BETHELL, Slingisby (1618-97), of ?St Paul, Covent Garden, London.

Bethell’s father, the scion of a Herefordshire family, had settled at Alne, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, in 1603 following his marriage into one of the county’s leading families, the Slingsbys of Scriven. Hugh Bethell*, the civil-war parliamentarian officer, belonged to a cadet branch of the family, which had settled at Rise, in the East Riding.25Supra, ‘Hugh Bethell’; Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. iii. 132-3, 470; VCH N. Riding, ii. 86-7.

Still only a child when his father died in 1623, Bethell was taken under the wing of his uncle, (Sir) Henry Slingesby*, who arranged his nephew’s apprenticeship to Henry Vincent, a member of the London Leathersellers’ Company, in 1630.26Leathersellers’ Co. Recs. Reg. of Apprentices, 19 Nov. 1630; Oxford DNB, ‘Slingsby Bethel’. As the third of six sons, Bethell appears to have enjoyed little in the way of maintenance, and in June 1635 he wrote to his uncle, requesting financial assistance. It was lack of money, he informed Slingesby, which explained the ‘black clothes’ he wore – although his sombre attire may also have been an expression of godly sobriety; one of the reasons he needed money was to recover a Bible which had been left to him in a friend’s will.27Leeds Univ. Lib. DD56/M/2. Bethell’s younger brother Walter was apprenticed to Vincent’s son-in-law, the godly London grocer Samuel Gosse, who would develop political connections with John Lilburne during the 1640s.28Leeds Univ. Lib. DD56/M/2; K. Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London, 327. Bethell’s mother was certainly one of the godly, and during the 1630s she attended nonconformist conventicles at the house of the dean of York Minster, ‘who being addicted to cards minded none of those puritanical matters’.29Marchant, Puritans, 81.

Bethell spent the period 1637-49 in Hamburg, the staple of the London Merchant Adventurers’ Company and did not return to England until December 1649.30S. Bethell, The Vindication of Slingsby Bethel Esq. (1681), 2. During his final year in Hamburg he appears to have acted as a financial agent for the Rump’s first council of state.31Sl. 1519, f. 155; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 583; 1650-1, p. 542. Having left England as a journeyman leatherseller, he returned as a fully-fledged merchant whose stock in trades included the export of cloth to Hamburg and the importing of cured fish from Norway.32CJ vii. 82a; CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 230. By the end of 1650 he had also joined a syndicate headed by Colonel Thomas Pride* for supplying victuals (presumably including cured Norwegian fish) to the navy.33CJ vi. 500b; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 503. In 1651, he was elected to the London common council, where his committee appointments suggest that he supported the Navigation Act and proposals to establish ‘free ports’ – both policies designed to build the maritime and financial resources that would enable England to supplant the Dutch as Europe’s greatest trading nation. As a leading member of the Hamburg branch of the London Merchant Adventurers, he would have seen the Dutch as England’s main commercial competitors in northern Europe – hence his apparent support for the Rump’s war against the Dutch republic in the early 1650s.34CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 230, 249-50; Farnell, ‘City of London’, 245, 290-2, 294; ‘The navigation act of 1651, the First Dutch War, and the London merchant community’, EcHR xvi. 446-7, 448-9, 450; Oxford DNB, ‘Slingsby Bethel’. Certainly, in his post-Restoration pamphlet The World’s Mistake in Oliver Cromwell he would argue that the protector’s pro-Dutch, anti-Spanish foreign policy, in failing to exploit the Rump’s naval victories over the ‘proud Hollanders’ or to curb the growing power of France, had inflicted great damage upon English trade and interests.35S. Bethell, The World’s Mistake in Oliver Cromwell (1668).

Bethell’s ‘interest with the Parliament’ prompted his uncle, Sir Henry Slingesby, to seek his help in 1651 ‘for a mitigation of their severe sentence against me’ – the Rump having included Slingesby’s name in an act for the sale of delinquents’ estates.36Slingsby Diary ed. D. Parsons, 344-7. In 1652, Bethell and his cousin Robert Stapylton* purchased Slingesby’s estate from the treason trustees, which they then held in trust for his family. Most of the money that was needed, £7,000 in all, appears to have been raised by Bethell and his brothers.37Slingsby Diary ed. D. Parsons, 349-52. Their title to Slingesby’s estate was challenged late in 1655 after Slingesby had been imprisoned for suspected involvement in the Yorkshire royalist uprising of that year. Writing to Major-general Robert Lilburne* and the Yorkshire militia commissioners in January 1656, Bethell and Stapylton expressed their astonishment that having ‘hazarded our estates, our lives, our all that was dear to us with the forwardest in contesting against the malignant interest, [we] should now find ourselves aggrieved and attempted to be wronged by that power which ought to maintain us in our rights’.38Slingsby Diary ed. D. Parsons, 352-4. These extravagant protestations of service against the ‘malignant interest’ probably had little basis in fact as far as Bethell was concerned, for he had been on the continent for much of the 1640s – and during the mid-1650s he spent a few more years in Hamburg, where he became involved in anti-Cromwellian agitation within the Hanseatic merchant community.39Oxford DNB, ‘Slingsby Bethel’; ‘Richard Bradshaw’. In 1658, he and Robert Stapylton were able to perform one last service for Slingesby – who would be executed that year for treason – which was to help negotiate a match between Slingesby’s eldest son, (Sir) Thomas Slingsby†, and a daughter of the royalist Sir Orlando Bridgeman*.40Leeds. Univ. Lib. DD149/82.

