SAVILE, Sir William (1612-44), of Thornhill, Yorks, and Rufford, Notts.

The Saviles were one of Yorkshire’s most venerable and prominent families, having settled in the West Riding by the early twelfth century and provided a knight of the shire for the first time in 1376.40Foster, Yorks. Peds.; Cliffe, Yorks. 30; HP Commons 1386-1421, ‘Sir John Saville’. The bulk of their huge estate (they owned at least 27 manors in Yorkshire alone) lay in the south-west corner of the West Riding, in the Bradford-Huddersfield-Halifax area.41C142/774/17; C142/424/190; C142/380/128; Notts. RO, DD/SR/73. Through a series of fortunate marriages they had also acquired manors and property in Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire and Wiltshire.42Clay, ‘Savile fam.’, 4. A large part of Savile’s estate had descended to him from his great-grandfather, George Talbot, 6th earl of Shrewsbury, and he was to spend over £3,000 in litigation defending his inheritance against the claims of the earl’s ‘heirs general’, who included Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, Henry Grey, 8th earl of Kent, and Thomas Howard, 21st earl of Arundel.43Notts. RO, DD/SR/225/146; DD/SR/211/128/1/130. Savile was well able to afford such costs, for his estate was worth about £6,300 a year by 1642 – an income which exceeded that of many peers.44Notts. RO, DD/SR/211/125/1/68. The Saviles’ wealth and huge landed estate gave them a powerful electoral interest in northern England. Savile’s grandfather, Sir George Savile†, 1st bt., had sat for Boroughbridge in 1586 and for Yorkshire in 1593, and his father, Sir George Savile†, 2nd bt., had been returned for Morpeth, Northumberland, in 1601 and for Appleby, Westmorland, in 1614.45HP Commons 1558-1603; HP Commons 1604-1629.

Within a few years of his elder brother’s death in 1626, Savile was being groomed to follow in the footsteps of his kinsman Sir John Savile† of Howley as a knight of the shire for Yorkshire.46Strafforde Letters, i. 48. However, it was not Sir John who sought to promote the young Savile’s interest but the former’s bitter rival Sir Thomas Wentworth†, the future earl of Strafford. Following the death of Savile’s father in 1614 and of his grandfather in 1622, Wentworth – who was Savile’s uncle and a close friend of his father – had become his de facto guardian.47Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P13/52. It was Wentworth who secured a match in 1629 between the 17 year old Savile and the eldest daughter of the lord keeper, Thomas Coventry†, 1st Baron Coventry.48Strafforde Letters, ii. 94. When Savile assumed his majority in 1633, Wentworth discharged his duties as guardian in a long letter of advice to his ‘dear nephew’. He recommended that Savile ‘lay aside all thoughts of going up to London these four or five years’ and advised him to avoid the court until he was at least 30, when his judgement would have matured to the point where he could ‘discover and put aside such trains as will always infallibly be there laid for men of great fortunes, by a company of flesh flies that ever buzz up and down the palaces of princes’.49Strafforde Letters, i. 167-9. Instead, he urged him to ‘live in your own house, order and understand your own estate, [and] inform and employ yourself in the affairs of the country’. Wentworth’s letter also included a frank assessment of Savile’s character.

You are, as I have observed, rash and hasty, apt to fall to censure others and exercise your wit upon them. Take heed of it; it is a quality of great offence to others and danger towards a man’s self, and that jeering, jesting demeanour is not to be used but where a man hath great interest in the person.50Strafforde Letters, i. 169.

Within a few years, Savile’s ‘rash and hasty’ nature and his apparent contempt for any authority in Yorkshire besides his own was to give great offence to Wentworth himself.

