BAGSHAWE, Edward (1589-1662), of the Middle Temple, London. and Moreton Pinkney, Northants.

Bagshawe was a younger son of a London Vintner, but his career was shaped by his father’s early death and his mother’s remarriage in 1598 to the Northamptonshire judge Sir Augustine Nicolls.15St Michael, Crooked Lane, London par. reg.; Vis. Northants. (Harl. Soc. lxxxvii), 119. ‘Bred’, as he explained, ‘at the feet of a Gamaliel in the law’, he acquired both invaluable professional connections and a robust Protestant piety.16E. Bagshaw, A Just Vindication (1660), 15 (E.1019.6). With Sir Augustine’s nephew and eventual heir, Francis Nicolls†, he was sent to Brasenose College, Oxford, and studied under Robert Bolton (d. 1631), who was developing into a widely respected but particularly austere Calvinist. Presented by Sir Augustine to the living of Broughton, Northamptonshire, in 1610, Bolton was to become a lifelong friend of the family.17Al. Ox.; ‘Bolton, Robert’, Oxford DNB; ‘Nicolls, Francis (of Faxton)’, HP Commons 1604-1629.

Meanwhile, at Sir Augustine’s request, both Francis Nicolls and Bagshawe were granted special admittances to the Middle Temple.18MTR ii. 499. Although his step-father died in 1616, the year he was called to the bar, Bagshawe profited from other Northamptonshire contacts at his inn, including judges Sir Henry Montagu† (later 1st earl of Manchester), Sir Sidney Montagu* and Sir Francis Harvey, to progress in his profession.19Bagshaw, Just Vindication, 15; MTR ii. 532, 539, 556, 591, 657, 677, 815. The following year he cemented local alliances by marrying Prudence Morgan, descended through her mother from yet another judge, Francis Morgan (d. 1558) of Northampton. The match may also have been promoted by Bagshawe’s godly patrons as part of an otherwise unsuccessful attempt to wean the Morgan family from their attachment to Catholicism. Despite the fact that Prudence’s brother Thomas was (as a ward) placed under the tuition of John Preston at Cambridge, he and two of his sisters married into the midlands recusant families of Fermor, Middlemore and Sheldon; their half-brother – son of their mother’s second marriage to Sir William Morgan of Tredegar – was also a Catholic.20Serjeantson, Hist. St Peter, Northampton, 198-9. In contrast, at least some of the Bagshawe children were baptized by Bolton at Broughton.21Broughton par. reg. Edward appears gradually to have accumulated property in Northamptonshire and alongside it trusteeships and executorships, including in 1629 a share in the wardship of the future regicide Sir Gilbert Pykeringe*.22Coventry Docquets, 469, 625, 644, 721. In 1635 he was engaged in Rockingham Forest business with Edward Montagu†, 1st Baron Montagu of Boughton.23HMC Buccleuch, iii. 374. That the same year he was made recorder of Banbury also indicates approval from opposition peer William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, the town’s steward.24Banbury Corporation Recs. 160.

Critic of ecclesiastical power

Following Bolton’s death, Bagshawe published the minister’s treatise on ‘the four last things’ together with two of his sermons and an appreciative biography; the dedicatee was Francis Nicolls, who had married Bagshawe’s sister Mary, and to whom he underlined the importance of the exercise of conscience in public life.25E. B. Mr Boltons last and learned work (1632). Over the next few years Bagshawe issued further sermons, a discourse on usury and a collection of prayers, always insisting that this was at Bolton’s express request.26Two sermons preached at Northampton (1635); A short and private discourse between Mr Bolton and one M.S. (1637); Certain Devout Prayers of Mr Bolton (1638). It was thus doubtless with a certain reputation as a champion of puritanism that, from 1634 if not earlier, Bagshawe appeared as counsel in the court of high commission and crossed swords with Archbishop William Laud’s chief enforcers.27SP16/487, f. 192. In 1639 Bagshawe was himself summoned before the court to answer charges that, when nominated by Francis Nicolls to act as an investigator in the course of a prosecution brought against him for ‘sundry enormous misdemeanours, violation of the canons ecclesiastical of this kingdom as keeping of unlawful conventicles and other like offences’, Bagshawe had ‘terrified’ witnesses ‘to the manifest perverting of justice’ and engaged in ‘brawling’ in the Northampton church where the commission held its proceedings.28SP16/437, ff. 89-92v. Bradshawe’s initial response being found insufficient, on 14 November he ordered to answer more fully.29CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 272.

