and not performing their Lord’s command, [they] are to be extinguished’.75Procs. LP ii. 701.

The bill for removing the bishops’ votes in the House of Lords was devised partly to give the parliamentary leadership, or ‘junto’, a voting majority in the Lords. Although Moore was broadly aligned with the junto on questions of religious reform, his association with Pym and his confederates was apparently slight, certainly during 1640-1. On the issue of money to pay and disband the English and Scottish armies in northern England, he seems to have been swayed by considerations that occasionally cut across the junto’s designs. Whereas he pledged £1,500 in November 1640 (and a further £500 in March 1641) towards securing a City loan for the maintenance of the armies, on 20 February 1641 – with the junto-men keen to secure parliamentary supply in order to strengthen their bargaining position with the king – Moore and Sir John Wray were tellers against granting two subsidies for supplying the armies in the north.76Procs. LP i. 228; ii. 501, 628. It seems that Moore and other ‘honest men’ were not willing to grant further supply until more progress had been made towards godly reformation and Strafford’s prosecution – both areas of policy on which the junto was prepared to compromise in its negotiations with the king.77Procs. LP ii. 498, 500; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 263-4. With Strafford (whose execution he seems to have witnessed) dead by mid-June, Moore was willing to serve on a committee, chaired by the future royalist grandee Edward Hyde, to draw up a bill for levying a poll tax.78CJ ii. 180a; Procs. LP iv. 350-1. Moore was named with eight other MPs to a conference-management team on 24 July – his only such appointment before the outbreak of civil war – concerning a loan of £40,000 from the City. But this conference was managed by four of the Commons’ grandees, with Moore apparently doing no more than merely attending the meeting.79CJ ii. 223b; Proc. LP vi. 82-3. Two days later (26 July), he was a teller in what seems to have been a minor division concerning the articles against the army plotter Henry Percy*.80CJ ii. 224b; Proc. LP vi. 94.

Granted leave of absence on 16 August 1641, Moore was appointed by both Houses on 30 August to the Lancashire commission for disarming Catholic recusants – an assignment that he took very seriously.81CJ ii. 259b, 267b; LJ iv. 385a; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 108. He does not appear to have returned to Westminster until mid-January 1642, when his diary coverage resumed (it had apparently ceased in mid-August 1641) and he was named to a committee for preparing a declaration concerning the threat of ‘invasion by papists’ and recounting ‘the several designs that this quarter of a year past [i.e. since the Irish rebellion of October 1641] hath been against the Parliament and the safety of the kingdom’.82CJ ii. 372a.

Between mid-January and the end of August 1642, Moore was named to approximately 25 committees and served as a teller in five divisions.83CJ ii. 414a, 474b, 497b, 509b, 554b; PJ i. 275; ii. 23. Roughly half of his appointments during these months were concerned with securing Lancashire – and the kingdom generally – against the perceived Catholic menace and for advancing godly religion and providing relief for the Protestants fleeing Ireland.84CJ ii. 372a, 381b, 387a, 391a, 409a, 414a, 415b, 417a, 438a, 446b, 447a, 467b, 486a, 496b, 702b; PJ i. 192, 291, 299, 426, 431; CSP Ire. 1633-47, p. 784. Similarly, his contributions on the floor of the House, which were brief and infrequent, focused on affairs in the north west, particularly in relation to the Catholic presence in the region and the dispatch of forces to Ireland.85PJ i. 260, 291, 295, 428, 432. In a debate on 10 February concerning the appointment of new lord lieutenants for the English counties, he joined D’Ewes and the Lancashire MP Roger Kirkbye in defending James Stanley, Lord Strange – Parliament’s prospective lord lieutenant for Lancashire – from accusations by Alexander Rigby I that he ‘was a favourer of papists and very forward against the Scots [in the bishops’ wars]’. Either Kirkbye or (more probably) Moore insisted that Lord Strange was a firm Protestant and had ‘merited very much both of this House and the commonwealth’.86PJ i. 338-9, 341. When, on 1 March, Rigby informed the Commons that a petition was being touted around Lancashire on Lord Strange’s behalf, Moore declared that he had been informed ‘of another petition that was carried up and down in that county, and means used to get hands to it, in which there were some false aspersions cast upon the Lord Strange’.87PJ i. 491. Despite his expressions of support for Lord Strange, Moore was among a group of Lancashire gentlemen that the House voted on 24 March should be recommended to Parliament’s newly appointed lord lieutenant for the county, Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, as his deputy lieutenants.88CJ ii. 495b.

