CULPEPER, Sir John (1600-60), of Hollingbourne, Kent

Culpeper is among the most politically and personally complex of the royalist grandees – the group of men that dominated the king’s and queen’s counsels during the civil-war period. Sir Edward Hyde* and several other contemporaries acknowledged his skill in oratory and argument and conceded that he possessed both courage and sound judgement.36Clarendon, Hist. i. 457; Life (1857), i. 86-7, 272; P. Warwick*, Mems. Charles I (1701), 195-6. But they also referred to his ‘ungracious’ appearance and manner of speaking, his quarrelsome nature and to his having ‘a fancy so perpetually working’ that he was prone to irresolution. According to one royalist colleague it was

observed by all that know Lord Culpeper [as he became in 1644] that he hath been not only unfortunate in most of his counsels but incompatible in business and very unacceptable (to say no otherwise) to most that have had any intimacy or conversation with him in affairs of moment.37Nicholas Pprs. i. 315.

Variously described as a ‘constitutionalist’ and a ‘politique’ in secondary sources, his most noted accomplishments were the joint-authorship (with Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland*) of the classic statement of mixed monarchy, His Majesties Answer to the XIX Propositions (1642), and his involvement – as one of the unscrupulous courtiers around the queen – in luring both Charles I and II into the fateful embrace of the Covenanting Scots.38D.L. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement (Cambridge, 1994), 56-8, 75-7; M. Mendle, Dangerous Positions (Alabama, 1985), 20, 185. No attempt has been made to reconcile these seemingly contradictory political legacies – nor, indeed, to make sense of Culpeper’s career generally. Yet there are strong grounds for regarding him as politically consistent and effective, with a capacity to inspire trust, if not necessarily affection, in both the king and queen and friendship in at least one of his fellow royalist grandees – Charles I’s bedchamber man and ‘favourite’ John Ashburnham*.39Supra, ‘John Ashburnham’; Clarendon, Life, i. 87-8, 272; Bodl. Carte 5, f. 40.

Background and early career

The Culpepers (or Colepepers) had settled in Kent by the late thirteenth century; and by the seventeenth century there were numerous branches of the family in both Kent and Sussex.40Attree, Booker, ‘Suss. Colepepers’, 48-9, 65-8; Everitt, Community of Kent, 70. Several of Culpeper’s ancestors had sat in Parliament since the early fifteenth century, with his father representing the Cinque Ports of Winchelsea and Rye in the latter years of Elizabeth I’s reign.41HP Commons 1386-1421, ‘John Culpepper’; HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘Jasper Culpeper’; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Thomas Colepeper’. Relatively little is known about Culpeper’s early years. It is not clear whether he was the John Culpeper who was admitted to Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1611.42Al. Cant. However, he was almost certainly the teenager of that name who matriculated at Hart Hall, Oxford – his father’s old college – in 1616.43Al. Ox. According to one contemporary, Culpeper was ‘bred to the law’.44D. Lloyd, Mems. (1668), 654. Yet having been admitted to the Middle Temple in 1618 he showed little interest in pursuing a legal career.

On coming of age in 1621, Culpeper inherited his father’s share in the Virginia Company of London (his elder brother Slaney having died in 1618), and in 1623, he allied himself with the faction in the company headed by the zealously Protestant 2nd earl of Warwick (Sir Robert Rich†).45A. Brown, The Genesis of the United States (Cambridge, MA, 1890), 982. In May of that year, Culpeper transferred his share in the company to his kinsman Ralph Freke and shortly thereafter sold the family residence at Wigsell to his cousin Sir Thomas Culpeper†.46Recs. of the Virginia Co. of London ed. S.M. Kingsbury, ii. 412; Attree, Booker, ‘Suss. Colepepers’, 68. It was probably soon after this liquidation of his assets that he left England for military service on the continent – most likely as a volunteer in one of the English companies assisting the Dutch against the Spanish – although it is not known under which commander. Hyde later observed that Culpeper had spent ‘some years of his youth in foreign parts, and especially in armies, where he had seen good service and very well observed it, and [he] might have made a very good officer if he had intended it’.47Clarendon, Life, i. 86.

Culpeper had returned to England by October 1628, when he contracted what was presumably a financially advantageous match to a daughter of a former lord mayor of London. After the death of his first wife a few years later, he married his cousin, through whom he acquired an estate at Hollingbourne, Kent, which he made his main residence. Having satisfied his appetite for soldiering, he now (according to Hyde) devoted himself to local politics

and studied the business of the country and the concernments of it, in which he was very well versed. And being a man of sharpness, of parts and volubility of language, he was frequently made choice of to appear at the [privy] council board in those matter which related to the country, in the managing whereof his abilities were well taken notice of.48Clarendon, Life, i. 86.

Although there is no evidence of Culpeper’s dealings with the privy council, he was certainly an active member of the Sussex sewers commission, and his services in that capacity evidently recommended him to the voters of Rye in the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640.49PC2/49, f. 138; Coventry Docquets, 48-9; E. Suss. RO, RYE 47/118/5; RYE 47/131/8. Despite suspicions that he was angling for a seat in order to advance his salt-making venture at nearby Broomhill, Culpeper beat eight other candidates to take the senior place for the borough.50Supra, ‘Rye’; E. Suss. RO, RYE 47/132, unfol.; Fletcher, Suss. 247. He was not shy of speaking in this, his first, Parliament, but seems to have shown little of the ‘volubility of language’ that tended to characterise the sternest critics of royal policy. Although he clearly regarded Ship Money as a notable grievance, he was at least willing to consider the crown’s offer of relinquishing the levy in return for subsidies.51Aston’s Diary, 98, 130, 132. His only appointment in this Parliament was to a committee set up on 24 April to prepare heads for a conference concerning the propriety of the subjects’ goods, the liberties of Parliament and innovations in religion.52CJ ii. 12a.

Although Rye offered to return Culpeper again in the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, he had already fixed his sights on representing his adoptive county of Kent.53Supra, ‘Kent’. In the complicated and somewhat fractious electioneering for the shire seats, Culpeper formed an uneasy partnership with Sir Edward Dering* against Richard Browne I*, whom Culpeper regarded as a candidate of the ‘precise party’.54Supra, ‘Kent’; Stowe 743, f. 149; Everitt, Community of Kent, 77-83; M. Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection (Cambridge, 1986), 133. On election day, Culpeper and Dering received more voices than Browne and were duly returned, though not without some tension as to who should take senior place – an honour that eventually fell to Dering.55Supra, ‘Kent’; ‘Rye’.

A reformist MP, 1640-1

Despite his relative inexperience as an MP, Culpeper soon emerged as one of the most active and respected Members of the Long Parliament. According to Hyde, he was

generally esteemed a good speaker ... who commonly spake at the end of the debate, when he would recollect all that had been said of weight on all sides with great exactness and express his own sense with much clearness and such an application to the House that no man more gathered a general concurrence to his opinion than he.56Clarendon, Hist. ii. 437.

Between November 1640 and the September 1641 recess, Culpeper was named to over 130 committees, appointed to 60 or so conference teams, served as messenger to the Lords on nine occasions and was a teller in five divisions.57CJ ii. 72a, 153b, 171b, 202b, 225b, 235a, 235b, 242b, 246a, 280b-281a, 284a, 285b; LJ iv. 141a, 289a, 305a, 330a, 339a, 340a, 347a, 351b.

He first made his mark in the House on 9 November – within a week of the Long Parliament assembling – when he reported the grievances of Kent.58CJ ii. 24b. Doubt has been cast on whether Culpeper actually delivered this speech, on the grounds that it was not mentioned by any of the Commons’ diarists.59Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 219. However, the Commons Journal clearly states that Culpeper ‘represented the grievances of Kent by word of mouth’; and most of his speech was later published by John Rushworth*, who ‘took with his pen at large as he [Culpeper] spoke the same’.60CJ ii. 24b; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 917-18, 1338. Speaking – or so he claimed – on behalf of Kent, Culpeper listed the most notorious grievances as ‘the greater increase of papists’; ‘the obtruding and countenancing of many divers new ceremonies in matters of religion’; the new Canons and clerical intermeddling in state affairs; military charges; ‘the heavy tax of Ship Money’; impositions on trade; and, lastly, monopolists, ‘the leeches that have suck’d the commonwealth’. The crux of his argument against Ship Money suggests that he had sympathised with the case advanced by the lawyers for John Hampden* in his 1637 Ship Money trial: ‘If the law give the king power in any case of danger of the kingdom, where he is a judge, to impose what and when he pleaseth, we owe all that is left to the goodness of the king and not to the law’. Nevertheless, he concluded his speech by extolling the king’s ‘exemplary piety and great justice, which renders his ears open to the just complaints of his subjects’.61Sir Iohn Culpeper his Speech (1640, E.196.8).

