SALWEY, Humphrey (c.1575-1652), of Stanford-on-Teme, Worcs.

The Salwey family was to be found at Cannock in Staffordshire under William I, but its association with Stanford-on-Teme dated at least from 1402, when John and Henry Salwey were lords of the manor.35Nash, Collections, ii. 366. Humphrey Salwey was escheator of Worcestershire in 1444; the MP, his namesake, inherited Stanford six generations of the family later. Thomas Salwey, Humphrey’s grandfather, was a frequent enough visitor to London to record the extremes of climatic conditions there under Elizabeth.36T.E. Winnington, 'Notes by Thomas Salwey', N and Q 3rd ser. xii. 427-9. Arthur Salwey, Humphrey’s father, went to the capital probably more often, to attend to the business of his office of secondary in the office of the queen’s remembrancer of the exchequer. By means of this income he added the nearby manor of Sapey to the patrimony of Stanford in 1591.37W. H. Bryson, The Equity Side of the Exchequer (Cambridge, 1975), 192; Nash, Collections, ii. 367. Humphrey was admitted to the Inner Temple by a special arrangement of his father, paying a reduced fee.38CITR i. 375. He himself did not in his prime become a central office-holder under the crown, but was active on the bench of magistrates for Worcestershire from the early 1620s. When he was appointed a commissioner for charitable uses in 1624, it was after nomination by the chamber of the city of Worcester.39Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 190. There is evidence that he was a reforming godly magistrate, as he took a leading part in the introduction of sermons and other pious disciplines to the county house of correction in the 1630s.40Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy, 324. It was doubtless in this arena that Salwey developed a working relationship with John Wylde*. Nevertheless, nothing about Salwey’s view of the monarchy can be read into his being fined £25 for not taking a knighthood at the coronation of Charles I; here he was among a company that included several future royalists.41E178/5726.

Religious reformer, 1640-3

Salwey first seems to have had aspirations to a parliamentary seat in 1640, when he stood in the election on 21 October for knight of the shire for Worcestershire. The future royalist Henry Townshend observed that most of the vocal support was for Sir Thomas Lyttelton* rather than for Salwey and his ally, John Wylde.42Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy, 48. The dispute had to wait until March 1641 before it was aired at the committee of privileges, but in any case the issues were local, springing from the view of the sheriff, Sir William Russell, that the defeated Lyttelton had nothing to commend him as a candidate. No anti-court sentiment seems at this stage to have animated Salwey, who was said even to have agreed that Lyttelton was elected.43Procs. LP. ii. 626, 680-1, 741. His first committee appointment (25 Feb. 1641) was the innocuous one for converting tillage to pasture, but shortly afterwards (9 Mar.) he was drawn into controversy by acting as a second to John Wylde in his dispute with Sir Henry Herbert*, when blows were exchanged. Salwey was a witness to the scuffle, and subsequently represented Wylde in attempts to smooth over relations between the lawyer and the courtier.44CJ ii. 92b, 100b, 268a; Procs. LP ii. 684-5.

On 26 March, Salwey delivered a trenchant speech on reform of deans and chapters, when against the wishes of some Members, time was found for a debate in the afternoon sitting. Sir Simonds D’Ewes apparently spoke to the effect that as the cathedral clergy performed no useful function their revenues should be diverted to more profitable uses. Salwey followed him, and went further, declaring that deans and chapters were ‘drones and ... the worst landlords saving bishops in the land’. They devoured £28,259 in rents, and should not be trusted: the state did not trust them to elect their bishops, lest they choose papists. His denunciation provoked defenders of the objects of his scorn; Falkland and Culpeper spoke of inheritance and of reform as preferable to abolition.45Procs. LP iii. 153-7. The speech helped establish Salwey as among the leading anti-papist and anti-episcopal Members. In April he secured a place on the committee working on the bill to restrain bishops from interfering in secular affairs. On 3 May he took the protestation, with the majority of other Members.46CJ ii. 133a. In August, after reporting Sir Percy Herbert’s attempts to convert to Catholicism the widow of Lord Keeper Coventry (Sir Thomas Coventry†) on her deathbed, Salwey was appointed to the committee against recusants, where he was joined as a new member by John Wylde.47CJ ii. 115a, 254a. In April 1642 and again in 1646 Wylde was charged with drawing up the bill of delinquency against Herbert.48CJ ii. 548b; Herbert Corresp. 23. Salwey’s career as an anti-papist with a strong interest in religious matters continued through the spring of 1642, when he joined the committee against innovations in religion (2 Mar.) and that for the better maintenance of ministers (15 Apr.).49CJ ii. 465b, 530a.

