BURGOYNE, Roger (1618-77), of Sutton, Beds. and Wroxall, Warws.

Pious and prosperous, with extensive estates in both Bedfordshire and Warwickshire and a reputation for the patronage of godly clergy, the Burgoynes occupied an eminent position in the political life of the midlands gentry. In the early seventeenth century their principal seat was Sutton, in Bedfordshire, and the young Roger Burgoyne grew up in a household which was a model of Jacobean Calvinist godliness, under the spiritual influence of the divine, Oliver Bowles, who held the parish living on the nomination of Sir John Burgoyne. At Cambridge, Bowles had been tutor to John Preston, renowned Calvinist preacher, sometime chaplain to Charles, prince of Wales (the future Charles I) and between 1622 and 1628 master of Emmanuel College. The college retained a puritan character when Burgoyne entered it in 1634.32Al. Cant.; S. Clark, Lives of Thirty-Two English Divines (1677), 76. Burgoyne may have shared the view of many of the fellows that ‘the true Protestant religion’ - the religion of Preston and Bowles - was besieged and under threat, both in the university and in the country at large. On Burgoyne’s entry to Lincoln’s Inn, his single surety was Samuel Browne*, a fellow Bedfordshire man and senior barrister of the inn, who had earlier served as the mentor, at his father’s request, to the young Oliver St John*.33L. Inn Lib. ms BIa6 (Adm. Reg. 1627-40), f. 130v; J.L. Sanford, Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion (1858), 389.

Burgoyne joined Lincoln’s Inn at a time when it was a-buzz with discussion of the great cause célèbre of that year – the trials of Henry Burton, Dr John Bastwick, and the prominent critic of the Laudian episcopate and member of the inn, William Prynne*. Another senior member of the inn, St John, was acting as counsel for Viscount Saye and Sele (William Fiennes) and John Hampden* in their challenge to the legality of Ship Money. By the spring of 1638, a few months after his twentieth birthday, Burgoyne had obtained a licence to travel abroad for three years.34CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 423. As a result of this extended education, he took little or no part in local affairs before the calling of the Long Parliament, was named to none of the commissions issuing out of chancery during the 1630s, and had few political assets beyond his family’s prominence and reputation for godliness.

Early political career, 1640-3

Bedfordshire was strongly polarized between supporters and opponents of the ‘court interest’ in the aftermath of the king’s failure to arrest the Scottish invasion of August 1640. On the day for the election of the two knights of the shire on 19 October the godly interest was represented by the Burgoynes’ neighbour, Sir Oliver Luke* of Cople (six miles to the west of the Burgoyne seat at Sutton), who seems to have taken the second place without a contest. The senior place was expected to be taken by Thomas Wentworth*, Lord Wentworth (the eldest son of the lord lieutenant of the county, Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Cleveland, and a future royalist), who would normally have expected to have taken the seat unopposed. On this occasion, however, the young Burgoyne stood against him - probably not in the expectation of winning, but as a stalking horse candidate to test the strength of opposition to the ‘court’ candidate, Wentworth. In the event, Burgoyne attracted support to the extent that although Wentworth was declared the victor, the contest had been close enough for both parties to claim the right to be seated in the Commons. Burgoyne’s disappointment, however, was only to be short-lived. When the king summoned Wentworth to the Lords, with a view to strengthening the royal interest in the upper House (25 Nov.), a writ for a new election was issued. Once again there was a contest, along similar lines to that of 19 October, but this time Burgoyne emerged as the victor, defeating Sir Lewis Dyve, stepson of John Digby†, 1st earl of Bristol, and a figure who was later to be one of the leaders of the mobilization of a royalist party in the county. Burgoyne had taken his seat by 4 March 1641, when he offered to bring in £500 for the cause of the king’s army in the north.35Procs. LP ii. 628. Anti-popery was a factor in this contest, as Dyve was rumoured to be a Catholic. The conduct of this election, in which Dyve was alleged to have detained the writ, was referred to an ad hoc committee which later turned its attention to other election disputes, but Burgoyne’s standing was never seriously questioned.36CJ ii. 40b, 45, 53, 68; Procs. LP i. 471, ii. 728-9.