As part of its efforts to expedite the sending of troops and supplies to Ireland’s beleagured Protestant forces, the Commons sent Moore into the north west in April 1642 with a letter to Sir William Brereton*, Viscount Lisle* (Philip Sidney), the sheriff of Cheshire and the mayor of Chester, authorising them ‘to see that all possible means be used in the transporting the horse troops that are in Lancashire and Cheshire into Ireland’ and to report to the House ‘why they [the troops] have been so long there and not gone’.89CJ ii. 524b; Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 538-9. At some point that spring, Moore joined the Welsh MP William Thomas in investing £600 as Irish Adventurers, although there is no record that they were ever allocated any land in Ireland (Thomas was a family friend of Moore’s fellow MP for Liverpool, Sir Richard Wynn, which probably explains how the two men had become acquainted).90Infra, ‘William Thomas’; The Names of Such Members of the Commons House of Parliament as Have Already Subscribed (1642, 669 f.5.3); Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 565; J.R. MacCormack, ‘The Irish Adventurers and the English civil war’, Irish Hist. Studies, x. 52. Moore’s concern with affairs in Ireland was familial as well as political, for he was related by blood and marriage to several of Ireland’s leading Protestants – most notably, Sir William Brabazon, 1st earl of Meath.91Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 73. Moore had returned to Westminster by 3 May, when he was a majority teller with Sir Philip Stapilton in favour of declaring Sir William Waller* rightfully elected at Andover – the opposing tellers were the Straffordians and soon-to-be royalists Sir Edward Alford and Edward Kyrton.92CJ ii. 554b.

Siding with Parliament, 1642

Anxious to defend Bank Hall against the rising tide of royalist feeling in and around Liverpool, Moore may well have welcomed a request by the Commons on 9 June 1642 (which was turned into an order of both Houses on 15 June) that Raphe Assheton II, Richard Shuttleworthe I, Alexander Rigby I and Moore – all now Lord Wharton’s deputy lieutenants – go down into Lancashire to oversee the enforcement of the Militia Ordinance in the county.93CJ ii. 590b, 615a, 625b; LJ v. 137a; Lancs. Civil War Tracts, 16-18, 21; Gratton, Lancs. 80. Before leaving for Lancashire, Moore pledged to provide two horses on the propositions for the defence of Parliament.94PJ iii. 472. Having returned to the House by 1 July, Moore ‘made a relation of the condition of affairs in Lancashire’, in which it emerged that he had met with Lord Strange and tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade him to replace the magazine that he had removed from Liverpool Castle. According to Moore, Lord Strange was reluctant to execute the commission of array in Lancashire, but that when he ‘appeared in it’ the people would ‘much adhere to him’.95PJ iii. 157, 159. On 11 July, Moore presented a letter to the House that had been sent to him by Raphe Assheton II in Lancashire, requesting that he acquaint the Commons with ‘what great benefit might ensue for the peace and quiet of [Lancashire] ... if the Lord Strange might be regained to our part and made [i.e. re-appointed in place of Wharton] ... lord lieutenant’. Assheton also requested that Moore hasten back to Lancashire ‘for the further execution of the ordinance touching the militia’. In the event, however, the House was unwilling either to dispense with Moore’s services or to pay court to Lord Strange.96PJ iii. 198-9. On 25 July, Moore also tried to defend Lord Strange’s confederate Roger Kirkbye against allegations by Rigby that he was active on the Lancashire commission of array. Nevertheless, Moore was almost certainly the ‘Moore’ named that same day (25 July) with Rigby to a standing committee to investigate and report on the proceedings of the commissioners of array.97CJ ii. 689b; PJ iii. 263.

Moore’s most important appointment of 1642 came in the form of a commission, granted on 6 August, as colonel of horse and captain of foot in a unit that Parliament – or perhaps, more specifically, the newly established Committee of Safety* – set up at some point that month to maintain the ‘guards and watches in [and] about London’ and, from 11 February 1643, the borough of Southwark.98CJ ii. 962a; LJ v. 307b-308a; Morton, ‘Fam. of Moore’, 154; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 118. It was the Committee of Safety that was responsible for paying Moore, and he was evidently privy to some of its intelligence findings.99CJ ii. 947a; iii. 158b; Harl. 164, ff. 307, 396. In the months that followed this auspicious beginning to his military career, the Commons vested Moore with extensive powers of search and arrest in hunting down deserters from the army of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, preventing ‘warlike provisions’ being conveyed to Oxford and in uncovering arms caches in the houses of London’s royalists.100CJ ii. 861b, 930a, 940b, 947a; iii. 37b, 49a, 52a, 93a, 106b, 125a; Harl. 164, ff. 284v, 307, 368, 382; Harl. 165, f. 109v; Add. 18777, ff. 127v, 136v. Given the magnitude of Moore’s authority and responsibilities, it is strange that this appointment has excited so little comment – then and since. How a Lancashire gentleman such as Moore, with no military experience or history of political intimacy with the parliamentary leadership, came to command London’s security forces is a complete mystery.