Many of Culpeper’s appointments and contributions to debate in the early months of the Long Parliament underline his commitment to reforming the perceived abuses of Charles I’s personal rule, to punishing their authors and to strengthening the power of Parliament relative to that of the crown. They also make clear that he was broadly aligned and generally on good terms with members of the parliamentary leadership – a group known as the ‘junto’. Named on 10 November 1640 to a standing committee for drawing together and presenting all evidence of the ‘deplored state of the kingdom’ (also known as the ‘committee of twenty-four’), he was likewise included on ad hoc committees for investigating and remedying the ills associated with monopolies, ‘unparliamentary’ taxation, the prerogative courts, prelacy and pluralism and other grievances.62CJ ii. 25a, 30a, 34b, 38a, 44b, 45b, 46b, 51b, 52b, 55a, 60a, 84b, 91a, 92a, 94b, 99a, 100b, 129a, 134a, 191a, 194b, 230b; Procs. LP i. 118, 120, 133, 514; ii. 428, 432, 470; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 119. He was a leading figure in the prosecution of the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†), receiving appointment to numerous committees and conference teams during the early months of 1641 for preparing charges against the earl and for making arrangements for his trial.63CJ ii. 39b, 75b, 79b, 86b, 88b, 98a, 107b, 108b, 109a, 112b, 113a, 120b, 122a, 126a; Procs. LP i. 270, 576, 577, 579, 828-9, 833; ii. 520, 565; iii. 130, 133, 513, 547; Verney, Notes, 50. On 25 March, he was added to the committee for managing the evidence against Strafford, reporting from this body the same day on the need to press the Lords to expedite the trial and to prevent ‘all unnecessary delays which may be occasioned by the earl of Strafford his excursions and impertinent exceptions’.64CJ ii. 112b. With the trial going badly for the prosecution by mid-April, Culpeper joined other Commons-men in arguing that the ‘safest and the speediest way’ to proceed against the earl was by a bill of attainder – a proposal favoured by the more militant wing of the junto, which regarded Strafford as too dangerous to live, even if executing him would jeopardise a settlement with the king.65Procs. LP iii. 513; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 243-4.

Culpeper also took a hard line against those judges who had declared for the crown in Hampden’s Ship Money trial, demanding that they be called before the House to give account of themselves.66Northcote Note Bk. 39. On 12 February 1641, he was appointed to carry up a message to the Lords, accusing one of this group, Justice Sir Robert Berkeley, of treason and requesting his committal.67CJ ii. 83b; LJ iv. 161a. He was a manager of several conferences in June concerning legislation for abolishing two of the principal instruments of prerogative justice – the courts of star chamber and high commission.68CJ ii. 189b, 195a. And when it emerged during the summer that commissions had been issued allowing some of the accused judges to ride the assize circuits, Culpeper and Hyde managed a conference on 5 August in which Culpeper urged that the ‘peccant [culpable] judges’ be prevented from riding circuit to the ‘dishonour’ of Parliament and the ‘distraction’ of the kingdom.69CJ ii. 233b, 237b; Procs. LP vi. 218-19.

The king’s attempted seizure of the Tower of London (and release of Strafford) early in May 1641, and revelations shortly afterwards about a plot to bring the royal army southwards, evidently strengthened Culpeper’s resolve to defend the commonwealth against the machinations of king and court. With Parliament seemingly facing imminent dissolution on 3 May, Culpeper urged that the House join with the Lords, ‘and by that we may try the affection of the king. And that if we should be dissolved, that we might be found doing the service we were hither sent for’.70Procs. LP iv. 180. The Commons’ response to the threat of dissolution and the army plot was the Protestation – effectively ‘an oath of association to resist a potential coup’. However, it is not entirely clear that Culpeper regarded the Protestation as the best way of proceeding – even though he may have been involved in drafting and steering the necessary legislation through both Houses. Rather than adopt an oath of association, he seems to have agreed with Sir Henry Vane I and Sir Robert Pye I in urging the less radical course of using the 1628 Remonstrance against tonnage and poundage and the Petition of Right as touchstones of allegiance.71CJ ii. 132b, 133b; Procs. LP iv. 180, 181; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 41; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 294.

Culpeper was named to a series of high-powered committees and conference teams in May 1641 for investigating the army plots and for securing the passage of the ‘Act of continuance’, which stipulated that Parliament could not be dissolved without its own consent.72CJ ii. 136b, 139a, 139b, 140b, 146a; Procs. LP iv. 272, 275, 278, 280, 282; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 296. The parliamentary diarist John Moore included Culpeper on the so-called ‘committee of six’ – or ‘committee of seven’ as it became following the addition of Sir Philip Stapilton – that was set up on 5 May ‘for the searching forth of the truth of this business [the army plots]’. This committee, which consisted almost entirely of junto-men, was given wide-ranging powers and was a precursor of Parliament’s first standing executive body, the Committee of Safety*.73Procs. LP iv. 219; D’Ewes (C), 16; L. Glow, ‘The Committee of Safety’, EHR lxxx. 290. It was probably in the hope of denying Charles the capacity to mount further plots that Culpeper supported the radical curtailment of royal powers outlined in the Ten Propositions in June – although, significantly, these did not address the controversial question of church reform.74CJ ii. 190b; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 352.

The grievance that seems to have troubled Culpeper the most as a Parliament-man – and that would continue to influence his political conduct even as a royalist – was the perceived threat posed by papists, particularly in high places. He was named to many of the committees set up in the early months of the Long Parliament for suppressing popery and served as a messenger and on conference teams concerning the king’s reprieve of the convicted Catholic priest John Goodman in January 1641 and on proposals the following March and April for removing papists at court and in the royal army.75CJ ii. 24b, 72a, 73a, 74a, 74b, 111b, 113b, 117a, 128b, 136b, 147a, 258a, 261a, 316b, 318b; LJ iv. 141a. In debate, he could generally be relied upon to advocate stern measures to counter the popish menace, even at the risk of heightening tension between the king and Parliament.76Procs. LP i. 210. 401; ii. 281, 419; v. 330, 619-20. On 1 December 1640, for example, following reports on the crown’s use of its dispensing power to protect priests and recusants from the rigours of the law, he called for an act ‘against the growth of popery’ and the preparation of a remonstrance to the king ‘concerning the queen’s mediation for recusants’.77Procs. LP i. 401, 404-5; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 229. He took a similarly provocative line on 11 February 1641, when he called for the disarming of Catholics and the removal of papists at court and from the House of Lords.78Procs. LP ii. 419. And it was possibly Culpeper’s call in June for the imprisonment of the principal popish nobility that led to the inclusion of a clause in the Ten Propositions that the king give his assent ‘that the persons of the most active papists, either Lords or Commons, may be so restrained as may be for the safety of the kingdom’.79Procs. LP v. 317, 330; Constitutional Docs. of the Puritan Revolution ed. S.R. Gardiner (Oxford, 1906), 166; Fletcher, Outbreak, 60. For Culpeper, the cancer of popery provided a compelling explanation not only for ills at the centre of power and government, but also for more specific problems. One of his principal briefs in the Long Parliament was the supply of the navy (indeed, during the second half of 1641 he chaired the Commons’ standing committee for the navy), and on 31 July, he complained that the queen’s secretary Sir John Wintour (a Catholic) had cut down timber in the Forest of Dean that might otherwise have been put to naval uses – the moral of this tale being not that sources of timber should be protected but that ‘you may see how papists may do anything without exception’.80Supra, ‘Committee of Navy and Customs’; CJ ii. 107a, 257a, 273b, 274b, 359a, 360a, 384a; Procs. LP vi. 161, 162, 163, 593; PJ i. 90, 96.

Defending episcopacy, 1640-1

Culpeper’s defence of the Church of England stemmed from the same root as his anti-popery – a fear of social and political disorder. ‘In matters of religion’, claimed Hyde, Culpeper was ‘in his judgement, very indifferent; but more inclined to what was established, to avoid the accidents which commonly attended a change, without any motives from his conscience’.81Clarendon, Life, i. 87. Expressions of popular hostility to the established church excited his indignation – as in June 1641, when he presented the House with a ‘scandalous’ paper from one Londoner, denouncing a local priest’s ministry as ‘Antichristian’ and ‘his church no church’.82Procs. LP v. 224, 227. ‘An aristocratical government in the church’, Culpeper assured the Commons that same month, ‘is much more safe than a democratical, for a monarchy such as ours is’.83Procs. LP v. 97. Bishops, for Culpeper, were ‘main columns of the realm’, and he defended other elements of the established church on similarly utilitarian grounds.84Procs. LP ii. 344. In mid-December 1640, he moved that a bill be prepared ‘for reviving such canons as shall be thought necessary’.85Northcote Note Bk. 70. And he joined Falkland on 26 March 1641 in urging the retention of deans and chapters, expressing the hope that they could be ‘made useful [rather] than utterly destroyed’ and that were they abolished, ‘learning would decay’.86Procs. LP iii. 155; v. 169, 175, 177. Three days later (29 Mar.), he moved to present a petition on behalf of the deans and chapters, but his motion was denied.87Procs. LP iii. 213.

Culpeper repeatedly opposed referring the London root and branch petition of December 1640 to a Commons committee on the grounds that ‘episcopacy itself was condemned in it’.88Prosc. LP ii. 344, 390. When it appeared, on 9 February 1641, that this petition and others of a similar nature would be committed to the committee of twenty-four, he and Falkland urged ‘that the same committee might have no power to meddle with episcopacy’.89Prosc. LP ii. 399. He also took issue with proposals for a bill to remove the bishops from the House of Lords, arguing on 10 March that ‘they sit here in respect of their jurisdiction, not as barons. It is inconvenient their sitting in Parliament, not inconsistent to their function’.90Procs. LP ii. 696, 703.