The case was evidently unresolved when, on 24 February 1640, Bagshawe commenced his lectures as Lent reader at the Middle Temple. Despite his later avowal that he had written them two years earlier, and thus in a different context, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he set out to be both topical and controversial.30Bagshawe, Just Vindication, 7. Having hinted to his audience that he had abandoned an initial idea ‘as too sharp a subject’, he nonetheless (according to a sympathetic account) announced an intention ‘out of Tacitus’, ‘not to follow the truth too near lest it should dash out his teeth, nor yet to follow it too far a distance lest he lost it’. At a time when the king looked certain to call another Parliament and petitioners took to the streets protesting against bishops, he proceeded to argue that an act of Parliament ‘made without the assent of the Lords Spiritual’ was a valid statute, that the clergy were (at least in certain respects) incapable of temporal jurisdiction, and that a bishop had no inherent ‘power as a diocesan to convict a heretic’.31SP16/447, f. 65; SP16/474, ff. 174-5. Hearers at the inn received him favourably, and Bagshawe later claimed the support of loyal courtier Baron Montagu of Boughton, but on 30 March Bagshawe was silenced. Lord Keeper John Finch† contented himself with ruling that the argument was ‘good law but not seasonably delivered’, but Archbishop Laud was more hostile. He summoned Bagshawe before the council and was prevented from punitive action only by the intervention of friendly councillors like the earl of Manchester. Yet although forced to abandon his readings, Bagshawe came away ‘with very great credit and applause’.32SP16/447, ff. 65-6; B. Whitelocke, Mems. (1732), 33; Bagshawe, Just Vindication, 6, 11-12; W. Laud, Works ed. W. Scott, J. Bliss (1847-60), iv. 132.

Long Parliament: grievances and religion 1640-1

It was his reputation for standing up to unpopular aspects of royal government, especially with regard to religion, that underlay Bagshawe’s ‘unanimous’ election to Parliament in the autumn as a Member for Southwark, ‘without asking, or seeking, or stepping one foot out of my chamber in the Middle Temple’.33SP16/447, f. 66v; Bagshawe, Just Vindication, 3. Initially he amply fulfilled expectations. In time, however, it became clear not only that his opposition to the temporal power of the clergy was predicated on an advanced notion of the royal prerogative, but also that his view of bishops was a good deal more nuanced than his most vociferous supporters anticipated.

In the early months of the Long Parliament Bagshawe spoke regularly and was frequently named to committees. Placed on the committee for privileges (6 Nov.), he expressed opinions in the Commons on at least three election disputes, apparently speaking in favour of a wide franchise (19 Nov.; 8, 11 Dec.), and was to the fore among those appointed to prepare an act addressing election disorders (30 Mar. 1641).34CJ ii. 20b, 224a; Procs. LP i. 188, 511, 570. He demonstrated a regard for upholding the privileges of the House (3 Feb.) and was among MPs delegated to reduce the number of committees to more manageable proportions (19 May).35Procs. LP ii. 355; CJ ii. 151a. On the second day of the session he voiced a hope that a Parliament ‘met together for the welfare and happiness of prince and people’ would achieve much: ‘who knows whether this may not be the appointed time when God will restore our religion as at first, and our laws as at the beginning’. His agenda was wide: the people were to be eased not just ‘from the bane of superstition, from the intolerable burden of innovation in religion, and from the racks and tortures of strange new-fangled oaths’ but also ‘from all illegal arrests and imprisonments’, from oppressive forest laws, from the evils of depopulation and enclosure, and ‘from exactions and expoilations of ... projectors and monopolists’.36Mr Bagshaws first speech (1641), 1-2; Procs. LP i. 36, 38, 40-1, 43, 47.