Moore’s reasons for siding with Parliament in the civil war are easier to account for, owing much, as they surely did, to his fear of the Catholic threat in Lancashire and from Ireland and to his evident commitment to the cause of further reformation in religion. The sincerity of his godly convictions is suggested by his appointment in the autumn of 1642 to request his friend, the Lancashire Presbyterian divine Charles Herle, to preach the next fast sermon and to thank him for doing so afterwards.101CJ ii. 824a, 870a; HMC 10th Rep. IV, 96. Remarks by another Lancashire Presbyterian minister, Adam Martindale, that Moore’s family was ‘a pack of arrant thieves’ and ‘those that were not thieves (if there were any such) were generally ... desperately profane and bitter scoffers at piety’ almost certainly refer to Moore’s royalist in-laws, the Hockenhulls, who were staying at Bank Hall in 1643-4 when Martindale was employed as Moore’s clerk. Martindale acknowledged that he was treated ‘pretty civilly’ by Moore himself.102The Life of Adam Martindale ed. R. Parkinson (Chetham Soc. o.s. iv), 36-7; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 125.

Moore and the ‘fiery spirits’, 1642-3

Moore’s duties as commander of London’s guard almost certainly reduced his attendance in the House, which probably explains why D’Ewes makes no reference to his friend’s parliamentary diary or note-taking activities after 17 October 1642.103Harl. 164, f. 36. In the period between early September 1642 and mid-October 1643, Moore was named to somewhere between 10 and 28 committees and served as a messenger to the Lords on perhaps one or two occasions.104CJ ii. 783a, 892b LJ v. 373a, 497a. On the assumption that most references in the Journals to ‘Mr Moore’ apply to him, his appointments, particularly during the autumn of 1642, suggest that he was aligned with the ‘fiery spirits’ in favouring the vigorous prosecution of the war and of any persons, including MPs, who were deemed ‘delinquents’.105CJ ii. 769a, 825b, 842b, 845b, 853a, 943a, 957b, 994b; iii. 26b, 65b, 86a, 89a, 174b, 257b, 278a.

Moore’s opposition to seeking a swift negotiated settlement of the war emerged clearly during the debates early in 1643 over peace talks with the king. On 8 February, he was a teller with Sir Philip Stapilton – one of the earl of Essex’s most trusted officers – in two divisions in which they succeeded in stymieing the efforts of the pro-accommodationist interest to secure a vote that Charles’s answer to Parliament’s peace propositions was ‘positive’.106CJ ii. 959b. In a debate on the peace process two days later (10 Feb.), Moore endorsed the line taken by the war-party grandees that the armies on both sides should be disbanded before negotiations – which to D’Ewes and other MPs genuinely committed to an accommodation seemed ‘preposterous’ and ‘to propose an impossibility against the making of peace’.107Infra, ‘Sir Philip Stapilton’; Sir Henry Vane II’; Add. 18777, f. 149v; Mercurius Aulicus no. 7 (12-18 Feb. 1643), 85-7 (E.246.39); no. 8 (19-25 Feb. 1643), 95 (E.246.41); CSP Ven. 1642-3, p. 215.

The discovery late in May 1643 of the plot of Edmund Waller* – a royalist conspiracy to deliver up London to the king – saw Moore receive a (highly unusual) Commons order authorising him to ‘call a regiment together ... to assist him in the searching for and seizing of arms in such suspected places as he shall be informed of and shall think fit’.108CJ iii. 110b. A week or so later (9 June), he was ordered to search the baggage of the French ambassador before his departure on diplomatic business to Oxford.109CJ iii. 121a. Although D’Ewes deplored the violations of privacy and property associated with Moore’s command, and had little respect for Moore’s political skills or connections, the two men remained fast friends. Like D’Ewes, moreover, Moore seems to have associated personal – and, perhaps, political – integrity with an eschewal of ‘sects or schisms’.110Harl. 164, ff. 289, 307; Harl. 165, ff. 110, 119v.

