BELASYSE, John (1615-89), of Worlaby, Lincs.

Despite his family’s strong Catholic connections, Belasyse was the only one of his siblings who would embrace Catholicism wholeheartedly – although before the civil war he appears to have remained outwardly conformable to the Church of England. He was educated at the family seat at Newburgh Priory, near Thirsk, and then in the household of his kinsman, Conyers, 7th Baron Darcy, before being sent to Cambridge in his early teens. Although he reportedly attended Peterhouse, there is no record of his admission to that or any Cambridge college, and it seems likely that he was tutored privately in the town. If this was the case then it can only have been because his Catholicism barred him from matriculating. From Cambridge, he travelled to France in the company of the Scottish peer, George Gordon, 2nd marquess of Huntly (one of the king’s most loyal supporters during the Covenanter rebellion), who commanded a Scottish troop of ‘gensdarmes’ in the service of the French king. Huntly placed him in an academy for young gentlemen in Paris, where he spent a year ‘learning his exercises’. Attendance at the French court and the almost obligatory duel followed. 59HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 376-7; Oxford DNB, ‘John Belasyse’. After spending two years in France he was recalled to England by his father, Thomas Belasyse†, Lord Fauconberg, who then set him up at court, ‘designing him a groom’s place of the bed chamber’ (Belasyse was a gentleman of the privy chamber by 1641 at the latest).60LC3/1, f. 25v; HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 377.

Belasyse maintained the life of a courtier until his marriage during the winter of 1636-7 to Jane Boteler, the daughter and heir of the Hertfordshire knight Sir Robert Boteler (one of whose kinswomen had married the Belasyse family friend William Frankland*).61HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 377; VCH Herts. iii. 107. The couple were obliged to marry clandestinely, for the bride was only about 16 at the time and in ward to the courtiers Endymion Porter* and Francis Leigh, 1st Baron Dunsmore, both of whom had also married into the Boteler family.62CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 264; CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 78. At about the time of their marriage, on 11 February 1637, Lord Fauconberg settled the manor of Worlaby in Lincolnshire on Belasyse and his wife.63C54/3094/1. When the union was officially solemnised at Coxwold on 8 March 1637 (not 1636 as is generally stated), the ceremony was attended by, among others, Frankland and Belasyse’s kinsman (Sir) Henry Cholmeley*.64Coxwold par. reg.; Coxwold Par. Regs. ed. R. L. H. Lloyd (Yorks. Par. Reg. Soc. cxx), 36. The couple’s main residence was at Worlaby, but they spent a considerable amount of time during the late 1630s in Yorkshire – mainly, it seems, at the home of Belasyse’s brother-in-law and close friend, the future royalist Sir Henry Slingesby*.65Slingsby Diary ed. D. Parsons (1836), 3, 19, 58, 75.

Although Belasyse’s wife supposedly came with a ‘great fortune’, her estate was saddled with debt. Moreover, as a ward, she was unable to dispose of her inheritance in order to satisfy her parents’ creditors.66Harl. 991, f. 16; HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 377; CSP Dom. 1637, p. 576. In November 1637, therefore, Belasyse and his wife successfully petitioned the king for a royal warrant to allow them to levy fines and suffer recoveries on her estate.67CSP Dom. 1637, p. 576; CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 19. To redeem his wife’s wardship, Belasyse granted to Endymion Porter and Lord Dunsmore a statute upon all his lands for £2,500.68CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 78; LC4/202, ff. 51, 52. Over the next ten years or so, he sold off his wife’s properties, using the proceeds to help consolidate his estate in Yorkshire and, after the civil war, pay off his composition fine. His trustees and associates in these various transactions included his brother Henry Belasyse, Slingesby, Cholmeley and Sir William Lister*.69Add. 33575, ff. 27-8; C54/3184/5; C54/3238/24; C54/3239/25; C54/3247/36; N. Yorks. RO, ZDU 2.

