LEIGH, Edward (1603-71), of Rushall Hall, Rushall, Staffs.

Leigh’s great-grandfather had acquired the manor of Rushall, near Walsall, by marriage in the early sixteenth century and it had become the family’s principal residence.28Shaw, Staffs. ii. 69; Willmore, Rushall, 40-1. Leigh’s father was evidently a man of strong but conformable piety, referring in his will to the Calvinist divine and Church of England apologist John Burgess – vicar of Sutton Coldfield, where Leigh senior resided in his later years – as his ‘worthy friend’ and the ‘careful physician’ of his soul.29PROB11/180, ff. 89v, 90; ‘John Burgess’, Oxford DNB; A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed (Cambridge, 1995), 455, 540. Burgess acknowledged that puritan nonconformists were ‘true and zealous professors with us of the same apostolical faith’, and by striving in his published work to reconcile Calvinist doctrine with church ceremonies he hoped to ‘reduce them to uniformity with us’.30‘John Burgess’, Oxford DNB.

Edward Leigh received what he described as a ‘liberal education’ at Magdalen Hall, Oxford; although the Oxford antiquary Antony Wood was less complimentary, referring to the ‘severe discipline’ (i.e. godly rigour) favoured by the college and by Leigh’s ‘high-Calvinist’ tutor William Pemble.31Leigh, Selected and Choice Observations Concerning the Twelve first Caesars (Oxford, 1635), epistle dedicatory; Ath. Ox. iii. 926; J. T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry (1984), 87-8; ‘William Pemble’, Oxford DNB. After leaving Oxford, Leigh was admitted to the Middle Temple, where he made ‘considerable progress ... not only in the study of the laws but of divinity and history’.32Ath. Ox. iii. 926. To escape an outbreak of plague in London in 1625, he spent six months in France, ‘with great improvement to himself and his studies’. He acknowledged his debt to his father in the dedication to his second publication – a historical work on the Roman emperors.33Leigh, Selected and Choice Observations, epistle dedicatory. However, he chose to dedicate his first publication, a devotional work on God’s covenants, to his stepmother, Lady Ruth Scudamore née Hampden (a kinswoman of John Hampden*), who was perhaps of a more puritan temper than was his father.34Leigh, A Treatise of the Divine Promises (1633), epistle dedicatory; Shaw, Staffs. ii. 68; ‘Thomas Blake’, Oxford DNB.

By the late 1630s, Leigh and his wife belonged to the circle gathered around the godly lecturer at Banbury, William Whately. Whately, although a zealous sabbatarian and ‘painful preacher’, was apparently not a puritan in the sense of pressing for further reform of the liturgy and rubric, at least not before the 1630s.35‘William Whately’, Oxford DNB. Indeed, he regarded the ceremonies of the pre-Laudian church as essentially indifferent, necessary only to keep ‘comeliness, uniformity and order’, and he advised godly people to ‘avoid all jangling and frivolous disputes about unnecessary quirks and quiddities and matters of ceremony and disputable points in things external’.36T. Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1997), 159-60. He was reportedly ‘much grieved and troubled’ by differences of opinion and division in the church, especially ‘among brethren professing for the main and, in fundamentals, the same truths’.37W. Whately, Prototypes, or the Primary Precedent Presidents out of the Book of Genesis (1640), sig. A5. All which suggests that the formative influences on Leigh’s piety may been less puritanical and more conventional than some authorities have supposed.38‘Edward Leigh’, Oxford DNB.

Banbury’s proximity to the academic resources of the university of Oxford may have attracted Leigh almost as much as Whately’s ministry; and in the year of Whately’s death, 1639, Leigh published Critica Sacra, a philological study of the Hebrew and Greek words of the Old and New Testaments.39Leigh, Critica Sacra (1639). This lexicon was undoubtedly his most influential publication, becoming a standard work of reference for divines and biblical scholars and earning him the ‘respect and kindness’ of the Calvinist archbishop, James Ussher.40Shaw, Staffs. ii. 65. The following year, Leigh and the godly minister Henry Scudder – Whately’s literary executors – published a similar work of biblical exegesis by their deceased friend.41Whately, Prototypes; ‘Henry Scudder’, Oxford DNB. In the epistle dedicatory, Leigh revealed that he had spent almost a year living in Whately’s house and four years under his ministry and that of all the ministers he had known ‘so experimentally’, Whately was ‘the most unblameable in his conversation’.42Whately, Prototypes, epistle dedicatory, sig. A3v.