In his early months in the House, Burgoyne was noticeable as an anti-papist, thus bringing with him to Westminster something of the flavour of his election contest. His first committee appointment, which had come on 8 March, days after his entering the House, was on the bill for disabling the clergy from temporal office, a blow in the cause of anti-Arminianism.37CJ ii. 99a. On 20 October, his servant took the parliamentary orders against innovations in religion to the churchwarden of St Giles Cripplegate, London, who failed to see the point of removing the communion rails and described MPs as ‘asses’. Burgoyne must have supported Sir Simonds D’Ewes* in haling the churchwarden to the bar of the Commons. Behind the hapless churchwarden was a more important target, the Arminian dean of Ely and vicar of the London parish, Dr William Fuller.38D’Ewes (C), 17, 98. On 1 September, he presented a petition on behalf of 25 cashiered army sergeants, which succeeded in producing an order from the House that they should each receive a payment of £40.39Procs. LP vi. 634. This interest in military affairs was more than a passing one. Burgoyne was on the committee for the more effective raising of troops to quell the Irish rebellion, and on 23 December, he revealed to the House a rumoured plot in Bedfordshire by a hundred Catholics who had assembled there; the ringleaders were sent for, and he was sent to Bedfordshire to substantiate the allegations.40CJ ii. 305b, 354a; D’Ewes (C), 335-6.

In February 1642, Burgoyne’s profile as knight of the shire was enhanced by his role as one of the three Members who with the Lords presented the Militia Ordinance to the king: he seems to have been selected as a substitute for a peer on this occasion (14 Feb.). A few days later, Burgoyne was named deputy lieutenant for Bedfordshire, and on 16 March his father led the men from the county who petitioned for the speedy execution of the Militia Ordinance.41PJ ii. 46; CJ ii. 431b, 486a. On 13 June, he pledged to bring in two horses to defend Parliament. Thereafter, his involvement in Commons business fell off markedly, to judge by the record of the Journal, and this may have owed much to his preoccupation with arrangements for his marriage to the daughter of a London merchant, Charles Snellinge: the marriage settlement bestowed on Burgoyne the manor and house of Wroxall, Warwickshire.42Warws. RO, CR 113/10. Nevertheless, he was in the House by December, when he moved that the property of a supporter of the king in Bedfordshire should be sequestered: he still maintained a hawkish line on the enemies of Parliament.43HMC 7th Rep. 443. In the early part of 1643, Burgoyne was despatched to Bedfordshire to bring in the weekly assessments, and was a natural choice as a member of the sequestration committee.44CJ iii. 16a; A. and O. On 8 June he took the parliamentary Covenant which committed those who took it to support the forces of Parliament against those of the king so long as they were controlled by ‘papists in open revolt’.45CJ iii. 120a.

Detached correspondent and critic of radicals, 1643-6

Burgoyne reported in the summer of 1643 to Sir Ralph Verney on the search for royalist plate, and on the military successes of Parliament. This was to be the start of a long correspondence with Verney, in which Burgoyne kept his friend abreast of public affairs; it was also the start, although Burgoyne himself could hardly have known it, of his slow but steady detachment from politics. He had no confidence in his own verbal skills; his tongue, he wrote to Verney, ‘hath little of oratory in it’.46Mems. of the Verney Fam. i. 389. There were two more important causes of his disengagement, both detailed in his letters to Verney: the demands of his domestic life, particularly much family illness, and his commitment to acting as his friend’s agent, in staving off the parliamentary machine of penal taxation. ‘I am not knowing of public affairs for the present, I have been so taken up with private’ he wrote in October, confessing himself a ‘stranger to the House’. The following month he was given formal leave to go to the country, which must have regularized his unofficial absenteeism.47Verney ms mic 636/5, Burgoyne to Verney, 12 Oct., 14 Oct. 1643.