On 8 July 1642 Salwey and Wylde hurried back to Worcestershire on the authority of the Commons, after hearing of attempts to execute the king’s commission of array.50CJ ii. 662a. After January 1642, when a petition in support of church government and against ‘sects and schisms’ was drafted with the support of the gentry including Samuel Sandys*, quarter sessions had become a cockpit of developing parties for and against the king. On 18 June the commission of array for the county was issued.51Northants. RO, FH133, unfol.; Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 21. The task of Salwey and Wylde was to prevent the imminent midsummer sessions from becoming a vehicle for promoting the commission, and they were successful. By 13 July, the pair had seen off Sherington Talbot, the principal promoter of the commission of array, who left Worcester for York when it became apparent that the MPs had launched a pre-emptive strike. With understandable hyperbole, the triumphant Salwey and Wylde wrote to the Speaker that 10,000 hands might have been put to their declaration in support of Parliament, had time allowed. On 12 July the grand jury acknowledged the favour Parliament had shown them in declaring the commission of array to be illegal, and requested the speedy implementation of the militia ordinance.52A Letter Sent from Mr Serjeant Wilde and Humphrey Salwey esquire (1642), 3-6. This petition and the letter of Salwey and Wylde were ordered by the Commons to be printed.53PJ iii. 223. By 18 July Salwey was back in the Commons, reporting at dinner to D’Ewes of other petitions coming into Westminster.54PJ iii. 232-3.

Salwey’s triumph was short-lived. On 3 August, at the assizes in Worcester, the royalists succeeded in getting the quarter sessions presentment overturned and the commission of array adopted.55‘Declaration and Protestation of the Grand Jury’ in Three Declarations (1642), 3. (BL, G3808.10). On the 9th, Salwey and Wylde were again despatched to the county, with authority to arrest the bailiffs of Droitwich for conniving at the removal by the 10th earl of Shrewsbury (John Talbot) of the county arms depot there, and to detain money raised in the county for military purposes. On this occasion, they did not succeed. Not only was government at county level seemingly safe for the king, but there were indications that a purge of high constables sympathetic to Parliament was under way. By 20 August Salwey was back at Westminster from Worcester ‘in great haste for fear of some violence’, reporting with Wylde attempts to kidnap them and take them to York, and commenting sourly on the ‘mean condition’ of those who had signed the declaration in Worcester on the 3rd.56PJ iii. 290, 310. Wylde at least achieved the immediate expulsion from the Commons of the leading royalists: Sir Henry Herbert, Samuel Sandys and Sir John Pakington.57CJ ii. 729a. On the 26th Salwey was named to a committee apparently considering a case of packing of the grand jury of Shropshire, but Worcestershire must surely have been uppermost in his mind.58CJ ii. 737b. On 29 August he was among those considering an alternative parliamentary association of counties in the west midlands and north Wales to counter the military activities of supporters of the king.59CJ ii. 743a.