Bagshawe was duly appointed to the committee reviewing the state of the kingdom preparing a declaration of grievances (10 Nov.).37CJ ii. 25a. He was included on a variety of committees addressing particular abuses: in the heraldic courts (23 Nov.); by local government officials charged with raising troops and money, and keeping the peace (14 Dec.); moneylenders (19 Mar. 1641); and wine monopolists (26 May).38CJ ii. 34b, 50b, 152b, 157a. Significantly, he was among the lawyers who argued in February that Sir Robert Berkeley†, justice of king’s bench and a fellow member of the Middle Temple, was not guilty of treason for upholding Ship Money, but although not directly involved in the trial of the lord deputy of Ireland, Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, he supported it trenchantly.39Procs. LP i. 431. On the day that he and others took the Protestation, he asserted regarding Strafford that ‘the kingdom cannot be safe while he lives’ (3 May 1641).40CJ ii. 133a; Procs. LP iv. 180. He also sat on the committee investigating petitions for release from those held in London prisons (including Southwark; 28 Aug.) and was among those nominated to prepare an act regulating printing (24 July). 41CJ ii. 222b, 274b. Plausibly through his continuing links with the Montagus, he was periodically given leave to act as counsel in proceedings in the Lords.42CJ ii. 60b, 99a, 183b, 271b.

Overwhelmingly, however, Bagshawe’s parliamentary activity from late 1640 to mid-1642 focussed on religion. Despite, or perhaps because of his wife’s Catholic kin, he was named to committees regulating and investigating recusants and priests (21, 27, 28 Nov. 1640; 26 Jan. 1641).43CJ ii. 33b, 38b, 39a, 42b, 73b, 139a. He saw the ‘popish plot’ as a real and constant threat, and proffered information of smuggled literature of Jesuit provenance to prove it (14 Nov. 1640).44Procs. LP i. 146-8, 150. ‘The grand authors of all mischief’ were ‘the priests and Jesuits’, who ‘practise[d] with foreign states’ and ‘whose eyes have ever been watching to destroy this our little Israel’ (18 Feb. 1642).45Mr Bagshaw his worthy speech (1642), A4 (E.200.32); Procs. LP i. 282. One way to curtail subversive activity would be to proceed against foreigners who refused to take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, a possibility he and four other lawyers were ordered to investigate in November 1641.46CJ ii. 305a

Unsurprisingly, the ecclesiastical courts were in his sights from the outset: his speech on grievances of 7 November 1640 cited the immediately damning example of the ‘gentleman who has been in the high commission five years and so is still for putting his hat on in sermon time’.47Procs. LP i. 36, 43. Accordingly he was on committees reviewing cases of some of the court’s more high-profile victims – Alexander Leighton (9 Nov.), George Walker (in whom he took a particular interest: 30 Nov.; 6 July 1641), William Prynne and his associates (3 Dec. 1640) – and involved in the deliberations with the Lords on bills for the abolition of both high commission and Star Chamber (26, 28 June 1641).48CJ ii. 24a, 40a, 44b, 189b, 191a; Procs. LP v. 514. Provincial courts were no better. Having presented a petition from Peter Smart, confined in king’s bench prison in Southwark for defiance of John Cosin, dean of Durham, Bagshawe claimed that no ecclesiastical court could fine or imprison (10 Nov. 1640) and called for Cosin to be excommunicated (21 Nov.).49Procs. LP i. 81, 83, 86, 232, 234. He was also on committees preparing charges against Matthew Wren, bishop of Ely, and William Piers, bishop of Bath and Wells (22 Dec.; 4 June 1641).50CJ ii. 56a, 56b, 166b.

With other lawyers Bagshawe led the attack on the Convocation which had continued to sit after the dissolution of the Short Parliament and on the ecclesiastical Canons which it had issued (9, 16 Dec. 1640; 12 Feb. 1641).51CJ ii. 48a, 52a, 84a; Procs. LP i. 310. In generally well-received speeches, printed by parliamentary order, he argued that the clergy had never had power to make canons which bound both clergy and laity without their consent and ‘that the authority which should give life and being to these [particular] canons is void in law’. In view of the vote of the House that they ‘were against the king’s prerogative royal, the fundamental laws of the land, the liberty of the subject and divers acts of Parliament’, he concluded that, in promoting them, the clergy were guilty of praemunire.

If the king and his people are thus used by the clergy for the maintenance of their own laws as to exclude them from heaven, from the church and from salvation, for so are excommunicated persons ... it is then most just for the king to exclude the clergy form the protection and benefit of his laws, when they so encroach and entrench upon them.52E. Bagshawe, Two Arguments in Parliament (1641), 2, 14, 24, 38; Procs. LP i. 525, 530-4, 537, 539-40, 543-4; ii. 596.

That the clergy should claim to have made their Canons with royal authority ‘aggravates their offence’, since they thereby made the king do wrong to his people.53Two Arguments in Parliament, 40-1.

