MILLINGTON, Gilbert (1597-1666), of Felley Abbey, Annesley, Notts.

Background and early career

Although there was at least one branch of the Millington family living in or near Nottingham in the early seventeenth century, the future regicide was born in St Clement Danes, Middlesex, where his father, Anthony Millington ‘gentleman’, resided in a house leased from the countess of Arundel.54PROB11/136, ff. 103r-v. In 1603, the crown granted Anthony Millington the reversion of the house and site of Felley Abbey, lying about ten miles north-west of Nottingham, and this became the family’s main country residence – although Anthony Millington also owned property in Nasing, Essex.55PROB11/136, f. 103; C142/389/9. Gilbert Millington trained as a lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn and was called to the bar there in 1621. Added to the Nottinghamshire bench in 1629, he was active as a justice of the peace throughout the 1630s; and by 1638, William Cavendish, 1st earl of Newcastle – the future commander of the royalist northern army – had appointed him one of his deputy lieutenants for the county.56C231/5, p. 13; SP16/381/73, f. 157; Notts. RO, C/QSM/1/8-11. Millington’s younger brother John, who was also educated at Peterhouse and Lincoln’s Inn, had secured the minor court office of purveyor of the king’s wine cellar by 1625.57CSP Dom. 1625-6, pp. 209, 565. In 1638, Millington recommended a cleric to the future royalist grandee Arthur Capell* for one of the latter’s Nottinghamshire livings on the grounds of the man’s ‘worth, his honesty, his conformity’.58HMC Hatfield, xxii. 294. Claims that Millington was linked with the puritan grandee Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick through one Samuel Burroughs – a Nottingham merchant – that he partnered the godly merchant Maurice Thomson in a cotton plantation on St Kitts, or that his son was a plantation manager on the island, are all without foundation.59D. Brown, Enterprise and Empire (Manchester, 2020), 75.

In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, Millington was returned for Nottingham, taking the junior place.60Supra, ‘Nottingham’. The nature of Millington’s popularity with the Nottingham voters is not immediately apparent. His estate at Felley Abbey, ten miles away, would not have afforded him any great proprietorial interest among the inhabitants and nor did he have strong family connections with the town. One Anthony Millington, who was probably a kinsman, had been granted his freedom of the town in 1623; and his widow was still living in the borough in the early 1640s.61Nottingham Borough Recs. iv. 382; v. 112, 213; Millington’s second wife was possibly this couple’s teenage daughter.62St Mary, Nottingham par. reg. (bap. 18 Feb. 1627); C6/111/30. Nevertheless, the Nottingham Millingtons were not among the town’s wealthiest inhabitants – indeed, Lucy Hutchinson (wife of John Hutchinson*) referred to Millington’s second wife as a mere alehouse wench and evidently thought her a poor (in both senses of the word) successor to his first wife, ‘a religious matronly gentlewoman’.63Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 146. Millington’s appeal to the corporation probably lay in his legal expertise and (presumably) extensive range of contacts both as a barrister and as a leading figure in county government. By the early 1640s, he numbered one of the county’s most influential men, John Holles, 2nd earl of Clare, among his patrons; and when Nottingham corporation chose Clare as the town’s recorder in July 1642, the earl named Millington as his deputy.64Nottingham Borough Recs. v. 204-5.

Millington’s lengthy career in the Long Parliament began slowly and unobtrusively. The House had been sitting for over six weeks before he received his first appointment – his nomination on 19 December 1640 to a sub-committee of the ‘Grand Committee for Religion’, charged with investigating the scarcity of preaching ministers and removing scandalous incumbents.65CJ ii. 54b. This was a fitting way for Millington to open his account in the House, for the promotion of a godly preaching ministry would be his overriding concern as a Parliament-man. He was included on a similar committee – on a bill for advancing the ‘true worship of God’ – on 13 February 1641.66CJ ii. 84b. However, most of the 16 committees to which he was named before the outbreak of civil war concerned relatively minor matters. Similarly, he made little impression on the floor of the House – that is, until 15 December 1641, when he was galvanized to speak by the presentation of a petition from Nottinghamshire by the future royalist Robert Sutton*, requesting that ‘the long established government of the church may still continue and that the abuses and errors of some particular persons may not cause the alteration of the ancient government’.67D’Ewes (C), 290; [T. Aston*], A Collection of Sundry Petitions (1642), 8-9 (E.150.28). The promoters of this petition claimed that it had been signed by more than 6,000 people.68J. Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998), 242. However, Millington and another godly MP Sir Samuel Luke alleged that ‘very undue means and practices had been used in getting hands to that petition’, and after a long debate it was laid aside.69D’Ewes (C), 290.

Millington seems to have been absent from the House for much of the winter of 1641-2 – as he may well have been for a considerable part of 1641, having taken three leaves of absence ‘upon some great occasions’.70CJ ii. 100b, 219b, 284a; Notts. RO, C/QSM/1/12, p. 122. And if he attended his seat regularly during the first half of 1642 it translated into a mere two committee appointments. However, on 7 April he was moved to speak again – this time by the need to supply the Protestant forces in Ireland.71PJ ii. 138. Concern for the fate of Ireland’s Protestants was doubtless one of his motives in advancing £1,275 as an Irish Adventurer in May 1642 – although most of this money was not actually his but had been raised by a group of Nottinghamshire investors that included his friend and neighbour Charles White*.72Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 187; CSP Ire. Advs. 1642-59, pp. 250, 265-6, 291, 328.