The outbreak of the first bishops’ war in 1639 prompted Belasyse ‘to attend upon his majesty in that expedition he made the first time into Scotland’.70HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 377. Belasyse served a volunteer in a troop of curassiers under the lord chamberlain of the royal household, Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke.71SP16/427/38, ff. 71, 73; HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 377. It is very likely that Belasyse shared the view of Slingesby – also a gentleman volunteer in the first bishops’ war – that the Covenanters’ grievances were ‘a pretence and cloak for wickedness’.72Slingsby Diary ed. Parsons, 11-12.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Belasyse and Frankland were returned for Thirsk. Belasyse owed his election to his father, who was by far the largest landowner in the Thirsk area and had represented the borough himself on four previous occasions.73Supra, ‘Thirsk’. Belasyse received only one appointment in this Parliament – to the committee of privileges, on 16 April – and made no recorded contribution to debate.74CJ ii. 4a. Belasyse’s future secretary and biographer, Joshua Moone, writing in the 1680s (probably from notes dictated by Belasyse himself), attributed the Short Parliament’s precipitate dissolution to ‘the treachery of Sir Henry Vane [II*] then secretary, [who] by representing the king’s intentions and private instructions to take less than twelve subsidies, deprived him of the whole’.75HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 378.

Belasyse was almost certainly the Captain Belasyse who was serving in Sir Jacob Astley’s regiment of foot in the king’s army by August 1640.76Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1241. He seems to have remained steadfastly loyal during the summer of 1640, apparently disdaining to join his brother Henry and other ‘disaffected’ Yorkshire gentry in their several petitions to the king in which they complained about the local impact of royal policies and requested that he summon a new Parliament. It was perhaps in recognition of his loyalty, that Charles employed Belasyse as a messenger to the Scots at Newcastle, late in September, to request the holding of treaty negotiations.77CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 89; HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 378; Slingsby Diary ed. Parsons, 62.

Belasyse was returned for Thirsk again in the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640.78Supra, ‘Thirsk’. Four days after his election, on 5 October, he was one of the signatories to the Yorkshire county indenture returning his brother Henry and their father’s cousin the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*).79C219/43/3/89. Unlike Henry, who was prominent among the ‘northern men’ – that is, the more active and reform-minded northern MPs – Belasyse took very little part in the Long Parliament’s proceedings. He made no significant contribution on the floor of the House and was named to perhaps no more than five committees, although it is possible that the clerk of the House was not always careful to distinguish between him and his brother and may have referred to both as ‘Mr Belasyse’.80CJ ii. 21a, 99b, 338b, 421b, 505b. Henry was by far the more active of the two men, however, and it is likely that most such references in the Journals or diaries relate to him rather than to John.

Although Belasyse showed no great interest in reform of the kingdom’s perceived abuses, still less in further reformation in religion, he apparently shared his brother’s concern to relieve the northern counties, where the English and Scottish armies had been quartered since the summer of 1640 and were causing great hardship. Thus on 21 November 1640, during a debate on security for a loan from the City for the supply of the armies, he offered to stand surety for £1,000.81Procs. LP i. 228. He was possibly the ‘Mr Belasyse’ who was sent into the north by the Commons in April 1641 to investigate the state of the king’s army – although his brother Henry was more closely involved in such matters and seems to have been absent from the House for much of April.82Supra, ‘Henry Belasyse’. Whichever Belasyse it was, they may have helped to trigger the first army plot, for when the plot was investigated in June, one of the conspirators testified that rumours had circulated among the officers ‘that Parliament intended to disband the army without money and that Mr. Belasyse was sent down to that purpose’.83Procs. LP v. 43. If Belasyse was indeed sent into the north, he had returned to the House by 3 May, when, notwithstanding his Catholic sympathies, he took the Protestation.84CJ ii. 133b. His only known appointment that summer was as a messenger to the Lords on 9 August to request a conference concerning amendments to the treaty with the Scots.85CJ ii. 248a; Procs. LP vi. 313.

It was only with the emergence at Westminster of a nascent royalist interest during the last few months of 1641 that Belasyse began to take a slightly more prominent part in the House’s proceedings. On 8 November, he was a teller with Sir John Culpeper against an article in the instructions for the parliamentary commissioners in Scotland to the effect that unless the king removed his evil councillors and appointed no new councillors without parliamentary approval then the two Houses would not be bound to assist him in supressing the Irish rebellion.86CJ ii. 307b; D’Ewes (C), 104, 105. Belasyse and Culpeper won the division from the godly pairing of Sir Thomas Barrington and Sir Anthony Irby. Then, on 17 December, Belasyse presented a petition to the House from imprisoned army plotter and future royalist grandee Sir John Berkeley*, requesting his release on bail.87D’Ewes (C), 302. This petition provoked a debate on what measures to take regarding the plotters, at the conclusion of which Belasyse and Edmund Waller (who would himself plot against Parliament in 1643) served as majority tellers in favour of putting the question that Berkeley should be granted bail. When the main question was put, Belasyse and Denzil Holles were majority tellers for the yeas, defeating Sir Philip Stapilton and Barrington by 122 votes to 84.88CJ ii. 347a; D’Ewes (C), 304-5.

