CHALONER, James (1601-60), of Steeple Claydon, Bucks., and Guisborough, Yorks.

Chaloner had studied in his youth at the Middle Temple, and what he pleased to term his ‘many employments’ during the early 1630s appear to have centred on the inns of court.31Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. pp. lxxvi-lxxvii. He was probably the ‘Mr Challoner’ with whom the Middle Temple barrister Bulstrode Whitelocke* enjoyed ‘excellent conversation’ in the late 1620s

in the house of one Mrs Percy in Fleet Street with Mr [Geoffrey] Palmer*, Mr [Edward] Hyde*, Mr [Harbottle] Grimston* ... and others, where they exercised their wits and learning in the imitation of star chamber proceedings and [in] sentencing, with ingenious speeches, those of their company who transgressed their orders by swearing, ill-speaking or the like ... and sometimes they put cases together but detested all scurrility and debauchery.32Whitelocke, Diary, 58.

The Percy residence on Fleet Street was evidently where Chaloner and his brother Thomas usually lodged when in London.33Infra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’; CSP Dom. 1637, pp. 110, 176.

In 1657, Chaloner would petition Protector Oliver Cromwell*, claiming that he had been ‘extremely oppressed by the late king in his alum rights, so that he has owing to him about £6,000 ... yet he lost £10,000 and the late king got £100,000 [a grossly exaggerated figure] by his alum works’.34CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 60. The Chaloners’ grievance concerning their ‘alum rights’ had began under James I, after Chaloner’s father – Sir Thomas Chaloner† – and a consortium of northern gentlemen had surrendered their interest in the alum works on the Chaloners’ estate at Guisborough to the crown. By the terms of this surrender, the crown had agreed that, following Sir Thomas’ death, it would pay his children an annuity of £1,000 from 1617 until 1638. This annuity represented ‘all the portions and the only means’ left by Sir Thomas – who died, heavily indebted, in 1615 – to his children ‘for their whole maintenance and livelihood’. Consequently, when the crown failed to pay even the first annual instalment, they were understandably aggrieved.35Infra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’; C2/JAS1/F11/44; C8/55/123; PSO2/180, unfol. (entry 16 Mar. 1637); PROB11/190, ff. 120r-v; N. Yorks. RO, ZFM/Alum mines, 1, 3, 4; R.B. Turton, The Alum Farm (Whitby, 1938), 72, 73, 76, 86-7, 122; ‘Sir Paul Pindar’, Oxford DNB.

The onus of pursuing the family’s claim against the crown fell mainly on Chaloner, and his efforts were rewarded in 1637 with a warrant for payment out of the exchequer of £3,291 for his part of the inheritance.36PSO2/180; N. Yorks. RO, ZFM/Alum mines, 3. This sum was never paid, however, and it seems likely that the crown’s bad dealing with Chaloner and his elder brother Thomas* over their inheritance had at least some bearing upon their parliamentarian allegiance during the civil war.37Add. 71448, f. 54. Early in 1637, Chaloner conceived another grievance against the crown when he was arrested on suspicion of helping Thomas, who had been accused of writing an anti-Laudian tract, to flee the country. Despite vigorously denying any complicity in his brother’s escape, Chaloner was imprisoned in the Tower and all his papers were seized by order of the privy council. He was bailed in mid-May, with Sir Edmund Verney* – the Chaloners’ neighbour in Buckinghamshire – and James’s future brother-in-law Sir William Fairfax of Steeton, Yorkshire, standing bond for £2,000 on condition that he appear before the privy council or one of the secretaries of state within six weeks.38Infra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’; PC2/47, ff. 153, 199; CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 560; 1637, pp. 44-5, 106, 109-10. Chaloner was evidently on close terms with the Fairfax family by the mid-1630s, and in September 1637 he married a niece of the wife of the future parliamentarian general Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*, the father of Sir Thomas Fairfax*.39Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. pp. lxxvi-lxxix, 301-2.