Savile’s most pressing concern during the early 1630s was not ‘command and government’ in the county – which Wentworth thought, with a little patience, would fall ‘infallibly’ into his hands – but the management and ordering of his estate. He spent much time and money consolidating his holdings in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Oxfordshire, running up some very large debts in the process.51Notts. RO, DD/SR/9/32-104; DD/SR/10/2-31, 102-15, 126-54, 175-93, 262-92; DD/SR/211/128/1/130. In October 1634, he put two thirds of his estate in trust for 20 years to pay off his debts. His trustees included his ‘kind friend’, the future royalist Sir John Ramsden*, another close friend and future royalist Francis Nevile*, and Wentworth’s old tutor Charles Grenewoode, the godly but conformist rector of Thornhill.52Notts. RO, DD/SR/73; DD/SR/211/128/1/130. Although Wentworth thought that Savile had been ‘left as weak in friends as any gentlemen I ever knew of your quality’, Savile had made good this deficiency by the late 1630s.53Strafforde Letters, i. 169. Besides Ramsden and Nevile, he was on close terms with two more future royalists – Sir Edward Osborne*, vice-president of the council of the north, and Wentworth’s wealthy young cousin Sir Thomas Danbie*.54Hull Hist. Centre, C BRL/265; Notts. RO, DD/SR/9/89/1-2; HMC Cowper, ii. 204. Indeed, Danbie spent so much time at Thornhill that one of the rooms there was known as ‘Sir Thomas Danby’s chamber’.55Notts. RO, DD/SR/215/50. Savile was also a friend of his fellow Pennine magnate Sir Arthur Ingram*.56Strafforde Letters, i. 267; Notts. RO, DD/SR/A4/25.

As Wentworth feared, the lure of London and the court proved too great for his nephew to resist; although even if Savile had wished to pursue a country existence, his ‘several suits at law’ would have required him to spend a considerable amount of time in the south. By March 1634, he had taken lodgings next to his father-in-law’s house in Fetter Lane, London, and by 1636 he had also acquired a house in Hackney.57Notts. RO, DD/SR/A4/25; DD/SR/211/128/1/130; Strafforde Letters, i. 218. Despite Wentworth’s strictures about the pitfalls awaiting ‘young gallants’ at court, Savile had obtained a place in the royal household – as a gentleman of the privy chamber – by June 1639 at the latest.58SP16/427/38v, f. 74. Savile probably had his kinsman and ‘loving friend’ the earl of Pembroke, the lord chamberlain, to thank for this appointment.59Eg. 2623, f. 41. In October 1638, Pembroke obtained the very same office for Savile’s fellow Yorkshire gentleman Sir William Pennyman – another future royalist and a close friend of Wentworth. It was Pennyman who, in January 1639, secured for Savile and another gentleman the office, in reversion, of clerk of the council in star chamber.60Supra, ‘Sir William Pennyman’. Savile’s purchase of several wardships during the 1630s, and his involvement in fen drainage schemes on former crown lands in Yorkshire, may also be attributable to his court connections.61E125/22, f. 409v; E125/23, f. 218; E134/14CHAS1/MICH47; WARD9/163, f. 86v; Borthwick, Wills in York Registry, Prerogative wills, Jan. 1644. Savile’s friends at court included not only Pembroke and Coventry, but also the crypto-Catholic peer the earl of Arundel.62Notts. RO, DD/SR/212/35/1: DD/SR/225/99.

More disturbing, from Wentworth’s point of view, than Savile’s attachment to the court, was his insubordination towards the council of the north. An ambitious young man, with a fine sense of his own rank and ‘quality’, Savile was not prepared to accept the authority of the council’s vice-president – his one-time friend Sir Edward Osborne, who was a relative newcomer to the county and whose estate was considerably smaller than his own.63HMC Cowper, ii. 204; Cliffe, Yorks. 312. Contrary to his assurance to Wentworth that ‘no man doth live in better intelligence’ with the council and Osborne than himself, Savile was a thorn in Osborne’s side. As the kingdom began to mobilize for the first bishops’ war in the summer of 1638, he flatly refused to obey Osborne’s order to bring his cavalry troop to York for training, insisting that ‘his horses should ... be trained in some more convenient place of the West Riding’.64Strafforde Letters, ii. 127, 193. Osborne complained to Wentworth that ‘if Sir William Savile may always prevail in his accustomed ways of opposition (which for the most part he doth), both lord president, council, deputy-lieutenants and justices of peace may soon sit down and let him govern all’.65Strafforde Letters, ii. 193.