Millington and the ‘fiery spirits’, 1642-3

The main focus of Millington’s political attention by the summer of 1642 was probably not Ireland, however, but Nottingham. On 30 June, he presented a petition to the Commons from the nascent parliamentarian faction in the town (among the signatories were Henry Ireton* and James Chadwicke*) asking leave to put the Militia Ordinance in execution to prevent ‘forcible attempts’ to seize the magazine and castle.73PJ ii. 152. Millington had already been appointed a deputy lieutenant for Nottinghamshire by Parliament’s lord lieutenant of the county, the earl of Clare, and on 1 July the Commons nominated him as a deputy lieutenant for Nottingham as well, although there is no sign that the Lords endorsed this order.74LJ v. 173b-174a, 275b; CJ ii. 647b. The knowledge that Nottinghamshire lay exposed to the attentions of the king’s party at York well have quickened Millington’s willingness to contribute to Parliament’s war-chest. In June, he offered to bring in £50 on the propositions for maintaining the earl of Essex’s parliamentary army, and he would pledge another £50 in December.75PJ iii. 472; Add. 18777, f. 109v. It was against this background of the growing royalist threat to Nottinghamshire, and with no sign that the earl of Clare would implement the Militia Ordinance in the county, that Millington was named on 25 July to a ‘standing committee’ to monitor the activities of the king’s commissioners of array.76CJ ii. 689b. His decision to side with Parliament in the civil war, effectively abandoning his Nottinghamshire estate to the hands of the royalists, was probably influenced above all by his godly religious convictions.

Millington began to receive parliamentary appointments regularly from the autumn of 1642; and between the outbreak of civil war and the summer of 1644, when he took another lengthy leave of absence, he was named to approximately 90 committees. The parliamentary diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes* identified Millington among the ‘hot spirits’ in the House, and this assessment is certainly borne out by the Nottingham MP’s assignments at Westminster.77Harl. 164, f. 315. One of the defining marks of these hot or ‘fiery spirits’ was an eagerness to identify and punish Parliament’s enemies – and from mid-September 1642, Millington’s services were repeatedly enlisted by the House for receiving information against ‘delinquent’ MPs and for interrogating, impeaching or sequestering those judged ill-affected to Parliament.78CJ ii. 769b, 803a, 808b, 834b, 953b. When the Commons set up a committee on 3 February 1643 for sequestering the estates of Parliament’s enemies, the task of drawing up the necessary legislation – denounced by D’Ewes as ‘unjust and illegal’ – was specially referred to Millington, and he would also help to secure the passage of this legislation through the House.79CJ ii. 953b; Harl. 165, ff. 307v, 315. A week later (10 Feb.), the House ordered him to prepare an ordinance allowing the Nottinghamshire parliamentarians to seize their opponents’ goods and rents.80CJ ii. 961a. Evidently Millington worked speedily, for the next day (11 Feb.) he was appointed a messenger to carry this ordinance up to the Lords.81CJ ii. 962a; LJ v. 590a. On 14 February, he carried up similar ordinances relating to Gloucestershire and Lincolnshire.82CJ ii. 964b; LJ v. 605b. He demonstrated as little sympathy for the welfare of ‘malignants’ as for their possessions, arguing on 13 March that royalist prisoners be kept in close confinement – a view that D’Ewes denounced as against ‘all law and conscience’.83Harl. 164, ff. 326, 326v.

Typical, too, of the fiery spirits was Millington’s determination to take a hard line against backsliders from the parliamentarian cause. Added on 18 July 1643 to the committee for examining Sir John Hotham* and Captain John Hotham* following their attempted defection to the royalists, he seems to have played a major role in assembling the case against the two men.84CJ iii. 172b, 218a, 285b, 518a, 562a; Harl. 165, f. 218v; Add. 31116, pp. 143, 146, 153. Similarly, on 7 November, he was included on the committee to examine another high-profile defector, Henry Rich†, 1st earl of Holland.85CJ iii. 304a. It was perhaps as much to distinguish potential enemies in Parliament’s midst as to make a statement of godly intent to the Scots that Millington endorsed moves over the spring and summer of 1643 to introduce a Scottish-style oath of association.86CJ iii. 37b, 165b. He took the resulting ‘vow and covenant’ on 6 June; and on 23 August, he was made a committeeman to investigate MPs who were perceived to have ‘violated’ this oath – an initiative almost certainly designed to intimidate those Commons-men who had backed the Lords’ abortive peace propositions a few weeks earlier.87CJ iii. 118a, 216b.

Supporting the war effort, 1642-4

Millington, not surprisingly, played a prominent role in the supply and defence of Nottingham, which for most of the war was a vital parliamentarian outpost in an otherwise royalist-dominated region.88CJ ii. 961a; iii. 23b, 52a, 322b, 353a, 377b, 435b, 448b; Harl. 164, ff. 347, 376; Harl. 165, f. 283; Bodl. Tanner 62, f. 295; Tanner 66, f. 224; HMC Portland, i. 105; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 86; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 105, 106. On 19 December 1642, he stood up in the Commons and declared that ‘he had matter to acquaint the House withall which concerned the safety of the kingdom and that it would admit of no delay’.89Harl. 164, f. 266. As it turned out, this matter of national importance was a letter from Nottingham concerning the town’s ‘desperate condition’ in the face of the advancing royalist army under the earl of Newcastle. In response, the Commons ordered Millington, Sir Thomas Hutchinson and John Broxolme to attend the earl of Essex about measures for preventing the north and the midlands being overrun by Newcastle’s forces.90CJ ii. 894b. This appointment marked the beginning of Millington’s close involvement in the management of Parliament’s military affairs in the midland and northern counties. He was regularly named to committees for supplying money or arms to Parliament’s forces across the Midlands, with a particular brief in May 1644 to prepare an ordinance to secure the necessary funds for bringing Shropshire under parliamentary control.91CJ iii. 86a, 111b, 298b, 400a, 482a, 513b; iv. 75a, 329b. And from early 1643, he would figure prominently in Parliament’s efforts to supply its northern army under Ferdinando 2nd Baron Fairfax*. On 27 February, the Commons established a committee ‘to consider of some way for the constant pay and supply of the northern army’, and by 8 March, when Millington reported from this body, it is clear that he was its chairman.92CJ ii. 981a, 994a, 994b; Harl. 164, f. 317. Inevitably, this position established Millington as an important point of contact between Westminster and its northern commander, and he was variously employed during 1643 and 1644 in writing letters of thanks or communicating orders to Lord Fairfax.93CJ iii. 106a, 333a, 404b, 425a, 518a; Harl. 166, f. 49v.