Burgoyne and Verney both sympathized with the parliamentary cause and both shared an interest in non-episcopal, Erastian forms of church government: in 1643 they eagerly awaited the appearance in print of a sermon by Thomas Coleman, a prominent member of the Westminster Assembly.48Verney ms mic 636/5, same to same, 7 Oct., 12 Oct., 7 Nov. 1643. But the Solemn League and Covenant with the Scots divided them. Burgoyne was at first an enthusiast for the Scots’ invasion and for Presbyterianism, writing in February 1644 of the Covenanters’ ‘brave and ... most resolute declaration, full of wisdom and piety’.49Verney ms mic 636/5, same to same, 7 Feb. 1644. Verney, by contrast, was unable to contemplate the surrender of authority in the Church of England implied in the deal struck with the Scots, therefore refused the Covenant, and went into voluntary exile rather than face the punitive consequences of remaining at home. By mid-September 1643, Burgoyne was committed to promoting Verney’s case in the Commons, and in October enlisted the help of his father, Sir John Burgoyne, in winning concessions for him.50Verney ms mic 636/5, same to same, 29 Aug., 23 Oct., 26 Oct. 1643. Burgoyne was on the issue of punishing refusers of the Covenant a dove, as so often on other matters; when the committee met to consider these cases, including Verney’s, he hoped it would ‘prove not a monster’.51Mems. of the Verney Fam. i. 305.

At the beginning of 1644, Burgoyne approved the expulsions of MPs from the House ‘very deservedly’ for supporting the king.52Verney ms mic 636/5, Burgoyne to Verney, 7 Feb. 1644. When Nathaniel Fiennes I* was threatened with execution for betraying Bristol, Burgoyne doubted the seriousness of the sentence: ‘it is possible he may live as long as you or I’.53Mems. of the Verney Fam. i. 308. His usual detached attitude prevailed when moderates such as the 3rd earl of Essex (Robert Devereux), were coming under fierce criticism at Westminster for their dilatory conduct of the war and their alleged lenience towards royalists; Burgoyne seems to have had little time for those who were leading the attack. When, in the spring of 1644, Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham, was ousted by Edward Montagu†, 2nd earl of Manchester as commander-in-chief of the Eastern Association, Burgoyne thought an injustice had been perpetrated: ‘I spake with him my self yesterday,’ he wrote to Verney, regretting that ‘there hath been too many aspersions cast upon a man of so much honour’.54Verney ms mic. 636/5, Burgoyne to Verney, 11 Apr. 1644. He was at Westminster throughout the debates on the Self-Denying Ordinance during the winter of 1644-5, and, once again, his sympathies seem to have been with the losing side – in particular with the earl of Essex, who was ousted by his command as a result of the military reform programme enacted between February and April 1645. ‘I do not hear to the contrary but that my lord general – as in all things, so in this particular – carries himself very nobly, not expressing very much discontent: if the service may be done, he cares not by what hand it is.’55Verney ms mic. 636/6, same to same, 27 Feb. 1645.

In spite of his estate in Warwickshire, as knight of the shire for Bedfordshire Burgoyne occupied a senior place among the commissioners nominated in the various wartime assessment ordinances there. In April 1644, he was busy with Sir Beauchamp St John*, Sir Oliver Luke*, and Samuel Browne* in getting in subscriptions for a loan in Bedfordshire to support the Scots army.56‘Civil War papers of Sir William Boteler’, 37-8. By August, he was wholeheartedly behind peace moves in the House of Commons, and set great store by moves in both Houses to respond to the overtures of the king, even though the pessimistic assessment by Edward Hyde* of what he perceived as Parliament’s lack of commitment to peace turned out to be more realistic than Burgoyne’s.57Verney ms mic. 636/6, Burgoyne to Verney, 8 Aug., 21 Nov. 1644; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 417. Ever optimistic about the chances of peace, Burgoyne also believed in the winter of 1644 that a church settlement would be achieved which would vindicate the allegations being made against the Independents. The new church would prove that Parliament would not tolerate ‘all kinds of sects or schisms’.58Verney ms mic. 636/6, same to same, 27 Nov. 1644. He was, it seems, still adhering to the reform programme advanced in 1641, and appeared unwilling to work out for himself the implications of the divisions within Parliament which were becoming all too evident.