Although repeatedly admonished by Wentworth for his disobedience and impatience, Savile was unrepentant; indeed, by December 1638 he had become the ‘main actor’ in a campaign to persuade the privy council to appoint an additional lord lieutenant for Yorkshire – a scheme that would have completely undermined Osborne’s authority in military matters and which Wentworth quickly scotched. According to Osborne, Savile also sought to strike at Wentworth by ‘placing his respects and favours in the country on such principally as he knows your lordship distastes and by his frequent applications above to your professed or supposed adversaries’.66Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P18/157; Strafforde Letters, ii. 147, 215-17, 308-9, 311-12; Cliffe, Yorks. 312. Wentworth was eventually forced to concede, with some embarrassment, that the most refractory members of the Yorkshire gentry by 1639 were his nephew Savile and his cousin Sir Thomas Danbie.67Strafforde Letters, ii. 308-9. Yet from his lofty but distant standpoint as lord deputy of Ireland, Wentworth found it difficult to believe the worst of Savile: ‘I should be very sorry my nephew made his old uncle such a return for bringing him forth from betwixt my knees when his friends were none, his adversaries mighty, [and] his estate extreme low and distracted’.68Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P10a/273-8; Strafforde Letters, ii. 311-12. Certainly Savile’s opposition was not grounded upon hostility to the crown’s policies. He had no objection to ‘Thorough’ and was active in local government during the personal rule of Charles I.69CSP Dom. 1634-5, p. 521; 1635-6, pp. 157, 277-8; F. Barber, ‘The W. Riding sessions rolls’, Yorks. Arch. Jnl. v. 371-3, 377, 379, 401; W. Riding Sessions Recs. ed. J. Lister (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. liv), 27, 35, 169; J. Watson, Hist. of Halifax (1775), 606-8. He was motivated simply, it seems, by a desire ‘to show his greatness and power above’ [i.e. at court] and in the county.70Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P18/157.

As the prospect of war with the Scots loomed larger during the early months of 1639, Savile seems to have declared a temporary truce in his feud against Osborne.71Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P19/29; Strafforde Letters, ii. 338-9. In January, following a royal order that the county’s trained bands muster for possible deployment against the Scots, Savile joined Osborne in a petition to the king from the Yorkshire deputy lieutenants and militia commanders, expressing their readiness to march to any rendezvous, but reminding Charles that their troops were ‘never ... once employed out of our county upon any remote service whatsoever’.72SP16/409/53, f. 141; SP16/409/67, f. 167; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 353-4. He also signed the petitions from the county’s deputy-lieutenants to the king and Sir Jacob Astley (sergeant-major-general of the king’s infantry) in March, asking that their men be paid a month prior to mobilization.73SP16/414/92, ff. 217, 219. In the event, the crown decided to select only six Yorkshire regiments for service against the Scots, one of which – much to his satisfaction – was Savile’s.74Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland Ms vol. 1608-1700, N33; Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P19/29. His commitment to the king’s Scottish war, and more obviously his pride, were manifested in his regiment, which elicited the praise of several commentators: ‘Sir William Savile hath a regiment of 1,300 men far excelling all others, being tall, proper men and all in red, and most neat in making their trenches’; ‘the goodliest quality body of men and the best appointed that ever I did see’.75Add. 29550, f. 38; Bodl. Rawl. B.210, ff. 39v-40; Six North Country Diaries ed. J. C. Hodgson (Surt. Soc. cxviii), 9. Evidently Savile had spent lavishly on equipping and training his men, and he may well have been exasperated that the king made peace with the Covenanters at Berwick in June before he and his men had been given a chance to prove themselves in action.

With the temporary cessation of hostilities against the Scots, Savile resumed his battle with Osborne. On 23 July 1639, he wrote to Wentworth, asking permission to resign from his offices as deputy lieutenant and militia colonel

being altogether unwilling to serve Sir Edward Osborne, who, although I believe left his troop of horse by command, yet to the world it looketh most untowardly that a colonel (and your lordship’s nephew) should serve any man that commanded a troop of horse, whilst by it he had liberty to discontent the best men of the country, and when that troop was in likelihood to march for the defence of the kingdom, left it.76Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P19/85.