Belasyse’s most important committee appointment in the Long Parliament – and his first in 1642 – was to a delegation of peers and Commons-men set up on 8 February to attend the king with reasons as to why he should pass the bill for removing bishops from the Lords and prohibiting the clergy from exercising temporal authority.89CJ ii. 421b; PJ i. 322. It seems that Belasyse, although almost certainly opposed to any aspect of further reformation in religion, may well have shared the Erastianism of the more godly MPs. According to Moone, Belasyse withdrew from the House later that month after waiting upon the king at Dover – where the queen embarked for Holland – and then accompanying him to Newmarket and on to York.90HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 379. But this account is contradicted by evidence from the Journals. Thus on 31 March, he was named to a committee for enabling Sir Christopher Wray* to sell some of his properties.91CJ ii. 505b. And he may have been the ‘Mr Belasyse’ who was appointed a messenger to the Lords on 12 May to request a conference concerning the king’s demand for justice against Sir John Hotham* for refusing him entrance at Hull. Sir Simonds D’Ewes* records the House employing Henry Belasyse as messenger. But in the Lords Journals the messenger is named as John Belasyse.92CJ ii. 586a; LJ v. 60a; PJ ii. 307-8.

By the summer of 1642, Belasyse was busy in Yorkshire raising troops (at his father’s expense) for the king.93HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 379. On 13 July, it was reported that Lord Fauconberg and ‘Mr Bellasis’ MP – almost certainly John – had been captured whilst crossing the Humber in a ship carrying ordnance for deployment against the parliamentarian garrison at Hull. Both men, it was claimed, had been endeavouring to ‘draw on all the rest of the gentry to engage themselves against the Parliament’ and had been active in ‘finding both horse and men in this service against Hull’.94A Letter Sent from the Leaguer Before Hull (1642, 669 f.6.53). Shortly after Charles had raised his standard at Nottingham in August, Belasyse and Sir William Pennyman* arrived from Yorkshire ‘with each of them a good regiment of foot of about six hundred men and each of them a troop of horse’.95Clarendon, Hist. ii. 335. On 6 September, the Commons disabled Belasyse from sitting for neglecting the service of the House and for signing a recent petition to Parliament from the Yorkshire royalists, protesting at the Hotham’s proceedings as governor of Hull.96CJ ii. 754b; LJ v. 273b-274a. Belasye conceived that ‘religion, honour and loyalty’ were ‘sufficient arguments’ for him to join the king’s party – although ‘religion’ in this context probably meant the cause of preserving the church against the Scots and their English puritan allies, rather than Catholicism.97HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 378. There is no evidence for the claim that he was an ‘open Catholic’ by the early 1640s.98J. Binns, Yorks. in the Civil Wars (Pickering, 2004), 45, 80.

Belasyse and his men took part in some of the fiercest engagements of the civil war, including Edgehill (Oct. 1642), Brentford and Turnham Green (Nov. 1642) and, as the commander of a ‘tertia’ under Prince Rupert, the storming of Bristol (July 1643).99Mems. of Prince Rupert, ii. 237, 240-3, 246-7, 250, 253-4, 264; HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 379-83; P. Young, Edgehill 1642 (Kineton, 1967),174. Seriously wounded at Bristol, he had recovered sufficiently to take part in the first battle of Newbury in September 1643.100Mercurius Aulicus no. 30 (23-9 July 1643), 403 (E.64.11); HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 382-3. By the end of the 1643 campaign season, he had established himself as one of the king’s most gallant commanders; and in January 1644, the royalist commander in the north, the earl of Newcastle, appointed him lieutenant-general of Yorkshire and governor of York, whilst he himself led a large part of his army back into Northumberland to counter the invading Scots. Belasyse was eager to take up this ‘considerable employment’, although as George Lord Digby* informed Newcastle, the king was highly reluctant to authorize his transfer from the Oxford army, ‘as robbing us of one of the most considerable and most gallant men amongst us, whose services have been so eminently good here, that his majesty could hardly be persuaded he could do better anywhere else’.101Sloane 1519, f. 26; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 105. Belasyse’s appointment under Newcastle meant that he was among those listed as absent on the king’s service in the Oxford Parliament’s letter to the earl of Essex in January 1644, urging him to compose a peace.102Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 574.

