ALURED, Matthew (1615-94), of Walkington and Beverley, Yorks.

The Alureds were one of the Hull area’s most prominent families.38Supra, ‘John Alured’. They had been associated with the cause of further reformation in religion since Elizabethan times, and Alured himself may well have had a godly upbringing.39Supra, ‘John Alured’. In his will, written a month before he died in 1628, Alured’s father had entrusted his young son’s care and education to his sister Lucy Darley, the wife of Francis Darley of Kilnhurst.40Borthwick, Prob. Reg. 40, f. 247. Alured was 13 when his father died, and, with his mother also dead, it is likely that he was raised thereafter at Kilnhurst. The Kilnhurst Darleys were closely related to the North Riding Puritan knight Sir Richard Darley (father of the future parliamentarians Henry* and Richard Darley*), whose household at Buttercrambe was noted for ‘fasting and prayer’ and ‘great terrors for sin’.41God’s Plot: the Autobiog. and Jnl. of Thomas Shepard ed. M. McGiffert, 52-3.

If Alured had indeed spent at least some of his youth in a godly environment, it would help to explain his later readiness to support and fight for Parliament in 1642 – his first year in the forefront of county affairs. In February of that year, he joined Sir Richard Darley and other leading Yorkshire gentlemen – most of whom would become parliamentarians – in a petition to the Lords, asking them to work more closely with the Commons for the relief of Ireland’s Protestants.42PA, Main Pprs. 15 Feb. 1642, f. 55. On 12 May, with the king raising troops in Yorkshire, Alured, Sir Richard Darley and many of the county’s future parliamentarians addressed a letter to Charles, requesting that he put his trust in the two Houses and forbear raising any ‘extraordinary’ guard.43A Letter from the...Committees of the Commons...at Yorke (1642), 9 (E.148.4). Alured signed another petition to the king from this group on 6 June, complaining about the king’s abandoning Parliament and drawing together the county’s trained bands – illegally, as the petitioners conceived it.44PA, Main Pprs. 6 June 1642, ff. 84-5. The concern, manifest in these petitions, that the kingdom’s forces should be under the firm control of Parliament was to become a key feature of Alured’s political thinking.

Alured was one of the first Yorkshire gentlemen to take up arms against the king. On 31 July 1642, he was commissioned as a lieutenant of horse in the troop commanded by his elder brother John Alured, and he may have been part of the force that defended Hull against the king in the summer of 1642.45SP28/34, f. 400. By the winter of that year, he was serving in Parliament’s northern army under the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*) and soon proved himself a courageous and committed soldier, capturing George Goring* when Fairfax’s forces stormed Wakefield and raising and equipping a troop of horse at his own expense.46SP28/34, f. 400; CJ ii. 891a; Newes From Yorke (1643), sig. A4 (E.85.17); A Miraculous Victory...at Wakefield in Yorkshire (1643), 9 (E.104.13); Jones, ‘War in north’, 367. In April 1644, he took over Sir William Fairfax’s regiment of horse, which included among its officers the godly North Riding gentlemen George Smithson* and Thomas Talbot II*.47Add. 18979, f. 194. This regiment subsequently fought at the battles of Selby, Marston Moor and Ormskirk and at the sieges of Liverpool and Montgomery Castle in Wales.48Jones, ‘War in north’, 367-8.

From 1645, Alured’s officers made several attempts – doubtless with their colonel’s blessing – to have the regiment incorporated into the New Model, but without success.49Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 214-15; CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 99. Following his regiment’s disbandment in February 1646, Alured joined the ever-growing ranks of the reformadoes (disbanded soldiers) in London. Late in March 1647, against a background of growing tension between the New Model army and the Presbyterians at Westminster, he signed a petition to Parliament from a group of reformado officers requesting, inter alia, payment of arrears, the settlement of public worship ‘according to ... the best reformed churches’, the abolition of county committees and that subjects have the benefit of Magna Carta and the Petition of Right.50LJ ix. 95b-96a. This was a highly Presbyterian, not to say crypto-royalist agenda. It was also one of the first officers’ petitions to make political demands on Parliament, and the Commons reacted testily: ‘as to their arrears, the House hath and will take them into consideration ... The rest of the petition, which concerns the management of the affairs of the public, it does not concern any to give instructions to the House therein’.51CJ v. 120a. According to the London diarist Thomas Juxon*, the petitioners had actually wished to curry favour at Westminster ‘and so render themselves capable of employment in the New Model’.52Juxon Jnl. 151-2. The officer who presented this petition, Sir Thomas Essex, was given command of one of the regiments that the City raised in July to counter the New Model army.53Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 33-4. However, there is no evidence that Alured accepted a commission under the Presbyterians, or that he approved of their plans for the disbandment of the New Model. His main reason for signing the March petition was probably, as Juxon claimed, to obtain permanent military employment. He had apparently already secured most of the £2,000 he was owed in arrears through ‘discoveries of delinquents’.54CCAM 55, 702.