Millington’s principal responsibility as part of Parliament’s management team for northern affairs was to raise money for Lord Fairfax’s cash-strapped army – and it was probably the difficulty of this task that explains why it took the Commons several attempts to hit upon the right formula. Three further committees for the supply of the northern army were appointed during 1643 – the first, on 8 May, included all the MPs for Yorkshire, Lancashire and Lincolnshire (and to which Millington was not named); the second, on 22 June, whose business was specially referred to Millington and Sir William Strickland; and the third, on 7 December, known as the ‘committee for supply of the Lord Fairfax’, was again chaired by Millington.94CJ iii. 76a, 140a, 333a, 353b. It has been argued that the 7 December committee ‘differed from its predecessors which had been concerned with Fairfax’s army and which had been manned by minor northerners’, and that it was in fact the first standing northern committee.95L. Glow, ‘Pym and Parliament: the methods of moderation’, JMH xxxvi. 388. However, it is difficult to see how the 7 December committee was markedly different from its predecessors either in terms of its remit or its membership. All that can be said with any certainty is that it was chaired exclusively by Millington – that is, until the summer of 1644.96Supra, ‘Northern Committee’. He made several reports to the House during the early months of 1644 concerning Lord Fairfax’s army; and on 5 March, he was a messenger to carry up to the Lords an ordinance for advancing £10,000 towards its maintenance.97CJ iii. 368a, 394a, 405b, 416a, 418a, 541a; LJ vi. 450b; Add. 31116, p. 216.

Millington’s commitment to the war effort transcended mere vested interest in winning back the north for Parliament. He secured appointment to a succession of committees from the autumn of 1642 for raising money in the City and for the defence of the capital; and on 12 December, he was named first to, and may have chaired, a committee set up to investigate the ‘menaces’ employed in promoting a pro-peace petition in London.98CJ ii. 845b, 847b, 876b, 884b, 885b; iii. 89a, 360b, 388b, 437a, 457a. More generally still, he was involved in securing money for the earl of Essex’s army and – on at least one occasion – in gathering military intelligence for the lord general.99CJ ii. 833a. Several of Millington’s assignments for raising money or for managing Parliament’s revenues during the early years of the war had as their ultimate objective the maintenance of Essex’s army.100CJ ii. 856a, 885b; iii. 181a, 257b, 473b, 489a. On two occasions during the summer of 1643, he was named to committees specifically devoted to paying and strengthening the earl’s forces.101CJ iii. 165b, 210b. Perhaps his most important appointment of 1644 was to a committee set up on 27 May to explore all ways and means of raising money.102CJ iii. 508b. He was made the chairman of this committee, which was quickly burdened with the task of finding cash for Essex’s army at a time when the war-party grandees and their allies were more interested in directing money towards the Scottish army in northern England or the earl of Manchester’s Eastern Association army.103CJ iii. 510b, 532a.

Allegiance and priorities at Westminster, 1643-4

Evidence of Millington’s own factional allegiance – assuming he had any beyond his broad alignment with those urging the vigorous prosecution of the war – is slight. It may be significant that he was named to a committee set up on 30 January 1644 to prepare an ordinance establishing ‘joint committees and commissioners ... for the better managing the affairs of both kingdoms’.104CJ iii. 382a. This and a similar initiative in the Lords created the legislative foundations for the Committee of Both Kingdoms* (CBK) – a body dominated by the pro-Scots, anti-Essexian interest. However, the Commons committee of 30 January contained two of Essex’s leading supporters – Sir Gilbert Gerard and Denzil Holles – and Millington may have been named simply because of his familiarity with northern affairs and the wishes of the Fairfaxes.105Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’. The only tellership of his parliamentary career is a little more revealing. On 20 April 1644, he was a teller with Edward Bayntun against putting the question of whether Parliament’s deputy governor on the Isle of Wight, Colonel Thomas Carne, had ‘discountenanced’ the ‘well-affected party’ there – as was alleged by the leading war-party man John Lisle*.106CJ iii. 435a, 465b-466a; Harl. 166, f. 50. Millington and Bayntun lost the division to Sir William Lewis and Sir Edward Hungerford, both of whom were aligned with Essex’s interest.107Harl. 166, f. 50. When the main question was put, the pairing of Millington and Bayntun was replaced by that of the war-party stalwarts Denis Bond and Sir Peter Wentworth.108CJ iii. 466a.

But despite Millington’s support for many of the reforms and initiatives required for the vigorous prosecution of the war, he was one of the few leading northern MPs who showed little interest in securing or maintaining a military alliance with the Scottish Covenanters. With the exception of his nomination to the 30 January 1644 committee and to successive – but from an English perspective, meaningless – commissions for conserving the peace between the two kingdoms, not one of his appointments before 1645 related directly to relations with the Covenanters or the maintenance of their forces in England or Ireland. Nevertheless, if Millington did indeed have reservations about bringing the Scots into the war, he apparently had no qualms about taking the Covenant upon its introduction in September 1643.109Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 481. Moreover, he seems to have shared the Scots’ desire for closer religious union not only between England and Scotland, but also among the Reformed churches of Europe. Several of his appointments during the early years of the war concerned measures for establishing closer ties with the Protestant cantons of Switzerland and with the United Provinces.110CJ ii. 842b; CJ iii. 237b. And there can be little doubt that the committee that the Commons set up on 3 May 1643 – to which Millington was named – for gathering evidence against Archbishop William Laud and Bishop Matthew Wren, and to prepare an ordinance for establishing an assembly of divines, was partly intended to reinforce Parliament’s godly bona fides in the eyes of the Scots.111CJ iii. 68a. Millington was subsequently included on several committees for liaising with the Westminster Assembly; and on 3 January 1644, he was selected for the legal team to manage the evidence at Laud’s trial.112CJ iii. 201a, 357b, 405b; iv. 170a, 218a. He was also named to a series of ad hoc committees from late 1642 for suppressing popery and settling a godly ministry.113CJ ii. 745b; iii. 23a, 369a, 470b; iv. 97b, 381b, 502a. What would ultimately prove the most important appointment of his parliamentary career was his addition on 21 October 1643 to the Committee for Plundered Ministers* (CPM).114CJ iii. 283b.