If Leigh’s appointment to the Staffordshire bench in August 1641 was intended as a sweetener by the crown it seems to have failed, for in the spring of 1642 he was a signatory to a Staffordshire petition, calling for the king to accept the Militia Ordinance and to ‘lean upon the hand and be graciously pleased to follow the counsels ... of Parliament, that the bleeding wounds of our brethren of Ireland be bound up’.43C231/5, p. 471; PA, Main Pprs. 16 May 1642, f. 131. Leigh was removed from the bench by royal commission the following August.44C231/5, p. 536. He raised a troop of horse for Parliament during the early months of the war, and by August 1643 he was a colonel in the parliamentarian forces of the west midlands association under Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh.45Honour Advanced, 6; Vicars, God in the Mount, 411-12. He also garrisoned Rushall Hall for Parliament, but the house was captured by the royalists in March 1643.46Staffs. RO, D260/M/F/1/6/87; Certaine Informations no. 12 (3-10 Apr. 1643), 96 (E.95.12). Leigh’s godly religious convictions had probably been a major factor in his decision to take up arms against the king.

Leigh figured prominently in the bitter factional dispute that rent Parliament’s leading supporters in the west midlands during the mid-1640s. This feud seems to have begun as a squabble over military resources between some of the Staffordshire officers and committee members and the Cheshire parliamentarian commander Sir William Brereton*.47Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 18. However, by the summer of 1644, it had become caught up in the wider issues of how and to what end the war should be fought. Leigh and several other Staffordshire officers headed a faction on the county committee that was keen to advance the power of the region’s parliamentarian commander the earl of Denbigh, who was aligned with the peace party leader at Westminster, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.48LJ vi. 654b; Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 60; ii. 127. They were opposed by Brereton, John Swynfen* and other militants within the west midlands association, who regarded Denbigh (and probably Essex, too) as lukewarm against the king and politically suspect.49Infra, ‘Sir William Brereton’; ‘John Swynfen’. On 30 September 1644, Leigh presented a petition to the Commons from several thousand of the Staffordshire ‘well-affected’ (among the signatories were John Bowyer* and Samuel Terricke*), requesting that Denbigh be allowed to resume his command in the west midlands.50PA, Main Pprs. 1 Oct. 1644, ff. 146-8, 154-6; A Speech of Colonell Edward Leigh (1644), frontispiece (E.10.26). Leigh used the occasion to lecture the House on the need for ‘a happy reformation and timely redress of errors in religion’, before descanting on Denbigh’s virtues as a man and general.51A Speech of Colonell Edward Leigh, 5-6.

Leigh stood as a candidate in the ‘recruiter’ election at Stafford in the autumn of 1645. A few months before the election, early in September, he had written to one of his Staffordshire kinswomen to ask that she move her husband – the firm but non-‘Scottified’ Presbyterian MP Sir Simonds D’Ewes – to support calls in the House for ‘the new choosing of knights for our county ... because I doubt not then to be one’.52Harl. 6711, f. 12. Later that month, the House ordered that a writ be issued for holding a new election at Stafford. However, it would delay making a similar order for county until the summer of 1646. Evidently impatient to secure a seat at Westminster, Leigh decided to contest the Stafford election and took as his running mate the earl of Essex’s nephew Sir Charles Shirley. This decidedly Presbyterian pairing was opposed by two prominent members of the pro-army interest in the region – Sir Richard Skeffington* and John Swynfen.

On election day, 30 October 1645, the contest went to a series of polls in which Swynfen and Leigh gained the most votes and were duly returned. Brereton was content at the return of Swynfen, but Leigh worried him

in regard he hath been all along mis-possessed of a rotten faction and prejudiced against those faithful men that with much struggling have been a means to preserve the Parliament’s interest in that county [Staffordshire], and in regard he comes into power by those that are not best affected ... I shall use my endeavour the more to gain ... [him] to a right understanding, in regard I take him to be a religious gentleman, and, if he prosecute right courses, he will have a very respective assistant of [sic] his fellow burgess [i.e. Swynfen].53Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 216.