The burden of unpalatable local tax collection – ‘an unacceptable service’ to Burgoyne – weighed heavily on him in the early months of 1645, and the optimism of his letters gave way to a more resentful tone.59Verney ms mic. 636/6, same to same, 4 Mar. 1645; CJ iv. 43b, 47a, 86b. He ‘could never trust’ soldiers, he declared to Verney, in February.60Mems. of the Verney Fam. i. 322. His visits to Bedfordshire were in aid of supporting the Scots army, and there is more than a hint that a change of heart on the Scots lay behind his continuing disengagement from the day-to-day activity of the House. Nevertheless, despite his very few committee appointments, he continued to attend the Commons in the spring. When, for instance, all MPs who were garrison commanders (among them, Sir Samuel Luke*, governor of Newport Pagnell) were disqualified from office under the terms of the Self-Denying Ordinance, Burgoyne was closely involved in the process by which their successors were chosen. ‘Both myself and [my] country men [his fellow Bedfordshire MPs] have all this afternoon been putting in governors into our garrison towns,’ he wrote to Verney on 17 April 1645, ‘instead of those Parliament-men that now by the [Self-Denying] Ordinance are outed.’61Verney ms mic. 636/6, Burgoyne to Verney, 17 Apr. 1645. In June, he complained that one committee on which he did sit had been in session until 10 p.m. one evening.62Verney ms mic. 636/6, same to same, 5 June 1645.

Absentee commentator and seeker of peace, 1646-8

In the first half of 1646, Burgoyne mostly stayed away from the Commons, detained at home first by his own illness, then by a visitation of smallpox upon his pregnant wife, which both she and her baby survived. He began making day trips to the House from his house at Chiswick in late June.63Verney ms mic. 636/7, same to same, 26 Feb., 9, 16, 23, 30 Apr., 4, 25 June 1646. For all Burgoyne’s closeness to the Verneys, objects of Parliament’s disapproval, he retained an undimmed sense of the justice of the parliamentarian cause and of punishing those whom he regarded as disturbers of the kingdom’s peace. It was not the generality of men who had supported the king that Burgoyne saw as being to blame for the civil war. To him, the culprits were a relatively small and well-defined group of royalist incendiaries. And it was this group which the parliamentary peace proposals completed in the summer of 1646, the Newcastle Propositions, properly singled out for punishment and exclusion from office. In July, as the relatively severe terms of the Propositions were readied for sending to the king, Burgoyne was hopeful that they would form the basis of a secure peace, adding, with evident satisfaction, that, if they did so, ‘I am confident [they] will be no small trouble to those that have been troublers of this kingdom.’64Verney ms mic. 636/7, Burgoyne to Verney, [-] July 1646.

In March 1647, Burgoyne secured leave to go the country, probably to Wroxall, and expected to be away for a month.65Verney ms mic. 636/8, same to same, 11 Mar. 1647; CJ v. 112a. The record of his leave of absence was the last mention of him in the Journal for this Parliament, but he was evidently in the House in the summer, albeit in the role more of an observer than of a participant. He reported to Verney the attempt to reduce the army, and fearfully recorded the advance of the New Model towards London in July: ‘What the end of these their actions may be, God he only knows: we fear God is just in his punishments’.66Verney ms mic. 636/8, same to same, 15 July 1647. He wished he could leave England to join Verney in exile, but he feared his wife would not agree.67Mems. of the Verney Fam. i. 363. He correctly advised Verney that in those circumstances, his long-running campaign to clear himself of suspicion was unlikely to make progress; the previous February he had suggested to Verney that William Pierrepont*, prominent among the Independents, might be best placed to help him.68Verney ms mic. 636/8, Burgoyne to Verney, 25 Feb. 1647. In August Burgoyne was distracted by the death of his eldest son, and was away from the House, but reported the flight of the Independents to the army: ‘Our worthy Speaker deserted us’, he wrote to Verney, signalling his disapproval.69Verney ms mic. 636/8, same to same, 2 Aug. 1647. Nevertheless, he seems to have viewed the arrival of the army in London as offering the Houses some welcome protection from disturbance: ‘Time will not permit me to reckon up all the benefits which we are likely to enjoy by them’.70Verney ms mic. 636/8, Burgoyne to Verney, 30 Aug. 1647.