In the debate sparked on 27 May 1641 by Dering’s introduction of a draft bill for abolishing bishops root and branch, Culpeper insisted that episcopacy was not ‘yet so past hope of reformation as we should yet need to enter upon this last and final remedy’. Instead, he suggested that the abolition question should be put aside until it was known whether the Lords would pass a bill sent from the Commons for removing bishops from the Upper House and other secular employments.91Procs. LP iv. 605-6. Appointed on 3 June to a committee for answering the Lords’ objections to this bill, he was named the next day (4 June) with Falkland and the junto-men John Hampden and Nathaniel Fiennes I to make the case for depriving the bishops of their votes and to a conference management team on the same issue.92CJ ii. 165b, 167b. When the root and branch bill was debated again on 11 June, Culpeper proposed that the statement in the preamble that episcopacy had been found ‘by long experience’ to be harmful to the church should be changed to ‘“late experience”, for he confessed that of late years many calamities had happened by them [the bishops] in the church, but he did not know that it had been so in former times’. In addition, ‘he would have the word ‘government’ put out and the word ‘governors’ put in, for he hoped that the grievances [in the church] had grown from the abuse of the government [i.e. episcopacy] and not from the government itself’.93Procs. LP v. 93-4. Culpeper evidently had little sympathy with Laudian innovations, and he was prepared to admit that bishops were ‘in their persons an impediment’ to wholesome church reform. Yet he was adamant that individual bishops’ personal failings did not necessitate the removal of the episcopate altogether. Nor was he convinced by the junto’s argument ‘that the revenues of the deans and chapters would serve to make up the livings though[out] England of a competent value’.94Procs. LP v. 573. Confident that the alternative to episcopacy – Presbyterianism – did not command a majority in the House, he thought that it would be unwise to do away with bishops before settling a new form of church government.95Procs. LP v. 108. Writing to the junto’s Scottish ally James Hamilton, 3rd marquess of Hamilton, on 26 July 1641, he implied that he was one of managers of the pro-episcopacy interest in the Commons:

My lord, that which I principally intend in this bill [for abolishing episcopacy] is that which I had in charge from your lordship – that there may be a full appearance at the last reading [of the bill] of such whose judgements are averse to innovation and that they may be encouraged to deliver their vote freely, though against the sense of the major part, whereby, at the worst, the bill may pass in a divided House.96NAS, GD 406/1/1397.

Financial reformer, 1641

Culpeper’s principal area of expertise at Westminster was not ecclesiastical affairs, however, but fiscal policy. Having improved his own fortune by ‘industry and thrift’, he evidently felt confident enough to tackle the kingdom’s finances.97Clarendon, Life, i. 87. A great many of his appointments in the Long Parliament were to committees or conference teams for securing City loans, on legislation relating to supply, or for the maintenance of the English and Scottish armies in northern England.98CJ ii. 31b, 66a, 68b, 86a, 91b, 96b, 107a, 112a, 113a, 130b, 143a, 159b, 161a, 164b, 165a, 178b, 180a, 191a, 193b, 196a, 197b, 199a, 201a, 214a, 223b, 226a, 228a, 229a, 270b, 273b, 308b, 314a, 320b, 335b. He was particularly associated with three major financial initiatives during 1641 – the bill for tonnage and poundage; the poll tax bill; and the introduction of a new book of rates.99CJ ii. 107a, 159b, 164b, 165a, 178b, 191a, 193b, 196a, 197b, 214a, 270b, 308b, 314a, 335b; Procs. LP iv. 683; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 348-9, 357-9. When it came to ways of raising money and matters of supply generally – issues that accounted for the majority of his contributions to debate – he tended to favour a tough approach towards the City, the customers and any other group that could be mulcted for cash. Even so, he did not approve of John Pym’s suggestion on 20 February 1641 that Parliament should ‘compel the Londoners to lend money’.100Procs. LP ii. 500; iii. 239; iv. 625, 628, 629, 675, 676, 680-1, 683, 690, 693; v. 204, 206, 207, 240, 274-5, 295, 385-6, 390, 498, 634, 641, 671; vi. 80, 83, 102, 555-6, 583. Culpeper’s personal commitment to addressing the kingdom’s financial problems was such that in November 1640, and again the following March, he pledged £1,000 towards securing City loans.101Procs. LP i. 229, 232, 235; ii. 628, 810. His desire to improve supply reflected his awareness not only of the kingdom’s pressing needs, but also those of the king. On 1 June, he argued that ‘the king must have a set revenue, [and] that there is no way left to do it but out of customs. That we ought to abate [taxes on] home commodities and to raise foreign commodities and out of this to settle the king a considerable revenue’.102Procs. LP iv. 675, 680-1, 683. The House found this a compelling argument and ordered that a new book of rates be prepared and that the tax upon ‘home commodities may be as light as may be and upon foreign commodities as heavy as trade will bear’.103CJ ii. 163a.

Culpeper’s concern to settle a ‘considerable revenue’ on the king, and his apparent efforts to secure him a grant of tonnage and poundage for three years, have been interpreted as an attempt to undermine the junto’s ploy of withholding supply until Charles had consented to the kind of reforms outlined in the Ten Propositions.104Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 348-9, 357-9. In his letter to Hamilton of 26 July, Culpeper informed the marquess that the book of rates was ready and that it was necessary to secure its approval before it could be used ‘to draw on his [the king’s] consent to such other bills as may be less acceptable; in which respect your lordship may think good to quicken such as may be proper to advance the business’.105NAS, GD 406/1/1397. By ‘such other bills’, Culpeper was probably thinking of the root and branch bill and other initiatives to reform the church. Had a new book of rates been passed and tonnage and poundage granted for three years, it has been conjectured that Charles would have been able to dissolve Parliament before it could divest him of even more power. In the event, Culpeper’s proposal of 1 June to lower rates on domestic products and raise them on foreign commodities was deemed financially unviable and was dropped, thereby allowing the junto to maintain its stranglehold on royal supply.106Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 349, 358-9.

Between the junto and the court, 1641

That Culpeper was in contact with Hamilton by July 1641 and had been appointed an esquire of the king’s body, suggests that he had friends at court, but whether they included the king at this stage is not clear.107LC3/1, f. 29. A more likely court patron is Sir Henry Vane I, who besides being secretary of state and treasurer of the king’s household was the scion of a well-established Kentish family.108Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’. During 1641, Culpeper worked closely with Vane across a range of issues – from the reprieve of Goodman and the prosecution of Strafford to settling the kingdom’s finances and the disbandment of the armies – and with Vane’s son Sir Henry Vane II* on the maintenance of the navy.109CJ ii. 66a, 73a, 109a, 118b, 139b, 143a, 153a, 164a, 190b, 223b, 273b, 274b; Procs. LP iv. 445, 693; v. 634, 635; vi. 161, 162, 583; V.A. Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger (1970), 66. The one occasion in the House on which Culpeper is known to have disagreed with Vane was on 22 March 1641, when Vane delivered a message from the king claiming the clergy’s subsidy money for the crown rather than for the ‘commonwealth’. Culpeper moved that no distinction should be drawn between king and commonwealth, but he was careful to state that he intended no disrespect to Vane by this motion.110Procs. LP iii. 51, 55. Vane was on familiar terms with Hamilton, which may explain how a relatively unknown Kentish gentleman like Culpeper had come to the attention of a great courtier like the marquess.111Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’.

Culpeper seems to have shared Hamilton’s and Vane’s commitment to the restoration of the Palatinate – a cause that was very much back on the agenda by the summer of 1641.112CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 98, 106; Adamson, Noble Revolt, ch. 12. On 5 July, he was named to a committee for examining the Commons Journals for material relevant to the restoration of the elector to his rights and possessions.113CJ ii. 199b. On 12 July, he was included on a committee of both Houses for deciding whether to seek further assurances from the king of his commitment to recovering the Palatinate and of his willingness to involve Parliament in this venture.114CJ ii. 207a. Culpeper spoke strongly on 30 August in favour of a petition from a group of London merchants willing to invest in a naval campaign against Spain (the most powerful of the elector’s Catholic enemies), targeted against Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and the West Indies.115Procs. LP vi. 617. A committee set up that same day to consider this petition was specially referred to the care of Culpeper and Pym.116CJ ii. 276a. Culpeper’s support for an aggressively anti-Habsburg foreign policy casts doubt on the notion that he was endeavouring to settle a considerable revenue on the king in order to free him from Parliament. Not only would a precipitate dissolution contravene the terms of the Act of continuance – which Culpeper had helped to push through the House in May – it would also forestall any chance of raising sufficient funds, or of settling relations between the two kingdoms, as to make possible the dispatch an Anglo-Scottish military expedition to the Rhineland.