Brereton asked John Lisle, a leading Independent in the Commons, to use his influence with Leigh (a friend and kinsman of Lisle’s) ‘to prevent him from being mis-engaged’.54Leigh, A Philologicall Commentary (1652), epistle dedicatory (E.1272.1). But if Lisle made any such attempt to gain Leigh to the ‘better party’ it was wasted effort, for Leigh would emerge as a prominent member of the Presbyterian interest at Westminster.

Leigh’s activities and appointments in the House – at least during the first year of his parliamentary career – are impossible to gauge with any precision, given the clerk of the Commons’ tendency to refer to both the Staffordshire colonel and the Kentish MP Captain Richard Lee simply as ‘Mr Leigh’. Nevertheless, most of these references can confidently be ascribed to Leigh, for the captain seems to have spent much of his time in Kent.55Supra, ‘Richard Lee’. Moreover, the clerk was more careful from late 1646 to accord both men their proper military rank, making the task of distinguishing their appointments much easier.

Leigh received a handful of nominations to committees in 1646 and 1647 dealing with affairs in the west midlands and north-west.56CJ iv. 429a, 633b, 674b, 703a. But if his appointments are any guide, it was the advancement of godly religion that occupied most of his time at Westminster. After the Restoration, he would be described as ‘a dangerous Presbyterian’, and his career in the Long Parliament lends some support to this assertion.57‘Gentry of Staffs.’ ed. Kidson, 36. During his first 18 months in the House, he was named to the Committee for Plundered Ministers* (chairing one of its meetings) and the committee for the sale of bishops’ lands and to the commissions for excluding notorious offenders from the sacrament and for regulating (i.e. making more godly) Oxford University.58CJ iv. 545b, 652b; v. 83a; A. and O; C. Cartwright, The Magistrates Authority in Matters of Religion (1647), preface (E.401.32). Moreover, if Wood can be credited, he was made a lay delegate to the Westminster Assembly at some point – although there is no evidence to this effect in the assembly’s records; nor did Leigh himself make any such claim in his publications.59Ath. Ox. iii. 926. He was certainly supportive of the assembly’s endeavours, however, praising its members’ ‘faithful advice ... their fervent prayers and diligent labours’.60Leigh, A Treatise of Divinity Consisting of Three Bookes (1646), epistle dedicatory. He also dedicated the 1646 reprint of his Critica Sacra to the assembly and received its thanks for the pains he had taken in the work.61Leigh, Critica Sacra (1646), epistle dedicatory (E.507.1); S.W. Carruthers, The Everyday Work of the Westminster Assembly (Philadelphia, 1943), 192.

It has been argued that Leigh’s friendship and admiration of ‘that great light of all the Reformed churches’ Archbishop Ussher – to whom he dedicated several of his treatises in the 1650s – indicates that ‘his preferred form of church government was a primitive episcopacy’.62Leigh, A Treatise of Religion and Learning (1656), epistle dedicatory; Leigh, Annotations on Five Poetical Books of the Old Testament (1657), epistle dedicatory; ‘Edward Leigh’, Oxford DNB. Yet Leigh’s writings and political activities during the 1640s are generally consistent with firm support on his part for the establishment of Presbyterianism. In his 1646 publication A Treatise of Divinity Consisting of Three Bookes, he urged Parliament to perfect the work begun by Edward VI and Elizabeth I, ‘that Christ’s government, worship and discipline might be set up in the three kingdoms’. He evidently felt that the two Houses were squandering a golden opportunity in this respect: ‘When did any Parliament enter into so solemn a league and covenant to reform themselves and [the] kingdom? When were there so many days of humiliation kept so generally in England? When was there such a constant daily lecture of worthy men in Westminster Abbey before?’ To drive home his point, he reminded Parliament of its commitment in the Grand Remonstrance of 1641 not to ‘leave private persons or particular congregations to take up what form of divine service they please’, but that ‘there should be throughout the whole realm a conformity to that order which the laws enjoin according to the word of God’.63Leigh, A Treatise of Divinity, epistle dedicatory. Although the form of church discipline referred to in the Grand Remonstrance was a non-Laudian episcopacy, the only model for ‘Christ’s government ... in the three kingdoms’ that was on the table by the mid-1640s – as Leigh undoubtedly appreciated – was Presbyterianism.