Chaloner remained in London or Buckinghamshire for most of the civil war and, with Thomas, contributed £200 towards the parliamentarian war effort.40E115/104/120; HMC 7th Rep. 553; LJ vii. 114a. Evidently trusted at Westminster, he was appointed a messenger in March 1643 between Parliament and its committee to treat with the king at Oxford.41CJ iii. 8b; LJ v. 654b. Early in 1645, he wrote several letters to Sir Ferdinando (now 2nd Baron) Fairfax in which he declared his support for the Self-Denying Ordinance and the new modelling of Parliament’s armies and his distaste for the machinations of the Presbyterian interest, which he thought were influenced by ‘private interests to the prejudice of the public’. He also expressed the hope that the New Model army would be commanded by an Englishman rather than a Scot, and he was evidently pleased when command was given to Sir Thomas Fairfax.42Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 155-6, 162-4. Chaloner, like his brother Thomas, was an opponent of continuing Scottish intervention in English affairs, and during the second half of 1645 they were among the signatories to letters from the parliamentary committees at York to Parliament, complaining of the ‘infinite oppressions and extortions’ of the Scottish army and pleading that the Scots be removed from Yorkshire immediately, ‘for they demean themselves not as if they came only for our subsistence but as if purposely to destroy us’.43Infra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’; Bodl. Nalson IV, ff. 90, 212-13, 244, 317; LJ vii. 640b.

Chaloner was firmly allied with the Fairfaxes’ interest in Yorkshire, and in mid-September 1645, Lord Fairfax wrote to Scarborough corporation recommending him as a candidate in the town’s forthcoming ‘recruiter’ election. Chaloner also had the backing of another senior northern parliamentarian, Francis Pierrepont*, the chairman of the Northern Association committee based at York.44Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 243; Scarborough Recs. 1641-60 ed. M. Y. Ashcroft (N. Yorks. RO Publications xlix), 42, 43. Chaloner’s competitors for the two seats were the godly local gentlemen Sir Matthew Boynton* and Luke Robinson*. All three candidates were aligned with the Independent interest at Westminster, and the contest turned largely, it seems, on the strength of their local connections and of their zeal in opposing the Scots.45Supra, ‘Scarborough’. Early in October, Chaloner and Lord Fairfax’s electoral agent, a certain Captain Harrison, attended the corporation in person and presented a second letter from Fairfax in support of Chaloner. They also reminded the office-holders of Lord Fairfax’s and Sir Thomas’s ‘great services’ to the parliamentarian cause and their ‘tried integrities’.46Scarborough Recs. 1641-60 ed. Ashcroft, 43, 49-50. Clearly, Chaloner was hoping to secure election on the back of his kinsmen’s illustrious reputations. The corporation, however, preferred the two local candidates Boynton and Robinson, who were duly returned.47Supra, ‘Scarborough’.

Defeated at Scarborough, the Fairfaxes attempted to secure a seat for Chaloner in the west country, where Sir Thomas Fairfax sought to take electoral advantage of his army’s victories. In November 1645, Sir Thomas, writing from Ottery St Mary, near Exeter, informed his father that he had ‘some hopes of procuring a place in these parts for Mr. Chaloner to be burgess of’.48Add. 18979, f. 207. But this proved to be wishful thinking on Sir Thomas’s part, and, as in the case of Scarborough, the east Devon seats were taken by candidates with strong local connections. According to the antiquary Anthony Wood, Lord Fairfax secured Chaloner the post of secretary to Parliament’s commission for overseeing the visitation of Oxford University in 1647.49Ath. Ox. iii. 503. But if that was the case, it did not prevent Chaloner playing a prominent role in Yorkshire during the second half of 1647 in representing the county’s grievances to Parliament.50Add. 71448, ff. 44-7.

Chaloner finally secured a parliamentary seat in the very last of the Yorkshire recruiter elections. In April 1648, he was returned for the West Riding borough of Aldborough in place of Thomas Scot II, who had died earlier in the year. Chaloner probably owed his election to the local influence of the Fairfaxes and that of their close ally, the future regicide Sir Thomas Mauleverer, who was MP for the neighbouring constituency of Boroughbridge.51Supra, ‘Aldborough’. Having taken his seat by 11 May at the latest, Chaloner was named to somewhere between one and 13 committees before Pride’s Purge on 6 December.52CJ v. 537b, 538b, 557a, 599b, 603b, 614b, 618a, 631b, 643b, 664b, 692a; vi. 60a, 81a. Unfortunately, the precise number of his appointments is impossible to establish in view of the clerk of the Commons’ habit of referring simply to ‘Mr Chaloner’, without distinguishing between James and his brother Thomas, who had been returned for the Yorkshire constituency of Richmond in 1645. Nevertheless, Thomas was clearly the more prominent Member, and it very likely that the majority of references in the Journals to ‘Mr Chaloner’ apply to him rather than to James.