Much of Culpeper’s industry in matters financial was directed less towards the king’s benefit than the more immediate goal of disbanding the English army in the north and securing the withdrawal of the Scottish army. Admittedly, the removal of the Scottish army from English soil had been one of Charles’s primary objectives from the very opening of the Long Parliament. But by the summer of 1641, his leading opponents at Westminster were also keen to have the Scottish, as well as the English, army disbanded, fearing that the king intended to use his journey to Scotland in August to build a party for himself among the Scottish soldiery.117Constitutional Docs. of the Puritan Revolution ed. Gardiner, 163. Culpeper was an important figure in the disbandment process, receiving appointment to numerous committees between May and September and helping to manage or report from almost 20 conferences relating to the paying off and disbanding of the English army and the withdrawal of the Scots.118CJ ii. 152a, 153a, 172b, 175b, 187a, 188a, 188b, 193b, 205a, 220b, 221b, 229b, 231a, 232a, 235b, 238b, 240a, 240b, 242b, 250b, 252b, 264a, 265a, 271a, 277b; Procs. LP vi. 70, 73, 154, 215, 216, 217, 220, 249, 336.

Perhaps because of his military exploits in his twenties, Culpeper was considered – or considered himself – something of an expert on questions pertaining to army administration and the defence of the kingdom.119CJ ii. 66a, 86a, 96a, 96b, 139b, 148b, 175b, 223a, 259b. His services were regularly enlisted by the House in July, August and September 1641, either as a committeeman or on conference teams, to deal with requests by the French and Spanish ambassadors to recruit men from the recently disbanded British and Irish armies.120CJ ii. 217b, 254a, 257a, 275b, 282b, 283a, 284a, 285b; Procs. LP vi. 418-19, 687-8, 692. Mindful of the need to maintain a reservoir of military manpower for the projected Palatinate campaign, he drew the House’s attention to efforts by the French ambassador late in August to recruit British troops exclusively for Louis XIII’s service.121Procs. LP vi. 614. On 8 September, he was part of a Commons’ delegation to the Spanish ambassador to know by what authority he was recruiting within the king’s dominions – reporting the ambassador’s reply the same day.122CJ ii. 282b, 283a; Procs. LP vi. 687-8. The next day (9 Sept.), he was a messenger to the Lords to desire a conference – which he then helped to manage – for countermanding a licence the king had granted to the Spanish ambassador to recruit 4,000 Irish troops for Habsburg service.123CJ ii. 285b.

It was ironic that by preventing foreign recruitment of men from the recently disbanded ‘new’ Irish army, Parliament created a body of disgruntled Catholic reformadoes (disbanded soldiers) that would contribute greatly to the success of the Irish rebellion a few months later. The king had been determined to keep the Irish army on foot until the Scottish army had been disbanded; while the Scots commissioners and their English allies had insisted on exactly the reverse.124Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 188. When the issue was debated on 7 January 1641, Vane I had ‘wished that till the Scottish army were dissolved and gone home that the said ... Irish army might still be held together under pay’.125Procs. LP ii. 136-7. Culpeper took the same line a few weeks later, arguing that the Irish army should not be disbanded – and this despite the fact that it consisted almost entirely of papists.126Procs. LP ii. 419.

Culpeper’s stance on the Irish army was one source of the tension that sometimes marked his relations with the junto on issues concerning the Scots, for whom disbanding the king’s forces in Ireland was a priority. Culpeper was a major figure in Anglo-Scottish affairs during the first ten months of the Long Parliament, serving as a messenger to the Lords and as a manager or reporter of numerous conferences on matters relating to the treaty between the two kingdoms, the cessation of arms between the armies in the north and the supply and disbanding of the Scottish forces.127CJ ii. 62a, 67a, 80b, 96a, 97a, 106b, 118a, 118b, 120b, 155a, 202b, 232a, 240b, 242b, 245a, 250b, 252b, 254a, 256b, 262a; LJ iv. 289a, 305a, 347a; Procs. LP iv. 584, 706; vi. 243. There can be little doubt that he hoped for a satisfactory outcome to the treaty negotiations – if only to ensure the success of the projected Palatinate campaign – and to that end he worked closely with the junto. But his idea of what constituted a satisfactory settlement was different from that of Pym and his allies, particularly on the question of closer religious uniformity between the two kingdoms. Most members of the junto, although not overly enthusiastic about Scottish Presbyterianism, were prepared to meet the Scots at least half way on the issue of church reform as the necessary price of securing their support for the establishment of a de facto republic in England of the kind to which the king had acceded in Scotland. Culpeper’s attachment to the Church of England as a bulwark against social and political instability prevented him from making this kind of concession. And having no need to play to the Scottish gallery, he sometimes showed a greater distrust of the Scots, and less willingness to compromise on what he saw as English honour and interests, than did the junto. Indeed, at one point he mocked Hampden that he should act ‘in reverence to the Scotch commissioners’.128Sloane 1467, ff. 96v-97.

In the debates on the Anglo-Scottish treaty articles, Culpeper sometimes raised objections where some of the Scots’ allies were disposed to let matters ride.129Procs. LP ii. 208; iv. 462, 464, 465, 548, 553; v. 240, 274-5; vi. 243; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 335. On 21 May 1641, he was a teller with John Glynne against reading a progress report on the treaty, urging instead that it be read the next day when attendance would be greater (evidently Culpeper anticipated that the report would receive more critical treatment in a fuller House). The clerk of the House mistakenly recorded Culpeper and Glynne as minority tellers for the yeas. But it is clear from the parliamentary diaries of Sir Simonds D’Ewes and John Moore that Culpeper and Glynne were the majority opposing tellers. After winning this vote, Culpeper moved for the Speaker to rise in order to prevent a fight-back by the Scots’ friends.130CJ ii. 153b; Procs. LP iv. 510, 511, 516. When the Scots’ allies moved for the addition of a controversial clause to one of the treaty articles on 19 June, he questioned whether the number of voices for the yeas outnumbered those for the noes and forced a division on the issue – which the anti-Scottish interest lost.131CJ ii. 181a; Procs. LP v. 239.

Yet Culpeper remained distrustful of the king’s bona fides – as his support for the Ten Propositions reveals – and was apparently sympathetic to those aspects of the junto’s reformist agenda that did not involve making concessions to the Scots. The closeness of his collaboration with the parliamentary leadership in the late summer of 1641 is suggested by his nomination, in second place, to a committee set up on 3 August to prepare a remonstrance concerning the state of the kingdom and the church – a document that would emerge in November as the Grand Remonstrance.132CJ ii. 234a, 253a. Every member of this committee with the exception of Culpeper – namely, Fiennes, Hampden, Pym, Vane II, William Strode I and Sir Walter Erle – was part of, or close to, the junto. Culpeper worked particularly closely with members of this group on Parliament’s preparations for the king’s journey to Scotland in August 1641. He received a dozen or so appointments in July and August – to committees, conference teams and as a messenger – concerning proposals for governing the kingdom in the king’s absence and for the recess of Parliament.133CJ ii. 189b, 220a, 227a, 230a, 230a, 235a, 238a, 242a, 243a, 246a, 257a, 274a; LJ iv. 339a, 351b. On 29 July, he reported a recommendation from a committee to consider the king’s journey to Scotland, that the Lords be desired to join with the Commons in a petition to Charles ‘to appoint a custos regni or locum tenens during his absence out this kingdom; and ... to give him power to give the royal assent in Parliament; and to do such other things as the king might do in Parliament if he were present’.134CJ ii. 230a; Procs. LP vi. 140, 141, 143-4. This was very much what Pym and his allies wanted to hear, and Culpeper pursued a similar line in debate, arguing on 6 August that proposals from the Lords to limit the power of a custos regni by specifying what bills he might pass would set a precedent for the king to direct Parliament in the same way.135Procs. LP vi. 244, 250. Culpeper was also involved in drawing up instructions in August for a high-powered parliamentary delegation to attend the king in Edinburgh.136CJ ii. 262a, 264b, 285b. Ostensibly, this committee was to liaise between king and Parliament, but its real purpose was to monitor Charles’s activities and to strengthen the junto’s links with the Scottish Covenanters.137Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 321. Culpeper’s continuing association with the junto and commitment to the reformist cause are clear from his management of a conference on 27 August, in which he justified the Commons’ preference for a shorter recess than that desired by the Lords, pleading ‘the unsettled condition of the kingdom at this time’ and ‘some impeachments for high treason which required a speedy trial’.138Procs. LP vi. 580, 581, 582, 583.

Swing to the king, 1641

The spirit of cooperation that generally marked Culpeper’s relations with the parliamentary leadership for much of the summer of 1641 was sorely tested early in September, when Pym and his allies renewed their efforts to bring the Church of England into nearer conformity with the Scottish Kirk. With the recess looming and still no substantive legislation for the reform of church worship, the Commons set up a committee on 31 August – to which Culpeper was named – to frame an order against innovations in religion.139CJ ii. 278b. The next day (1 Sept.), Pym reported the order, which seemed to be ‘well approved by the House’, until Culpeper moved that

as we had provided a remedy against the abuses in the church on the one hand, so we would likewise provide a remedy against such as did vilify and condemn the Common Prayer Book established by act of Parliament on the other hand, or else he feared it might be the occasion of many tumults in the church and state.140Procs. LP vi. 634.