Bethell’s return for Knaresborough in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659 was secured on the strength of his connections, both familial and proprietorial, with the Slingsbys.41Supra, ‘Knaresborough’. He was appointed to only one committee in this Parliament – the committee of privileges (28 Jan. 1659) – and made relatively few contributions to debate.42CJ vii. 594b. On the rare occasions he said anything of note on the floor of the House, he invariably sided with the republican interest against the Cromwellian court party. During a debate on the Other House on 19 February, he joined the commonwealthsmen in questioning the protector’s right to resurrect the House of Lords under the terms of the Humble Petition and Advice, although he confined himself to the simple statement that ‘I observe from that Act that we are the people’s Parliament and not any single person’s’.43Burton’s Diary, iii. 354. When, on 28 March, the House debated whether to ‘transact with the persons of the other House as a House of Parliament’, he moved that after the word ‘Parliament’ be added ‘when they shall be bounded [their powers limited] by this House’. The question was then put but passed in the negative.44Burton Diary, iv. 285. Like other republican MPs, he regarded the Scottish and Irish Members as Cromwellian placemen, and on several occasions during March he questioned their right to sit in the House.45Burton’s Diary, iv. 112, 241; [S. Bethell], A True and Impartial Narrative of the Most Material Debates and Passages in the Late Parliament (1659), 5, 7, 9-11 (E.985.25).

Soon after Parliament was dissolved in April 1659, Bethell wrote a tract in which he praised the commonwealthsmen for their ‘great virtue and abilities’ and denounced the ‘late usurper’ (Oliver Cromwell), the Humble Petition and Advice and the ‘servile and mercenary court party’. By seeking to invest the ‘pretended protector’ with ‘more power then any king or prince of England ever had’, he argued, the court party had ‘cast dirt upon the famous Long Parliament (whose successes and great achievements will, by posterity, be had [sic] in admiration) for asserting the rights of the people against the king’s own person’. ‘If the Parliament had sat longer’, he maintained, ‘the commonwealthsmen could not have preserved the liberties of the nation many weeks more from the ruins the courtiers had designed. And therefore the dissolution of it may well be looked upon as a deliverance equal with that from the Gunpowder Plot’.46[Bethell], True and Impartial Narrative, passim.

Following the army’s dissolution of the restored Rump in October 1659, Bethell sided with the civilian republican interest led by Sir Arthur Hesilrige* against Major-general John Lambert* and his allies. In November, Bethell refused to endorse a letter sent by some of his fellow City militia commissioners to General George Monck* (who had written to the London militia appealing for support), urging him to reinstate the radical officers he had removed from his army in Scotland and to cease his warlike preparations. When the London militia committee was remodelled by the committee of safety on 11 November, Bethell was left out of commission.47A True Narrative of the Proceedings in Parliament (1659), 63-5, 70 (E.1010.24); Complete Prose Works of John Milton ed. R.W. Ayers, vii. 136, 143. The committee’s fall and the re-assembly of the Rump late in December brought him back into favour, and on 2 January 1660 he was the last of ten non-MPs to be elected to a new council of state.48CJ vii. 801a. However, with the arrival of Monck in London the pace of political reaction quickened, and Bethell was excluded from the council that was elected following the re-admission of the secluded Members in February. In a report on the London militia committee prepared by the council, Bethell – who appears to have been restored to the committee by the common council late in December – was described as being disaffected to Monck.49HMC Leyborne-Popham, 166; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 153. When a new militia committee was elected by the corporation on or about 23 February, Bethell was not included.50Guildhall Lib. Ms 186/1; CJ vii. 850a.

Bethell was involved by mid-March 1660 in a conspiracy organised by Edmund Ludlowe II*, Thomas Scot I* and other leading commonwealthsmen to rally the republican interest in the City and army against Monck. Bethell was employed ‘by his fellow citizens’ to enlist the support of Hesilrige, who still nominally commanded two regiments and three garrisons. 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”’.51Ludlow, Mems. ii. 251-2; Ludlow, Voyce, 101; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 196. Bethell was by this time persona non grata, and in the elections to the 1660 Convention, his elder brother, Henry Bethell†, who had signed the Yorkshire declaration for a free Parliament, took his place at Knaresborough.52HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Henry Bethell’.