Like Thomas, James retained his seat at Pride’s Purge and was one of only 70 or so MPs who were listed as still sitting in the House by mid-December.53Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 38 (12-19 Dec. 1648), sig. Ddd7 (E.476.35). It was Thomas, the more radical of the two brothers, who was closely involved in drawing up the dissent – the formal renunciation required of all Rumpers of the vote of 5 December that the king’s answers at Newport were a sufficient grounds for a settlement.54Infra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’. Yet James was apparently not inactive in the House during the winter of 1648-9, for he was named to at least six committees between Pride’s Purge and the regicide, including the Committee for Indemnity* and a committee set up on 29 December for establishing a high court of justice to try the king.55PA, ms CJ xxxiii, p. 474; CJ vi. 96a, 103a, 106a, 109a, 113b, 122b. Given his intimacy with the Fairfaxes, he was probably the ‘Mr Chaloner’ included on a Commons delegation to Sir Thomas (now 3rd Baron) Fairfax on 14 December to discover the grounds of the army’s continued refusal to bar some Members from attending the House. Thomas Chaloner’s close political collaborator, Henry Marten, had been one of the minority tellers against this committee’s establishment.56CJ vi. 97a. Yet as several contemporary sources confirm, it was James not Thomas who was among the 33 MPs who entered their dissent on 20 December – the day of its introduction as a test of the Rump’s membership (Mercurius Pragmaticus evidently mistook James for Thomas Chaloner).57PA, ms CJ xxxiii, p. 473; NLS, Adv. ms 35.5.11, f. 50; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 39 (19-26 Dec. 1648), sig. Eee3 (E.477.30); [W. Prynne*], A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members Case (1660), 21, 23 (E.1013.22). Later that same day (20 Dec.), James as well as Thomas were named to a nine-man committee for drafting a declaration justifying the dissent.58PA, ms CJ xxxiii, p. 474; Mercurius Elencticus no. 57 (19-26 Dec. 1648), 544 (E.477.31).

It is partly because of Chaloner’s willingness to take the dissent on its introduction that he has been identified as a member of the Marten-Chaloner group of ‘ideological republicans’ and as one of the more ‘committed commonwealthsmen’.59Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 265, 370; Worden, Rump Parl. 218; R. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), 577, 605; ‘James Challoner’, BDBR. His role in the king’s trial, however, throws into question the extent to which he shared his brother’s uncompromisingly republican views. Although appointed one of the king’s judges, he attended only six sessions of the trial commission and only the first two days of the trial itself.60Muddiman, Trial, 76, 89, 195, 197, 202, 203, 207, 209. Moreover, unlike his brother, he did not sign the royal death warrant. In a vindication of his part in the king’s trial, written not long before his death in 1660, he claimed that he had been opposed to the ‘horrid and desperate actings’ of the early months of the Rump.

I was not in the House either little or much when any debate was had or mention made of the king’s trial. But coming afterwards to the House, I found my name inserted in a certain order to that purpose [the ordinance of 6 January 1649 establishing the high court of justice], upon the reading whereof I did not apprehend that thereby was intended towards his said Majesty anything that might trench either to the deprivation of his royal dignity, much less of his life, both which I did from my heart detest and abominate, but expecting that by this means there might have been a representation made of something to the House, that should have made a happy accommodation betwixt the king and his people ... I was thereupon led to appear once or twice, at the most, at the very beginning of the trial, during which time there was nothing transacted by way of charge ... but his Majesty (as well he might) ... denied the jurisdiction of the court and desired conference with both Houses ... which they denied his Majesty, which I endeavoured for, but by the major part it was overruled, and then (and not before) I perceived his Majesty was in great danger of his life and that it was not in my power to do his Majesty any service and so left them and came no more among them at all at those meetings, nor so much as at the Parliament-house for some months after, neither would I ever have come thither any more but to uphold as much as in me possibly lay his now Majesty’s title and the House of Lords, to the upholding of both which I still gave my vote, [and] so did I observe divers others to do the like, though overborn by the major part ... to keep things from falling into a worse condition.61Add. 71448, f. 67.