This motion caused great consternation, for, as Culpeper had doubtless calculated, any mention of the Prayer Book in the order would defeat the junto’s main purpose in passing it – which was to send a positive message to the Scots about progress on church reform. In a thin House, he succeeded in having the order recommitted; and on 6 September, he clashed with the Scots’ allies again, when he was a teller with Falkland in two divisions relating to the finer wording of the order – the resulting amendments serving to strengthen the order’s defence of Prayer-Book worship.141CJ ii. 279b, 280b-281a; Procs. LP vi. 654; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 355. However, they lost a third division on whether the order, thus amended, should pass, and it was promptly re-committed to the same committee.142CJ ii. 281a; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 369. Although the Commons’ junto-men succeeded in removing all reference to the Prayer Book from the order before it was sent to the Lords, the anti-junto peers were able to prevent its passage and to send down instead (via a conference on 9 September) an order the Lords had passed back in January, enjoining that church services should be performed according to the Prayer Book.143CJ ii. 283a, 286b; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 358. It was Culpeper who reported this order to the Commons, along with another from the Lords authorising its publication.144CJ ii. 286b; Procs. LP vi. 714. The Commons rejected both these orders, but voted to publish a declaration that recited not only its own order against innovations, as sent up to the Lords and devoid of any reference to the Prayer Book, but also the Lords’ order of January upholding the use of the Book.145CJ ii. 287. This declaration also included a ‘narrative of the whole matter’ that was implicitly critical of the anti-junto peers. Yet the fact that Culpeper was among those tasked with drafting this declaration suggests that he saw it as an acceptable compromise that at least partially satisfied his desire for a public statement from Parliament in defence of the Prayer Book.146CJ ii. 287a. The two Houses went into recess that same day (9 Sept.), with Culpeper securing appointment to the Commons’ Recess Committee*, chaired by Pym.147CJ ii. 288b. Writing to the king the next day (10 Sept.), the royal intelligencer and man-of-business Sir Edward Nicholas† enclosed a letter from Culpeper to Hamilton, so that Charles ‘may see all the passages of the House of Commons’.148Evelyn Diary ed. Wheatley, iv. 86.

Culpeper was apparently not quite as active at Westminster after the recess as he had been before it – a sign, perhaps, of the deterioration in his relationship with the parliamentary leadership. Nevertheless, between November 1641 and June 1642, when he left London to join the king at York, he was named to approximately 50 committees and nine conference teams and served as teller in six divisions and twice as a messenger to the Lords.149CJ ii. 307b, 312a, 316b, 325a, 326a, 334b, 335a, 335b, 336a, 340a, 344b, 353a, 361b, 400a, 489a, 580a; LJ iv. 500a, b, 658a. The Commons’ agenda after the recess was dominated by the question of how to suppress the Irish rebellion, and this is reflected in many of Culpeper’s appointments and contributions to debate during the last two months of 1641 and the first two of 1642.150D’Ewes (C), 77, 78, 84, 97, 99. During this period, he featured regularly on committees and conference teams relating to one or other aspect of Irish policy.151CJ ii. 305b, 309a, 312a, 324b, 335b, 336a, 353a, 357a, 358b, 362a; D’Ewes (C), 349. He also chaired a committee set up on 27 December to draw up propositions for securing and supplying Munster, which he reported to the House and carried up to the Lords.152CJ ii. 357b, 359b, 361b, 375a; LJ iv. 500.

Where Culpeper differed from Pym and his allies regarding Parliament’s response to the Irish rebellion was, predictably, on the question of whether to bring the Scots into the conflict. The junto was eager to accept Scottish offers of military assistance, but the anti-Scots interest in the House, Culpeper among them, rallied against this proposal.153Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 417. Admittedly, he never openly rejected the idea of accepting Scottish help; and he was included on conference teams for treating with the Scots about Irish affairs.154CJ ii. 335b, 336a. Nevertheless, he moved against offering to pay the Scottish troops to be deployed in Ireland, or to furnish them with arms – which would have interpreted by the Scots, and rightly, as a calculated snub.155D’Ewes (C), 93, 293. Nor was he happy with the junto’s attempt to include a clause in additional instructions for Parliament’s commissioners in Scotland that unless the king removed his evil councillors the two Houses would ‘take such a course for the securing of Ireland as might likewise secure our selves’.156D’Ewes (C), 99, 101, 104-5; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 423-4. On 8 November, he was a minority teller with the future royalist John Belasyse against the inclusion of this clause in the instructions.157CJ ii. 307b. The majority tellers were the godly pairing of Sir Thomas Barrington and Sir Anthony Irby. Hand in hand with the marshalling of resources against the Irish rebels went measures for countering what was perceived as the growing popish threat in England. During November and December, Culpeper was closely involved in various Commons’ initiatives for ‘securing the persons of the prime papists’ and for putting Parliament and the kingdom into a posture of defence.158CJ ii. 316a, 318b, 319a, 325a, 326a, 335a, 361b, 364b; D’Ewes (C), 103, 154. It is a measure of the seriousness with which he took the popish menace that on 3 December he was named to a committee that effectively threatened the anti-junto majority in the Lords with a de facto parliamentary coup unless it passed the bills sent up to them ‘for the preservation of the kingdom’.159CJ ii. 330b; D’Ewes (C), 228; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 438.

The point of no return in Culpeper’s relations with the junto was probably reached with the debates surrounding the Grand Remonstrance in November and December 1641. Added on 16 November to the committee for drawing up the Remonstrance, and having been part of the original drafting committee set up on 3 August, he had probably contributed at least something to the template on which the Remonstrance would be based.160CJ ii. 317b. However, there is little to support the claim that it was Culpeper, rather than Pym, who drafted the bulk of the Remonstrance.161Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 428; Fletcher, Outbreak, 82; HMC Cowper, ii. 295. Culpeper and Falkland were added to the drafting committee on 16 November with a view, it seems, to amending the Remonstrance following a heated debate that day in which the ‘episcopal party’ had succeeded in having a clause against the Prayer Book omitted and had argued vociferously against a clause that the bishops had introduced ‘idolatry and popery into the church’.162D’Ewes (C), 149, 150-2. And certainly the influence of Culpeper and Falkland has been detected in several new articles in the Remonstrance – particularly number 184, stating that it was far from the House’s intention ‘to let loose the golden reins of discipline and government in the church, to leave private persons or particular congregations to take up what form of divine service they please’.163Constitutional Docs. of the Puritan Revolution ed. Gardiner, 229; Fletcher, Outbreak, 149.

Despite their likely involvement in drafting the Remonstrance, Culpeper and Falkland joined Hyde and ‘divers others’ on 22 November 1641 in arguing that it should not pass the House.164D’Ewes (C), 183. Culpeper’s argument against the Remonstrance focused on the impropriety of acting without the Lords and in a manner that could be construed as addressing the people.

It speaks of altering the church government, [and this] will offend the people. The declaration going but from this House goes but on one leg ... All remonstrances should be addressed to the king and not to the people, because he only can redress our grievances ... Our writ doth not warrant us to send any declarations to the people, but to treat with the king and Lords; neither was it ever done by any Parliament heretofore.165Verney, Notes, 122; D’Ewes (C), 184.

After voting narrowly in favour of the Remonstrance, MPs then debated whether it should be printed. This suggestion that the House should – in Dering’s words – ‘remonstrate downwards, tell tales to the people’, so appalled Culpeper, Hyde and their allies that they supported a highly controversial motion by Geoffrey Palmer for permission to ‘enter their protestations against [the] printing of it’.166D’Ewes (C), 186. Over the next few weeks, Culpeper continued to speak against the Remonstrance and in support of Palmer and the right of dissenting Members to enter a formal protest.167D’Ewes (C), 193, 204, 322; Add. 64807, f. 14v. After serving as a minority teller with John Ashburnham on 15 December against giving order for the Remonstrance to be printed, he was added that same day to a committee of both Houses for presenting the controversial document to the king.168CJ ii. 344b, 346b; D’Ewes (C), 295.

Culpeper emerged during the last two months of 1641 as one of the Commons’ leading spokesmen for the nascent royalist party. When he had crossed the junto before November it was largely in defence of the established church rather than personal monarchy. But the debates on the Grand Remonstrance and on eliciting Scottish support to crush the Irish rebellion seem to have opened his eyes to the intentions of Pym and his allies not just of clipping Charles’s wings but of reducing him to a mere ‘duke of Venice’, a puppet monarch. Having endorsed the Ten Propositions in the summer of 1641, in November, Culpeper questioned one of their central assumptions – that the Houses should exercise at least a share in the choice of royal councillors. The power to select royal councillors, argued Culpeper, belonged to the ‘king alone’.169D’Ewes (C), 105. And during December, he came down on the king’s side on every major issue of contention in the House. On 3 December, he complained of the ‘very great tumult’ occasioned when a crowd of citizens had assembled at Westminster on 29 November and had ‘accosted some of the Members to desire their votes for the putting down of bishops’.170D’Ewes (C), 211, 230. Four days later ( 7 Dec.), he and the future royalist Sir Frederick Cornwallis were minority tellers against a bill for placing the nation’s armed forces under the command of a lord general and lord admiral. This thinly-disguised attempt to transfer control of the militia and navy from the king to the Houses was designed not only to weaken Charles’s power, but also to strengthen the junto’s hand in the military preparations against the Irish rebels.171Infra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; CJ ii. 334b; D’Ewes (C), 244-5. Even more revealing of Culpeper’s shift towards the court was his criticism the next day (8 Dec.) of a proposed declaration that neither the king nor Parliament would ever consent to the toleration of Catholicism in Ireland. Culpeper’s argument – that such a declaration would drive loyal Catholics into the arms of the rebels – made good sense, but it may also reflect his knowledge of the mission to the king of Thomas Dillon, 4th Viscount Dillon, which established that Charles was willing to tolerate popery as a condition of peace.172D’Ewes (C), 254; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 396-9, 419.