The dispute at Nottingham, 1644-5

Millington’s career at Westminster was interrupted in the summer of 1644 by the growing tension in Nottingham between the supporters and opponents of the town’s parliamentarian governor Colonel John Hutchinson. In July, the CBK received a petition from Nottingham requesting that Millington be sent down to settle the dispute; and on 15 July, the committee recommended this course of action to the Commons.115CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 350, 368; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 133. The House, on 17 July, agreed to this proposal and ordered that Millington be replaced as chairman of the committees for Lord Fairfax’s army and for raising money by Sir Thomas Widdrington and William Ellys respectively.116CJ iii. 563b, 569a; Harl. 166, f. 98a. If Lucy Hutchinson can be credited, the petition sent to the CBK was organised by Millington’s friends in Nottingham – principally, it seems, Captain Charles White – as a ‘pretence’ to allow the MP ‘to come down and visit his wife and children, whom he had a longing desire to see and knew not any other way how to bring it about’. But Lucy Hutchinson also saw this petition as part of a deeper design by Millington and his friends on the Nottinghamshire committee to oust Hutchinson from the governorship, or at least to curtail his authority over the townsmen and the local parliamentarian forces.

Until the summer of 1644, Millington had apparently presented himself as Hutchinson’s ‘friend and his protector’ – although in Lucy Hutchinson’s opinion this was merely another pretence on his part to deceive her husband. Certainly, if Millington had been supportive of Hutchinson at Westminster, he rapidly ceased to be so once back in Nottingham, joining James Chadwicke*, White and other opponents of Hutchinson in a public paper condemning the governor’s power as being inconsistent with their own civil authority as committeemen. In response, Hutchinson allegedly told Millington ‘that he had dealt very unfaithfully to those that entrusted him to compose differences, which he had rather made than found, and very treacherously with him [i.e. with Hutchinson], making himself a party and the chief of his adversaries, when he pretended only to be a reconciler’.117Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 133-6. Unabashed, Millington ‘continued to foment and raise up the factions in the town against the governor, and by his countenance the [town’s parliamentary] committee every day meditated and practised new provocations to stir up the governor to rage, or at least to weary him in his employment’.118Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 139, 143-4, 148-9; Nottingham Borough Recs. v. 227-32.

Millington emerges from Lucy Hutchinson’s account as the ringleader of the faction against her husband – a view shared by D’Ewes, who referred to Millington as ‘the chief means of those factious fellows’ on the Nottinghamshire committee.119Harl. 166, f. 203v. It was only Millington’s ‘power in the House’, she claimed, that upheld those ‘wicked ones’ at Westminster eager to ‘pursue their mischiefs’ against the governor.120Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 136, 137, 138, 146. In October 1644, Millington even went so far as to accuse Hutchinson of a design to betray Nottingham to the royalists, and he wrote letters to the CBK to this effect.121CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 58-9; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 145. He continued to attack Hutchinson after returning to Westminster late in 1644, speaking ‘very bitterly and virulently’ against him in April 1645 when the dispute at Nottingham was discussed in the Commons.122CJ iv. 112a; Harl. 166, f. 203v; Add. 18780, f. 6. After ‘much debate’, the House ordered (a reluctant) Millington to return to Nottingham to ‘apply himself to further a reconcilement between Colonel Hutchinson and the committee’.123CJ iv. 118b; Harl. 166, f. 203v. In the event, it was Hutchinson’s successful defence of the town against a royalist attack that same month, rather than Millington’s good offices, which seems to have begun the healing process.124Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 158-9.

Lucy Hutchinson was keen to ascribe Millington’s machinations against her husband entirely to self-interest – that is, a desire to lay his hands on sequestered royalist goods seized by Hutchinson’s forces, ‘which would have been good booty to his mean family’.125Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 137, 146. What she overlooked, perhaps willfully, was that Millington had suffered considerable losses in the war as a result of his commitment to Parliament. In 1644, his house at Felley Abbey had been plundered and garrisoned by the royalists, causing damages amounting to £1,713 – and it would not be until 1648 that the Commons recompensed him by issuing orders that eventually resulted in him receiving the rents on sequestered estates near Felley worth £140 a year.126CCC 193; CJ v. 461a; vi. 565a-b, 571b. Again, Lucy Hutchinson believed that the only reason Millington sought to patch up his differences with her husband after the royalist attack on Nottingham in 1645 was because he realised how much popular credit he had lost by the quarrel.127Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 159. The CBK also thought that ‘private interests’ had been put before the public good, but apparently believed that both sides had been guilty on this score.128CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 115.

Yet as Lucy Hutchinson conceded, the quarrel at Nottingham had been exacerbated by religious tensions – in other words, by issues of principle – within the town’s godly leadership. Millington and his allies in Nottingham were agitated not only by Hutchinson’s powers as governor, but also by his willingness to tolerate separatists, and hence they enlisted the support of the town’s ‘orthodox’ puritan ministers – among them, Millington’s friend Laurence Palmer – in their struggle against him. Although Lucy Hutchinson thought Millington’s professions of godliness a mere pretence – citing his second marriage as evidence of his hypocrisy – this charge cannot be sustained in the face of his commitment at Westminster to the work of godly reformation.129Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 131, 146; L. Palmer, Saint Pauls Politiques (1645), epistle dedicatory. And his abiding support for the Nottingham Presbyterian ministry notwithstanding, Millington seems to have been part of a county network that was broadly pro-Independent (in a political sense) and that included the earl of Clare, Francis Pierrepont*, Colonel Francis Thornhagh* and Gervase Pigot*.130LJ vii. 698a; SP28/241, unfol. (letter of 29 Sept. 1646); Notts. RO, CA 3420, p. 27; Nottingham Borough Recs. v. 247. Indeed, in national political terms Millington was very close to John Hutchinson himself during the later 1640s – and certainly by January 1649, when they both signed Charles I’s death warrant. Lucy Hutchinson acknowledged that after their quarrel in 1644-5, the two men ‘lived in good friendship’ with each other.131Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 159; HMC Portland, i. 295.