Bagshawe’s elevated view of the royal prerogative was at the heart of his criticism of the church. ‘All ecclesiastical courts’, he asserted, were ‘to be kept by the king’ (16 Dec. 1640), although he assigned the legislature a complementary role in regulating the clergy, questioning in debate ‘why ministers should speak against Parliament, for had it not been for Parliaments they had not enjoyed wives, for by canon law they are not permitted to have any’ (8 Jan. 1641).54Procs. LP i. 626; ii. 147. The published claims by Joseph Hall, bishop of Exeter, that episcopacy was established iure divino [by divine right] were ‘directly contrary to the laws of England’ and against the crown’; he ‘utterly den[ied]’ that ‘episcopacy is inseparable to the crown of England’ and that it is ‘a third estate in Parliament’ (9 Feb. 1641).55Procs. LP ii. 402.

Nineteen years later Bagshawe asserted that he had not gone so far as to advocate the abolition of episcopacy. When some of his constituents had presented him with a petition for its ‘total extirpation ... root and branch’ with the request that he would promote it in the House, he had declined to do so, explaining that reform and regulation would be a better solution. When the petition reached the Commons by another route, he had ‘openly declared [his] opinion concerning bishops, for establishing them in their function and jurisdiction, agreeable to Law’ and even opined that ‘the state of prelacy’ was

so incorporated into monarchy, that the ruin of one would hazard the ruin of the other: That it was so interwoven with the common law, in so many original writs, that the destruction of it would take away one of the chiefest piers of the common law for learning and pleading in ecclesiastical matters.56Bagshawe, Just Vindication, 3-4.

Yet it is possible that in 1641 not all his constituents or auditors appreciated the subtlety of his position, or that he had expressed it in quite such stark terms. When he moved that the London petition be debated by a committee of the whole House (8 Feb.), he also observed that it was ‘not episcopacy, but episcopapacy [which] is to be rejected, i.e. that episcopacy which is grounded in papal principles’; the following day he drew a widely-recognised distinction between the system ‘of primitive times’ and that pertaining ‘at this day’.57Procs. LP ii. 390, 393; Mr Bagshaws speech, 1. But his avowal that it was not necessary to embrace Presbyterianism and his implication that there was nothing inherently wrong with the Book of Common Prayer may well have been lost when he pushed for the removal of clergy from commissions of the peace and of bishops as voting members of the House of Lords on the ground that it was ‘a foul and filthy thing for clergymen to exercise temporal jurisdiction’ (1, 2, 10, 11 Mar.; 4 June).58Mr Bagshaws speech, 7-8; Bagshawe, Just Vindication, 4; Two Arguments in Parliament, 35-6, 42; CJ ii. 94b; Procs. LP ii. 696, 702, 717; iv. 724, 738.

With the passage of time the extremism of lobbying crowds did not propel Bagshawe towards greater caution as it did fellow MPs like Sir Edward Dering*. He was a vociferous member of committees involved in the impeachment of the bishops who had endorsed the irregular sitting of Convocation (13 Nov.; 17 Jan. 1642).59CJ ii. 314b, 385b. His officially-sanctioned speech portrayed it as a trial ‘expected of all men and much desired’; the crimes were ‘treason in the highest degree’ against both the monarch and ‘the whole body politic of this kingdom’ and the number of criminals on a scale to astonish ‘the Christian world’. Whereas hitherto most bishops had been ‘glorious lamps in the church’, these men had

turned this truth of God into a lie, the grace of God into wantonness and perverted the ways of godliness by their own vicious and ungracious live[s], have led in ignorance and blindness the flock of Christ over which they have been placed as shepherds, thereby permitting and suffering them to walk in strange ways, according to their own inventions.60E. Bagshawe, A Speech concerning the trial of the Twelve Bishops (1642), sig. A2, A2v, A3v (E.200.10).

Meanwhile, Bagshawe continued to be a friend of pious congregations and godly preachers. He received committee appointments to review the complaints of the parishioners of St Gregory by St Paul’s (25 Nov. 1640), meet the aspirations of those who desired a parish church at Wapping (30 Aug. 1641), promote the gospel (12 Apr. 1641) and better maintain the ministry (25 Mar. 1642).61CJ ii. 36a, 119a, 151a, 277a, 496b, 500b. He promoted the interests of Dr Anthony Thompson, whose income from tithes had been diminished because of fen drainage (27 Jan. 1642) and supported the efforts of the parishioners of Finchingfield, Essex, to retain the services of their former minister Stephen Marshall by arguing that men should not be forced ‘to leave a certainty for an uncertainty’ – although it is conceivable that Bagshawe preferred not to have such an apparently ‘root and branch’ opponent of episcopacy take up a proffered lectureship at St Margaret’s, Westminster.62PJ i. 187, 191; ii. 86.