Forced to attend the Commons in October by the summons aimed more at the alienated Presbyterians than at disengaged absentees like himself, Burgoyne was hopeful that a full House, dominated by the Independents, would produce a measure of relief for tender consciences like that of Verney. The continuing turbulence of politics in London, with Parliament caught between the pressures of the army on the one hand and the City on the other, caused him to despair of any stable settlement, and he wished the clock could be turned back: ‘I pray God grant us some moderation though it prove episcopal’. By the end of the year, he was sure that ‘without the infinite mercy of God we shall inevitably turn into absolute confusion’. 71Verney ms mic. 636/8, same to same, 14 Oct., 2 Dec., 30 Dec. 1647. It was his dread of a reopening of a war by whatever means that motivated him to abhor the second civil war in Wales, and to fear the riot of Surrey men in and around the precincts of the palace of Westminster in May 1648, which Burgoyne narrowly escaped witnessing. By June he was considering his absence from the House a providence of God. In July, he sped out to the country to protect his property against the horsemen of George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, and other rebels, noting grimly that the horses of Lord Saye and Sele (William Fiennes) were taken: ‘honest men may suffer too as well as he’. Presumably it was Saye’s political dexterity and ability to ride the political storm that made Burgoyne disapprove of ‘Old Subtlety’.72Verney ms mic. 636/8, same to same, 30 Mar. 1648; 636/9, 18 May, 1 June, 6 July 1648. John Lilburne and Henry Marten* were also among Burgoyne’s bêtes noires, and he approved of Parliament’s despatch of troops against Marten, who was armed in the name of the people; Burgoyne was confident that they would ‘lay his regiment of whores upon their backs’.73Verney ms mic. 636/9, same to same, 17, 24 Aug. 1648.

He greatly resented the apparently orchestrated petitioning campaign that assailed the Parliament in May 1648, urging the two Houses to reopen the face-to-face negotiations with the king that had been abruptly curtailed by the Vote of No Addresses (3 Jan. 1648). By May 1648, however, the threat of a Scottish invasion in support of the king had become sufficiently acute, that, resentfully, Burgoyne could see no alternative to complying in some measure with the Scots’ demand that they should once again be involved in settling both kingdoms. ‘I am sorry we should be brought so low,’ he wrote in exasperation to Verney

as to be necessitated to such a compliance with those whom heretofore we disdained to admit as counsellors, much less as rulers, but, for ought I perceive, we must be rid by them the second time. They [the Scots] began; the City, Assembly, army, have had their successive turns and gone the round; and now enter Scot again; from them all, libera nos.74Verney ms mic. 636/9, same to same, 4 May 1648.

Burgoyne remained at Westminster for most of the summer of 1648. His letters during this time reveal an increasing impatience with the county petitioners, still demanding the revocation of the Vote of No Addresses, and with the City, still dominated by political and religious Presbyterians and doing all it could to hamstring the efforts of Sir Thomas Fairfax* to quell the royalist insurrections in Kent and Essex.75Verney ms mic. 636/9, same to same, 18 May, 1 June 1648. Burgoyne admired at least some of the political Independents and appreciated their influence in the House in maintaining a coherent show of political authority, despite the threats to any semblance of stability from the City, the Scots and the advocates of popular sovereignty. When, in August, Sir William Masham*, the Independent and hard-line member of the Essex county committee, was released by the Colchester royalists who had taken him hostage, Burgoyne was only too pleased to see the return of this tough-minded Independent to the Commons’ benches. ‘Sir William Massam is released,’ he informed Verney on 17 August, ‘and therefore I trust things will proceed orderly in the House’.76Verney ms mic. 636/9, same to same, 17 Aug. 1648.

Yet, while he may have resented the attempts by the Scots and the City to stampede the Commons into making a hasty agreement with the king in the summer of 1648, once the opportunity presented itself for a settlement in which Parliament negotiated from a position of strength, Burgoyne was keen that the Commons should exploit it. Once the Scots army under James Hamilton, 1st duke of Hamilton [S] had been defeated at Preston (17-19 Aug.), Burgoyne was among those who hoped that the renewal of negotiations with the king at Newport, Isle of Wight, would bring about a lasting settlement. Should Parliament fail, MPs well knew that there were Levellers and sectaries all too keen to impose their own radical constitutional schemes; and that was a threat which, Burgoyne hoped, would concentrate MPs’ minds.77Verney ms mic. 636/9, same to same, 14 Sept. 1648. He remained happy to be outside the ruling group in Parliament, and joked to Verney in October during the share-out of high legal offices to the Independents and their friends that he might get a job as court crier.78Verney ms mic. 636/9, same to same, 12 Oct. 1648. Nevertheless, he was confident in October that Charles would accept the terms of the treaty because he had accepted ‘the guilt of all the blood that hath been shed’, suggesting how far the thinking of the army had extended even to long-standing advocates of peace like Burgoyne.79Verney ms mic. 636/9, same to same, 19 Oct. 1648. He was astonished at how ‘his holiness’ Oliver Cromwell* was prepared to favour the Presbyterians, given his former antipathy to them, but his reporting of the four-hour reading of the army Remonstrance in the Commons on 20 November was neutral, giving little away about Burgoyne’s reading of events.80Verney ms mic. 636/9, same to same, 20 Nov. 1648.