Parliamentary career, 1645-8

Millington’s career, or at least the rate at which he received Commons’ appointments, slowed after his return to Westminster from Nottingham late in 1645. Between then and Pride’s Purge in December 1648, he was included on approximately 39 committees, which was less than two thirds the number he had accumulated in 1643 alone. Most of these 39 nominations occurred in 1645 and 1646. Granted leave of absence in the spring of 1646, he was apparently away from the House for most of that summer – a pattern repeated in 1647 and 1648.132CJ iv. 546a. In 1647, the excuse was his need to recover his health; in 1648, it was in regard of his ‘urgent occasions’ in the country.133CJ v. 131a, 274a, 532a. He signed letters and warrants of the Nottinghamshire county committee in the summer of 1646 and in the summer and autumn of 1648.134SP28/241; Bodl. Nalson VII, f. 122; Tanner 57, f. 352; HMC Portland, i. 477. But otherwise his activities and whereabouts during his absences from the House after 1645 remain a mystery.

Millington’s Commons’ appointments between 1645 and 1648 do not place him firmly in any particular political camp at Westminster. Beyond a commitment to seeing the war in Nottinghamshire and nationally through to a successful conclusion, there is little that can be deduced from his work as a committeeman or as a messenger to the Lords.135CJ iv. 52a, 57a, 75a, 235a, 241b, 252a, 284b, 297a, 321a, 429a, 526a; LJ vii. 209b, 656b, 659b, 698a; HMC Portland, i. 293, 295. However, several of his assignments in the House do suggest that on certain issues he may have been broadly aligned with the parliamentary Independents. Although he appears to have played no part in the creation of the New Model army, or in securing the passage of the Self-Denying Ordinance, his appointment on 10 June 1645 to desire the Westminster Assembly to join with the House in prayers ‘to seek God for a blessing upon Sir Thomas Fairfax* his army’ on the eve of the battle of Naseby, is not the kind of assignment that would have fallen to a Member with close ties to the ousted commander of Parliament’s army (and the leader of the Presbyterian interest at Westminster), the earl of Essex.136CJ iv. 170a. Also revealing is Millington’s letter to Nottingham corporation of September 1645, urging it to petition the Commons for a writ to hold a ‘recruiter’ election to replace the town’s royalist MP William Stanhope, who had been disabled from sitting in 1644.137Notts. RO, CA 3419, p. 50. When this initiative to recruit the House had been introduced the previous month, its principal backers had been leading members of the anti-Essex interest.138D. Underdown, ‘Party management in the recruiter elections, 1645-8’, EHR lxxxiii. 238-9. The corporation replied that ‘the town reposeth that trust in him [Millington] that whilst he is at the Parliament they conceive they have no need neither do they desire to petition for another burgess for our town’.139Notts. RO, CA 3419, p. 50. Certainly the regularity with which the corporation sent gifts to Millington or his wife suggests that it did indeed value his services.140Notts. RO, CA 3420, p. 23; CA 3421, p. 67; CA 3423, pp. 31, 61, 65; CA 3424, p. 27; CA 3425, p. 29; CA 3426, p. 31; Nottingham Borough Recs. v. 222, 236, 245, 247, 254.

The Independent interest was defined partly by its hostility to continued Scottish intervention in English affairs; and here, too, Millington’s parliamentary assignments place him closer to the Scots’ enemies at Westminster than to their friends. The fact that he was appointed a messenger on 18 February 1645 to carry up to the Lords (among other things) an ordinance for raising money to pay the Scottish army in England is less revealing than his nomination on 10 May to a committee for directing the war effort within the Northern Association.141CJ iv. 52a, 138b; LJ vii. 209b. Every member of this committee, which included Lord Fairfax and Sir Thomas Fairfax*, was aligned with the pro-army interest and was hostile to the Scottish presence in northern England. Also worth noting in this context is Millington’s appointment, in second place, to a committee set up on 31 July to examine the Scots’ allegations against the Carlisle MP Richard Barwis (another member of the 10 May committee).142CJ iv. 226a. Since late 1644, Barwis had been involved in an acrimonious dispute with the Scots over who had overall military command in Cumberland and Westmorland – which were under Scottish occupation – and had been supported by a number of leading Independents at Westminster. Although the 31 July committee had been set up at the Scots’ insistence, practically its first and only action was to imprison the Scots’ principal informants in the dispute.143Supra, ‘Richard Barwis’. Millington became embroiled in another Anglo-Scottish quarrel as a committeeman in May 1646 for justifying a Commons’ vote (secured by the Independents) that the Scots hand over Charles – who had surrendered himself to their army a few days earlier – and that he be imprisoned in Warwick Castle.144CJ iv. 541b, 548a.

The most important development in Millington’s parliamentary career during the mid-1640s was his emergence as a leading figure on the CPM. Having assumed the chair of the committee by March 1645, he reported the cases of several unfortunates who had publicly professed what were generally deemed blasphemous or grossly heretical opinions.145Supra, ‘Committee for Plundered Ministers’; SP22/1-2A, passim; Harl. 166, f. 218; Add. 31116, p. 428; CJ iv. 171a, 420b, 500a; v. 512b; CCC 27. On 11 June, the House ordered him to prepare an ordinance for punishing those who uttered or published blasphemous words.146CJ iv. 171a. The most notorious case of blasphemy that Millington handled was that of the ‘Socinian’ Paul Best, who – as Millington reported to the House on 28 January and 4 April 1646 – had denied ‘the trinity of the Godhead, the deity of Christ and of the Holy Ghost, with several other monstrous and unheard-of blasphemies’.147CJ iv. 420b, 489a, 500a; Add. 31116, pp. 525-6. This and similar reports would have strengthened the case for a ‘rigid’ Presbyterian church settlement that severely limited toleration for tender consciences – and in this cause, if in little else, Millington can be regarded as an ally of the Scots’ friends at Westminster. To judge by several of his appointments during the mid-1640s, he supported the establishment of the London Presbyterian classis, the expropriation of church lands for Parliament’s use, and measures to enforce church discipline.148CJ iv. 218a, 276a, 553b. On 25 October 1645, for example, he was a messenger to desire the Lords’ concurrence in (among other things) an ordinance for suspending ignorant and scandalous persons from the sacrament.149CJ iv. 321a; LJ vii. 659b. On 9 February 1648, an ordinance for the payment of tithes and other dues to London’s ministers was specially referred to his care.150CJ v. 460b. Why he failed to secure nomination to the 1646 and 1648 commissions for excluding scandalous communicants is a mystery – unless it was to avoid compromising his position as chairman of the CPM. Yet although he undoubtedly favoured the establishment of a powerful Presbyterian church, it is worth noting that none of the three divines he requested (on the Commons’ behalf) to preach sermons during the mid-1640s or whom he thanked for having done so – namely, John Foxcroft, John Strickland and William Strong – featured prominently in the campaign of the ‘Covenant-engaged’ interest for jure divino Presbyterianism.151CJ iv. 392b, 678b.