Moore had fallen ill by early July 1643 with ‘a very violent, burning fever’ and, fearing for his life, had D’Ewes draw up a will for him. On 7 July, D’Ewes relayed a message to the House in which Moore claimed that he had contracted his illness ‘by his watching and labours in your service’, and that Bank Hall, ‘having been twice plundered ... and [he] being far from his own estate, he is in much want’. Through D’Ewes, he asked for £50 of the almost £1,000 due to him in arrears of pay, and he protested that ‘though he might have gained some thousand pounds in your service if he would have followed that course which some others have done, yet he never gained one penny in a sinister or unjust way’. Seconded by D’Ewes and other MPs, the Speaker moved successfully for an order to the Committee of Safety for paying Moore £100.111CJ iii. 158b; Harl. 165, f. 119v; Eg. 2647, f. 20. With his duties as commander of the guard assigned to another officer while he recovered, Moore relinquished his colonelcy in London altogether on 25 July.112CJ iii. 152b; Morton, ‘Fam. of Moore’, 154. He was well enough to attend the House on 7 August to vote against the propositions for settlement that had been drawn up by the peace interest in the Lords.113Harl. 165, f. 148v. But having received commissions in mid-August as a colonel of foot in Lancashire and governor of Liverpool he may have left the House shortly thereafter to assume his new duties in the north west.114Liverpool RO, 920 MOO/776; Morton, ‘Fam. of Moore’, 154; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 223.

Governor of Liverpool, 1643-4

D’Ewes makes no reference to his friend’s presence in the House between 7 August 1643 and May 1645, when Moore took the Solemn League and Covenant (it was not Moore, as several authorities have stated, but D’Ewes who spoke in the Commons in August 1644 in support of Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh).115Harl. 165, f. 148v; Harl. 166, f. 213v; A. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warws. (Cambridge, 1987), 237; Gratton, Lancs. 103. The ‘Mr Moore’ who received appointments in the Commons during the autumn of 1643 was in most cases the Shropshire MP Richard More.116CJ iii. 243b, 247a, 278a, 280a. Moore was in Liverpool by late October or early November, when he launched a daring raid across the Mersey estuary to capture a royalist battery that had been bombarding the town from the Wirral.117T. Dyson, ‘Col. Moore’s offensive against Wirral, Nov. 1643’, Trans. Hist. Soc. Lancs and Cheshire, clxii. 29-47. On 22 November, the Commons ordered the Committee of Navy and Customs* [CNC] to write to Parliament’s lord admiral, Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, requesting that he appoint Moore a vice-admiral for Lancashire and Westmorland (Warwick did not oblige until April 1644).118CJ iii. 317b; HMC 10th Rep. IV, 68; CCC 2802; V.-Adms. (L. and I. cccxxi), 33, 49. As governor of Liverpool and regional vice-admiral, Moore operated a flotilla – which included the William and Thomas (re-named in 1643 Moorecock) – in harrying and taking royalist shipping in the Irish Sea.119SP16/509, f. 99; CJ iii. 127a, 127b, 528b; v. 590a; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 556; 1645-7, p. 292; HMC 10th Rep. IV, 69; A Cal. of Material Rel. to Ireland and the High Ct. of Admiralty 1641-60 ed. E. Murphy (Dublin, 2011), 128, 159 M. Gratton, ‘Liverpool under Parliament: the anatomy of a civil war garrison, May 1643 to June 1644’, Trans. Hist. Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, clvi. 67-8; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 130, 161. However, he was criticised by MPs for failing to use the ships at his disposal to prevent the landing of royalist reinforcements from Ireland late in 1643.120Harl. 165, ff. 246r-v.

Among those tending Moore’s interests in London and keeping him abreast of the news during his absence from the House were not only D’Ewes but also Sir Raphe Assheton I*, William Ashhurst*, John Bradshawe* and (by December 1645) the grandest of the Independent grandees, Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland.121Harl. 165, f. 246v; Belvoir, PZ.2, f. 40; QZ.5, f. 1; QZ.25, f. 3; HMC 10th Rep. IV, 69, 74, 76-7. Moore had probably come to Northumberland’s attention as a result of their involvement in naval affairs; he would also have been well known to the earl’s nephew, Viscount Lisle, through their endeavours in 1642 to dispatch troops to Ireland.122SP16/513/49, f. 104.