Savile’s resignation request was merely a gesture, but his contempt for Osborne was genuine enough and had no doubt intensified as a result of the vice-president’s decision in February 1639 to allow a consortium of northern gentry (among them the future parliamentarians, Lionel Copley* and Thomas St Nicholas*) to erect an iron-works at Conisborough in south Yorkshire.77CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 517. Whatever reasons Savile had given for opposing the scheme (which Osborne had ignored), his main objection was undoubtedly that it threatened the profitability of the earl of Pembroke’s iron-works at Kimberworth, also in south Yorkshire. Savile had been interested in leasing Kimberworth from Pembroke since at least September 1638, and at some point in 1639 he became receiver and farmer of the revenues of the earl’s manors, lands and iron-works in Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire.78Notts. RO, DD/SR/211/128/1/8, 23, 41; Strafforde Letters, ii. 216; W.E. Preston, ‘Two seventeenth-century Yorks. rentals’, Yorks. Arch. Jnl. xxxiv. 329. His duties included the management of Pembroke’s northern estates, as well as the collection of rents and revenues.79Notts. RO, DD/SR/221/94/1; Preston, ‘Two seventeenth-century Yorks. rentals’, 329. Savile continued his stewardship of Pembroke’s northern estates during the early years of the civil war, despite the earl’s decision to remain in Parliament’s quarters. As late as November 1643, just a few months before Savile’s death, Pembroke thanked him for managing his interests in the north. Although Savile died owing large sums to Pembroke, Savile’s widow was to claim that the earl had received at least £7,000 from his northern estates in 1642 and 1643 and that this was due entirely to the ‘care and pains of her husband ... in those distracted times’.80Notts. RO, DD/SR/211/128/1/19; DD/SR/211/128/15. Savile certainly contracted heavy debts in Pembroke’s service, taking out numerous loans during the early 1640s to cover his expenses.81Notts. RO, DD/SR/211/128/1/41, 79; W. Yorks. Archives Service (Kirklees), DD/R/F/28. In many cases, the guarantors of these loans were Savile’s closest friends, namely Francis Nevile, Sir John Ramsden, Sir Thomas Danbie and Sir George Wentworth II*.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Savile was returned for Yorkshire – taking the junior place behind the North Riding gentleman Henry Belasyse. Savile owed his election to the strength of his proprietorial interest in the West Riding and probably also – despite his defiance of Osborne – to the backing of Wentworth (now the earl of Strafford).82Supra, ‘Yorkshire’. In his only recorded contribution to debate in this Parliament – during the debate on 4 May concerning the crown’s offer to relinquish Ship Money in return for 12 subsidies – he certainly took a Straffordian line in claiming that if Ship Money were removed his Yorkshire constituents would accept the voting of subsidies. He was immediately taken to task by his fellow Yorkshireman Sir John Hotham, who insisted that Savile’s claim was without foundation, for where he lived (in the East Riding) ‘the country complained more of those military charges, and unless they might have relief ... they would not willingly give’. Hotham was supported by Belasyse, who also questioned the authority for Savile’s claim.83Aston’s Diary, 142-3. On 8 May – three days after the Short Parliament’s dissolution – Savile and Francis Nevile testified before the privy council concerning words spoken by Hotham and Belasyse during the debate on 4 May; Savile was also said to have informed against another prominent Yorkshire MP, Sir Hugh Cholmeley.84CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 155, 156; Procs. LP ii. 364. When questioned by the council, Hotham and Belasyse claimed to have forgotten what they had said. However, after Nevile had ‘repeated and averred to the board, the king being present, what they had spoken’, they were committed to the Fleet, where they remained for ten days.85CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 154-5. Yet a correspondent of the 2nd Viscount Conway (Sir Edward Conway II†), writing on 12 May, claimed that Nevile ‘did aver nothing against Mr Belasyse nor the rest, although it were so reported, and Sir William Savile is much afflicted at their commitments’ and had insisted that he shared their views, ‘having often before discoursed against those military charges’.86CSP Dom. 1640, p. 156. However, Hotham’s son, John Hotham*, was later to claim that after the two men’s commitment, Savile ‘did jeeringly say “now they might send to Mr [George] Peard* [a Middle Temple barrister] ... to move for a habeas corpus for them”’.87Procs. LP ii. 364. Whatever their precise role in the council’s proceedings against Hotham and Belasyse, Savile and Nevile were widely believed to have acted in breach of parliamentary privilege.