As on the question of the new Irish army, Culpeper was prepared to subordinate his hostility to popery where English interests – in this instance, forestalling Scottish intervention in Ireland – were concerned. But on this occasion, he may also have been trying to curry favour with the king. The issue of intimidation by the London crowd re-surfaced on 13 December, when the House debated what punishment to mete out to a Middlesex magistrate who had posted a guard of the trained bands around Westminster on the lord keeper’s orders, but without the authority of Parliament.173D’Ewes (C), 268; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 434. Culpeper, who (like the king) probably regarded the crowd as a tool of the junto, was one of the tellers against having the unfortunate magistrate removed from the bench.174CJ ii. 340a; D’Ewes (C), 275. His presentation to the House a few days later of a petition from the reformadoes of the king’s former army in the north, requesting their arrears of pay, is also noteworthy, for it was largely from this group of men that Charles recruited the ‘cavaliers’ who would accompany him to Westminster on 4 January 1642 in his ill-fated attempt to arrest the Five Members.175D’Ewes (C), 314; CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 218, 241. Culpeper sided with another of the junto’s bugbears late in December – the bishops. As late as mid-November, he had been critical of those bishops who had been complicit in making the Laudian new Canons.176D’Ewes (C), 134. But on 30 December, he clashed with Strode and other puritan MPs by speaking in support of the 12 bishops who had petitioned the Lords that day, protesting at their ‘forced and violent absence’ from the House as a result of intimidation by the London crowd.177Add. 64807, f. 21v; LJ iv. 497a.

Royal minister, 1642

Culpeper’s reward for his services to the king came on 1 January 1642 with his appointment as chancellor of the exchequer and a seat on the privy council (Falkland was appointed secretary of state the same day).178PC2/53, f. 99; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 527. Hyde claimed that it was he who had been the moving spirit behind Culpeper’s appointment.179Clarendon, Hist. i. 457. However, Culpeper was offered the chancellorship only after Pym had been sounded out about the office and had refused it.180Procs. in Kent 1640 ed. Larking, 68; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 486. Although not quite the court outsider that Hyde painted him (as his links with Vane I and Hamilton attest), Culpeper was almost certainly a stranger to the king’s counsels over the arrest of the Five Members.181Clarendon, Hist. i. 487. Had that not been the case, it seems very unlikely that he would have allowed himself to be named, in first place, to a committee set up on 3 January for responding to the king’s demand that the Five Members be handed over for arrest.182CJ ii. 367a.

Culpeper, Hyde and Falkland ‘perfectly detested’ the king’s proceedings on 4 January 1642 – or so Hyde claimed – and were torn between ‘grief and anger that the violent party had by these late unskilful actions of the court gotten great advantage’.183Clarendon, Hist. i. 487. As Hyde added, however, the king’s wisest counsellors were

far from thinking that the accused Members had received much wrong, yet they thought it an unseasonable time to call them to account for it; that if anything had been to be done of that kind, there should have been a better choice of the persons – there being many of the House of more mischievous inclinations and designs against the king’s person and government.184Clarendon, Hist. i. 505-6.

This suggests that Hyde – and probably Culpeper, too – was not opposed in principle to arresting the king’s leading opponents at Westminster, but rather that the king had gone about it the wrong way and had picked the wrong targets.

The attempted arrest of the Five Members allowed Culpeper to distance himself from the court. On 5 January 1642, he was named, in first place, to a committee to sit at the Guildhall (which was deemed a safer location than the Palace of Westminster) to consider ‘all things that may concern the good and safety of the City and kingdom’.185CJ ii. 368b, 369a. But in accepting court office, he and Falkland contracted the lasting enmity of the ‘governing party’ at Westminster and were identified by parliamentarian propagandists as friends of the Catholic interest.186CJ ii. 369b; Clarendon, Hist. i. 459; Life, i. 84. Falkland disdained to respond to such slurs, but Culpeper ‘made an apology for himself [on 11 January], that he neither was nor ever would be for the popish party but would be ready to spend his blood for the true religion against popery’.187Clarendon, Hist. i. 459-60; PJ i. 33. The next day (12 Jan.), he was at pains to report to the House the suspicious activities of a ‘great recusant’ in Kent.188PJ i. 42-3, 49.

The junto’s hostility towards Culpeper was fully justified, however, for shortly before the king left London on 10 January 1642, he renewed his commands to Culpeper, Hyde and Falkland

to meet constantly together and consult upon his affairs and conduct them the best way they could in the Parliament ... And so they met every night late together and communicated their observations and intelligence of the day; and so agreed what was to be done or attempted the next – there being very many persons of condition and interest in the House who would follow their advice and assist in anything they desired.189Clarendon, Life, i. 83.

One of the first fruits of these clandestine deliberations was probably Culpeper’s motion in the House on 12 January that he should ask the king to return to London ‘for the begetting of a true understanding between his Majesty and the Parliament’.190PJ i. 45. Predictably, this suggestion met with a lukewarm response and was quietly dropped the next day. Partly to maintain his credit in the House and partly to address his own concerns about Catholic influence in high places, Culpeper contributed to Commons’ initiatives that implicitly assumed the existence of an ongoing popish conspiracy at court. In addition, he continued to receive appointments to committees for countering perceived threats to Parliament and the kingdom from the king or his supposed agents.191CJ ii. CJ ii. 372a, 379b, 383b, 384a, 457a. On 17 January, he was named, in first place, to another high-profile committee ‘to consider the safety of the kingdom’ and with ‘a large power to proceed in Irish affairs’ – a power that Culpeper succeeded in enhancing.192CJ ii. 385a, 386b; PJ i. 99. On 25 January and again on 9 February, he was named in first place to committees for presenting petitions to the king: the first for putting the kingdom in a posture of defence; the second, for defending Pym’s claim that many leading Irish rebels had been allowed to pass over to Ireland by the king’s ‘immediate warrant’.193CJ ii. 394a, 423b. Culpeper and Hyde were also employed by the House as messengers and mediators to the king, particularly on matters relating to the war-effort in Ireland.194CJ ii. 375a, 405b, 412a, 418b, 443a, 454b. A few months later, Culpeper would invest £150 (£600 according to Rushworth) as an Irish Adventurer.195E403/2985; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 565; Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 180.

Although he remained an important figure at Westminster during the early months of 1642, Culpeper was now excluded from the parliamentary leadership’s more partisan initiatives. It is perhaps indicative of the distrust in which the junto held him that from late December 1641 he received not a single appointment to conference-management teams. And for his part, when he was not shuttling back and forth between king and Parliament, he was apparently content to have his fellow MPs believe that he was concentrating on financial and commercial matters, as befitted his new office.196CJ ii. 422b, 429b, 489a, 491b, 496a, 499a, 523b; LJ iv. 658a; PJ i. 418. Only very occasionally during the early months of 1642 did he betray his true political colours – most notably on 27 January, when he was a minority teller against declaring the king’s trusted intimate James Stuart, 1st duke of Richmond, a ‘malignant’ for moving that the Lords adjourn for six months (which would effectively have dissolved Parliament altogether).197CJ ii. 400a; PJ i. 203. Similarly, on 4 March, he tried to excuse the king for having colluded in the flight abroad of the army plotter Henry Jermyn*.198PJ i. 501. Yet behind the scenes, Culpeper was skillfully insinuating himself in the favour not only of the king but also the queen. In a very short space of time he became one of the king’s and queen’s most influential advisers.199Clarendon, Life, i. 88, 90-1; HMC Cowper, ii. 305. It was on the ‘sole advice’ of Culpeper that the king determined to ‘retire into the northern parts, with a resolution that he would get Hull into his hands’. With the magazine in Hull at his disposal, the king would be well-placed to defy Parliament as he chose. Already, it seems, Culpeper was thinking in terms of creating a military party for the king. Hyde and Falkland, on the other hand, were keen for Charles to remain near London, within easy negotiating distance of the two Houses.200Clarendon, Life, i. 91.