Moore had particular need of his friends after his failure to prevent the fall of Liverpool to Prince Rupert’s forces in June 1644. The loss of Liverpool, and Moore’s eleventh hour escape by ship while royalist troops massacred hundreds of the townspeople, did little to enhance his reputation either locally or nationally. But much of the blame for Liverpool’s capture lay largely, it seems, with some of the soldiers and sailors manning its defences, who either out of faintheartedness or treachery abandoned their stations, leaving Rupert’s troops free to enter the town at will.123Supra, ‘Liverpool’; HMC 10th Rep. IV, 102-3; CCC 1344; Gratton, ‘Liverpool under Parliament’, 71-3; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 138. Moore seems to have lobbied vigorously, through his friends, to retain his place as governor after Liverpool was re-taken in November 1644. That he succeeded in this endeavour, in the face of considerable opposition from his fellow Lancashire deputy lieutenants and colonels, probably owed much to the support of the earl of Essex and Sir John Meldrum, the officer in charge of recovering Liverpool for Parliament, who praised Moore’s fidelity to the cause and the courage and zeal he had shown in defending the town against Prince Rupert.124HMC 10th Rep. IV, 73, 74; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 91; Gratton, Lancs. 91.

Westminster and Ireland, 1645-7

Moore returned to Westminster at some point between late March and 16 April 1645 – the day on which he was named to a Commons committee for resolving the feud between Colonel John Hutchinson* and the parliamentary committee at Nottingham.125Belvoir, QZ.25, f. 15; CJ iv. 112a. For the next 15 months or so he attended the Commons on a reasonably regular basis, receiving nomination to 22 committees and serving as teller in four divisions – two of which indicate his alignment with the more militant Independents in taking a tough line against royalists compounding for their estates.126CJ iv. 193a, 297b, 471a, 521a. His services were also enlisted by the House for translating the correspondence in French that had been captured in the king’s cabinet at Naseby, to advise with the Westminster Assembly concerning the election of elders within the London Presbyterian classes and to bring in an ordinance for regulating and sending godly ministers to Oxford University.127CJ iv. 183b, 218a, 595b. The Self-Denying Ordinance deprived Moore of his offices as colonel and governor of Liverpool (the Colonel Moore appointed governor of Gaunt House, near Oxford, after its capture in June 1645 was another man), but he remained active in a military sphere as vice-admiral of Lancashire and Westmorland and in organising supplies for Brereton at the siege of Chester during the winter of 1645-6.128CJ iv. 577a;

Moore is not easy to categorise in terms of his factional allegiance during the mid-1640s. He was among a raft of mostly Independent MPs added to the Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports* in October 1645, and the following spring he was selected by the House to request the prominent Lancashire Presbyterian divine Richard Heyricke to preach the next fast sermon and to thank him for doing so.129CJ iv. 297a; LJ vii. 624b. There is little in Moore’s parliamentary career to suggest that he was a prominent friends of the Scots, although on 9 July 1646 he reported (probably from the standing committee for petitions) amendments to an ordinance for paying £4,000 in arrears to a group of Scottish officers.130CJ iv. 493a, 526b, 556a, 584a, 612b. The next day (10 July), he was appointed a messenger to carry this ordinance and other legislation to the Lords.131CJ iv. 613b; LJ viii. 427a. Writing to Moore in Ireland in June 1647, his wife referred to the MPs Alexander Bence, Squier Bence and Giles Grene – who were leading members of the CNC and broadly aligned with the Presbyterian interest – as his arch-enemies, but it appears that their motives in withholding money for the Moorecock and related expenses were more pecuniary than political.132HMC 10th Rep. IV, 97-8.

Defeating Parliament’s enemies in Ireland was apparently Moore’s priority at Westminster by the mid-1640s. Named on 1 July 1645 to the Presbyterian-dominated Star Chamber Committee of Irish Affairs* [SCCIA], he was one of this new executive’s most active members, attending at least 40 of its meetings between July 1645 and August 1646.133Supra, ‘Irish Committees’; CJ iv. 191a, 295a; CSP Ire. 1633-47, pp. 407, 477. Why he then served as a minority teller with the Independent MP Sir Henry Mildmay on 14 April 1646 against charging £10,000 upon the excise ‘for the service of Ireland’ is another mystery. The opposing, majority tellers were his colleagues on the SCCIA, Richard Knightley and Sir John Temple.134CJ iv. 521a. This tellership notwithstanding, Moore was among those subsequently named by the SCCIA to press the excise office for payment of the £10,000.135CSP Ire. 1633-47, p. 473.