Although denied a command in the New Model (probably because none was available), Alured remained loyal to Parliament, and during the second civil war he raised a regiment of the East Riding trained bands against the royalists and the invading Scots.55Packets of Letters from Scotland, 5; CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 106. That he subsequently supported the establishment of the commonwealth can be inferred from his appointment early in 1650, on the recommendation of the Yorkshire Rumpers, as one of the county’s sequestration commissioners.56CCC 171; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 302. He was also active under the Rump as a Yorkshire militia commissioner.57Doncaster Archives, DD/CROM/11/30. When the threat of a Scottish invasion again loomed, in the summer of 1650, he finally secured a place in the regular army, being given command of a regiment of foot raised for the Scottish service by the Yorkshire parliamentarian George Gill, who had been cashiered on charges of defrauding the state.58CSP Dom. 1650, p. 263. Although Gill obtained a letter from Oliver Cromwell* testifying to his ‘innocency and good service’, his attempts to clear his name at Westminster were frustrated by Alured’s kinsman Henry Darley and by Darley’s friend, the regicide Sir John Bourchier*.59G. Gill, Innocency Cleared, or the Case and Vindication of Col. George Gill (1651), 12-14; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 462-3. Gill later claimed that Alured had ‘thirsted after my regiment’ and had conspired with his (Gill’s) enemies, the Yorkshire Rumper Sir William Allanson and his brother Francis Allanson of Leeds, to blacken his reputation.60Gill, Innocency Cleared, 3, 4, 10.

Service in the regular army appears to have transformed Alured from political opportunist and military careerist into a sincere and steadfast supporter of the Good Old Cause. He spent the early 1650s campaigning in Scotland, where he established himself as one of the commonwealth’s most competent commanders.61Scotland and the Commonwealth ed. C.H. Firth (Scottish Hist. Soc. xviii), 320. In September 1651, the Rump acknowledged his diligence in its service by granting him sequestered lands in Scotland worth £200 a year.62CJ vii. 14a. In 1653, he was given charge of all the forces in the west of Scotland, and in April 1654 – four months after the establishment of the protectorate – Cromwell appointed him commander-in-chief of an expeditionary force to secure the western isles of Scotland.63Add. 25347, f. 11; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 463. But before going to Ireland to raise troops for this expedition, Alured discussed political affairs with a number of republican officers and political agitators, including Colonels John Okey*, Thomas Sanders* and Robert Overton – whom Alured had known since the early 1640s, when they had served together at Hull – and the former Leveller leader John Wildman*. He would later name Overton and Wildman as the men ‘that endeavoured first to dissatisfy him’ concerning the legitimacy of Cromwellian rule.64Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke ms XX, f. 104; D. P. Massarella, ‘The Politics of the Army 1647-60’ (York Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1977), 354-5; Oxford DNB, ‘Robert Overton’. Once in Ireland, Alured became involved with those of ‘Anabaptists’ judgements’, among then Edmund Ludlowe II* (‘Anabaptist’ here probably meaning supporters of a republic rather than radical sectarians), and was alleged to have made numerous accusations against Cromwell – that ‘there was none to call him [the protector] to an account, for he had got all the power into his own hands’; that ‘those which were to be elected (meaning Members for the Parliament) must first come to the said lord protector and council to be catechised before they should be permitted to sit’; that ‘the honest old Independents were [not] looked upon and that those chiefest in all his highness’s council are the Presbyterians and cavaliers’; and much more in a similar vein.65Add. 25347, ff. 21v-25v; The Case of Col. Matthew Alured (1659), 5-6 (E.983.25); TSP ii. 313; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 355-6, 372. Alured never explicitly denied these remarks, and they are consistent with the views he was to espouse later that year. Cromwell was in no doubt of Alured’s ‘evil intentions’ towards the government, and in May 1654 he relieved him of command and summoned him to London.66TSP ii. 285-6.