Several of Leigh’s appointments in 1646 suggest he was broadly in favour of the Scots’ political programme and was keen to suppress ‘scandalous’ pamphlets against them.64CJ iv. 576a, 644b, 663a. But his principal contribution to the ‘covenant-engaged’ interest was in advancing the cause of godly reformation and the establishment of a national Presbyterian church. These and related issues account for a significant proportion of his committee nominations during his three years at Westminster.65CJ iv. 625b, 632a, 635a, 678b, 691a, 695a; v. 7b, 10b, 11a, 35a, 66a, 119b, 321b, 327b, 602a, 603b. A number of these assignments are particularly revealing. He was made chairman of a committee set up on 4 August 1646 for settling the maintenance of several new parishes within the eleventh London classis.66CJ iv. 632a; Cartwright, The Magistrates Authority in Matters of Religion, preface. The next day (5 Aug.), he was named to a three-man committee for preparing an ordinance appointing Daniel Evance as a lecturer in Lichfield cathedral.67CJ iv. 635a. Evance was one of the earl of Essex’s chaplains and a supporter of Presbyterianism on the grounds of ‘better a tyranny than no [church] government’.68D. Evance, The Noble Order (1646), 41 (E.319.10). On 12 October, Leigh was one of seven Presbyterian MPs tasked with bringing in an ordinance for the national subscription of the covenant; and on 9 December, he was part of another septet of godly Members – this one charged with preparing an enumeration of ‘those more crying national sins, for which the nation hath not as yet been humbled before God’.69CJ iv. 691a; v. 7b. His next appointment was to a committee established on 12 December for examining the preacher William Dell for the unauthorized publication of a sermon he had delivered to Commons on the morning of 25 November and for his criticism of a sermon delivered that afternoon by Christopher Love, who had preached strongly in favour of a Presbyterian reformation.70CJ v. 10b. Dell was an army preacher and fervent anti-formalist, and it was probably his opposition to all fixed church structures, as much as his printing of his sermon without permission, that had landed him in trouble with the House.71Cartwright, The Magistrates Authority in Matters of Religion, sig. A3. That same day (12 Dec.), Leigh was named to a committee for examining a work by the Presbyterian ministers of London in favour of jure divino Presbyterianism.72CJ v. 11a. His last appointment of 1646, on 31 December, was to a committee, which he chaired, for receiving complaints against unordained preachers and investigating preaching at ‘private meetings’ – a remit that was intended to include sectarian gatherings as well as the services of episcopalian ‘malignants’.73CJ v. 35a, 102a. Indeed, the London radical William Walwyn claimed that Leigh’s committee, which sat in ‘the queen’s court’ at Westminster, ‘extremely perplexed honest people [i.e. sectaries] about their private meetings and doctrines’.74The Writings of William Walwyn ed. J.R. McMichael, B. Taft (Athens, GA, 1989), 288, 389-90. On 27 January 1647, Leigh was assigned the lead role in a committee for drafting a declaration to be read in every church, appointing a ‘day of public humiliation for the late growth and spreading of errors, heresies and blasphemies in this kingdom’.75CJ v. 66a.

Leigh was almost certainly on familiar terms with a number of prominent Presbyterian ministers, including one of the Westminster Assembly’s most talented members, Richard Vines, who shared Leigh’s admiration for Ussher.76‘Richard Vines’, Oxford DNB. On 27 January 1647, Leigh was ordered to request Vines to preach before the Commons on the next day of public humiliation – Vines using the occasion to deliver a sermon that one London radical denounced as an attack not upon heresy but religious Independency.77CJ v. 66a; A Warning for All the Counties of England (1647), 18 (E.381.13). In all, Leigh received eight appointments in 1647-8 either to request ministers to preach before the House or to thank them for their efforts.78CJ v. 66a, 96b, 320b, 527a, 580a, 590b, 648a, 692b. Assuming that these appointments reflected, at least in part, Leigh’s own religious preferences, it is significant that none of the six ministers involved (Charles Herle, Stanley Gower, Thomas Hill, John Lightfoot, William Strong and Richard Vines) were supporters of a ‘rigid’, jure divino Presbyterianism, although all of them apparently favoured a national Presbyterian church and the suppression of sectarianism. Leigh was particularly keen to advance the career of Lightfoot – a fellow native of Staffordshire – who was among the leading Erastians in the assembly.79HMC Portland, i. 412; ‘John Lightfoot’, Oxford DNB.