In the Commons, Salwey returned to his interests in religious matters. On 31 August he was asked to thank two ministers for their preaching at a public fast, and to invite them to have their sermons printed. This, and the inviting of ministers to preach, was a task he was to perform some 17 times over the next six years; as a senior Member of the House (in age if not parliamentary experience), as one known for his trenchant views on ‘innovations’ and as the father of a minister, Arthur Salwey, who was himself invited to deliver a fast sermon, the Commons knew that he could be relied upon to do these things properly.60CJ ii. 746b; iii. 158b, 177a, 222b, 255b, 297b, 439a, 542b, 689a, 707a; iv. 36b, 90a, 454a, 629b, 653a, 678b; vi. 10a; J. Walker, Sufferings of the Clergy (1714), 18. The House had first declared its interest in the Scottish model of Presbyterianism as long before as March 1641, and now Salwey and Wylde were named to the committee to prepare a declaration in answer to one from the general assembly of the Scottish church.61Walker, Sufferings, 11; CJ ii. 748a. Any work he may have undertaken for this committee must have been punctuated by activity relating to the outbreak of civil war. He and Wylde were asked to take care that Worcester was put in a state of defence, and added to the committee for raising money on the ‘propositions’ of Parliament. On the 13th, Wylde reported their order, which D’Ewes considered to contain ‘dangerous clauses’, but which passed the House easily.62CJ ii. 761a, 764ab; PJ iii. 352-3. Two of Salwey’s sons joined the parliamentary forces: John was in the lifeguard of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex and was mortally wounded at Newbury in September 1643; Richard Salwey* was a major.63CJ iii. 377b.

On 22 September, Salwey journeyed to Worcester at the behest of the Commons for the third time since the opening of this Parliament; as his letter to Wylde made clear, it was an uncomfortable experience, as royalist officers burst into his room at an inn late one night and only reluctantly desisted from searching him.64Add. 18777, f. 14v. On 8 October he and Wylde were near the top of a list of gentry declaring their intention to unite the counties of Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Shropshire under the direction of the earl of Essex to expel the king’s adherents in arms, guilty of ‘outrages, rapine and barbarous cruelties’.65HMC Portland iii. 100. Sir Robert Harley* was another signatory to this declaration; on 16 September he and Salwey had been named to a Commons committee to receive information on royalist delinquents.66CJ ii. 769a.

Prosecutor of the clerical hierarchy, 1643-5

In January 1643 Salwey was added to the Committee for Plundered Ministers, and on 17 April to a committee on Ireland, where his interest may have been primarily in religious matters.67CJ ii. 920a; iii. 47b. On 5 September he delivered into the Commons a petition from ministers returning from Ireland, calling for a collection to be made for their relief. Salwey was asked to bring in an ordinance to this effect.68Harl. 163, f. 166v; CJ iii. 228a. Working still in tandem with Wylde, Salwey sat on the committee preparing the case against Bishop Matthew Wren and Archbishop William Laud (3 May), which he and Francis Rous were to manage. In what was evidently a turbulent day’s proceedings, Harley moved that the two Arminians should either be tried or banished to New England, and in the debate on the first alternative, (the second being dismissed by many as a ‘jest’), Salwey proposed that the committee preparing the impeachments be also asked to bring in an ordinance to establish an assembly of divines. His logic for linking the two was that the king had denied such an act, under the influence of the Laudians. D’Ewes’s commentary was that Salwey himself had been lent upon by ‘some of the fiery spirits’ with whom he associated, ‘himself being but a weak old man’. Thus it was that Salwey was named as a lay member of the assembly of divines when it was authorised by the Commons on 7 June.69CJ iii, 68a; 119b; Harl. 163, f. 382v.

D’Ewes’s view of Salwey as old and weak is belied somewhat by the consistent vigour with which he denounced popery and its adherents. On 23 May, he moved that the principal ‘papists in arms’ should be impeached, which opened the way for Henry Darley to identify the chief among these as Queen Henrietta Maria. Having voted that the queen had indeed levied war, the House moved on to consider her impeachment, and John Pym subsequently went to the bar of the Lords to impeach her. D’Ewes, a member of the committee for the queen’s impeachment, again thought that this had all been orchestrated; but if it had been, it seems likely that Salwey was as much a knowing participant as D’Ewes himself was.70Harl. 163, f. 390v; CJ iii. 100b.