At some point during the second half of 1645, Moore submitted a proposal to the SCCIA for raising a regiment of foot to serve in Ireland.136Liverpool RO, 920 MOO/1513; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 169. On the committee’s recommendation, its leading member, the lord lieutenant of Ireland, Viscount Lisle, commissioned him as a colonel on 15 July 1646, by which time Moore had already begun preparations to raise a regiment and ship it to Ireland.137Liverpool Univ. Lib. GB 141, MS.23.2A(2); CSP Ire. 1633-47, pp. 469, 471, 473, 479, 503, 510, 513, 535; HMC 10th Rep. IV, 80; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 227. Arthur Annesley* and his fellow commissioners with the British forces in Ulster were expecting Moore’s arrival in August or September.138Belvoir, QZ.26, f. 18. But lack of money and provisions meant that it was not until late November that Moore landed in Ireland, and most of his regiment deserted when the ship carrying it from Liverpool ran aground on the Isle of Anglesey.139Belvoir, QZ.26, f. 22; CJ v. 282a; LJ viii. 662a; CSP Ire. 1633-47, pp. 542, 550, 565.

Moore spent most of 1647 in Ireland, battling the Irish Confederates and against the lack of provisions for his ‘greatly-distressed’ soldiers.140Bodl. Carte 20, f. 522; CJ v. 95b; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 526; CSP Ire. 1633-47, p. 601; HMC 10th Rep. IV, 77-8, 82, 83, 85, 86-90, 96. He was one of the commissioners appointed by the Derby House Committee of Irish Affairs* in March to treat with the king’s lord lieutenant of Ireland, James Butler, marquess of Ormond, for the surrender of Dublin to Parliament, which was effected in June.141Bodl. Carte 20, ff. 513, 515, 517; Carte 21, ff. 188, 216, 235, 237; CSP Ire. 1633-47, pp. 681, 687, 741; 1647-60, p. 738; HMC 10th Rep. IV, 82; R. Cox, Hibernia Anglicana (1690), pt. 2, app. xxxviii; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 651; CJ vii. 165a. But he was certainly not Parliament’s chief negotiator, as one authority has implied.142Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 178, 179. His son and heir, Edward Moore, also exaggerated in claiming that after the surrender of Dublin his father ‘received all the power from the lord of Ormond and ruled and governed the whole kingdom of Ireland as one of the three commissioners from the Parliament of England to his dying day. Besides, at his death he was governor of Dublin’.143HMC 10th Rep. IV, 83. In fact, the government of Parliament’s quarters in Ireland in the two years or so after the surrender of Dublin devolved principally upon Colonel Michael Jones, and he and then Colonel John Hewson* were the only parliamentary governors of Dublin during Moore’s time in Ireland.144Supra, ‘John Hewson’; Bodl. Carte 21, f. 436v; ‘Michael Jones’, Oxford DNB.

Second civil war and regicide

Moore returned to England in the spring of 1648, but had not yet resumed his seat, it seems, when both Houses passed an order on 22 March that the £1,000 voted him in August 1647 in part of his arrears be paid out of such concealed or under-valued delinquents’ estates as he could discover and report to the Committee for Advance of Money*.145Belvoir, QZ.28, f. 13; CJ v. 277a, 465a; LJ x. 132a. Heavily in debt, and with his army arrears largely unpaid, Moore had frequently played the role of informer for the committee since the summer of 1645 and, in all, had received about £1,750 as a discoverer of concealed estates.146CCAM 179, 581, 597, 623, 632, 684; HMC 10th Rep. IV, 76; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 234.