Undaunted by his recall, Alured fell in with a group of like-minded officers and civilians in London ‘that would stand right for a commonwealth’. In mid-September 1654, following the council’s exclusion of MPs deemed enemies of the government, Alured, Okey, Sanders, Wildman, Vice-Admiral John Lawson and other republicans began plotting the overthrow of the protectorate. Their meetings were attended by a variety of the government’s enemies, including the inveterate commonwealthsmen Henry Marten*, Lord Grey of Groby*, Thomas Scot I* and Sir Arthur Hesilrige*.67TSP iii. 147-8; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 360-1. However, the conspiracy was quickly broken by Secretary John Thurloe*, and its only upshot was a petition, drafted by Wildman, attacking the protectorate.68B. Taft, ‘The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army: causes, character, and results of military opposition to Cromwell’s Protectorate’, HLQ xlii. 20, 23, 36-8. This was intended for general circulation in the army, but had only been signed by Alured, Okey and Saunders when it was seized by the government in a raid on Alured’s chambers in mid-October 1654.69Stowe 189, f. 61; Taft, ‘The Humble Petition’, 33.

The petition, The Petition of Several Colonels, as it came to be known, has been seen as the last of the army-Leveller manifestoes.70Taft, ‘The Humble Petition’, 15, 41. Addressed to Cromwell, it was essentially a denunciation of the protectorate as contrary to parliamentary government and the ‘fundamental rights and freedoms of the commonwealth’. Echoing the language of the army manifestoes of the late 1640s, the petition declaimed against Cromwell’s king-like control over a standing army, his negative voice upon the legislative and demanded ‘constant successive Parliaments ... without any imposition upon their judgements ... and that nothing should be imposed upon or taken from the people but by their Parliaments’.71Stowe 189, ff. 60-1; The Petition of Several Colonels of the Army (1654, 669 f.19.21); CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 302-4. The petition concluded by asking for a ‘full and truly free Parliament’ – a thinly veiled denunciation of the recent exclusions – to settle the government according to the ‘fundamental rights ... proposed to the late Parliament [the Rump] by the general council of the army in the Agreement of the People’. This was the version of the Agreement that the council of officers had agreed upon in the winter of 1648-9, which incorporated the essence of the Levellers’ demands, but proposed slightly more restrictions on religious liberty and acknowledged an obligation to consult with the Rump about the settlement of the secular government.72Taft, ‘The Humble Petition’, 22. Alured later justified his signing of this petition as a ‘means to testify my dissent’ to Cromwell’s ‘great apostasy’ and ‘backsliding’ from the ‘old cause’ espoused by the army in 1648-9 against rule by a single person or House of Lords.73Case of Col. Matthew Alured, 1, 9-15; Taft, ‘The Humble Petition’, 15, 40.