Political retiree and reluctant MP, 1649-58

Burgoyne may by late November 1648 have accepted the army’s perspective, for certainly by 7 December he had accepted Pride’s Purge, and appealed to Verney ‘whether the army had not very just cause to except against these that ventured so desperately to undo the army and all the godly people’, denouncing the ‘juggling’ Treaty of Newport. Not for the first time, Burgoyne’s sense of disappointment and betrayal, after previously high hopes, was making him reverse his position. His previous support for the treaty made him vulnerable, of course, but he was not ‘meddled with’ (as he put it to Verney) at the purge, and he actually attended the House on 7 December, the day immediately after the army’s coup. He expected ‘very suddenly to be repelled [from the House] though not imprisoned’.81Verney ms mic. 636/9, same to same, 7 Dec. 1648. He left before anything happened to him, and wrote on 2 January 1649 that the 4th would mark a month (28 days) since he was last in the Commons. By the beginning of January, even before the Commons had set up the high court of justice to try the king, Burgoyne had decided to leave London and to have no more to do with political life at Westminster. ‘I have now retired myself to all the privacy I can,’ he wrote to Verney, ‘and could be content to be a monk or hermit rather than a statesman, and, as the present conjuncture of affairs stand[s], I am as likely to be the one as the other’.82Verney ms mic. 636/9, same to same, 2 Jan. 1649.

Burgoyne abstained from political activity almost completely during the six years which followed the army’s coup. He regretted that the revolt by the Levellers in September 1649 revealed divisions among the soldiers ‘formerly so unanimous in the cause of God’, but ascribed the rising to ‘knaves’ among them.83Mems. of the Verney Fam. i. 449. The legislators of the Rump Parliament seem to have regarded as him as hostile to the new republican régime, and for most of the 1650s, his name (like that of his father) was absent from the local assessment and administrative commissions. He retained a place on the Warwickshire bench, but as he was inactive in or out of sessions, he may have remained a magistrate virtually by oversight. But he applauded the ‘absolute overthrow of our enemies’ in the victory of the government forces over Charles Stuart at Worcester in September 1651.84Mems. of the Verney Fam. i. 482-3. In September 1653 he was appointed a magistrate: whether this was a genuine re-appointment or confirmation of a place that had lapsed by default is unclear. Not until the summer of 1657, by which time the Cromwellian protectorate had taken on a distinctly conservative hue, did the Burgoynes find themselves named to a local commission - to raise funds for the politically unimpeachable cause of war against Spain.85A. and O. Retired to Wroxall, he lived the life of a private gentleman, and appointed a succession of Presbyterian clergy to the living, which was technically a chaplaincy of the house there. Among them were William Cooke and Luke Milborne, both expelled from other livings in 1662.86Calamy Revised, 132, 349. At Sutton, he was the patron of a young divine of a different hue, Edward Stillingfleet, who personified reconciliation between the Presbyterians and the Anglicans, and who went on to a glittering career in the restored Church of England. Stillingfleet dedicated Origines Sacrae (1662) to Burgoyne, describing his patron as a ‘rare mixture of true piety and the highest civility ... in a most sweet, affable and obliging temper’.87Wroxall Abbey Recs. pp. xxxvii, xxxviii. In 1657, Burgoyne was named a commissioner for ejecting scandalous ministers in Warwickshire, further confirmation of his sympathies with those building the Cromwellian state church.88SP25/78, p. 237.