The period between mid-May 1648 and Pride’s Purge was one of the busiest in Moore’s parliamentary career. He was named to 22 ad hoc committees, served as a teller in one (minor) division and was a messenger to the Lords on two occasions.147CJ v. 559b, 663b, 681b; LJ x. 424a, 452a. Regarded by the House as one of its most trusted servants, he was made chairman of committees for receiving and stating army accounts, for drafting an ordinance giving greater power to the sequestration treasurers at the Guildhall and for transporting to the colonies (or otherwise disposing of) the English and Scottish prisoners captured during the second civil war.148Supra, ‘Committee for Sequestration’; CJ v. 557b, 581b, 589a, 629a, 632b, 635a, 641b, 653b, 658b, 662b, 692a; vi. 5a, 57b, 60b; CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 110, 114, 127, 139, 148, 190, 280, 288; CCC 147; HMC 10th Rep. IV, 91, 93-4. By mid-June, moreover, he had resumed his role as commander of London’s guard and was busy all summer in arresting royalists, searching houses and seizing horses and arms. On this occasion, he took his orders from the Derby House Committee*.149CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 132, 133, 136, 148, 152, 154, 156, 157, 166, 167, 175, 211, 254; CJ vi. 103a. His activities as Parliament’s chief of security in London – and perhaps also the considerable amount of time and effort that he and his agents put into discovering concealed delinquents’ estates – prompted Marchamont Nedham to refer to him in December 1648 as ‘the state’s new catchpole or privy plunderer cum privilegio’.150Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 39 (19-26 Dec. 1648), sig. Eee3 (E.477.30); SP19/118, ff. 281-2; CCAM 529, 840, 886, 890-1, 946, 967, 989, 991, 1012, 1046, 1191. The Commons also turned to Moore that summer to write letters on its behalf to Assheton II and other leading Lancashire parliamentarians, thanking them for their ‘good services’ in defending the region against the royalists and Scottish Engagers.151CJ v. 615b, 680b. On 5 August, he was appointed to request Heyricke and the ‘moderate Independent’ divine Joseph Caryl to preach the next fast sermon.152CJ v. 662b; ‘Joseph Caryl’, Oxford DNB. In addition to these duties, he was a regular attendee at the Admiralty Committee and the SCCIA.153Add. 9305, ff. 41, 45v, 54v, 60v, 67; CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 11, 27; R. McCaughey, ‘The English Navy, Politics and Administration 1640-9’ (New Univ. of Ulster Ph.D. thesis, 1983), 278. None of his handful of committee appointments that autumn was linked in any way to the treaty negotiations with the king at Newport.

Moore retained his seat at Pride’s Purge on 6 December 1648 and was among those MPs who took the dissent to the 5 December vote – that the king’s answer to the Newport propositions were an acceptable basis for settlement – on 20 December, the day it was introduced as a test of the Rump’s membership.154CJ vi. 97b; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 39, sig. Eee3. In contrast to Alexander Rigby I – the only other Lancashire Member appointed a commissioner to try the king – he was very active in Charles’s prosecution, attending 14 meetings of the trial commission and all four sessions of the trial itself.155Muddiman, Trial, 76, 228. But although he signed the king’s death warrant on 29 January, he was among a group of 13 commissioners who had not attended the trial commission that day and who had to be sought out in the Commons, or wherever, and prevailed upon to append their signatures at the foot of the warrant.156Muddiman, Trial, 228; S. Kelsey, ‘The death of Charles I’, HJ xlv. 751. A few days after the king’s execution, he was added to a sub-committee of the trial commission for investigating ‘those that threaten, practise, or design any evil against this court or the lord president [John Bradshawe] or any the members thereof’.157CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 353.

As Lancashire’s only regicide and a man with strong ties to the county’s Presbyterian clerical leaders – notably, Heyricke – Moore represents something of a conundrum. One obvious explanation for his regicidal behaviour during the winter of 1648-9 is that he had been traumatised and radicalised by his experiences during the first civil war – notably, Prince Rupert’s assault on Liverpool – and in Ireland in 1647, where he and his regiment had taken part in the great Protestant victory at Dungan’s Hill, in August, which had ended with the massacre of 3,000 Catholic soldiers.158HMC 10th Rep. IV, 83, 84, 85. His bitterness towards the royalists is clear from a letter he had written to the Speaker in April 1647 on behalf of the parliamentarian tenants of the earl of Derby at Liverpool, in which he had accused his former patron of trying ‘to break their customs and raise their fines to his own advantage’. The Liverpool area, he claimed, had been ruined by the earl and his royalist confederates, ‘and I hope the honourable Houses will in convenient time give reparation forth of their and the papists’ estates’.159HMC 10th Rep. IV, 81-2; CCC 1344-5.

Moore probably regarded the king as a larger, more threatening version of the earl of Derby. But perhaps even more damning in Moore’s eyes was Charles’s intransigence – not only in the face of overwhelming evidence of his past crimes against the ‘good people’ of England but also in refusing to renounce visiting further violence upon them by means of Ormond’s royalist-Catholic army in Ireland. Ormond’s Irish coalition, although menacing, was also highly unstable, however, and if Charles refused to compromise and order the marquess to lay down his arms, then the most effective way of dividing the enemy in Ireland was by destroying its lynchpin, and only common object of loyalty, the person of the king.160J. Adamson, ‘The frighted junto’, in The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I ed. J. Peacey (Basingstoke, 2001), 61-2. Moore had been making preparations for returning to the fray in Ireland from the summer of 1648, and during the king’s trial he had been involved in drafting a letter to the Protestant commander in Ulster, Sir Charles Coote*, thanking him for moving against Ormond’s allies in the province.161Supra, ‘Sir Charles Coote’; CJ v. 657a, 670a, 137b; vi. 114b, 123a; CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 33; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 56, 66, 97; CCAM 839; J. S. Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland (Dublin, 1999), 59, 61. By signing the royal death warrant, Moore may well have believed that he was helping to strike the first major blow in a new campaign that would finally bring all of Ireland under parliamentary control.