By 15 July 1643, Salwey’s committee to set up trials of leading Laudian clerics had moved on to consider the case against Bishop William Juxon. That summer, Salwey was also busy in making arrangements for the assembly of divines. This was the high water mark of his activity in the House. He served as an intermediary between the Commons and the assembly: in, for example, reporting to the divines the draft of the Solemn League and Covenant and the arrangements made for the taking of it by them and by MPs (22 Sept.).71CJ iii. 144a, 167b, 241a, 252a. After the striking impression he had made in his speeches in the House and his association with Wylde in combating emerging royalism in Worcestershire, Salwey seems from mid-1643 to have settled into a lower profile, being named to committees not of the first importance, such as that for Westminster Abbey, liaising with ministers and representing the Westminster Assembly and the Commons to each other. In January 1644 he was, by apparent contrast, back in the role of prosecuting innovators in religion, this time Laud himself, but it was Wylde who managed the trial, and Salwey’s influence cannot be detected.72CJ ii. 439b; iii. 271b, 272a, 357b.

Salwey’s religious outlook seems to have been that of a country puritan of the stamp of Sir Robert Harley. He and Harley were together named to a total of 13 Commons committees between March 1642 and October 1648, including that of 27 April 1644 for demolishing illegal obstacles to the worship of God. A few days later, Salwey was asked to convey to the assembly of divines the desire of the Commons for a settlement of the church. Though evidently a Presbyterian in religion, Salwey was not an uncritical advocate of the Scots church polity. On 16 May 1644, he was willing to represent to his colleagues at the Westminster assembly the wish of the Commons that the Scottish church should not meddle in matters under discussion in London.73CJ iii. 470b, 473b, 496a.

On 2 August 1644, Salwey was the beneficiary of an ordinance granting him the office of remembrancer of the exchequer; the Lords concurred, and the office was confirmed as his the following day. He succeeded Richard Fanshawe†, one of a family under whom Salwey’s father had served as deputy. He received his patent on 28 September 1644, and was admitted on 28 October.74Bryson, Equity Side of Exchequer, 187; Officers of the Exchequer comp. Sainty, 47. This was the court of which John Wylde was later to become chief baron; and Wylde’s brother, George, was given the place of deputy remembrancer, under Salwey, in 1648.75Bryson, Equity Side of Exchequer, 177, 188; E159/488, Easter 1648, rot. 9. The appointments confirm that there was a continuing working relationship and friendship between these Worcestershire Members.

In September 1644 Salwey returned to the House after a brief absence occasioned by a narrow escape from plague in his household. The previous month (5 Aug.), he had been named to the committee framing the ordinance for raising forces to reduce Worcestershire to the will of Parliament, and was probably more active in Westminster than in his county. Nevertheless, he was asked by the Committee of Both Kingdoms to report on the conduct of the war in the west midlands: friction between the county committees of Worcestershire and Warwickshire was referred to the judgment of Wylde, William Purefoy I* and himself. His own position was that of someone who wanted the war to be continued and won by Parliament, with or without Scots help.76CSP Dom. 1644-1645, pp. 66, 190, 195, 379.

Collaborator and critic of the Scots, 1645-7

Salwey urged the Westminster Assembly to speed up work on the Directory of Worship, and conveyed the Commons’ irritation with dissent among the ministers; those of minority opinions in the assembly were to give written reasons for them.77CJ iii. 579b, 622b, 675a, 693b. At the assembly itself, Salwey seems to have been an active member of committees, though it is frequently unclear whether references to ‘Mr Salwey’ are to him or to Arthur, his son, who was a clerical member of the body. Either he or his son was named to committees of the assembly to consider the relief of servants to attend holy day services and to stamp out superstitious customs; in April 1645 it was more certainly Humphrey who with Sir Robert Harley, Sir John Clotworthy* and others, joined with ministers of the assembly to consider means of sending ministers to Ireland.78Mins. Sessions of the Westminster Assembly of Divines eds. A.F. Mitchell, J. Struthers (1874), 3, 22, 82. Salwey’s membership of the Committee for Plundered Ministers, renewed in November 1644, was an important link here, since the Committee and the Assembly evidently worked closely together. Salwey’s experience on this body, which worked with godly ministers and their patrons, would have been valuable on parliamentary committees such as that of 26 November 1644 to consider admission to the sacrament in the state church.79CJ iii. 705b. In April 1645, Salwey was still considering criteria for admission or exclusion to the Lord’s Supper.80CJ iv. 114a.