So influential was Culpeper at court by February 1642 that he succeeded in persuading the king to relax his commitment to maintaining the power of the episcopate.201Clarendon, Life, i. 92-3, 96; Clarendon, Hist. i. 568. On 14 February, Culpeper was named to a committee of both Houses to present to Charles for his royal assent the bills for excluding the bishops from the Lords and for impressment.202CJ ii. 430b, 439a. Culpeper – who in Hyde’s opinion was ‘naturally inclined to expedients’ – believed that if Charles assented to the bishops’ exclusion bill, then the Houses would not press him on another item in the legislative pipeline, the militia bill. Culpeper was in no doubt as to which of the two bills posed the greater threat to royal authority, warning the king of the ‘dreadful consequences which would attend the yielding in the point of the militia; as if it would be the next day in their [Parliament’s] power to depose him ... and [that] whilst the sword remained in the king’s own hands, there would be no attempt to make further alterations’. When the king, devoted as he was to episcopacy, refused to accept that the only way to retain the power of the sword was to sacrifice the bishops’ seats in the Lords, Culpeper ‘went to the queen and repeated all the arguments he had used to the king, with his usual vehemence’, and it was Henrietta Maria who prevailed with her husband to pass the bishops’ exclusion bill.203Clarendon, Life, i. 93-5.

Yet Culpeper’s thinking on the parliamentary status of the bishops was determined by more than mere expediency. As he had intimated back in November 1641, when arguing that the power to appoint ministers belonged solely to the king, he favoured a classical theory of a mixed polity in which the three estates – Commons, Lords and monarch – were each defined and balanced by their respective functions.204D’Ewes (C), 105. Hyde, by contrast, denounced the exclusion of bishops from the Lords on the grounds that the three estates consisted of the Commons and the lords temporal and spiritual, with the king standing outside and above Parliament.205Clarendon, Life, i. 96. This disagreement between Hyde and Culpeper over the structure of the constitution would resurface during the summer in relation to His Majesties Answer to the XIX Propositions.

Culpeper, like Hyde and Falkland, continued to play a double game during the spring of 1642 – participating in debates (although much less frequently that he had before 1642) while informing the king of Parliament’s plans and how they might be countered.206Clarendon, Life, i. 100, 102-3. Culpeper operated what amounted to a spy-ring upon the junto, through which he discovered an intention to have himself, Falkland and Hyde sent to the Tower for giving evil counsel to the king. To forestall such a design, the three men resolved that they would never attend the Commons ‘all together and seldom two of them; and when they were [there], they would only hear and speak no more than was of absolute necessity’.207Clarendon, Life, i. 111, 112. But though Culpeper generally maintained a discreet silence on the floor of the House, he was occasionally provoked into a loyal outburst – as on 1 April, when Sir Peter Wentworth declared that Parliament could not confide or trust in the king. Culpeper ‘wondered that any man should dare to speak such language within these walls’ and succeeded in having Wentworth explain himself to the House.208PJ ii. 115.

Culpeper’s efforts to maintain a low political profile while surreptitiously assisting the king were not helped by his fellow Member for Kent Sir Edward Dering, whose release from the Tower – whence he had been sent by the Commons for having published his speeches in the House – had been procured by Culpeper in mid-February 1642.209PJ i. 348. Dering was a major figure in the Kent assizes petition of late March, ‘the most celebrated of the county manifestos of loyalty to the king’.210Fletcher, Outbreak, 307. Still smarting at his imprisonment by, and then expulsion from, the House, Dering vowed that if Culpeper too was expelled he would ‘ride from east to west and visit all Kent but we would petition him in again’.211Procs. in Kent 1640 ed. Larking, 76. Anxious not to give the junto an opportunity to question his own loyalty to Parliament, Culpeper declared on 6 April that he was ‘very sorry’ that the petition was still circulating in Kent and hoped that the House would take action against it.212PJ ii. 133.

Culpeper was still sufficiently trusted by the Commons to receive appointment on 15 April 1642 to a three-man parliamentary delegation to the king at York, urging Charles to reconsider his intention of going to Ireland to suppress the rebellion.213CJ ii. 530a, 537. Once at court, however, Culpeper privately advised the king to seize the magazine at Hull – a proposal that the queen heartily seconded.214Letters of Henrietta Maria ed. M. A. E. Green (1857), 68. On his return from York, Culpeper was named, in first place, to a committee for informing the king of Parliament’s efforts to suppress ‘seditious’ pamphlets and sermons.215CJ ii. 548b. Granted leave of absence for two weeks on 6 May, he had returned to the House by 19 May, serving as a teller that day with Sir John Strangways against including a clause in one of Parliament’s declarations to the king that he was bound by his coronation oath to assent to such bills as the two Houses should present to him.216CJ ii. 580a. Culpeper and Strangways lost this division, and this ‘new doctrine’ – that the king was obliged to pass all legislation presented to him – was specifically attacked in His Majesties Answer to the XIX Propositions.217His Majesties Answer to the XIX Propositions (1642), 3 (E.151.25).

Answer to the XIX Propositions

Culpeper’s last stand at the head of the dwindling royalist interest in the Commons came on 2 June 1642, when he moved that a committee be set up to consider whether, under the terms of the treaty at Ripon, Scots in England were exempt from taking the oath of supremacy.218PJ iii. 2. This was, in part, another instance of Culpeper highlighting the threat to English sovereignty inherent in the junto’s dealings with the Scots. But it also reflected his conviction that any diminution of the king’s royal supremacy in religion, at least in England, was a matter of ‘dangerous consequence’.219PJ iii. 2; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 520-1. Culpeper’s motion was successful, and he was named in first place to a committee for determining whether Scots in England were indeed exempt from the oath.220CJ ii. 601a. That same day (2 June), he was named in second place to a committee for subjecting other aspects of the treaty to further consideration.221CJ ii. 601a. His last appointment in the House was to a minor committee on 8 June.222CJ ii. 613a. At some point during the next few days, he left London for York – probably in the company of Falkland – arriving at court not later than 13 June, when he signed an engagement of the peers at York to defend the king and the true Protestant religion.223His Majesties Declaration Made the 13 of June 1642 (1642), 2 (E.154.45).

By the time Culpeper and Falkland arrived at court, they had prepared for publication the king’s answer to Parliament’s Nineteen Propositions. ‘Writ with very much wit and sharpness’, and employing a classical theory of balanced government derived (directly or indirectly) from the Greek historian Polybius, His Majesties Answer to the XIX Propositions gives the lie to Hyde and others that Culpeper had ‘never sacrificed to the muses’ and was largely unversed in polite learning.224Clarendon, Life, i. 87, 130-1; Warwick, Mems. 196. It was apparently Culpeper who penned that part of the Answer referring to the king as one of the three estates and coordinate with the other two – the Lords and Commons – in the legislative process. Misled by ‘some lawyers’ (or so Hyde claimed), Culpeper had abandoned the traditional understanding of the ancient constitution in which the king stood outside and above the three estates of Commons, lords spiritual (the bishops) and lords temporal, as head of the body politic.225Clarendon, Life, i. 131, 132. Modern commentators have suggested that the Answer’s resort to a Polybian constitutional model was to some extent forced on Culpeper and Falkland by the fact of the king’s agreement to the exclusion of the bishops from Parliament.226Mendle, Dangerous Positions, 155. Yet it is evident that Culpeper favoured such a model by November 1641 at the latest, when he had used it to defend the king’s right to appoint his own councillors. Indeed, this was arguably Culpeper’s principal aim in rendering the monarch part of, rather than above, the body politic – to preserve to the king those powers exclusive to his estate, which included the appointment of ministers of state and control of the kingdom’s military resources. The whole import of the Answer was that the exercise of executive government belonged properly and indefeasibly to the monarchical estate alone – not to Parliament and much less to a republican junto. For all its talk of ‘a regulated monarchy’, the Answer expressed not so much a ‘commitment to the rule of law’ as a commitment to the retention of a genuine personal monarchy – although one shorn of the bishops and the church as its main instruments of authority.227Smith, Constitutional Royalism, 90-1. The preservation of the ‘high and perpetual power’ of the crown, particularly in relation to the militia, would be a major component of Culpeper’s thinking both as a royalist and royal councillor.

Royalist grandee, 1642-50

Culpeper has been assigned to the constitutionalist, pro-accommodation wing of the king’s party during the civil war – partly on the basis of his involvement in the royalists’ August 1642 peace overtures to Parliament.228Smith, Constitutional Royalism, 3, 4, 5, 109-10, 117, 119; ‘Sir John Colepeper’, Oxford DNB; CJ ii. 739b, 740a; PJ iii. 320-4. He was apparently instrumental in persuading Charles to sue for peace, although it is possible that he was motivated more by a pragmatic assessment of the king’s military weakness at that juncture than a desire to avoid civil war at all costs.229Clarendon, Hist. ii. 300-1; England’s Memorable Accidents (12-19 Sept. 1642), 9-10 (E.240.2); Letters of Henrietta Maria ed. Green, 125. In fact, much of Culpeper’s wartime career suggests that he was among the less irenic of the royalist grandees. He was a leading figure in the king’s military counsels from August 1642 until the winter of 1644.230His Maiesties Speech to the Gentlemen of York-shire (1642), 5 (E.109.26); Add. 18981, f. 112; Harl. 6802, ff. 221, 357; Harl. 6851, ff. 104, 212; Harl. 6852, ff. 24, 233; Cornwall RO, RS/1/1053; PA, WAL/2, f. 97; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 354; iii. 149, 192, 346, 347, 364; Carte, Life of Ormond, vi. 151; Mems. of Prince Rupert, ii. 438; HMC Hodgkin, 102. He retained the trust of the queen and was a close ally of Ashburnham, both of whom were committed to the vigorous prosecution of the war.231Letters of Henrietta Maria ed. Green, 56, 68, 75, 91, 97, 129, 154, 186, 194, 201, 213, 270; Clarendon, Life, i. 172-3. He played no recorded part in the Oxford treaty negotiations of 1643. It may also be significant in this context that he opposed the appointment of Hyde as chancellor of the exchequer (Culpeper relinquishing that office to become master of the rolls) and to the close committee or ‘junto’ that the king set up in September 1643 (which included both Culpeper and Hyde).232Clarendon, Life, i. 146, 177. As well as being Culpeper’s rival for court preferment, Hyde favoured a political rather than a military solution to the war.233Infra, ‘Edward Hyde’.