Belasyse decided that the best way to observe Newcastle’s command to ‘keep himself in a defensive posture’, was to go on the offensive.103Newcastle Mems. ed. Firth, 35-6. In March 1644, therefore, he launched two assaults on the parliamentarian stronghold of Bradford, only to be beaten off on both occasions by his kinsman Colonel John Lambert*. These defeats left him powerless to prevent a conjunction between Lord Fairfax’s forces in Hull and the West Riding and Cheshire cavalry commanded by Sir Thomas Fairfax*; and on 11 April this combined force attacked Belasyse’s 3,000 to 5,000-strong army at Selby, to the south of York. After a battle lasting ‘eight or ten hours’, the Fairfaxes captured the town, along with Belasyse himself, most of his officers and 2,000 troops.104Leeds Castle corresp., C1/12; CJ iii. 462a; HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 384; Binns, Yorks. in the Civil Wars, 80-1; P.R. Newman, ‘The defeat of John Belasyse: civil war in Yorks. January-April 1644’, YAJ lii. 123-33. The stiff resistance put up by Belasyse at Selby surprised at least one parliamentarian commentator: ‘Colonel John Belasyse, as pretty a handsome gentleman-usher as need walk before any lady of the court, he was never used to shoot off pistols, yet at last pinch, to save his life, he defended himself more than was expected’.105Mercurius Britanicus no. 32 (15-22 Apr. 1644), 253 (E.43.19). Belasyse attributed his defeat to the treachery of one of his officers.106HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 384. Newcastle, however, took a more dispassionate view: ‘all this had been prevented’, he informed the king, ‘if the Lord Loughborough and Colonel [George] Porter had given Colonel Belasyse assistance, as they had time enough to have done and orders too’.107Mems. of Prince Rupert, ii. 433-4. Belasyse’s defeat at Selby led directly to the siege of York and, indirectly, to the parliamentarian victory at Marston Moor.108Newman, ‘The defeat of John Belasyse’, 133.

After his capture, Belasyse was taken down to London, and on 31 May 1644, he and Sir John Ramsden*, who had also been captured at Selby, were brought to the bar of the Commons, where the Speaker acquainted them with the ‘horror and greviousness’ of their offence, ‘which was no less than, at one blow, to endeavour the ruin of religion, liberty, the privileges and very being of Parliaments and the introducing of popery and slavery ... and for these grevious crimes of high treason, you are ... committed as traitors to the Tower’.109CJ iii. 512b; Add. 31116, p. 282; Harl. 166, f. 68; HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 385. Whilst imprisoned in the Tower, Belasyse received visits from Sir Christopher Wray, Sir Henry Cholmeley and Sir Thomas Widdrington*, Lord Fairfax’s son-in-law.110CJ iii. 682a, 692b, 715b. He was exchanged early in 1645 and, upon making his way to Oxford, was created Baron Belasyse of Worlaby by the king for his services to the royal cause.111CJ iv. 18b; HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 385.

Undeterred by his capture and imprisonment, Belasyse returned to active service, taking part in the royalist siege of Leicester in May 1645 and in the battle of Naseby, where he fought as a volunteer. In September, the king appointed him captain-general of his horse guards. The following month, he took part in a royal council of war in which he joined those advising the king to march into Scotland to join Belasyse’s ‘intimate friend’ the marquess of Montrose (they had probably become acquainted through the marquess of Huntly).112HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 385-6, 387-8. Appointed governor of Newark by the king in October, Belasyse strengthened the town’s defences and made numerous sallies against the besieging parliamentarians.113HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 388-91. Early in May 1646, he surrendered the town to Parliament in accordance with instructions from the king – who was in the Scots’ custody in the leaguer at Newark – although he was reluctant to accept terms he thought dishonourable simply to indulge Charles’s wish for the Scots’ army to retreat northwards as quickly as possible.114HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 393-4; HMC Portland, i. 358, 377-8; LJ viii. 310a. Moreover, if Lucy Hutchinson can be credited, Belasyse had surrendered ‘much discontented that the king should have no more regard to them who had been so constant in his service’.115Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 165. After Newark’s surrender, Belasyse returned to his ‘plundered habitation at Worlaby’, but was ‘soon removed by some jealousies which the committee of Lincoln had of his retaining so many poor Cavalier officers about him’. He then repaired to London, where in June he was examined by the Committee of Both Kingdoms* concerning the king’s dealings with the Scots.116HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 395; HMC Portland, i. 377-8. The committee also interrogated the royalist intriguer Dr Michael Hudson, who alleged that Belasyse had been implicated in a royalist design to ‘bring the king to the Parliament from the Scots’.117HMC Portland, i. 382.