Retreat from opposition 1641-2

Once the House returned from the summer recess of 1641 Bagshawe’s appearances in the Journal became less frequent, raising the possibility that, once religion dropped down the parliamentary agenda, his commitment ebbed. His first attempt to raise the issue of strangers and the oaths of supremacy and allegiance on 21 October was dismissed as insufficiently urgent to warrant attention at that point.63D’Ewes (C), 19. He had reservations about the Grand Remonstrance, finding it dangerously imprecise. Although he conceded that, for example, there had been malpractice in some of the law courts, he asserted the legality of the courts themselves. If particular clauses of the Remonstrance were ‘imperfect and unsound’ in this way, it would be impossible to vote it through (22 Nov.).64D’Ewes (C), 184n; Verney, Notes, 122. As a consequence, with others who were to become royalists, he spoke in support of Middle Temple lawyer Geoffrey Palmer* when the latter was censured for his opposition to the measure.65Verney, Notes, 127.

By spring 1642 Northamptonshire connections were also pulling Bagshawe away from condemnation of royal servants and towards courtiers. On 28 March he moved for the revival of the right of Henry Stanhope†, 1st Baron Stanhope, to the office of postmaster-general, presumably for the benefit of Stanhope’s widow, Katherine, governess of Princess Mary.66PJ ii. 96. Ten days later he delivered a petition from Sir William Wilmore, sheriff of Northamptonshire, seeking release on grounds of age and ill-health from the custody to which he had been committed for having allegedly privileged publishing messages from the king over those from Parliament.67PJ ii. 137. Nonetheless, on 10 June Bagshawe offered £50 towards the defence of the kingdom.68PJ iii. 471. On 5 July he had his first committee appointments in over three months, to address problems surrounding mobilisation in Leicestershire and to consider representations from the judiciary in Ireland.69CJ ii. 652a, 652b. In view of the opinions he expressed a few months later, it is likely that in the former case Bagshawe found himself at odds with fellow committee member Sir Arthur Hesilrige* over the legality of dismissing an unsympathetic sheriff. He was apparently still in the House on 4 August, when he was named to the committee for public fasts and on the 10th, when he was one of a handful of lawyers delegated to deal with sensitive business, but he then seems to have absented himself for a period.70CJ ii. 702b, 712b. If he went home to Northamptonshire, he can hardly have avoided encounter with troops on both sides massing in the area.

Lukewarm parliamentarian 1642-3

Bagshawe reappeared in the Journal on 15 October, when he belatedly registered an affirmative to the confirmation of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, as commander-in-chief of parliamentary forces.71CJ ii. 810a. Unprecedentedly, he received three committee nominations on the 17th – to uphold the law on tithes, make arrangements for the defence of Windsor Castle and manage a conference with the Lords over the king’s dismissal of the lord chief justice – all of which might be seen as engagement with efforts to limit damaging consequences of the war.72CJ ii. 811a, 811b. On the face of it, it is surprising that he was named to the small committee entrusted with preparation of an oath of association pledging loyalty to Parliament (22 Oct.), but this was perhaps representative of attempts to include those less enthusiastic about impending conflict.73CJ ii. 819b. A few days later, in the aftermath of the inconclusive battle of Edgehill, he was among those who backed a motion to open peace negotiations (31 Oct.).74Add. MS 18777, f. 47.

Evidently troubled about the slide into open war, Bagshawe played little obvious part in the chamber over the next three months. When on 29 November fellow lawyer John Wylde* brought in a declaration ‘importing that the king’s making of sheriffs by letters patent’ – a move to circumvent the activities of those with parliamentary sympathies by appointing substitutes – ‘was illegal’, Bagshawe ‘endeavoured to refute’ it, supplying precedents from before and after the Norman conquest.75Add. 31116, pp. 23-4; Add. 18777, f. 76. Although he was nominated as a commissioner for associating midland counties including Northamptonshire (15 Dec.), he was not among those MPs who on 30 December made a contribution towards the army.76Add. 18777, f. 109v; LJ v. 493b. It is conceivable that continuing hope to promote a resolution of the conflict combined with concern for a godly but moderate religious settlement and suspicion of Catholics who had adhered to the royalist cause – including his own brothers-in-law Colonel Thomas Morgan (who was to be killed at Newbury) and Anthony Morgan – to keep him at Westminster when other considerations might have led to an early desertion. He was in the company of several like-minded lawyers.