Chaloner’s account of his actions during the winter of 1648-9 was endorsed after his death by his son Edmund, who insisted that his father had been ‘absolutely against the forcible seclusion of the Members [Pride’s Purge], and against the abolition of the House of Peers’.62HMC 7th Rep. 147. Chaloner’s assertion that he had absented himself from the House in the months after the trial is belied by his nomination to at least 12 committees between early February and late May 1649.63CJ vi. 134a, 146b, 147b, 154a, 161b, 167b, 180b, 189b, 190b, 198a, 201a, 217a. Like his brother and Marten and their allies, he was also named committees in 1649 for lightening the burdens of the poor, the indebted and those enmeshed in the trammels of litigation – although Thomas was apparently more committed to these causes than was James.64CJ vi. 167b, 190b, 284a, 330b, 337a. Where he seems to have diverged markedly from his brother and his republican friends was on the issues of abolishing kingship and the House of Lords. The ‘Mr Chaloner’ who was named to committees on these matters was almost certainly Thomas; James apparently had no hand in these proceedings.65Infra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’. Similarly, he was named to only one committee relating to the 1649 Engagement for abjuring the monarchy and Lords.66CJ vi. 307b. The claim that he supported the aggressively mercantilist policies of Thomas Chaloner and his republican circle rests on little more, in seems, than his appointment to the committee set up on 16 March 1650 for establishing a council of trade.67CJ vi. 383b; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 605.

Chaloner’s principal contribution to consolidating the Rump in power and shaping its political priorities was in helping to render it more appealing to parliamentarian moderates, not in advancing a republican agenda. In 1660, he would claim that when he had attended the Rump it was often to perform ‘good offices for such as were in distress either for lives or estates’.68Add. 71448, f. 68. The royalist army officer Sir John Owen would ‘thankfully acknowledge and truly certify’ that Chaloner had been ‘the only instrument under God’ for saving him from the scaffold in March 1649.69Add. 71448, f. 66; HMC 7th Rep. 147. Chaloner also played a leading role in the Rump’s assault on the Levellers that spring. He, Thomas Scot I and Henry Ireton were appointed on 18 April to bring in a declaration against the promoters of Leveller writings, and the fact that a copy of this declaration survives among Chaloner’s papers suggests that he played an important part in its composition.70CJ vi. 189b; Add. 71448, f. 49. The declaration accuses the Levellers of ‘insisting upon some things manifestly destructive to propriety [i.e. property] and to the most necessary subsistence of the army and, lastly, endeavouring such a liberty of conscience as if allowed would in all likelihood introduce nothing but heresy ... and profaneness’.71Add. 71448, f. 50. He was appointed in May and again in September 1649 to return the thanks of the House to Fairfax and his officers for suppressing the Leveller mutinies at Burford and Oxford, and he was subsequently named to several committees for suppressing pro-Leveller publications and to enforce the banishment of the Leveller leader John Lilburne.72CJ vi. 218a, 276a, 300a; vii. 12a, 55b, 75b. Chaloner’s respect for the traditional political order is consistent with his support for measures to compensate the former clerk of the House of Lords, John Browne. He was almost certainly the Chaloner who served as a minority teller on 12 September 1649 in support of Browne’s claim; the winning tellers were the republicans Henry Marten and Luke Robinson.73CJ vi. 294a, 430b.

One of Chaloner’s priorities in the Rump was the advancement of godly religion. He was named to numerous committees for the maintenance of a godly ministry, propagating the gospel, the suppression of profanity and superstition, and defining the acceptable bounds of Protestant orthodoxy – although some of these appointments may have been his brother’s, who took a keener interest in such matters than his reputation as an atheist and debauchee would suggest.74Infra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’; CJ vi. 180b, 231a, 270a, 275b, 317b, 327b, 336b; vii. 12b, 244a. James was involved, so he claimed, in assisting ‘godly, orthodox ministers that were in want, procuring them pensions’, and one of the Chaloners – probably James – was active in presenting ministers to vacant livings.75Add. 36792, ff. 13, 57v, 62v, 69, 79v; SP22/1, f. 162v; Add. 71448, f. 68. Added to the committee for regulating (reforming) the universities – an important instrument for settling a godly ministry – he made several reports from this body to the House, signed many of its orders and, by March 1651, was serving as its chairman.76CJ vi. 201a, 282b, 549a; vii. 141a; LPL, Sion L40.2/E16, passim; ms 1104, item 7; Peterhouse Archives, Misc. vol. 3, pp. 17, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25; HMC 8th Rep. ii. 64; C. Hotham, Corporations Vindicated in Their Fundamental Liberties (1651), 35, 104, 105, 114, 121; The petition and argument of Mr. Hotham (1651), 3, 33, 35, 38; To every Member of Parliament Charles Hotham of Peter-house (1653, 669 f.17.32); T. E. Reinhart, ‘The Parliamentary Visitation of Oxford Univ. 1646-52’ (Brown Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1984), 473, 505, 509-16.