The petition’s only notable consequence was the cashiering or resignation of the three men who had signed it. Alured was court-martialled in December 1654 on charges of inciting mutiny in Ireland that spring and of participating in writing and publishing the three colonels’ petition.74Add. 25347, ff. 21v-25v; Case of Col. Matthew Alured, 3-8; In his defence, he claimed that he had spoken principally against the Instrument of Government and that neither his words nor the petition could be construed as a breach of the ‘laws and ordinances of war’.75Add. 25347, ff. 26v-29; Case of Col. Matthew Alured, 15-18; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 365-6. The court disagreed, however, and on 8 January 1655 he was cashiered and imprisoned.76Case of Col. Matthew Alured, 3-8; Clarke Pprs. iii. 11, 15, 17; Clarke Pprs. v. 244. In July, he was forced to relinquish the estate in Scotland that the Rump had bestowed on him in 1651.77Add. 25347, ff. 15v-19v. A prisoner for almost a year, he was released early in 1656 and lived ‘inoffensively’ for six months, but was then detained for a further six months in August, apparently on suspicion of complicity in the virulently anti-protectorate pamphlet, England’s Remembrancers.78Bodl. Rawl. A.41, pp. 560-1; Case of Col. Matthew Alured, 2; Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, iv. 262; CSP Dom. 1656-7, pp. 71, 582; TSP iii. 707; iv. 359; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 747. By early 1658, he was reportedly living quietly near Hull, ‘minding nothing but the increase of his estate’.79‘Two letters addressed to Cromwell’ ed. C. H. Firth, EHR xxii. 313.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, Alured was returned for Hedon – the constituency that his elder brother John had represented in the Short and Long Parliaments. Alured had consolidated the family’s interest at Hedon during the 1650s, gaining control of the sequestered estates of the Constables of Halsham, from whom the Alureds had leased the manor in which the borough was situated.80Supra, ‘Hedon’; CCC 2155. He was named to ten committees in this Parliament, including those for settling a godly ministry in Wales and the northern counties (5 Feb.) and to consider the manner of transacting business with the Cromwellian Other House (6 Apr.).81CJ vii. 594b, 600b, 609a, 622b, 623b, 627a, 637b, 638a. On the floor of the House, he made common cause with the ‘commonwealthsmen’ (republican MPs) and consistently supported their attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the protectoral settlement. The few contributions he made to the protracted debate on the bill of recognition (the bill confirming Richard Cromwell as lord protector), which took up most of February, were congruent with the republicans’ efforts to impede its progress.82Burton’s Diary, iii. 154, 192; CJ vii. 601b. And on at least three occasions in March, he questioned the right to sit of the Scottish and Irish Members, who were regarded by the republican interest as mere Cromwellian placemen.83Burton’s Diary, iv. 87, 170, 231. He was particularly outspoken in denouncing what he saw as the strong royalist presence in the House: ‘You have vipers in your bowels, divers delinquents’, he declaimed on 12 February.84Burton’s Diary, iii. 233. He also favoured tough measures against the agents of Cromwellian ‘tyranny’, seconding a motion of Ludlowe for the cashiering of Major-general William Boteler*, following a report from the committee of grievances on 12 April that he had abused his authority as an officer.85Burton’s Diary, iv. 410. Alured’s hostility towards Cromwellians and cavaliers was matched by his concern to defend his fellow commonwealthsmen and other radical opponents of the protectorate. He endorsed calls on 3 February and 16 March for the release of his friend Robert Overton – who had been imprisoned late in 1654, a few weeks before Alured – and defended the republican MP Henry Neville against charges of atheism and blasphemy.86Burton’s Diary, iii. 46; iv. 160.

Alured’s clearest demonstration of commitment to the republican interest was his tellership with Major-general John Lambert’s man-of-business, Captain Adam Baynes, in a division on 7 March 1659 concerning the disputed election at Malton.87CJ vii. 611a; Burton’s Diary, iv. 42, 46. Alured and Baynes were tellers against confirming a recommendation from the committee of privilege for upholding the return of the pro-Cromwellians, and possibly crypto-royalist, Philip Howard* and George Marwood* over that of Colonel Robert Lilburne* and his fellow republican, Luke Robinson*. In the event, Alured and Baynes lost the division by 142 votes to 173. This was a serious defeat for the republican opponents of the Cromwellian regime and probably heightened the army’s fears that Parliament was dominated by its enemies – an important factor in its decision to bring down the protectorate. A more immediate cause of the army coup of 21 April was the Commons’ vote three days earlier (18 Apr.) to prohibit the council of officers meeting without permission from Parliament and the protector, a decision which angered the republicans, and Alured in particular. ‘I cannot in conscience be silent’, he told the Commons, ‘Will you put away your friends [the army] and hug your enemies? First purge your own House of cavaliers ... Some Members have not right to sit here. I hope you will not restrain them [the army] from interrupting such’.88Burton’s Diary, iv. 457, 460.