If the London newsbooks can be credited, Culpeper re-emerged as an advocate of peace negotiations at the meeting of the Oxford Parliament in January 1644 – although again there are signs that his motives were more complex than a fixed preference for a negotiated settlement. Having been delegated with Hyde to manage the lower House, he used the first day’s proceedings on 22 January to move that peace propositions be sent to Westminster, ‘and that his Majesty may pass an act against papists and deliver up such delinquents as were proclaimed traitors by his Majesty, at the desire of both Houses, before this war begun and yet notwithstanding [are] commanders in his Majesty’s army’.234Clarendon, Hist. iii. 293; The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer no. 41 (23-30 Jan. 1644), 314-15 (E.30.19); Mercurius Britanicus no. 21 (29 Jan.-5 Feb. 1644), 167 (E.31.14); Mercurius Etc no. 2 (31 Jan.-6 Feb. 1644), 10 (E.31.18); Juxon Jnl. 43. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Culpeper’s stance against highly-placed Catholics – notwithstanding his apparently cordial relations with the queen. Yet it was probably no coincidence that his two main target groups, court papists and former army-plotters, included most of his main rivals for royal favour – namely, George, Lord Digby*, Lord Jermyn and Henry Percy, Lord Percy*. Culpeper’s attendance in the Oxford Parliament prompted the Commons at Westminster to issue orders on 22 January and 9 February for disabling him from sitting as an MP and for sequestering his estate.235CJ iii. 374a, 394a. His name was subsequently included among those excepted from pardon as to life and estate in Parliament’s propositions for the Uxbridge and Newport peace treaties.236CJ iii. 639a; LJ vii. 55a; x. 548b.

Culpeper’s sensitivity on the issue of popery, and perhaps also his willingness to entertain the idea of a negotiated settlement, may well have been strengthened by the knowledge that the king, with the encouragement and assistance of the queen and Digby, was moving towards a military alliance with the Irish Catholic Confederates. Like many others at court, Culpeper had serious reservations about such an alliance, especially if it threatened to undermine the English and Protestant interest in Ireland and lead to the deployment of a Catholic army on English soil. But despite his misgivings over the king’s Irish policy, Culpeper remained a trusted and influential member of Charles’s counsels during 1644 – much to the disgust of several senior royalist officers, who had come to regard him as a civilian meddler in military affairs.237Clarendon, Hist. iii. 192, 347, 364; Life, i. 145; Pythouse Pprs. ed. W. A. Day (1879), 54. Culpeper’s loyalty was rewarded that October with his creation as Baron Culpeper of Thoresway (Culpeper was lord of the Lincolnshire manor of Thoresway). According to Hyde, his creation ‘did much dissatisfy both the court and the army, to neither of which he was in any degree gracious, by his having no ornament of education to make men the more propitious to his parts of nature’.238Clarendon, Hist. iii. 445.

Culpeper served as one of the king’s commissioners at the Uxbridge treaty of early 1645, and upon the collapse of negotiations he accompanied the prince of Wales to Bristol, having been appointed one of the future Charles II’s councillors.239LJ vii. 150a; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 450. One of Charles’s likely motives in establishing the prince’s council was that of purging the court of men like Culpeper and Hyde who were thought to be ‘something rigid in the business of the Irish’, thereby giving him greater freedom to negotiate a deal with the Confederates.240Carte, Life of Ormond, vi. 70. Culpeper and Hyde were the leading spirits on the prince’s council – Culpeper again assuming a central role in military affairs.241Add. 78255, unfol.; Sloane 1519, f. 54; Bodl. Clarendon 24, f. 129; Carte 16, f. 232v; Wm. Salt. Lib. S.MS.45, unfol.; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 480, 520-1; HMC Portland, i. 274, 282; J. L. Sanford, The Great Rebellion (1858), 618-20, 621-3. Following the king’s defeat at Naseby, Culpeper joined Digby and Ashburnham in pushing for an alliance with the king’s ostensible enemies the Scottish Covenanters.242Bodl. Clarendon 27, ff. 114, 117; HMC Portland, i. 245-6, 332-3; Clarendon SP ii. 188-9, 207. To this end, he renewed his contacts with Hamilton – imprisoned by the king in Pendennis Castle since 1644.243Bodl. Clarendon 27, f. 117v; Clarendon SP ii. 197; HMC Portland, i. 333; Clarendon, Hist. iv. 149-50;. Whereas Culpeper had been averse to seeking military assistance from Irish Catholics, he was willing to do so from Scottish Protestants, seeing it as ‘the only way left to save the crown and three kingdoms’. ‘All that they [the Covenanters] can ask’, he told Ashburnham, ‘or the king part with, is a trifle in respect of the price of a crown’.244Clarendon SP ii. 207.

In March 1646, Culpeper accompanied the prince of Wales to the Scilly Isles, and from there he went on to Paris to acquaint the queen with the prince’s situation.245Clarendon, Hist. iv. 140. Having at first opposed the idea of the prince taking refuge in France, he changed his mind at the persuasion of the queen and from the spring of 1646 was, after Jermyn, the most influential figure in her counsels and those of the pro-Scottish alliance faction in the king’s party.246Bodl. Clarendon 27, f. 117; Clarendon, Hist. iv. 172; Clarendon SP ii. 231, 236. With the king in the hands of the Scots by the summer of 1646, Culpeper, Jermyn and Ashburnham wrote repeatedly to him, pleading that he take the Covenant and endorse a Presbyterian church settlement – the minimum terms on which the Scots would engage for him.247Clarendon SP ii. 242-5, 246-9, 255-6, 260-5, 268-75, 278, 301-3, 312-3, 314, 329-30. The three men insisted that in order to raise a military party for himself – ‘the only engine able to do your business’ – he must sacrifice his adherence to episcopacy.248Clarendon SP ii. 261. To Culpeper and Jermyn this was a price worth paying, for as they told Charles, without ‘the power of the sword ... the kingly office signifies very little’.249Clarendon SP ii. 301. The king, on the other hand, was convinced that episcopal control of the church was ‘the only firm foundation of all power’.250Clarendon SP ii. 248. Moreover, he believed that Culpeper and Jermyn were ‘never rightly grounded in religion according to the Church of England’ – and, indeed, that Culpeper ‘had no religion’ at all.251Clarendon SP ii. 270; Clarendon, Hist. iv. 206.

Culpeper’s and Jermyn’s lack of scruples with regard to episcopacy was a positive advantage as far as the queen was concerned, and they continued to dominate both her and the prince of Wales’s counsels.252NAS, GD 406/1/2398. Culpeper’s ascendancy was resented by many of the more anti-Covenanter and pro-episcopacy royalist grandees, among them Sir Edward Nicholas, who observed late in 1648 that

none of the king’s affairs, which have of late been left wholly to the conduct of Lord Culpeper, have been managed with any advantage to his Majesty. Few then look for better success in the sad condition of his Majesty’s present affairs till persons of virtue and piety be chosen rather than hot brains.253Nicholas Pprs. i. 107.

Nevertheless, Culpeper proved as successful in ingratiating himself with the young Charles II as he had been with his father, and his credit at court increased after his mission to the tsar in 1650, from which he returned with a loan of 20,000 rubles in corn and furs.254Add. 37047, ff. 42, 57, 60, 62; Clarendon, Hist. v. 233; ‘Sir John Colepeper’, Oxford DNB.

Later career and death

Culpeper, Jermyn and the queen were the moving spirits behind the royalists’ several attempts between 1648 and 1651 to forge a successful military alliance with one or other party in Scotland – a policy that came to a disastrous conclusion with Charles II’s defeat at Worcester in September 1651. After Worcester, Culpeper and Jermyn were supplanted in Charles II’s favour by Hyde and his allies.255‘Sir John Colepeper’, Oxford DNB. At the Restoration, Culpeper was re-appointed master of the rolls, but a promising – or at least lucrative – career at the restored court was cut short by his death on 11 July 1660.256Attree, Booker, ‘Suss. Colepepers’, 68. In his will, he asked to be buried ‘without any pomp or state’ in Hollingbourne church, although the parish registers contain no record of his interment there. Shortly before Culpeper’s death, the king had given his word to grant £12,000 for clearing his estate of debt and raising portions for his children, and Culpeper duly charged his estate with bequests worth in excess of £12,000.257PROB11/301, f. 193. He was succeeded by his eldest son Thomas 2nd Baron Colepeper, who sat in the Restoration House of Lords.