He was brought back reluctantly into public life in the 1656 Parliament. Early in July 1656, he confessed that talk of a Parliament ‘a little discomposes me’, and later that month confided to Sir Ralph Verney in cypher that ‘the thing that troubles me is the election, what to do in it if it cannot be avoided is the question, and now you know the only reason why I take this journey at this time’. The journey in question was to a sister’s in Yorkshire, remote from anywhere where he might stand as a candidate. Thinking himself safe 15 miles beyond York, he was even more discomposed by news on 1 September of his own election for Warwickshire, ‘such unwelcome news of an election at Warwick, which does much disorder and afflict me’.89Verney ms mic. 636/14, Burgoyne to Verney, 7 July, 26 July, 1 Sept. 1656. But by this time, Burgoyne was perfectly reconciled to the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, and may well have preferred the Erastian efforts of the government to create a state church in a context of toleration to the uncertainties and contradictions of the Rump on this question.

It is always difficult to assess whether Burgoyne is being ironic in his letters, but he even expressed some interest, jokingly or not, in an office at the court of the lord protector.90Mems. of the Verney Fam. ii. 8. He deplored a plot against Cromwell, discovered in January 1657, hoping that the plotters would be caught and executed, and was thus probably enthusiastic in his work on the committee for the bill for the protector’s security, to which he was appointed in September 1656.91Verney ms mic. 636/15, Burgoyne to Verney, 15 Jan. 1657; CJ vii. 429a. He admired the personality of Cromwell, in his eyes ‘noble and upright’.92Mems. of the Verney Fam. ii. 34. As he reported the debates on whether the decimation tax should be continued, his chief anxiety was that there would be a remonstrance from the army, and a re-opening of the troubles of a decade earlier.93Verney ms mic. 636/15, Burgoyne to Verney, 29 Jan. 1657. As in the Long Parliament, Burgoyne maintained a distrust of courtiers, albeit Cromwellian ones, and remarked on 12 March 1657 on their absence from the House during the debates on the Other House: ‘they are ashamed some of them to appear for that cause against which they have been so formerly so violent, and to speak against [the Other House] were to speak against their own conscience or at least wise interest’.94Verney ms mic. 636/15, same to same, 12 Mar. 1657. In this Parliament Burgoyne made no more impression on the diarists than he had done during the 1640s. Thomas Burton* noticed his name on only one occasion, when he was excused at the call of the House on 31 December 1656, but Burgoyne appeared in the chamber ‘just as the vote passed’.95Burton’s Diary, i. 287. He sat on five committees, two concerned with church organization.96CJ vii. 449b, 588a.

Final years, 1659-77

With the rule of Protector Richard Cromwell* in an ever increasing state of crisis, Burgoyne obtained a licence to travel ‘beyond seas’ in the company of two others, though the purpose of this travel, and indeed whether it was actually undertaken, is unclear.97CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 562. He did attend the restored Long Parliament in 1660, demonstrating that he considered himself one of the excluded Members of 1648, and was named in the last week of February to important committees to review qualifications for membership of Parliament, to draft a militia act, and to consider how best to settle ministers.98CJ vii. 848b, 849a, 855b. These appointments suggest a revival of interest in public life almost to match his enthusiasm of 1641, but he seems not to have taken any further interest in standing for Parliament. Burgoyne saw the end of the Rump as a political death: ‘after many sad groans at last we did expire and now are in another world’. As for himself, he also was ‘dead as to a politic capacity’.99Mems. of the Verney Fam. ii. 160. He was, however, perfectly acceptable to the restored monarchy, being named to local government commissions both in Bedfordshire and Warwickshire.100SR. He lived mostly at Wroxall, where nine of his children were baptized between 1653 and 1674. When he died on 16 September 1677, possibly of some gastric illness, he was buried five days later at Sutton, where a daughter of his was baptized a month after his death.101Par. Reg. of Wroxall, 10-15; Genealogia Bedfordiensis, 283; Mems. of the Verney Fam. ii. 323. He left bequests of £1,000 or £1,200 to each of his five older daughters.102PROB11/355, f. 139. Two of his great-grandsons were MPs, one being General John Burgoyne, who surrendered a British army to the American colonists on 17 October 1777.103HP Commons 1715-1754, ‘Sir Roger Burgoyne’; HP Commons 1754-1790, ‘John Burgoyne’.