Despite his complicity in the crown’s efforts to stifle its critics after the Short Parliament, Savile joined Yorkshire’s ‘disaffected’ gentry – led by the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*), Belasyse, Cholmeley and Hotham – in their petitions to the king of July, August and September 1640, in which they complained about illegal billeting, pleaded poverty in the face of royal commands to mobilize the militia and, in the case of the last petition, requested that Charles summon a Parliament.88Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland Ms vol. 1608-1700, N38 Car. I; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1215, 1231. However, he later claimed that he had supported Strafford’s removal of the clause relating to Parliament from the third petition.89Procs. LP iii. 450. Given his apparent antipathy towards the Scots, it is not entirely clear why he signed any of the petitions, for they had the effect of encouraging a Scottish invasion whilst at the same time retarding the royal war effort. Perhaps he was indeed concerned to relieve the county of the crushing burden of military charges (as he had intimated in May).

Within just two days of the king summoning Parliament (24 Sept. 1640), Savile was canvassing support in the Pennines for his re-election as knight of the shire.90W. Yorks. Archives Service (Bradford), SpSt/11/5/3/4; Cliffe, Yorks. 323. His rivals for the county places were two of the summer’s leading petitioners, Lord Fairfax and Henry Belasyse. The fact that all three men had been involved in the petitioning campaign suggests that the contest was primarily a factional struggle for the honour of representing the county; there is no evidence that the candidates were divided over major, ‘national’ issues at this stage. In fact, Belasyse, like Savile, was to become a royalist in 1642. Even so, the election was a bitterly contested affair and concluded with Savile’s defeat on a poll and the return of Fairfax and Belasyse.91Supra, ‘Yorkshire’. Nevile, too, failed to secure re-election that autumn.92Supra, ‘Francis Nevile’. Apparently the Yorkshire electorate had not forgotten their perceived betrayal of Belasyse and Hotham in May; nor had Parliament. On 4 February 1641, the Commons resolved that Nevile be imprisoned in the Tower at the House’s pleasure and that Savile be sent for as a delinquent for his ‘absolute breach of the privilege of this House’.93CJ ii. 78b; Procs. LP ii. 360-1, 363-4, 368. Despite this resolution, Savile was determined to secure a seat, and some time early in February he was returned for the Wiltshire borough of Old Sarum in place of Edward Herbert I (the recently appointed attorney-general, who had been summoned to sit in the Lords as an assistant).94CJ ii. 75a; Procs LP v. 403. Savile owned property in Wiltshire, but was returned on the interest of his friend and kinsman the earl of Pembroke.95Supra, ‘Old Sarum’. On arriving at Westminster in mid-February, Savile was committed to the custody of the serjeant-at-arms.96CJ ii. 84b; Procs. LP iv. 436, 440. That he had not suffered the same fate as Nevile – immediate confinement in the Tower – was attributed by some MPs to his having ‘by force of friends, overborn the force of justice’.97Procs. LP v. 111. One of these friends was undoubtedly Pembroke.

Despite his past differences with Strafford, Savile agreed to appear as a witness for the defence at his uncle’s trial in the spring of 1641.98LJ iv. 210a. On 7 April, he gave evidence on the 27th article: that Strafford had levied an illegal tax upon Yorkshire during the autumn of 1640 for the maintenance of the trained bands – and specifically, for the pay of Danbie’s and Pennyman’s regiments, which had been assigned, on the king’s orders, to defend the county’s northern border against incursions by the Scots.99D. Scott, ‘‘Hannibal at our gates’: loyalists and fifth-columnists during the bishops’ wars – the case of Yorkshire’, HR lxx. 288. Corroborating the testimony of his erstwhile enemy Sir Edward Osborne and other Yorkshire Straffordians, Savile claimed that the lord lieutenant had obtained the consent of the greater part of the Yorkshire gentry for the levies.100Procs. LP iii. 433, 438, 443, 450; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 620. In fact, the levies appear to have been widely regarded as illegal, whilst the Scots saw them as part of a design by Strafford to plunge the two nations back into conflict.101Alnwick, Y.I.47 (The Scots’ charges against Strafford, 16 Dec. 1640). One consequence of Strafford’s trial and subsequent attainder appears to have been to effect some kind of reconciliation between the earl and his nephew. Savile’s visit to the Tower the day before Strafford’s execution on 12 May was almost certainly to discuss arrangements for the care and provision of his uncle’s family and estate.102LJ iv. 245a. Early in June, the king would grant a patent to Savile, Pennyman, Sir George Wentworth I* and other gentlemen to serve as trustees of all Strafford’s property, from which they were to provide for his widow’s jointure, pay off his debts (which amounted to £107,000) and raise portions for his children.103SO3/12, ff. 154v, 155, 157; W. Yorks. Archives Service (Leeds), WYL100 (former Temple Newsam ms TN/F/18/1); HMC 4th Rep. 83.