Despite his professed reverence for parliamentary government, Alured apparently supported the army’s forcible dissolution of Richard Cromwell’s Parliament on 21 April 1659. Alured, Overton and Colonel Nathaniel Rich* reportedly assured Lieutenant-general Charles Fleetwood* in May that ‘so far from discouraging their [the army’s] return to the Good Old Cause ... they blessed the Lord in their souls and spirits for what was already done’. They also, it seems, intimated their desire to be taken back into army service, but Fleetwood, wary of their radicalism and past insubordination, offered them nothing.89Mercurius Politicus no. 568 (19-26 May 1659), pp. 449-50; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 82. Alured, having been ‘very active’ in the restoration of the Rump in May, then appealed directly to the Commons, describing his sufferings for the Good Old Cause.90Ludlow, Mems. ii. 95. Anxious to reward its supporters, the Rump, on 10 June 1659, pronounced Cromwell’s sentence against him unjust and appointed him captain of Parliament’s life-guard on 9 July; the council of state assigned him lodgings in Whitehall a few days later.91CJ vii. 678a-679a, 703b, 708b, 710a; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 15. He had initially been reluctant to accept this command, ‘thinking it not equivalent to a regiment of horse which he had commanded’, but Ludlowe persuaded him ‘of the honour and usefulness of that employment’.92Ludlow, Mems. ii. 95-6; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 394. On 5 August, the Rump approved Alured’s appointment as colonel of a regiment of horse.93CJ vii. 749b, 750b.

Alured was one of relatively few senior officers in England to oppose Lambert and the army’s dissolution of the restored Rump in mid-October 1659 – and later that month, he and about 15 other officers were removed from their commands for refusing to subscribe an ‘engagement’ pledging loyalty to Lambert and his confederates.94Declaration of the Officers of the Army Opened, 29; Clarke Pprs. iv. 62; Clarke Pprs. v. 312; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 148; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 617, 618. In a petition to Fleetwood on 1 November, nine of the ejected officers, including Alured, Harbert Morley* and Colonels Okey and Sanders, denounced the army’s proceedings. It had never been part of the Good Old Cause, they argued, ‘to wrest all power and authority out of the hands of the people’s representatives in Parliament and to fix it in the army’ - conveniently overlooking the fact that they had endorsed just such a course in April. They insisted that all standing forces should be subordinate to Parliament – an echo of The Petition of Several Colonels – and demanded the holding of new elections on as broad a franchise ‘as the safety of the cause will bear’. Evidently Alured’s experience in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament had convinced him that the Good Old Cause could not be served by free Parliaments – ‘without any imposition upon their judgements and consciences’ – as he had argued in 1654.95Add. 4165, ff. 38-42; A True Narrative of the Proceedings in Parliament (1659), 55-62 (E.1010.24); TSP vii. 771-4; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 617-21.

Alured played a leading part in the overthrow of the committee of safety (the interim government set up by the army in October 1659) and in the restoration of the Rump in December. In mid-December, acting on instructions from Speaker Lenthall and pro-Rump commonwealthsmen such as Sir Arthur Hesilrige, he helped to foil an attempt by Sir Henry Vane II* to win over a section of the fleet.96Parliamentary Intelligencer no. 1 (19-26 Dec. 1659), 2 (E.182.15); CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 591. And on 24 December, with Lambert’s forces disintegrating in the north, Alured, Okey, Henry Markham* and several other colonels mustered the regiments about Westminster and declared for a Parliament.97Whitelocke, Diary, 553; Baker, Chronicle, 676. One of the Rump’s first acts on re-assembling on 26 December was to place interim control of the armed forces in the hands of seven parliamentary commissioners, among them Alured, Okey and Thomas Scot I.98CJ vii. 797a. Alured confirmed his allegiance to the Rump in dramatic fashion on 27 December, helping to prevent a large group of the Members secluded at Pride’s Purge in 1648 from gaining entry to the House.99OPH xxii. 30-32. The House – and Hesilrige’s faction more specifically – rewarded him for his loyalty by re-instating him as a colonel of horse.100Infra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; CJ vii. 805b, 809b, 812a.

On 10 February 1660, as part of efforts by Hesilrige and his allies to retain military power and keep a check on General George Monck*, the council of state recommended that the Rump appoint Alured major-general of London.101CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 354; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 694. Similarly, the next day (11 Feb.), he was named (with Hesilrige) to a new five-man commission for governing the army under Fleetwood as commander-in-chief – ‘at which Monck was noted to be discontented, and many judged it an act of no great present policy’.102CJ vii. 841a; Whitelocke, Diary, 569; Baker, Chronicle, 686-7; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 697-8. According to Ludlowe, Alured’s appointment gave ‘great satisfaction of the Commonwealth party’, especially as he had been chosen instead of Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*, who was deemed a member of ‘Monck’s party’.103Ludlow, Mems. ii. 223-4. Monck, for his part, regarded Alured as one of Hesilrige’s spies.104J. Price, The Mystery and Method of His Majesty’s Happy Restauration (1680), 97. On 14 February, the council ordered Alured to form a guard for Parliament and indemnified him and Okey in response to an indictment brought by Sir Gilbert Gerard* at the Middlesex assizes against the two colonels for (allegedly) assaulting him when the secluded Members had been prevented from entering the House on 27 December 1659.105CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 362, 363; A Copy of the Presentment and Indictment Found and Exhibited by the Grand-Jury of Middlesex in the Upper Bench at Westminster (1660); Ludlow, Mems. ii. 232.