Purge and regicide, 1648-9

Millington’s lengthy absences from Westminster during the years 1646-8 meant that for some of this period he was replaced as chairman of the CPM by Harbottle Grimston.152Supra, ‘Committee for Plundered Ministers’. He was named to only seven committees between January 1647 and December 1648, receiving several leaves of absence during that time and being declared absent at the call of the House in April and September 1648.153CJ v. 66a, 131a, 274a, 329a, 339a, 421a, 434a, 460b, 532a, 543b, 689a; vi. 34a. Clement Walker’s* claim that Millington was among the Independents whom Parliament rewarded with grants and offices in March 1648 is apparently without foundation.154[C. Walker], Hist. of Independency (1648), 83 (E.463.19).

In July 1648, at the height of the second civil war, Millington signed a letter to Parliament from the committee for Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, requesting that

for the future discouragement of ... rebellious practices in the kingdom, some of the chiefest actors in this late design [in the midlands] may be brought to speedy trial at the assizes ... and the rest of the prisoners now in custody to be sent over sea [sic], who will otherwise remain here as seeds of new insurrections.155Bodl. Nalson VII, f. 122; HMC Portland, i. 477.

His only appointment in the House between February 1648 and Pride’s Purge in December was to a committee set up on 28 August to discover from James Hamilton, 1st duke of Hamilton, and other captured Engagers the identity of those who had encouraged them to invade England.156CJ v. 689a.

It seems to have been Pride’s Purge, in December 1648, and moves to bring the king and other ‘capital offenders’ to trial, that re-kindled Millington’s enthusiasm as a Parliament-man. He was named to six committees during the second half of December, including those to consider how to proceed ‘in a way of justice’ against the king and on an ordinance establishing a ‘special court’ to try him.157CJ vi. 98b, 102a, 102b, 103a, 106a, 106b. He made his dissent to the 5 December vote – that the king’s answers at Newport were an acceptable basis for settlement – on 25 December, which was only a few days after this test of loyalty to the Rump had been introduced.158[C. Walker], Anarchia Anglicana (1649), 49 (E.570.4). Having been tasked with John Blakiston on 3 January 1649 to investigate how the ordinance for a court to try Charles was proceeding in the Lords, Millington reported to the Commons later that same day (3 Jan.) that the peers had rejected this legislation, whereupon the House ordered Millington, Augustine Garland, John Lisle, Henry Marten and Thomas Scot I to bring in a second ordinance for erecting a high court of justice.159CJ vi. 109a, 110b. Anticipating that the peers would reject this second ordinance as well, hard-line Members urged that sole legislative authority should be vested in the Commons, which prompted the nomination of committeemen – Millington among them – on 4 January to prepare the form of two questions upon the debate.160CJ vi. 111a. It was probably this committee that was responsible for framing the three resolutions adopted later that day, which made the Commons ‘the supreme power in the nation’, with the authority to make binding laws without the consent of either the king or the Lords.161CJ vi. 111a. On 6 January, Millington was named with Blakiston, Marten, Scot and five other MPs to design a new great seal.162CJ vi. 112b. In all, he was nominated to 13 committees during January, including the Committee for Advance of Money* and the soon-to-be-defunct Derby House Committee*.163CJ vi. 107b, 109a, 110a, 110b, 111a, 112a, 112b, 113b, 114b, 115b, 124a, 126a.

But it was the work of the trial commission that probably took up most of Millington’s time during January 1649. Named as a commissioner in the second ordinance for a high court of justice, on 6 January, he was one of the most active of the king’s judges. In the second session of the trial commission, on 10 January, he and seven other commissioners were named to a committee for determining what ‘order and method’ should be employed in managing the trial. Five days later (15 Jan.), during the fifth session, he was named to an eleven-man committee for comparing the charge against the king with the evidence and for devising ‘such general rules as are fit for expediting the business of the said court’. In the eighth session, on 19 January, he reported that the court’s legal counsel had produced a first draft of the charge against the king. And in the twelfth session, on 24 January, he was named to a committee for examining the witnesses against the king and was appointed with Thomas Chaloner to collect a number of Charles’s letters in the possession of the clerk of the House of Lords for use as evidence against their author.164Muddiman, Trial, 198, 202, 206, 212, 213, 223. In all, Millington attended 15 of the 19 meetings of the trial commission, all four sessions of the trial itself and then signed the royal death warrant.165Muddiman, Trial, 76, 228.

It is not clear precisely what drove Millington to regicide. There is little in his earlier career to suggest that he favoured a radical overhaul of the political order, much less the establishment of a republican ‘free state’. Perhaps the most likely motive for his conduct in January 1649 was puritan wrath at the king’s pride and obduracy in the face of his blood guilt and the evidences of divine providence. The day after the regicide, 31 January 1649, the Rump ordered Millington to thank the Independent divine John Cardell for his sermon to the House that day in which he had praised the army and urged MPs to remain steadfast in the cause of vanquishing God’s enemies and reforming the kingdom.

I beseech you, take heed of faithless fears and of unworthy despondencies after all the mighty appearances of God for you, which have been so managed from time to time as if they had been purposely given out to encourage you unto this work and in this work that now you are in hand with.166CJ vi. 126b; C. Cardell, Gods Wisdom Justified, and Mans Folly Condemned (1649, E.540.24).

Facing execution himself in 1661 for his part in the regicide, Millington claimed that he had been ‘overawed by the powers then in being ... and accordingly did unhappily act in that most prodigious offence’.167HMC 7th Rep. 157. Yet his conduct as a trial commissioner indicates no unhappiness on his part in bringing the full weight of the court to bear against the king. What is impossible to determine, however, is whether his principal end in participating in the trial was to bring the king to the block, or to force his submission and a settlement that fell short of regicide. In this respect, it is perhaps significant that although Millington attended the meeting of the trial commission on 29 January at which the death warrant was produced for signing, the presence of his signature among those of 13 commissioners who had not attended this meeting suggests that he had departed the court without signing and that, like them, he had to be sought out in the Commons, or wherever, and prevailed upon to append his name and seal at the foot of the warrant.168Muddiman, Trial of Charles I, 226-7, 228; S. Kelsey, ‘The death of Charles I’, HJ xlv. 751.