Salwey may not have been one of those members of the Westminster Assembly enthusiastic for Scottish Presbyterianism, but he became physically close to the Scots army when units of it under Alexander Leslie, 1st earl of Leven [S] were active in the west midlands counties in July and August 1645. Salwey and Wylde had helped co-ordinate the parliamentarian breakthrough into Worcestershire in April, and on 9 July Salwey, Wylde and Harley worked on an ordinance to include these counties in levies for the army. Two days later, Salwey was selected, with three other local MPs who sought to keep up the momentum of the war, to accompany the Scots forces. By 31 July Salwey, Sir John Corbet*, William Purefoy I and Edward Bayntun* were outside Hereford, calling on the royalist garrison there to surrender.81CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 609; CJ iv. 197a, 202b, 204a, 208b, 209b, 210b; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 122. In the event, the Scots presence at Hereford turned out to be something of a false dawn, and by the end of September, Salwey was back in the House. He must at this point still be considered an enthusiast for seeing the war through to victory. In December 1645 he was on the committee to reorganize the London militia.82CJ iv. 364b; LMA, COL/CC/01/01/041, f. 156v. On 3 January 1646, Sir Philip Stapylton presented to the Commons a letter drafted at the Committee of Both Kingdoms in reply to the king’s letters of 26 and 29 December. Charles had offered to come to Westminster in person for 40 days, provided that he might afterwards withdraw to Worcester, Newark or Oxford, and suggested that the militia be committed to the care of a politically mixed group of named commissioners. The House decided to refer the draft reply to a committee of those members of the Committee of Both Kingdoms who were MPs, with the addition of eight others.83CJ iv. 395b; LJ viii. 72ab. Salwey was among these, and they were nearly all men who a year and a half later would seek the protection of the New Model army when the House was threatened by Presbyterian-inspired crowd violence.

In religion, Salwey continued to work with colleagues like Sir Robert Harley on promoting godliness. Thus in the first half of 1646 he was named to a committee to prepare a bill for the better observation of the Sabbath (20 Jan.) and to one to consider settling a preaching ministry in the country (7 Apr.); and was named again as a commissioner to judge the fitness of individuals to take the sacrament (3 June).84CJ iv. 412a, 502a, 562b. He was added to a committee on 8 July, with John Wylde as a colleague, to produce a declaration against the re-admission of sequestered ministers to livings, and was still inviting ministers to deliver sermons to the Commons and thanking them on behalf of the House.85CJ iv. 608a, 629b, 653a. In April 1647 he and John Wylde* were responsible for uniting the parishes of St Alban and St Helen in Worcester, with an augmentation of £50 confiscated from assets of the dean and and chapter. They attracted George Lawrence MA, a former lecturer at St George’s, Botolph Lane, London, a supporter of the protestation, a faithful adherent of the Directory, and one who in 1660 would be ejected from his living at St Cross Hospital, Winchester. This was a miniature example of the kind of state church reorganisation that Salwey would have supported for the country as a whole.86St Helen’s, Worcester, par. reg. f. 16; Calamy Revised, 318.

Salwey’s experience at the Westminster Assembly and his stay with the Scots army when it was helping spearhead the parliamentary war effort in the west midlands qualified him for further tasks involving Parliament’s delicate relations with the Scots. Even so, it is difficult to see anything more than courtesy and a desire to keep open diplomatic channels behind the committee work to disavow anti-Scottish publications, and the consideration of the expenses of the Scots army. By the end of 1646, Salwey was still being appointed to committees dealing with the Scots, but the focus was changing; on 26 December it was voted that the Scots should get out of England, and the committee was asked to find a way of conveying this to them.87CJ iv. 644b, 650b; v. 30a. Busy though Salwey was on many committees, it would appear that no development in his political outlook took place during the second half of the 1640s. He was still working for a godly church settlement, and was a respected elder Member, but in politics he was much less of a force – perhaps naturally, since by 1647 he was 72 years of age – than he had been in his firebrand days of 1641. D’Ewes’s suspicions then that Salwey was a mere mouthpiece for more cunning radicals has an echo in the later 1640s, when he was overshadowed by his son, Richard, who sat for Appleby from 1645.