Leigh was a leading figure in the Presbyterians’ campaign during the early months of 1647 to suppress the London militants and friends of the army. On 9 March, the Commons empowered the committee on unlicensed preaching, which Leigh chaired, to imprison recalcitrant offenders; and on 15 March, the Petition of Many Thousand Citizens – a work of the London radicals, which the Presbyterian grandee John Glynne denounced as ‘a scandalous and seditious paper’ – was referred to Leigh’s committee to discover the petition’s authors and promoters.80CJ v. 109a, 112b; Writings of Walwyn ed. McMichael, Taft, 277. One of the petitioners, the Baptist and future Leveller Nicholas Tew, refused to answer the committee’s interrogatories and was imprisoned for his temerity – as Leigh informed the House on 19 March.81Writings of Walwyn ed. McMichael, Taft, 277; CJ v. 118b. According to those petitioners haled before Leigh’s committee, they were ‘reviled with odious titles of factious and seditious sectaries’, and the Presbyterian grandees Sir Philip Stapilton and Denzil Holles threatened to draw their swords on them.82Writings of Walwyn ed. McMichael, Taft, 289. The actions of Leigh’s committee later formed the substance of one of the New Model army’s charges against the Eleven Presbyterian Members.83A Particular Charge or Impeachment [against the Eleven Members] (1647), 7 (E.397.17). But the Presbyterian majority in the Commons saw no impropriety at the time; and on 25 March, the House referred the investigation of another radical publication to Leigh’s committee.84CJ v. 124a. The radical pamphleteer styling himself ‘Amon Wilbee’ identified Leigh as a leading opponent of the sectaries.

Colonel Leigh, a man of a fiery disposition, who is generally made chairman upon any business that doth (pro or con) concern these men [the Presbyterian grandees], said...that it was no matter if there were not one of them [sectaries] suffered to live in the land, but were all either put to death or banished.85A. Wilbee, Prima Pars de Comparatis Comparandis (1647), 20, 26, 39 (E.396.11).

However, in his preface to a pamphlet published in 1647 by his ‘worthy friend’, the Yorkshire puritan minister Christopher Cartwright, justifying the power of the magistrate to suppress heresy, Leigh firmly denied that he had ever uttered the words ascribed to him by Wilbee, and he insisted that though he was opposed to the sects he was willing to tolerate those ‘who err not in fundamentals and are godly and peaceable’.86Cartwright, The Magistrates Authority in Matters of Religion, preface; ‘Christopher Cartwright’, Oxford DNB. As for his alleged ‘fiery disposition’, he felt sure that ‘some of those who were complained of at the committee where I was in the chair gave a very good testimony of me and my carriage towards them’. He also denied that he had served as chairman of any committee besides those for unlicensed preaching and concerning the eleventh classis. Despite this self-portrait as a man of moderation, at least one pro-Presbyterian controversialist applauded him not only for his piety, but also for using his ‘committee for complaints’ to hammer the sects.87[J. Gauden], Hinc Illae Lachrymae, or the Impietie of Impunitie (1647), 9 (E.421.6).

After the spring of 1647, Leigh’s record in the struggle against sectarianism and to establish a national Presbyterian church becomes less impressive. He was included that April on the committee to bring in a new London militia ordinance (a major Presbyterian initiative) and to investigate further ‘seditious’ pamphlets.88CJ v. 132b, 153a. But his name then disappears from the Journal until mid-June; and he would receive only two committee appointments that summer. The first of these was to a committee for appeasing the soldiery.89CJ v. 210a. The second committee, set up on 30 June, represented an attempt by the Commons to encourage a spirit of compromise among the parliamentarian faithful. Thus, Leigh and nine other ardent supporters of a Presbyterian church settlement – some friendly towards the army, others less so – were appointed to nominate person of ‘moderation, piety and learning’ to draw up heads for an accommodation in religion.90CJ v. 228b. On 16 July – ten days before the Presbyterian-inspired ‘riots’ at Westminster – Leigh was granted leave of absence, and he does not appear to have returned to the House until September.91CJ v. 245b, 295b.