Serving the Rump, 1649-53

Millington was Nottinghamshire’s most prominent member of the Rump after Henry Ireton, eclipsing both Francis Pierrepont and John Hutchinson in the affairs of the newly established Commonwealth. Between the regicide and the Rump’s dissolution in April 1653, he received over 50 committee appointments – the vast majority falling within the years 1649-51. Why his attendance seems to have tailed off after the summer of 1651 is not clear – unless it represented dissatisfaction at the growing influence of the army after the battle of Worcester (Sept. 1651) and the subsequent outbreak of war with the Dutch.169Worden, Rump Parl. 313. Like many other Rumpers, he was added to a series of standing committees in 1649, among them the Committee of Navy and Customs* and the committee for excise, of which he was an active member.170CJ vi. 112a, 219b, 318a; Add. 63788B, f. 90; Bodl. Rawl. C.386, unfol. But more revealing of his commitment to the new regime was his inclusion on the committee that the Rump set up on 1 February for taking the dissent of MPs seeking admission to the House.171W. Prynne*, A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members Case (1660), 25 (E.1013.22). This body, which operated like a committee for absent Members, was important in determining the Rump’s membership and therefore its political complexion. He seems to have endorsed initiatives in 1649 for preventing Presbyterian ministers preaching or publishing against the fledgling republic and for enjoining MPs’ subscription to the Engagement abjuring monarchy and Lords.172CJ vi. 131b, 275a, 307b. He was evidently unmoved by Leveller denunciations of an over-mighty Parliament encroaching on the people’s liberties, for he was selected in May to bring in an Act giving the Rump’s committees power to administer oaths.173CJ vi. 214a. Moreover, he featured regularly on ad hoc committees for enforcing allegiance to the commonwealth, punishing and mulcting delinquents and maximising state revenues.174CJ vi. 126b, 130a, 131b, 186a, 218b, 259b, 298a, 307b, 576b; vii. 222b, 245b, 250b Not surprisingly, he was a leading figure on the Rump’s ‘committee of Nottingham’, from which he made several reports in 1649 relating to the arrears of the late Colonel Francis Thornhagh.175CJ vi. 162b, 255b, 266b, 280a, 280b. He also chaired a committee for recompensing the clerk of the (now defunct) House of Lords, John Browne.176CJ vi. 430b, 510a.

Heading Millington’s agenda in the Rump, however, was the advancement of godly religion and the suppression of vice and unorthodoxy. He was clearly considered (and doubtless considered himself) one of the Rump’s experts on ecclesiastical and doctrinal issues – a group dominated by men who wished to retain a national Presbyterian church, but one that allowed latitude to Calvinists who wished to opt out of parochial worship.177Worden, Rump Parl. 126-7. This objective is reflected in his nomination to committees for repealing the statutes against those who failed to attend their parish church (29 June 1649), to bring in a declaration for the maintenance of a Presbyterian ministry (7 Aug.), to consider the articles of Christian orthodoxy (26 July) and for the relief of tender consciences in matters of religion (6 Jan. 1653).178CJ vi. 245b, 270a, 275b; vii. 244a. The two ministers whom Millington requested to preach on the Commons’ behalf in 1650 were the ‘orthodox’ Congregationalists Joseph Caryl and John Bond, who favoured an accommodation with their Presbyterian colleagues.179CJ vi. 413a, 423b, 438a, 447b; Worden, Rump Parl. 122-3. In March of that year, Millington was added to perhaps the Rump’s most formidable body for enforcing godly orthodoxy – within the ministry, at least – the committee for regulating the universities.180CJ vi. 388b. An active member of this body, he was involved in 1651 in purging ‘scandalous’ elements within his alma mater, Peterhouse.181LPL, Sion L40.2/E16, pp. 153, 375; Peterhouse Archives, Camb. Misc. vol. 3, p. 24; To every Member of Parliament Charles Hotham of Peter-house (1653, 669 f.17.32). When John Owen* and other ministers submitted a petition to the Rump on 10 February 1652, condemning the Socinian text the Racovian Catechism and urging tougher action against radical sectarian and heterodox beliefs, the care of this matter was specially referred to the godly trio of Millington, Sir James Harington and Francis Rous.182CJ vii. 86b; Oxford DNB, ‘John Owen’. On 2 April, Millington reported the committee’s opinion that the catechism was ‘scandalous, blasphemous and erroneous’.183CJ vii. 113b. It was possibly in connection with his work on this committee that he reported (on 7 Jan. 1653), and may well have helped to draft, a bill against scandalous and unlicensed publications.184CJ vii. 244b.

Much of Millington’s energy in the campaign to suppress ‘scandalous’ and ‘erroneous’ opinions was channelled through the CPM, which he was chairing again on a regular basis by mid-February 1649 at the latest.185SP22/2A, ff. 250, 252; SP22/3, pt. 2; f. 148; Add. 25302, f. 145. Among the several cases he reported from the CPM were those of an ‘erroneous, scandalous and profane’ publication concerning the sabbath (8 Mar. 1650), the recalcitrant Presbyterian minister William Jenkyns (4 July) and several works by the religious controversialist John Fry (20 Feb. 1651).186Supra, ‘Committee for Plundered Ministers’; CJ vi. 378b, 436b, 536a, 539a; 255a. It was as the CPM’s chairman that Millington presided over the interrogation in March 1653 of the radical anti-formalist William Erbery, who would have done himself no favours with Millington by denouncing both Presbyterian and Independent churches as ‘all whores together’.187Clarke Pprs. ii. 233-9; Worden, Rump Parl. 326. Another of the committee’s victims, the astrologer William Lilly, described Millington as ‘a drunken Member [who] was much my enemy’.188The Lives of those Eminent Antiquaries Elias Ashmole...and Mr William Lilly (1774), 105; Worden, Rump Parl. 133. The minister of Whitby, in Yorkshire, whose case came before the CPM late in 1652, accused Millington of abusing what was evidently his very considerable power in the committee.189W. Knight, The Case and Vindication of William Knight (1653), 10-11.