Belasyse petitioned to compound on the Newark articles in June 1646, claiming that he had never attended the Oxford Parliament, ‘nor was ever a popish recusant nor popishly affected’.118SP23/187, pp. 78, 82; CCC 1338. In October, the Commons voted that, notwithstanding the Newark articles, Belasyse’s fine ought to be £7,500 – that is, half the value of his estate. However, in respect of his ‘labouring with the king’ during the war on behalf of parliamentarian prisoners, notably Edward Wingate*, and of certain ‘engagements’ made by the ‘commissioners of both Houses’ to him, the Commons accepted a fine, reckoned at a tenth, of £2,073.119CJ iv. 687b; CCC 1338; Perfect Occurrences no. 41 (2-9 Oct. 1646), sig. Qq4v (E.513.16). These ‘engagements’ had probably been made in return for Belasyse’s cooperation with the Committee of Both Kingdoms in June. He may also have received help with his composition from Lord Fairfax. In April 1647, Belasyse wrote to Fairfax in the warmest of terms: ‘Cicero tells us there is no treasure like a true friend; this is verified in your lordship who now, when I am forsaken of all the world, are pleased to be so sensible of my sad condition and condole with me’.120Bodl. Fairfax 32, f. 150. In order to pay his composition fine, Belasyse sold his wife’s manor of Boxbury-cum-Chells and borrowed £1,500.121Add. 33575, f. 28; LC4/203, f. 44. His fine was increased by £506 in 1649, following his disclosure of a debt of £5,000 he was owed by his kinsman Sir Thomas Barton (by 1651, Belasyse was owed £7,000 by James Hay, 2nd earl of Carlisle).122LC4/203, f. 184; SP23/187, pp. 71, 74; CCC 1338. Belasyse’s sale of his Yorkshire manor of Little Busby to George Marwood* in 1650, in a transaction involving Sir Henry Cholmeley, Sir Thomas Harrison (father of Thomas Harrison II*) and Sir Thomas Ingram*, may also have been prompted by financial necessity.123N. Yorks. RO, ZDU 2.

Without awaiting the outcome of his composition, Belasyse obtained a pass to go overseas, and upon landing in France he took service with the Prince of Condé, commander of the French forces besieging the Spanish held fortress of Mardyke. After the fall of Mardyke, he presented himself to the queen mother in Paris, and from Paris he travelled into Italy, where he became involved in negotiations with the Venetians to raise troops in England for service against the Turks. During his stay in Italy he was presented to the pope by the ‘cardinal protector of the English nation’, who had received a ‘very advantageous’ account of his character. Evidently by this date, Belasyse was a practising Catholic. Early in 1648, with the second civil war looming, the prince of Wales commanded Belasyse to ‘decline the service of the Venetians ... having occasion for his services in England’. On accompanying the prince to Holland, Belasyse received a commission as general of horse to the now marquess of Newcastle, who planned to raise an army in Yorkshire and to link up with the invading Scots under the duke of Hamilton. However, the defeat of Hamilton and the Scots at Preston put pay to this scheme, and Belasyse went to Brussels to join his ‘old friend’, the marquess of Montrose.

At some point in 1649, Belasyse’s father (now Viscount Fauconberg) obtained a pass for him to travel into Yorkshire, but on returning to England he was arrested by the council of state and imprisoned once again in the Tower, having been falsely accused of plotting to raise forces against the new commonwealth government.124HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 395-6. He had been released by September 1650, when he was given a pass to go overseas on giving security of £5,000, only to be arrested and sent to the Tower a third time, in April 1651, on suspicion of plotting against the state.125CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 250, 520, 558; 1651, pp. 137, 168, 234; HMC Portland, i. 578; CCC 1338. He was held in the Tower until the royalist defeat at Worcester in September 1651, when he was again bailed, this time for £6,000.126CSP Dom. 1651, p. 417.