Chaloner’s other main area of activity in the Rump, besides promoting godly reform, was the management of the commonwealth’s financial resources and the supply of the army. He was regularly named to committees for managing the improving the excise and other revenue streams, for increasing yields from composition, sequestration and the sale of forfeited estates and for provisioning and financing the armed forces.77CJ vi. 154a, 161b, 290b, 325a, 400a, 528a, 533b, 589a, 606b; vii. 58a, 104a, 128a, 250b. He was also active on the committee for excise – although he was never formally added to this body – and on the committee for the sale of church lands, most of the proceeds of which went towards paying the soldiery.78CJ vi. 147b; Add. 37682, f. 26; Bodl. Rawl. C.386; LPL, Comm Add 1, f. 93. On 22 July 1651, he reported from a committee on a bill relating to the sale of delinquents’ estates and was a teller with his brother Thomas that same day in favour of paying £300 to a parliamentarian supporter in lieu of his crown pension.79CJ vi. 589a, 606b. However, the two brothers were on opposing sides in the high-profile debate on whether to include the estate of William Craven, 1st Baron Craven, in the 1651 bill for the sale of delinquents’ estates: Thomas favoured inclusion, James was against.80Infra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’; A True and Perfect Narrative of the Several Proceedings in the Case Concerning the Lord Craven (1653), 7, 9, 11 (E.1071.1); M. Brod, ‘The uses of intelligence: the case of Lord Craven, 1650-60’, in Revolutionary England ed. G. Southcombe, G. Tapsell (2017), 111, 116, 117. Chaloner’s several reports from the Committee for Indemnity early in 1652 concerned disbursements to the state’s creditors from the assessment revenues.81CJ vii. 68a, 105a.

Chaloner was conspicuous in the Rump’s efforts to reward its commander-in-chief – Cromwell as well as Fairfax. He reported from, and may well have chaired, several committees established in the summer of 1649 for settling an estate of £3,000 a year (later increased to £4,000 a year) on Fairfax and for recompensing a loyal member of the lord general’s interest in Yorkshire, Colonel John Alured*, for his losses in Parliament’s service.82CJ vi. 225b, 279b, 285b, 299a; vii. 7b; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 151. On 6 September 1651, in the aftermath of the victory at Worcester, the Rump entrusted Chaloner with the task of finding accommodation for Cromwell in Hampton Court. He was also named to a committee that day (6 Sept.) to determine a suitable reward for Cromwell’s ‘great and faithful services’.83CJ vii. 13b. But Chaloner was, and would remain, much closer to Fairfax. The two men were evidently regular correspondents throughout the 1650s, and by February 1651 at the latest, Chaloner was lodging in or near the Fairfax residence on Great Queen Street, in London; by the spring of 1652, he had moved into York House – Fairfax’s mansion on The Strand.84Add. 71448, ff. 3-42. When Fairfax let York House to Bulstrode Whitelocke in 1652, Chaloner took up residence in another Fairfax property, the Lodge in the Middle Park at Hampton Court, on which he spent £200 rendering fit for habitation.85Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Fairfax’; Add. 71448, f. 21; CJ vii. 240a, b; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 349; 1654, pp. 66, 115, 175.