Following the readmission of the secluded Members on 21 February 1660, Alured might have been expected to join the more zealous commonwealthsmen in outright opposition to Monck. Early in March, however, Alured, at the general’s behest, went to Hull to persuade the governor there, his friend Robert Overton, to yield the town.106CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 541, 593; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 246-7. ‘It was matter of wonder to me’, thought Ludlowe, ‘that Colonel Alured, in whom the commonwealth party had reposed so great trust, should suffer himself to be employed in such a message to one of the most faithful servants of the Parliament’.107Ludlow, Mems. ii. 246-7; Voyce, 95-6. Alured had probably been won over by Monck’s avowed commitment to preserving the republic, limited toleration and (as the November 1659 address to Fleetwood had demanded) to holding ‘as comprehensive an election of a succeeding Parliament as the safety of the cause will bear’. Nevertheless, he reportedly ‘prevaricated in his trust and went privately to the governor [Overton], staying late with him at night’.108Price, Mystery and Method, 126. Monck showed even less faith in Alured than Alured did in him, for in April the general removed him from command after some of Alured’s troops had mutinied and declared for Lambert – even though Alured himself reportedly denounced their actions.109Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 159. In the elections to the 1660 Convention that spring, Alured stood as one of six candidates at Hull, but came second to last on a poll.110Hull Hist. Cent. C BRB/4 (Hull Bench Bk. 1650-64), p. 308. He appears to have lain low thereafter, breaking cover briefly in December to obtain a royal pardon.111SO3/13, unfol.

Alured’s losses as a result of the Restoration were considerable. In July 1660, he was relieved of his place as comptroller of customs at Hull, and during the next year or so he was omitted from all local commissions and would have been forced to relinquish the church and crown lands he had purchased during the early 1650s, which included the Yorkshire manors of Burstall Garth and Patrington and fee farm rents worth £341 a year.112CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 134; LR2/266, f. 77; CRE 6/1, p. 196; C10/94/1. He was arrested and briefly imprisoned in the wake of Venner’s rising in 1661, and again in 1663 on the highly dubious charge of having raised a war-chest of £20,000 to help fund the abortive Yorkshire rising of that year.113Add. 33770, f. 31; CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 299; R.L. Greaves, Deliver Us From Evil, 53. He was also arraigned before the court of exchequer in 1663 to account for his proceedings as receiver of former crown revenues in Yorkshire under the Rump.114LR9/117, unfol. Almost nothing is then heard of him until 1673, when his election as mayor of Hedon was rendered void by his refusal to take the oaths of office.115VCH E. Riding, v. 179. In 1679, he was peripherally involved in whig attempts to prove the legitimacy of the duke of Monmouth – Charles II’s natural son – and thus pressure the king into excluding his Catholic heir, the future James II, from the succession.116CSP Dom. 1679-80, pp. 449, 450, 454.

Alured died in the summer of 1694 and was buried in St Mary’s, Beverley on 28 August.117St Mary, Beverley par. reg. His will contains references to lands in Holme (probably Holme-on-Spalding-Moor, about 10 miles west of Beverley) and in Sutton and Sculcoates near Hull. He charged his estate with annuities of £25 and legacies of about £1,300. His legatees included the nonconformist minister William Foster and the poor of Foster’s congregation at Beverley, of which Alured was evidently a leading member.118Borthwick, Harthill deanery wills, Sept. 1694. This congregation was nominally Presbyterian, but by this date the differences between Presbyterians and Congregationalists were minimal.119VCH E. Riding, vi. 242-3. Alured died without surviving sons, leaving the bulk of his estate to his daughter and grandson.120Borthwick, Harthill deanery wills, Sept. 1694. His lands were almost certainly worth less than £400 a year – the approximate value of the Alureds’ estate in the late 1630s.121CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 558. None of his immediate family sat in future Parliaments.