During the early 1650s, Belasyse emerged as a senior figure in the royalist conspiratorial network in England. He was one of the six members of the Sealed Knot, which was set up by the king and Sir Edward Hyde* (the future earl of Clarendon) late in 1653 to supervise royalist plotting in England, and as such he was implicated in several royalist conspiracies and uprisings against the protectorate.127Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 75-6, 94, 207, 218, 220-1, 232. However, he does not seem to have appeared in arms himself or attempted to raise the royalists in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire in the king’s cause. During the abortive Yorkshire rising of March 1655, for example, he remained quietly in London – although he was arrested and detained yet again in the Tower (while in prison his estate was assessed for the decimation tax).128Nicholas Pprs. ii. 243; SP23/231, f. 241. His failure to take a lead in this and other projected risings did not arise, it seems, from any want of zeal on this part, but rather from a conviction (held by most members of the Knot) that without a major division within the army, a general rising of the king’s party ‘would only be to their own destruction’.129CCSP iii. 11; HMC 10th Rep. vi. 195. Eager to avoid a further spell in the Tower, he went abroad in February 1656, having obtained a pass to go overseas through Major-general John Lambert. (Belasyse and Lambert were on close terms, despite their political differences, and after Lambert’s attainder for treason in 1660, Belasyse was granted his properties in Yorkshire to hold in trust for his wife and children).130Add. 34014, f. 19; CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 578; 1661-2, p. 478; CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 30; D. Farr, John Lambert (Woodbridge, 2003), 163-5, 222, 224.

On his return to England in March 1657, Belasyse continued to eschew military engagement against the protectorate; and the marriage of his nephew, Thomas 2nd Viscount Fauconberg, to a daughter of the lord protector probably acted as a further disincentive for him to plot against the state – although he did make approaches on the king’s behalf to the Presbyterian grandees the earl of Manchester and Richard Browne II*.131Add. 34015, f. 58; CCSP iv. 15, 20, 130. The Sealed Knot’s principal failing, according to its opponents, was that it was too passive and cautious, and certainly Belasyse’s career during the 1650s appears to bear out this charge. Its work was also undermined by a quarrel between Belasyse and another of its members Sir Richard Willis, who held a grudge against Belasyse for supplanting him as governor of Newark in 1645.132HMC Ormonde, n.s. 397; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 103-6. When Willis was arrested and imprisoned in 1655, ‘being [aware] of Belasyse’s intimacy with Lambert, he thought he had betrayed him and [therefore] sent him a challenge’.133CSP Dom. 1655, p. 212. Betrayal of a different kind prompted Philip Howard* to fight a duel with Belasyse late in 1657, after Belasyse had seduced his sister-in-law.134CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 258; HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 397.

In July 1659, Belasyse and another leading royalist intriguer Sir John Grenville were given a commission from the king to treat with General George Monck*, though to little effect.135CCSP iv. 260-4, 268-9; Mordaunt Letter-Bk. 115. There was an expectation in royalist circles that Belasyse would rise with Sir George Boothe* that summer, prompting the army to arrest him and his guests at Worlaby on the night before the rebellion.136HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 397-8; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 116. Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper* later complained to Hyde about Belasyse, whom he held partly to blame for Boothe’s defeat. The ‘slowness of Lords Willoughby and Belasyse’, he declared, ‘was inexcusable ... [Belasyse] is not an active man, as [Hyde] may experience after two or three more failings. [Edward] Rosseter* says he heard nothing of the business [Boothe’s rebellion] until the instant; he will never be commanded by [Belasyse]’.137CCSP iv. 458. In reply, Hyde informed Cooper that he had much the same opinion of Belasyse, adding, with a touch of sarcasm, that ‘doubtless he and his nephew will be more active when the game is a little fairer’.138CCSP iv. 468. During interrogation after the rebellion, Boothe attempted to play down his own role by implicating Belasyse and other leading royalists, and as a result Belasyse was committed to the Tower (for a fifth time) in September on charges of high treason.139HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 398; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 188. He remained in the Tower until early November, when Lambert obtained orders from the council for his release on bail of £10,000.140Bodl. Rawl. A.259, p. 138; CCSP iv. 432; Mordaunt Letter-Bk. 115.