Strafford’s execution appears to have focused Savile’s mind on his own predicament as a virtual prisoner of the serjeant-at-arms. On 18 May, Sir John Hotham delivered a petition from him, requesting that the House remit his punishment. ‘Divers’ MPs spoke on Savile’s behalf; but because he had failed to acknowledge his offence, the petition was returned to Hotham.104CJ ii. 149a; Procs. LP iv. 436, 442. Savile petitioned the House again on 21 May and a third time on 29 May through his friend Sir Arthur Ingram. With characteristic impatience, Savile asked either to be given his freedom or be sent to the Tower.105CJ ii. 153a; Procs. LP iv. 505, 513, 660. When this petition was debated on 12 June, Hotham called for Savile’s release, but the House decided instead to call Savile’s bluff and duly sent him to the Tower – although his friends managed to have him spared the indignity of attending the Commons to receive sentence kneeling at the bar of the House, which was perceived as another instance of elite favouritism.106CJ ii. 173b; Procs. LP v. 110, 111, 114, 116; Notts. RO, DD/SR/212/23. Savile’s fourth petition was presented to the Commons by Ingram on 19 June.107CJ ii. 180; Procs. LP v. 236, 243. Once again, there were calls for his release, prompting the godly MP William Strode I to remind the House of Sir John Eliot†, who had died in the Tower because ‘he would not discover the secrets of this House’.108Procs. LP v. 243. After ‘great debate’, the House divided on whether Savile should be released, with the tellers for the yeas, the future parliamentarians Sir Walter Erle and Arthur Goodwin, losing to Lord Fairfax and the future parliamentarian turncoat Sir Henry Anderson.109CJ ii. 180; Procs. LP v. 236-7, 243-4. Why Erle and Goodwin supported Savile is not clear – possibly it was as a favour to Pembroke. Called to the bar of the House on 29 June, Savile was finally released from the Tower, although some MPs (led by Sir Arthur Hesilrige) then tried to prevent him from sitting, claiming that he had ‘obtained an election in Wiltshire and kept the return in his pocket’.110CJ ii. 190a, 192a; Procs. LP v. 403, 404, 408. This debate threatened to raise uncomfortable questions about Pembroke’s electoral influence – Old Sarum certainly being in his pocket – and it was perhaps for this reason that the House agreed with a motion from Strode that the matter be laid aside.111Procs. LP v. 408. Savile had taken his seat by December 1641, when he was named to a minor committee to consider several petitions from Lincolnshire.112CJ ii. 338b.

The king’s attempted arrest of the Five Members on 4 January 1642 appears to have alarmed Savile deeply, and for a brief period he made common cause with Charles’s staunchest opponents at Westminster. During the first three months of 1642, he was named to five committees, most of which were related to Parliament’s efforts to take control of the kingdom’s military resources.113CJ ii. 394a, 414b, 433a, 497a. Thus on 25 January, he was named to a committee for attending Charles with proposals that included the controversial request that the militia should be placed in such hands as Parliament could confide in – a proposal which the Lords refused to endorse.114CJ ii. 393b, 394a. That same day (25 Jan.), he was named to a committee to examine Colonel Sir Thomas Lunsford, Sir John Penington and others of the king’s party in London whom the Commons regarded as incendiaries.115CJ ii. 394a; PJ i. 170-1. Savile also supported the widening of parliamentary authority in Yorkshire, carrying up to the Lords several Commons’ orders relating to the seizure of a suspicious arms shipment at Hull (7 Feb.).116CJ ii. 415b; LJ iv. 566a; PJ i. 295, 301. Similarly, on 15 February, he was appointed with Lord Fairfax, Belasyse, Cholmeley, Hotham and Sir Philip Stapilton to confer with the earl of Essex, Yorkshire’s lord lieutenant, about the command of the county’s militia.117CJ ii. 433a. Perhaps the clearest sign of Savile’s alienation from the king during the early months of 1642 is his appointment with Jerome Weston, 2nd earl of Portland, and Sir Thomas Hele* to ride post to Dover (where Charles was bidding farewell to the queen) ‘to quicken his majesty to allow of the ordinance for settling the militia’.118CJ ii. 447b; PJ i. 428, 479. On 25 February, Savile reported to the House that the king would respond to Parliament’s requests concerning the militia the following day – when, with the queen safely in France, he refused to give his consent to the Militia Ordinance.119CJ ii. 454b, 459-460a; PJ i. 466.