The settling of a godly preaching ministry accounted for a number of Millington’s appointments under the Rump; and in May 1650, he reported an Act for augmenting impropriated rectories and tithes that had been sequestered from Catholics and delinquents.190CJ vi. 180b, 359a, 382b, 418a. On 23 May 1651, the House entrusted Millington and Nicholas Lechmere with particular care of a bill for the better propagation of the gospel and maintenance of the ministry.191CJ vi. 578b. Millington was likewise one of the Rump’s champions in its war against swearing, cursing and licentious behaviour generally. On 15 March 1650, he was ordered to bring in an act for the stricter observation of the sabbath, which he reported to the House on 22 March and again on 12 April.192CJ vi. 317b, 382b, 385b, 397a. The following month (April), two clauses in a bill for suppressing adultery and fornication were specially referred to his care.193CJ vi. 397a.

Later career, imprisonment and death

Although Millington was not, it seems, the most assiduous of MPs by 1653, he almost certainly opposed the Rump’s forcible dissolution by the army in April of that year. He does not appear to have stood for election to any of the protectoral Parliaments, but he had little difficulty accommodating himself to Cromwellian rule. He attended his place on the Nottinghamshire bench regularly during the period 1654-9, and, like his ‘intimate friend’ Edward Cludd*, he seems to have endorsed Major-general Edward Whalley’s* programme against vagrancy and unlicensed alehouses.194C6/111/35; Notts. RO, C/QSM/1/13, unfol. In 1654, he joined Francis Pierrepont, James Chadwicke, Charles White and other local Presbyterians to establish Nottingham’s first classis, in which he served, with White, as a ruler elder for the parish of Greasley.195Nott. Univ. Lib. Hi2 M/1, ff. 2v, 5, 6v; Williams, ‘Nottingham Presbyterian classis’, 166-8. In 1657, he was added to the Nottinghamshire commission for ejecting scandalous ministers.196SP25/78, p. 237. His success in adapting to life under the protectorate may explain his lack of haste in attending the Rump after its restoration in May 1659. Listed in early June among those MPs who had yet to take their seats, he did not receive his first appointment in the House until 25 July.197CJ vii. 731a; A Catalogue of the Names of This Present Parliament (1659, 669 f.21.43).

Named to 18 committees in the restored Rump, Millington was assigned particular care of those for appointing a new clerk of the Parliament and for the ‘protection of persons in the public and private worship of God’ – presumably against interference by Quaker evangelists.198CJ vii. 767a, 774b, 793a. The Rump’s concern to put its finances in order – which is reflected in a number of Millington’s committee appointments – was fuelled by anxiety to stem army unrest over pay and related grievances.199CJ vii. 731a, 762a, 772a, 786b, 791b.

The fallout from Sir George Boothe’s* rebellion in August 1659 exacerbated tensions among the Rump’s leading politicians, prompting the establishment of committees on 6 and 8 September – to which Millington was named – to consider the introduction of a new Engagement ‘against any king, single person and House of Peers and every of them’ and ‘to prepare something to be offered to the House in order to the settlement of the government of this commonwealth’.200CJ vii. 774b, 775b. When Major-general John Lambert* and other senior officers petitioned Parliament early in October demanding payment of arrears and the censure of their critics in the House, the Rump responded by cashiering the petitioners and placing the army under ‘loyal’ commissioners. Millington’s last appointment was on 12 October, when he was named to an eight-man committee for rebutting the army’s petition.201CJ vii. 796b; C. Fleetwood*, The Lord General Fleetwoods Answer to the Humble Representation of Collonel Morley (1659), 12 (E.1010.6). The next day Lambert and his army friends dissolved the Rump.202R. Hutton, The Restoration (Oxford, 1985), 65-6.

Millington resumed his seat late in December 1659 following the third (and, as it proved, final) restoration of the Rump. All but one of the 15 committees to which he was named in these dying days of the Long Parliament preceded the re-admission of the secluded Members on 21 February 1660, and several of these appointments suggest that he shared his fellow Rumpers’ concern to preserve their power and achievements against the rising tide of support for a restoration of monarchy.203CJ vii. 803a, 806a, 806b, 807a, 821a, 838b, 844a. He seems to have chaired, and certainly reported from, a committee established on 10 January 1660 concerning the Engagement.204CJ vii. 806b, 843a. His final parliamentary appointment, appropriately enough, was to a committee set up on 29 February for the ‘settling of ministers and of all matters concerning religion and the confession of faith’.205CJ vii. 855b. It was probably as a member of this committee that he drafted or otherwise took charge of an act for confirming ministers in sequestered livings, which, inevitably, was laid aside.206Add. 70096, unfol.

Although Millington complied with the May 1660 proclamation ordering the regicides to surrender themselves, he was excepted from the Act of Indemnity, and on 16 October he was tried for high treason.207CJ viii. 61a; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 314; An Exact and Most Impartial Accompt of the…Trial…of Nine and Twenty Regicides (1660), 240. Having put in a plea of not guilty, he confessed during the trial that he was ‘guilty every way’ – his only excuse being that he had been ‘awed by the present power then in being’.208Trial…of Nine and Twenty Regicides, 251, 274. Sentenced to death the next day (17 Oct.) and imprisoned in the Tower, he petitioned the king to pardon his ‘prodigious and rebellious treason’.209CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 314. On 7 February 1662, he was brought before the bar of the Lords where he ‘confessed his hearty sorrow for his sin and desired mercy’, submitting a petition to the same effect.210LJ xi. 380b; HMC 7th Rep. 157. His abject confessions of guilt, and probably his advanced age, ultimately secured a reprieve from execution, but his estate was forfeit to the crown and he was confined to Mont Orgueil Castle on Jersey.211LR2/266, ff. 1, 24; E178/6403. He died on Jersey a little before 19 September 1666 and was buried in ‘common ground’ on the island.212CSP Dom. 1666-7, p. 192; 1670, p. 714. Having been attainted of high treason, he died intestate. He was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.