In general, Richard Salwey was described in the Journal as ‘Major Salwey’, and sometimes ‘Mr Salwey junior’, but there is no reason to believe that this was always how father and son were distinguished. Thus the ‘Mr Salloway’ who took an ordinance for an allowance for Waring and Herring, treasurers for the Committee for Compounding, to the Lords in April 1647, was probably Richard Salwey, Waring’s son-in-law; and the ‘Mr Salwey’ of October 1647 considering how arrears of army pay should be met was also more likely to have been the son, with military experience, than the father, without it.88CJ v. 145a, 340a. Furthermore, some of Humphrey Salwey’s involvements from late 1646 probably began as concerns of Richard. Thus, matters relating to the subjugation of Ireland, close to Richard Salwey’s heart as an Adventurer member of the Company of Grocers, drew in his father. Humphrey, with his brother-in-law, Richard Knightley, and Sir John Temple, was responsible for ensuring that the Committee for Compounding (where Richard was well connected) provided £5,000 for the army in Ireland; and Richard wrote a letter to his father about Irish affairs, which was read in the House with other correspondence relating to Ireland.89CJ iv. 702b; 734a; CCC 47. Richard Salwey was an out-and-out political Independent, and under the influence of his son’s burgeoning career, Humphrey Salwey was aligned with that faction in Parliament. This was not necessarily a trajectory which could have been foreseen from the antecedents of his work in the Westminster Assembly and correspondence with the Scots.

Political Independent, 1647-50

In the spring of 1647, Humphrey Salwey was being named to committees as an obvious counter-weight to developing political Presbyterian interests. These bodies included one (with his son) to consider a report from the forces in Ireland (27 Mar.), and the committee of appeals for the visitation of Oxford University. Here the Members added on 23 March included, as well as Salwey, James Fiennes, Speaker Lenthall, Denzil Holles and Sir Robert Harley.90CJ v. 121b, 127b. In April he was still active in the Westminster Assembly, taking up the ultra-orthodox Confession of Faith to the Lords and Commons for approval. Just as in the Commons Humphrey is difficult to distinguish from his son Richard, so in the assembly he is easily (and less recoverably) confused with his older son, Arthur, a minister and clerical member there. It is clear that both Salweys were wholly committed to the work of the assembly; in religious matters, Humphrey’s interests were consistent from the earliest days of the Long Parliament.91Mins. Sessions of the Westminster Assembly, 333, 348, 354.

Salwey encouraged the publication in April 1648 by the Presbyterian minister, John Geree, of a work discussing the lawfulness or otherwise of drinking healths. The book was dedicated to the MP and suggests that such casuistical matters continued to inform his religious outlook.92J. Geree, [Greek], A Divine Potion to Preserve Spirituall Health (1648), sig. A2. In political terms, however, he was by this time numbered with the Independents, and with Richard he probably fled to the army on 22 July 1647 in the face of the Presbyterian coup. An element of doubt about this remains, as the Salweys are mentioned in only one of the listings, and then with ‘query’ beside their names.93HMC Egmont, i. 440. It is even possible that they spent the summer in Stanford-on-Teme, moved more by personal matters than political ones; Humphrey’s wife, Anne, was buried there on 31 August. That Salwey was a victim of the Presbyterians in at least one sense is, however, clear from his reinstatement in the office of remembrancer in the exchequer in March 1648; the office must have been wrested from him some time in the summer of the previous year. His recovery of the post, said to be worth £200 a year, ensured that he was listed in a published attack on Independent office-holders.94CJ v. 500b; A List of the Names of the Members of the House of Commons observing which are Officers of the Army (1648), 2.