Savile’s last appointment in the House came a month later, on 25 March 1642, when he was named to a committee to consider measures for the safety of Hull.120CJ ii. 497a. Shortly thereafter, however, he abandoned his seat, for just four days later (29 Mar.) the House ‘took notice’ that Savile, Pennyman, Danbie and William Malory had all ‘gone down to York without leave’ and promptly summoned them back to Westminster, ‘they being all suspicious men’.121CJ ii. 503a, 515a; HMC Buccleuch, i. 295. By May, Savile was convinced that Yorkshire could be held for the king, and he helped to prove the point by putting his militia regiment at Charles’s disposal and raising troops for the royalist cause.122PJ ii. 264; Hunter, S. Yorks. i. 124; The Last True Newes from Yorke, Nottingham, Coventry and Warwicke (1642), sigs. A2v, A3 (E.116.9). He also found time to entertain his brother-in-law Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*, and possibly the king himself, at Thornhill, and he was probably in attendance on Charles when the latter raised his standard at Nottingham in August.123Notts. RO, DD/SR/A4/25 (entry for 26 July 1642); Last True Newes from Yorke, sig. A3; W.D. Christie, Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, i. app. 2, p. xxvii. On 6 September, he was disabled by the Commons for neglecting the service of the House and for signing a petition to Parliament from Yorkshire’s royalist gentry, protesting at the proceedings of Sir John Hotham as parliamentary governor of Hull.124LJ v. 273b-274a.

Savile joined Nevile, Ramsden and other prominent Yorkshire royalists on 26 September 1642 in a letter to the commander of the king’s northern army, William Cavendish, 1st earl of Newcastle, requesting military assistance against the Hothams’ ‘infesting the country’.125Newcastle Mems. ed. Firth, 189. Indeed, it was later reported that Savile had offered to compound with Captain John Hotham for £2,000 – probably in the hope of saving his estate from plunder, although Hotham seems to have thought that Savile intended defecting to Parliament.126CJ iii. 234a; Speciall Passages no. 15 (15-22 Nov. 1642), 130 (E.127.35). Savile’s alarm at the Hothams’ belligerency probably explains his presence just three days later, on 29 September, among the signatories to the Yorkshire ‘treaty of pacification’ – an abortive attempt by the Fairfaxes and other West Riding gentry to keep the county neutral. The royalist signatories to this treaty included Savile’s friends Nevile, Osborne and Ramsden.127A. Woolrych, ‘Yorkshire’s treaty of neutrality’, History Today, vi. 696-704. The treaty was immediately condemned by Parliament and was soon rendered a dead letter in Yorkshire where the tide of war was flowing too strongly too resist.128CJ ii. 794a.

Savile was instrumental during October and November 1642 in bringing the Newcastle’s army into Yorkshire and was one of the first to suffer as a result of the outbreak of hostilities in the county, when his house at Thornhill was plundered by parliamentarian soldiers (it was later burnt to the ground by the parliamentarians with losses in goods of £4,000).129Add. 18777, ff. 19v, 60v; Add. 24475, ff. 5-8; Bodl. Nalson II, f. 181; CJ ii. 853a, 948b; Newcastle Mems. ed. Firth, 190; Whitaker, Loidis and Elmete, 315; Preston, ‘Two seventeenth-century Yorks. rentals’, 331. Savile was also closely involved in efforts to raise money for Newcastle’s army; and in February 1643, he was party to the so-called Yorkshire engagement, by which the signatories pledged their estates as security on loans for the supply of the earl’s troops.130CCAM 908. He himself lent £500 and signed bonds on the engagement for large sums of money.131Add. 15858, f. 237; Bodl. Tanner 62, ff. 655-6; Doncaster Archives, DD/CROM/11/6; CCAM 823, 928. His decision to side with the king in the civil war was apparently consistent with his religious convictions, for if his patronage of Charles Grenewoode (Strafford’s old tutor and chaplain) as rector of Thornhill is any indication, he was a supporter of episcopacy.132CJ iii. 130b.