On 20 January 1643 he supported John Maynard* and others who argued that episcopacy should not be abolished before a workable alternative system was established, safeguarding such rights as the collection of tithes.77Harl. 164, ff. 279, 279v. On 4 February he was one of a quartet also composed of Maynard, John Glynne* and the more hard-line Roger Hill II* deputed to ‘mend the returns’.78CJ ii. 954b. As the Commons debated Charles I’s answer to propositions for peace, Bagshawe helpfully proffered precedents from the reign of Henry III for the appointment of arbitrators between the king and his barons, while on the 11th he joined Glynne and William Pierrepont* in ‘speaking very earnestly, honestly and solidly’ for embarking on treaty negotiations without any pre-condition of the disbanding of armies.79Add. 31116, p. 48; Harl. 164, f. 295v. When London citizens anxious at the implications of such a treaty petitioned for explicit measures to indemnify them for their service to Parliament and for ‘a more strict association and covenant for the defence of the religion, laws and liberties’ for which they had engaged, Bagshawe cast it as a breach of privilege. He had raised an uncomfortable point. Other MPs could concede that their delegates dealing with the City could not tie their hands with promises and that the petition was ‘full of violence and injustice because it tended to impose a new oath upon the subjects of England’, but a majority, for reasons of policy or otherwise, preferred to postpone debate.80Harl. 164, f. 305.

In January Bagshawe had complied with orders to nominate assessors for taxation in Southwark, but he is likely to have been half-hearted at best as a member of the committee on the ordinance to allow London and Westminster to construct defensive fortifications, notwithstanding his family origins there (6 Mar.)81CCAM 12; CJ ii. 991a. The following day he spoke ‘shortly’ against the proposed weekly assessment to cover the costs, although ‘with so low a voice’ that diarist Lawrence Whitaker* recorded that he ‘could not hear what he said’ – the inaudibility perhaps stemming from an awareness that there was little chance of making an impact.82Harl. 164, f. 316. Walter Yonge I* heard him ask for Southwark to be excused contributions because the borough had already expended £800 on fortifications, but he was unsuccessful.83Add. 18777, f. 174v; CJ ii. 993a. His nomination with Edward Montagu I* or George Montagu* to the committee to investigate sums of money raised and paid to the army, on the other hand, may have afforded them the opportunity to pursue growing resistance to the war effort (22 Mar.).84CJ ii. 12a.

Bagshawe remained some weeks more at Westminster. He may have been as willing as ever to participate in improving arrangements for sending relief to Ireland (20 Apr.).85CJ iii. 53b. On 6 May he was one of a trio of MPs named to prepare an order recalling warrants to search the houses of ‘papists and ill-affected people’ because they deemed to have been a pretext whereby ‘divers good people have been abused and wronged’, which might be interpreted as a sign of a softening attitude.86CJ iii. 73a. Yet, although he rejected the motion that Henrietta Maria should be impeached for high treason as a way of ‘striking at the head and root of all our mischiefs’ (23 May), he did so only to propose instead that proceedings against the queen be ‘as we did against the earl of Strafford, and as was done 25 Henry VIII against Queen Anne of Cleves and 33 Henry VIII against Queen Catherine Howard’.87Add. 31116, p. 103. Unless this was a ploy to introduce an unsustainable prosecution, it suggests that he still thought that Catholics were largely culpable for the kingdom’s ills. His last appearance in the Journal was on 27 May, when he was among the lawyer MPs ordered to oversee the destruction of altars in the chapels of their inns and the lending of the associated chapel plate on the public faith.88CJ iii. 106b. The removal of such ‘innovations’ may itself have been to his taste, but the diktat to the inns and the plundering of their assets may not.