Leigh’s tally of committee appointments during the second half of 1647 – a mere five – would be even lower than it had been for first half of the year.92CJ v. 295b, 321b, 322a, 327b, 329a. The one piece of parliamentary business that seems to have caught his interest was the drawing up and dispatching of peace propositions to the king. On 30 September, he was made a committeeman to consider a proposition ‘touching religion, in the points of government and doctrine’, and on 6 October, he featured on a committee for preparing a proposition ‘concerning the settlement of the Presbyterian government and concerning the exemption of such tender consciences as cannot conform to that government’.93CJ v. 321b, 327b. His first appointment of 1648 was as a minority teller with Sir Walter Erle in favour of giving the Westminster Assembly’s articles defining religious orthodoxy the strongly Presbyterian title of ‘a confession of faith’.94CJ v. 502a; Leigh, A Systeme or Body of Divinity Consisting of Ten Books (1654), epistle dedicatory.

The Presbyterian revival at Westminster in 1648 did not meet with a notably enthusiastic response from Leigh. He was named to a mere six committees that year – the last, on 24 October – none of any great importance.95CJ v. 538a, 602a, 603b, 631b, 678a; vi. 60a. But the army and its supporters had not forgotten his role as chairman of the ‘committee for complaints’, and at Pride’s Purge he was among those MPs they arrested and imprisoned – in Leigh’s case in the King’s Head tavern.96Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 36-7 (5-12 Dec. 1648), sig. Ccc3v (E.476.2). He was still a prisoner on 20 December – the army categorizing him as one of the ‘middle men’ among its captives – and he would not be released until some point during the second half of January 1649.97Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 168 n. 71, 195; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 39 (19-26 Dec. 1648), sig. Eee4v (E.477.30). On 16 January, he joined 11 other Presbyterian victims of Pride’s Purge in a letter to the Presbyterian divine and polemicist James Cranford in his role as licenser, requesting his imprimatur for a pamphlet by William Prynne* – published on 23 January – lambasting the army and its proceedings and vindicating the secluded Members.98Add. 70006, f. 62; W. Prynne, A Vindication of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1649, E.539.5). Leigh undoubtedly opposed the king’s trial and execution, later denouncing the regicide as an ‘abominable practice’, and he claimed that

Had I been sooner freed out of the King’s Head in the Strand (where I with many other worthy secluded Members were confined for not going along with the rest of the House in their intended evil design) I had published a treatise against king-killing (which I had formerly composed) before that fatal stroke.99Leigh, Choice Observations of all the Kings of England (1661), 221.

Leigh retired from public life after his release early in 1649 – the assertion that he was appointed a commissioner to Munster by the Rump and to the Staffordshire assessment commission under the protectorate is completely groundless.100Wedgwood, ‘Staffs. parlty. hist.’, 81. He did continue to write and publish during the interregnum, and he dedicated several of his works to his former Presbyterian colleagues in the Long Parliament, including Edward Montagu†, 2nd earl of Manchester, and Sir Robert Pye I*.101Leigh, Annotations on Five Poetical Books of the Old Testament (1657), epistle dedicatory; England Described (1659), epistle dedicatory (E.1792.2). But little in the content of his publications dealt directly with topical issues. Looking back, perhaps, to the work of John Burgess and William Whately, he edited and, in 1653, published Lancelot Andrewes’s A Learned Discourse of Ceremonies Retained and Used in the Christian Churches, though he was careful to state that he did not ‘thereby avow and justify superstitious and needless rites’, and he concluded his preface by commending his readers ‘to the love of God and the hatred of popery’.102Andrewes, A Learned Discourse of Ceremonies Retained and Used in the Christian Churches ed. Leigh (1653), sig. A3v (E.1535.2). The following year he published a treatise outlining what he regarded as the ‘fundamentals’ of religion – ‘a work seasonable for these times, wherein so many articles of our faith are questioned and so many gross errors daily published’.103Leigh, A Systeme or Body of Divinity, frontispiece. As a former student of the Middle Temple he also retained an interest in the English legal system, and in 1657 he published, anonymously, a small pamphlet in support of the ordinance passed by the second protectoral Parliament for reforming and regulating the court of chancery, professing that he himself had been ‘a suitor and sufferer in the high court of chancery for many years, even above the common age of man’. In this work he referred to the Members of the 1653 Nominated Parliament as ‘not very learned statesmen, yet doubtless men of very good and honest intentions and very sensible of the burdens of the nation’.104[Leigh], Some Considerations Concerning the High-Court of Chancery (1657), 1, 2. When the ordinance lapsed following the dissolution of Parliament, Leigh wrote a second pamphlet, urging the people to petition the protector and his council for its continuation.105Leigh, Second Considerations Concerning the High Court of Chancery (1658).