One of Newcastle’s more energetic – if less competent – colonels, Savile was involved in a series of engagements against the Fairfaxes over the winter of 1642-3, ending with his humiliating defeat at Leeds in January 1643.133Add. 18777, f. 138; Add. 24475, ff. 5-8; Belvoir, MSS Historical etc., 1650 Originals, QZ.23, f. 7; LJ v. 579b-580a; The Rider of the White Horse (1643), 1-2, 5-7 (E.88.23); J. Binns, Yorks. in the Civil Wars, 55, 58-61. By May 1643, when Newcastle appointed him governor of Sheffield Castle, Savile had become quite as oblivious to the rule of law as Captain Hotham: ‘Your commission is as mine’, he informed his deputy at Sheffield, Major Beaumont, ‘which is to do what you have a mind to for the good of the service’. ‘Be sure you want not any money’, he later advised Beaumont, ‘so long as any roundhead hath either fingers or toes left within ten miles of the castle’.134Hunter, Hallamshire, 136, 138. Given Savile’s zeal in the king’s service, it is difficult to credit allegations made by Captain Hotham and Sir Edward Bayntun* in September 1643 that he and his kinsman Thomas Viscount Savile had offered to deliver up Yorkshire to Parliament if they might ‘come over’ without prejudice to their persons or estates.135CJ iii. 234a, 235b. The king certainly gave no credence to these allegations, assuring Savile that he retained his trust – a fact illustrated in November 1643, when Savile was appointed governor of York.136W. Yorks. Archives Service (Leeds), WYL100 (former Temple Newsam mss TN/PO/2A/1/13, 14, 19, 21, 22, 26, 27); HMC 2nd Rep. 17; Newman, Roy. Officers, 332. He did not enjoy this honour for very long, however, dying suddenly at York on 24 January 1644 (not 19 or 20 January as is generally supposed).137Hunter, Hallamshire, 140; Keeler, Long Parl. 334. The cause of death is not known, but it was probably some kind of camp fever. He was buried at Thornhill on 15 February.138Thornhill Par. Reg. ed. Charlesworth, 100. His widow subsequently married the Cambridgeshire royalist Sir Thomas Chicheley†.139HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Thomas Chicheley’.

In his will, Savile charged his estate with over £12,000 in bequests and about £800 in annuities. His legatees included his friends, the leading Yorkshire royalists Danbie, Nevile, Ramsden and Sir Paul Neile*. In addition, he left £50 to his ‘faithful friend’, the parliamentarian MP John Selden, who was the de facto husband of another of Savile’s legatees, his ‘honourable kinswoman’, Elizabeth, countess dowager of Kent. He appointed his wife, Nevile, Ramsden and another Yorkshire royalist, Sir Richard Hutton, his executors. His personal estate was reckoned to be worth at least £14,000, although his debts (including the money he had set aside for portions) amounted to over £31,000. The witnesses to his will included Charles Grenewoode and the controversial Laudian cleric John Cosin, who administered probate.140Borthwick, Wills in York Registry, Prerogative wills, Jan. 1644; Notts. RO, DD/SR/A5/11/6, f. 9; DD/SR/211/128/1/66, 68.

The task of clearing Savile’s estate of debt – which fell mainly to his chief executor, Francis Nevile – took over five years and involved protracted legal wrangling.141Preston, ‘Two seventeenth-century Yorks. rentals’, 330-2. Nevile’s task was made harder by an ordinance of July 1645, granting £4,000 out of Savile’s sequestered estate to the parliamentarian peer Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton.142CJ iii. 526; iv. 201a, 209b, 210a; LJ vii. 499. Nevertheless, the estate appears to have survived the vicissitudes of the 1640s remarkably well and was worth at least £6,400 a year in the early 1650s.143Notts. RO, DD/SR/A5/1/1-4. By the early 1660s, it was valued at over £8,000 a year.144H. C. Foxcroft, Life and Letters of Sir George Savile, i. 57-8. Savile was succeeded by his son George† – the renowned ‘Trimmer’ of Restoration politics – who represented Pontefract in the 1660 Convention and ended his career as 1st marquess of Halifax.145HP Commons, 1660-90, ‘Sir George Savile’.