In the summer of 1652, Fairfax appointed Chaloner one of three commissioners for the management and reform of civil and church affairs on the Isle of Man – the Rump having granted Fairfax the lordship of the island in 1651.86Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Fairfax’; Chaloner, A Short Treatise of the Isle of Man, 1-3; CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 126. By late 1653, Chaloner had written a short treatise concerning the customs and topography of the island (published in print in 1656), which he dedicated to Fairfax on the grounds that ‘persons of most merit, least seeking and readiest laying down places of the highest trust and importance in a commonwealth have been held the fittest to possess them; a rare example whereof your lordship stands evidenced to the whole world’.87Add. 71448, f. 27; Chaloner, A Short Treatise of the Isle of Man, 2. Chaloner was esteemed, says Wood, as ‘an ingenious man and a singular lover of antiquities. He ... made divers collections of arms, genealogies, seals, monuments etc. from ancient evidences, which being so done, were fairly written by him in paper books’ – none of which appear to have survived.88Ath. Ox. iii. 503.

Although Chaloner was named to the committee set up on 25 September 1651 to prepare a bill for dissolving the Rump and calling a new Parliament, it is not known how he reacted to the army’s forcible dissolution of the Rump in April 1653.89CJ vii. 20b. However, his removal from the Buckinghamshire bench in July 1653 and his omission from the Buckinghamshire and Yorkshire assessment commissions in November certainly indicates that he was persona non grata with the army and its adherents. In 1655, he was suspected (probably unjustly) of trying to elicit Fairfax’s support for the royalist risings of that year.90TSP i. 750. In October 1656, Fairfax appointed him his deputy on the Isle of Man – in effect, its civil governor – a post that he took up the following July, when Fairfax wished him a ‘prosperous journey’ to the island.91Add. 71448, f. 34; CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 135. Chaloner seems to have remained on the Isle of Man for the next three years and did not resume his seat when the Rump was restored in May 1659.92Add. 71448, ff. 38, 40, 42.

Chaloner followed Fairfax late in 1659 in seeking to assist General George Monck* against General John Lambert* and the committee of safety, but when he attempted to secure the Isle of Man for Monck he was (in the words of his son) ‘clapt close prisoner in a dungeon in Peel Castle in that island by order of those who were then in power at Wallingford House [the committee of safety] ... who looked upon him as a person devoted to the royal interest’.93Add. 71448, ff. 57-8; HMC 7th Rep. 147. The countess dowager of Derby would later certify that Chaloner had been imprisoned for his ‘affection and service’ not only to Monck but also to those of the ‘royal party’, and that he had shown ‘much ... affection’ to the royal interest during his time on the island.94Add. 71448, f. 64; HMC 7th Rep. 147. On 27 December 1659, the re-restored Rump ordered those holding Chaloner – one of whom was an army officer and reputed Quaker – to release him, and on 31 January the House confirmed his governorship of the Isle of Man.95CJ vii. 797b; Add. 71448, f. 56; Parl. Intelligencer no. 2 (26 Dec. 1659-2 Jan. 1660), 11 (E.182.16).

The circumstances of Chaloner’s death in 1660 are somewhat confused. Both Wood and John Aubrey alleged that he had poisoned himself – in March or April, according to Wood; ‘after the Restoration’, according to Aubrey – after receiving news that ‘the superior power then in being’ intended to secure Peel Castle for the king and take him into custody.96Ath. Ox. iii. 503; Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 160. But this account of his demise is contradicted by that of his son Edmund, who claimed that his father, being of a ‘tender and weak constitution’, had fallen sick during his imprisonment in December 1659 and had died of natural causes the following summer.97HMC 7th Rep. 147. It is certainly difficult to see why a man such as Chaloner, who had not signed Charles I’s death warrant and had supported Monck and the ‘royal party’ during the winter of 1659-60, would have had so much to fear from the restoration of the Stuarts that he felt compelled to commit suicide. Documents among Chaloner’s own papers suggest that Monck had re-instated him as governor of the Isle of Man by early May 1660 and state that he had died in July 1660 – evidence that tends to corroborate his son’s version of events.98Add. 71448, ff. 63, 69.

Chaloner’s place of burial is not known, although it was presumably on the Isle of Man. No will is recorded. His estate, by his own admission, was small, consisting largely of a moiety of the manor and rectory of Steeple Claydon and of a lease for the mining and working of alum at Guisborough.99C10/477/57; C54/3289/19; LR2/266, f. 1; N. Yorks. RO, ZFM/Alum mines, 5; Add. 71448, ff. 68, 69; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 497; LJ vii. 114a. There is no substance to Aubrey’s claim that Chaloner possessed an estate worth nearly £1,500 a year.100Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 160. None of Chaloner’s immediate descendants sat in Parliament.