Not until the second restoration of the Rump, late in December 1659, did Leigh decide to resume his political career. On 27 December, he was one of a number of secluded Members who sought to gain admittance to the House, only to be turned away (again) by the army.106W. Prynne*, A Brief Narrative of the Manner how Divers Members of the House of Commons...were again Forcibly Shut Out (1659), 3 (E.1011.4). He resumed his seat in the House following the re-admission of the secluded Members on 21 February 1660; and in the last few weeks of the Long Parliament he was named to nine committees, four of which related in one way or other to establishing a godly ministry and a ‘confession of faith’.107CJ vii. 848b, 851b, 854a, 855b, 856a, 857a, 858a, 860b, 877a. Leigh was also appointed to request Thomas Manton to preach before the Commons and to thank him and his fellow Presbyterian divine Edmund Calamy for their sermons.108CJ vii. 850b, 855b. Leigh apparently supported the calling of a new Parliament, but he was anxious to impose qualifications upon its membership – probably in the hope of ensuring a godly church settlement. On 9 March, the unlikely pairing of Leigh and the regicide and die-hard commonwealthsman, Thomas Chaloner, were tellers in a division on the qualifications for parliamentary membership to be added to the bill for dissolving the Rump and summoning a Convention.109CJ vii. 868b. Leigh and Chaloner wanted the bill referred to a committee of the whole House, which they obviously felt would be more likely to add suitable qualifications. In the event, they lost the division to the ‘Presbyterian’ grandees Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire and Sir Anthony Irby, and the bill was referred to a select committee.

Leigh almost certainly welcomed the Restoration, but he received no preferment from the restored monarchy and nor does he appear to have stood for re-election to Parliament. He marked the return of the king with another historical study, Choice Observations of all the Kings of England from the Saxons to the Death of King Charles the First, although an expression of the author’s disillusionment and desire for ‘a way of retirement’ that one authority has detected in this work is in fact a quotation from a 1648 pamphlet by the Independent divine John Goodwin.110Leigh, Choice Observations, 218-19; Goodwin, Neophytopresbyteros, or the Yongling Elder, or Novice-Presbyter (1648), 137 (E.447.27); ‘Edward Leigh’, Oxford DNB. Part of Leigh’s purpose in writing this tract was apparently to clear the Long Parliament, and by implication himself as one its Members, of any responsibility for the regicide: ‘The general’s commission [either that of the earl of Essex or of Sir Thomas Fairfax*], the covenant, the Parliament’s declarations and engagements both to the king and Scots, were for the preservation of the king’s person ... I may justly vindicate the Parliament of England from having any hand in this abominable action’.111Leigh, Choice Observations, 219.

Leigh mostly recycled or expanded his old work after 1661; his one substantially new piece – Three Diatribes or Discourses on Foreign Travel, Money and the Measurement of Distance (1671) – proved to be his last.112Leigh, Three Diatribes. He died on 2 June 1671 and was buried on 6 June in Rushall church. In his will, he directed that his polyglot Bible, his ‘lexicons’ and all his published works be chained in a cabinet for the use of his sons and successive generations. He charged his estate with legacies amounting to about £100, including a bequest of £10 to ‘poor ministers and Christians’ (perhaps a euphemism for ejected ministers and their congregations) in Stafford. He commanded his eldest son Henry to ‘honour and please God’, and his two younger sons ‘to make religion their great business’.113PROB11/358, ff. 187r-v. Leigh was the only member of his family to sit in Parliament.