The final campaign, 1649-50

Moore was an active member of the Rump during its first six months, receiving appointment to 19 committees between mid-December 1648 and May 1649, including a committee set up on 1 February for taking the dissent of MPs seeking admission to the House.162W. Prynne*, A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members Case (1660), 25 (E.1013.22). Added to several standing committees under the Rump, he was an active member of the Committee for the Army* and the CNC (now purged of Grene and the Bences).163CJ vi. 112a, 113b, 137b; SP28/58-60, 63; Bodl. Rawl. A.224, ff. 9, 23. On 7 May, he reported – from a committee on parliamentarian war damages – the losses that Liverpool had sustained during the civil war, whereupon the Rump voted that £10,000 should be allocated to the town out of the sequestered estates of Lancashire royalists and Catholics.164CJ vi. 203a. A few days later, he returned to Liverpool, where the mayor and leading townsmen had petitioned Thomas Fairfax*, 3rd Baron Fairfax (without success) to re-appoint him governor.165CJ vi. 207a; Liverpool RO, 920 MOO/341; HMC 10th Rep. IV, 66, 77, 93; Gratton, Lancs. 127.

Parliamentary politics apparently held less appeal for Moore than soldiering in Ireland. In response to an order of the Rump in February 1649 for recruiting his regiment from units disbanded in Lancashire, he tendered a proposal to the council of state for transporting 1,000 foot and four troops of horse to Ireland, where he would spend much of that summer on campaign. He and his regiment fought in the decisive parliamentarian victory over Ormond at Rathmines, near Dublin, in August.166CJ vi. 137b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 56, 66, 97, 207, 535; Bodl. Tanner 56, f. 40; Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. x, f. 26; Mems. of the Great Civil War ed. Cary, ii. 160; Craven, ‘Lancs.’, 68. On 20 July and again on 26 August, Oliver Cromwell* granted Moore a licence to return to England to replenish his regiment.167HMC 10th Rep. IV, 93; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, 113. He had resumed his seat in the Rump by 4 October, and his last two parliamentary appointments, which were both tellerships, occurred a week later (11 Oct.).168CJ vi. 302b. The second of these divisions was apparently of little consequence, but the first – in which he was a majority teller with Algernon Sydney – reveals that he supported the admittance to the Rump of the prominent republican and reputed atheist Henry Neville.169CJ vi. 305b, 306a; Worden, Rump Parl. 72-3. Shortly thereafter, Moore left Westminster for his command in Ireland, landing at Dublin in early December.170HMC 10th Rep. IV, 94; Perfect Diurnall no. 3 (24-31 Dec. 1649), 24 (E.533.33).

Falling sick of a pleurisy or fever at the siege of Tecroghan Castle, near Trim, north west of Dublin, Moore died on 7 June 1650 and was buried in Christ Church, Dublin, in July.171HMC 10th Rep. IV, 94-5; GL, Sir John Moore’s Pprs. Ms 507; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 211, 563. He had written his will in July 1649; but although it was read in the Rump on 23 July 1651 and again on 2 March 1652 in an attempt by his ‘administrator’ and former steward, Richard Worsley, to secure Moore’s arrears of pay (which amounted to over £6,000), it was never entered in probate.172Liverpool RO, 920 MOO/844; CJ vi. 608b; vii. 100a; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 219. It is not clear whether this initiative ran counter to or in tandem with that of Moore’s heir, Edward, who had taken out letters of administration on his father’s estate in November 1650.173PROB6/25, f. 177. On 2 March 1652, the Rump voted that a proviso be added to an additional act for the sale of delinquents’ estates to the effect that lands worth £120 a year be settled on Edward Moore in full of his father’s arrears and ‘for the use and performance’ of his will.174CJ vii. 100a. But there is no evidence that this proviso was inserted in the draft legislation, and Edward Moore was left burdened with debts of somewhere between £6,350 and £8,000.175CJ vii. 183a; Watts, ‘Moore Fam.’, 239. John Moore was the last of his immediate family to sit in Parliament.