In the spring of 1660, Belasyse joined many royalist nobility and gentry ‘now residing in and about the city of London’, in a declaration thanking General Monck for his courage in asserting ‘the public liberty’. The signatories also renounced any intention to take revenge upon their parliamentarian enemies and declared their loyalty ‘to the present power, as it now resides in the council of state’.141A Declaration of the Nobility and Gentry that Adhered to the Late King (1660, 669 f.24.69). At the Restoration, Belasyse’s loyalty to the crown was rewarded with his appointment as lord lieutenant of the East Riding and governor of Hull.142SO3/13; Hull Hist. Cent. C BRB/4, p. 313; HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 398; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 214. He was an active member of the Lords in the Cavalier Parliament, where he took a close interest during the early 1660s in legislation concerning fen drainage, particularly in Lincolnshire.143HP Lords, 1660-1715, ‘John Belasyse’. Late in 1664, he was given command of the English enclave at Tangier, ‘a trust to which his genius and inclinations much lead him’, although he proved more ambitious for profit than military honours and was widely criticised for his ‘corrupt, covetous ways’. He spent not much more than a year in Africa, but retained his governorship of Tangier until the spring of 1667, when he was appointed captain of the gentlemen pensioners at court.144CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 606, 615; 1665-6, p. 363; 1667-8, p. 136; CSP Dom. 1660-85, p. 119; Pepys Diary, vi. 306; vii. 99, 130; viii. 45, 61, 100, 103-4, 127, 154-5; Davis, Second Queen’s Regt. 82; HP Lords, 1660-1715, ‘John Belasyse’.

Belasyse made no effort to hide his Catholicism after the Restoration, and, with the passage of the Test Acts in 1673, he resigned all his public offices.145CSP Dom. 1673, pp. 194, 287, 480; HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 398. He continued to sit in the Lords, however, and was considered by the whig leader Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*, 1st earl of Shaftesbury as ‘triply vile’, although this classification was subsequently altered to merely ‘vile’.146HP Lords, 1660-1715, ‘John Belasyse’. Identified by Titus Oates and his collaborators as a leading actor in the Popish Plot, Belasyse – along with a number of other Catholic peers – was imprisoned in the Tower by the Commons in 1678 and impeached of high treason, although he was never brought to trial.147Add. 40717, ff. 202-4; HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 399; CSP Dom. 1678, pp. 481, 551, 586; 1685, pp. 162-3; N. Luttrell, Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, i. 11. He remained in the Tower until February 1684, when he was released on bail of £20,000.148HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 399; HP Lords 1660-1715, ‘John Belasyse’. His career took a dramatic upward turn during the reign of his co-religionist James II, who made him a privy councillor and first lord of the treasury.149Luttrell, Brief Historical Relation, i. 383; CSP Dom. Jan. 1686-May 1687, pp. 330, 345; CTB viii. 1141. Although generally supportive of James’s policies, Belasyse was one of the so-called Catholic ‘moderates’ at court and was alarmed by some of the king’s more extreme pro-Catholic measures.150Reresby Mems. 561; Mems. of Thomas Earl of Ailesbury ed. W. E. Buckley (1890), i. 126; J. P. Kenyon, Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland (1958), 125, 141; HP Lords 1660-1715, ‘John Belasyse’. Nevertheless, he continued to serve James almost to the end, abandoning his employments only in December 1688, when it was clear that the king’s cause was lost.151HMC Hastings, ii. 202.

No action was taken against Belasyse after the Glorious Revolution, and he lived on quietly in London until his death on 10 September 1689. He was buried in St Giles-in-the Fields, next to his second wife, on 14 September.152Add. 4162, f. 84; PROB11/401, f. 283; CP. In his will, he charged his estate with legacies and bequests totalling about £18,600 and annuities of £260.153PROB11/401, ff. 255-60. Only one of his sons, Henry, had survived into adulthood, and he had been killed in a drunken quarrel in 1667 – a year after his return for Great Grimsby to the Cavalier Parliament. Belasyse was succeeded by his grandson, upon whose death in 1691 the title became extinct.154HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Sir Henry Belasyse’; Oxford DNB, ‘John Belasyse’.