Perhaps fleeing the threat of persecution in London, Bethell departed England for the English exile community at Lausanne, Switzerland, in the autumn of 1662, in the company of John Biscoe*, Edward Dendy*, Cornelius Holland*, Nicholas Love* and William Say*. He later accompanied his ‘very intimate friend’ Ludlowe, John Lisle*, William Cawley I*, Say, Love and Holland to the Swiss town of Vevey.53Ludlow, Mems. ii. 343-4; Ludlow, Voyce, 13-14; Oxford DNB, ‘Slingsby Bethel’. By the end of 1665, he had joined the group of exiles at Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where he became friends with Algernon Sydney* and the Quaker political activists William Penn and Benjamin Furly.54J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623-77 (Camb. 2008), 180, 210, 220. He had returned to London by November 1667, when he sent his ‘kind salutes’ to his kinsman Sir George Marwood*.55N. Yorks. RO, ZDU 172, Marwood fam. corresp. (mic. 1298): George Marwood jun. to Henry Marwood, 23 Nov. 1667.

Bethell’s pamphlet The World’s Mistake in Oliver Cromwell, published in 1668, revealed the influence of Sydney and other ‘interest’ theorists in the intimate connections it made between trade and state power. That same year he published Et à Dracone, in which he called for the confiscation of church lands and argued that toleration was good for trade. In his best known work, The Present Interest of England Stated, published in 1671, he identified his former bugbears the Dutch as England’s natural allies in preserving Europe’s liberties ‘against the all-devouring designs of the French king [Louis XIV]’.56[S. Bethell], The Present Interest of England (1671), 28-33; Scott, Algernon Sidney, 124-5, 214-16; Oxford DNB, ‘Slingsby Bethel’; R. Walter, ‘Slingsby Bethel’s analysis of state interests’, Hist. of European Ideas, xli. 491, 495-7, 502.

After several decades in the political wilderness, Bethell enjoyed a brief return to national prominence in 1680, when, at the height of the Exclusion Crisis, he and another whig were elected sheriffs of London. Bethell’s election, which represented ‘a deliberate challenge to the coercive Anglican regime in church and state’, was attributed at the time to the influence of Sydney and the City republicans, although it probably owed more to Bethell’s close ties with leading opposition figures and his championing of the conjoined interests of trade and Protestant nonconformity.57Scott, Algernon Sidney, 215; Oxford DNB, ‘Slingsby Bethel’. As sheriff, Bethel appointed the anti-popish incendiary Titus Oates as his official chaplain. Not surprisingly, Bethell was vilified by his tory opponents; and even the whig historian Gilbert Burnet had little good to say about him, describing him as an Independent, ‘a known republican in principle ... a sullen and wilful man and run the way of a sheriff’s living into the extreme of sordidness’ – a reference to Bethell’s godly disdain for courtly extravagance and wasteful hospitality.58G. Burnet, Hist. of My Own Time ed. O. Airy, ii. 254; Oxford DNB, ‘Slingsby Bethel’.

Bethell stood for Southwark in the elections to the third Exclusion Parliament in 1681, but was defeated on a poll.59The Tryal of Slingsby Bethel, Esq. (1681); HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Southwark’. In 1683, he was tried and imprisoned for his part in orchestrating the London whigs’ defiance of the crown. Released early in 1685, he left for the Netherlands and did not return to England until after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The triumph of the whig cause in 1688-9 did little to abate his fear and loathing of the Anglican church hierarchy and the corrupting influence of the royal court. Only ‘repentance and reformation’, he argued, could furnish England with the moral strength and providential blessings needed to defeat the French: ‘the want of reformation being generally the occasion of war; and God seems to call for it by the little use He hath made of our immoralists either at sea or land, other than as a scourge for our sins’.60Add. 41812, f. 224v; S. Bethell, The Providences of God, Observed Through Several Ages, Towards this Nation (1691), 25, 39; Oxford DNB, ‘Slingsby Bethel’. Having been entrusted (or so he claimed) by Ludlowe with overseeing the publication of A Voyce from the Watch Tower, he opposed the scheme of his fellow custodian of the manuscript, a London bookseller, to purge the text of its intensely Protestant and providentialist language in order to render it more palatable to the country whigs and republicans of the 1690s.61C10/245/13; Ludlow, Voyce, 17-20, 76-8; Oxford DNB, ‘Slingsby Bethel’.

Bethell died on 4 February 1697, and although his place of residence had apparently been Fetter Lane in Holborn, he was buried the next day (5 Feb.) at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, where his wife had been interred almost 30 years earlier.62St Paul, Covent Garden par. reg.; PROB11/437, f. 330v; HMC 5th Rep. 386; Oxford DNB, ‘Slingsby Bethel’. In his will he made bequests to the value of £1,450 and left £6,000 to be invested in property in Yorkshire, for reasons which he did not specify. He also donated £20 to the London Dissenting ministers and promoters of the Happy Union, Matthew Mead (a Congregationalist) and John Howe (a Presbyterian), to be distributed among deserving nonconformist clergy. Having died childless, he left the bulk of his estate, including £1,000 in Bank of England stock, to his nephew William Bethell.63PROB11/437, ff. 329v-330v; Calamy Revised, 279-80, 347-8; Oxford DNB, ‘Slingsby Bethel’.