After the turbulence of the summer, from September 1647, Salwey resumed a partnership of sorts with John Wylde, with whom he sat on a number of committees. These included the local one for sale of the leaden steeple of Worcester cathedral (25 Oct.), and one to produce an ordinance for punishing drunkenness (23 Feb. 1648). These topics – church property sales and moral reform – were themes with which Salwey had long been associated, and he was now able to busy himself in them without inhibition. He was a member of committees to remove obstructions in sales of bishops’ lands (28 Oct. 1647), to enforce stricter observation of the sabbath (23 Feb. 1648), and to maintain a preaching ministry in London (16 Oct. 1648).95CJ v. 343a, 344b, 471a; vi. 53b. He still collaborated with Sir Robert Harley, working with him on an ordinance for the rebuilding of Brampton Bryan church, badly burnt in the siege there, and on 27 October 1648 considering how to present the Covenant to the king.96CJ v. 679b; vi. 63a. However closely he co-operated with his more radical son, Richard, these links with Wylde and Harley were still very strong. After the purge by the military on 6 December he was recorded as being in the House six days later, after which a more significant committee appointment followed: on 6 January 1649, to the Committee for Indemnity.97CJ vi. 109a, 113b. Given his active political associations, it is unsurprising that when nominated as a commissioner for the trial of the king, Salwey declined to act.98A. and O.

Like the three MPs of the Wylde family, Salwey accepted the regicide, even if he was unwilling to play an active role in it. He was in the House on 3 February 1649, on a committee considering an ‘obnoxious’ publication and the restraining of preaching and publishing against Parliament.99CJ vi. 131b. On the 8th, he was named to an important committee to review the commissions of the peace, suggesting that he was thought to be a safe pair of hands by the new regime.100CJ vi. 134a. The problems of distinguishing him from his son if anything intensify after 1649, but it seems likely that it was Humphrey who played a significant role in drafting legislation on the moral and religious topics that interested him so much earlier. He took a lead in the notable act against adultery and fornication (‘whoredom’), though he did not exercise enough control to keep pace with the drafting, and was with Richard on the committee for legislation against Ranters.101CJ vi. 171a, 317a, 423b. He still evidently pursued the vision of a purified state church; he worked on bills to settle ecclesiastical promotions and maintenance, and to prevent ministers from interfering in state affairs (a concern of his from 1641).102CJ vi. 179a, 201a (clerical interference); 216a, 227b, 231b, 359a, 382b (promotions and maintenance). On 7 August, after the House had resolved to abandon Presbyterianism on the Speaker’s casting vote, Salwey was of the committee to work out the implications, and he was also named to committees on propagating the gospel in Wales and New England, as well as local schemes such as that for Colchester.103CJ vi. 180ab, 231a, 256a, 275b, 352a, 416a. The cause of speeding up sales of confiscated lands was another which interested him, although he seems not to have availed himself of the chance to profit personally in this market.104CJ vi. 271b, 358b, 400b, 528a, 555a.

It is possible that Salwey was named to many more committees than he actually attended. He was asked to head that reviewing the engagements of the commonwealth in October 1649, but in most others he was simply named, without special responsibility. Certainly his appointment to the important Committee of Navy and Customs was merely nominal, as its order books record no attendances by him at all.105CJ vi. 219b, 312b; Bodl. Rawl. A.224. His health was beginning to cause him difficulties by mid-1650; he was given leave to go to the country in June and August that year. In February 1651 he reorganised his London accommodation, and asked the Inner Temple for an office, telling them he intended moving most of his work out of London. A year later, in a further act of tidying his affairs, he had the House agree to pay £200 a year to his executors for seven years after his death, the funds to be drawn from the profits of his exchequer office.106CJ vi. 431b, 452a, 603b; CITR ii. 297-8. In these circumstances, and that of his old age, his career in the Rump must be considered a coda. He never did remove to the country, dying in London in December 1652. Like George Wylde, another Worcestershire MP who predeceased him, Salwey was buried on 20 December in Westminster Abbey, a mark of the respect in which he was held by fellow parliamentarians, and a privilege accorded him as a former member of the committee for Westminster Abbey and College. Unlike Wylde, he was disinterred and reburied outside the Abbey following the Restoration, soon after 9 September 1661.107Marriage, Baptismal and Burial Regs. of the Collegiate Church or Abbey of St. Peter, Westminster ed. J.L. Chester (1876), 146, 522. Stanford passed to his eldest son, Edward, who died soon after; the property then came to Edward Salwey’s son, another Edward Salwey*, who sat for Droitwich in 1659.