Disablement and imprisonment

It is not clear precisely when, over a summer that saw a series of disasters for the parliamentary cause, Bagshawe defected to the royalists. On 28 September he was among MPs summoned under penalty to appear before the committee empowered to sequester absent Members to give an account of themselves.89CJ iii. 256b. He sat in the Oxford Parliament and as a result was disabled at Westminster on 22 January 1644, but he did not sign the letter from Oxford to the earl of Essex on the 27th.90CJ iii. 374a. The king issued him with a pardon on 30 March and as late as April he was living in All Saints’ parish, Oxford, but having perhaps returned to Northamptonshire, in June he fell into the hands of Colonel William Purefoy I*, Member for Coventry and was despatched under guard to Westminster, where he was called before the Commons and admitted subscribing to some communications from Oxford. On 29 June he was committed to king’s bench prison, indicted of high treason.91Black, Docquets, 215; M. Toynbee and P. Young, Strangers in Oxford (1973), 262; CJ iii. 546a.

After the Restoration Bagshaw made much of his ‘long imprisonment’, but it is clear that he did not lack friends.92E. Bagshawe, The Rights of the Crown of England (1660), A3 (E.1749.1). On 10 September 1644 his former ward Sir Gilbert Pykeringe was given leave to visit him, while on 25 March 1645 he was granted bail for six weeks, provided he stayed within ten miles of the lines of communication and returned to prison, and in April 1650 he was given leave to stay ten days in London to consult over papers with Pykeringe.93CJ iii. 623a; iv. 89b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 126. Enforced leisure gave him the opportunity for writing. A defence of church revenues obtained through tithes and glebe lands and a defence of the doctrine, liturgy and discipline of the Church of England were issued in 1646, but appear to have made little impact.94Bagshawe, Rights of the Crown, sigs. A3-A4. In 1648, perhaps secure in the knowledge that, despite the perception that it was ‘perilous, if not capital to write law’, there would be Independents willing to indulge him, he ventured to publish a refutation of William Prynne’s* vindication of the visitation of Oxford University: he could count on agreement with the assertion that the Presbyterian Prynne was ‘of narrow and slender judgement’ if not with his argument that rights in the matter lay solely with the king.95E. Bagshawe, A Short Censure of the Book of W.P. (1648), sig. A2.

Meanwhile, and again despite his later complaints, Bagshawe appears to have escaped serious financial penalty. Indeed, in 1648 and 1650 the Committee for Advance of Money* was told that he was in possession of trunks of valuables worth between £7,000 and £8,000, the property of his wife’s sequestered kinsman William Sheldon of Beoley, a recusant. Far from suffering sequestration himself, in 1653 he was confirmed with his brother or son John as a lessee of a Sheldon estate in Northamptonshire.96CCAM 870, 1215; CCC 3149. He had returned to regular activity at the Middle Temple by at least June 1656, when his son John was specially admitted, and an audit in 1659 noted that he had been in possession of the same chamber since 1640.97MTR iii. 1098, 1132, 1134, 1138, 1143.

Apologist for monarchy 1660-2

Shortly before the Restoration Bagshawe published in Oxford a Latin treatise on absolute monarchy.98De monarchia absoluta (1659, E.980.4). On 30 March 1660 George Thomason acquired his newly-published A Just Vindication, designed to clear himself and his Lent reading of 1640 ‘from the aspersions and scandals of two opposite parties whom it was impossible for me to please’. While one side had accused him ‘of faction, that I set bounds and limits to episcopacy’, the other had accused him ‘of apostasy, that, contrary to Law, I would not take it quite away’. Adherence to the latter

sticking close to this opinion, and abhorrency of taking the Scotch Covenant, tending to the utter abolition of episcopacy, was the alone ground of that load of afflictions which lay long upon my body and estate.99Bagshawe, Just Vindication, 6.

Notwithstanding avowals that he would ‘speak no ill’ of the dead archbishop, in effect he held Laud accountable for stirring up trouble over the reading, perhaps counting on a lack of defenders.100Bagshawe, Just Vindication, 2, 11. Emboldened by the return of Charles II – which he was ‘only able to liken to the inauguration of King Solomon’ – he published a further manuscript finished during his imprisonment, asserting The Rights of the Crown of England under the law.101E. Bagshawe, Rights of the Crown.

Bagshawe was elected treasurer of his inn that autumn and was still active there in June 1662.102MTR iii. 1152, 1177. He died that October and was buried in Northamptonshire.103Serjeantson, Hist. St Peter, Northampton, 198-9. None of his four sons who lived to adulthood sat in Parliament. His heir, Francis, followed him into the legal profession, while Henry became a canon of Durham and Edward, also a clergyman but in contrast a controversialist, was ejected from his Oxfordshire living in 1661 and imprisoned for his subversive nonconformity.104Al. Ox.; Calamy Revised, 21-2.