BOURCHIER, Sir John (c.1595-1660), of Beningborough Hall, Newton-on-Ouse, Yorks.

Bourchier was descended from an illegitimate son of the 2nd Baron Berners, whose family was of Norman extraction and had been granted the barony of Bourchier in the mid-fourteenth century.49Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. i. 305; CP. Bourchier’s paternal grandfather, Ralph Bourchier†, had inherited the manor of Beningborough, near York, in 1557 and had established it as the family’s principal residence. The first of his line to enter Parliament, he had sat for several boroughs and as a knight of the shire for Yorkshire during the Elizabethan period.50VCH N. Riding, ii. 162; HP Commons, 1558-1603. Bourchier’s father, William Bourchier, had been destined to assume a similarly prominent position in the county’s affairs, but in 1598, when John Bourchier was about 3 years old, he had been certified a lunatic. With Ralph Bourchier having died that same year, the guardianship of William and his children was granted to his wife and her brother, the Essex puritan grandee Sir Francis Barrington†.51WARD9/94, ff. 473v, 649v; C142/254/69; HMC Hatfield, viii. 236; xi. 233. When William’s eldest son died unmarried in about 1620, the family estate passed to the recently-knighted Sir John Bourchier, the future MP.52C142/337/98; WARD9/94, f. 473v. It was probably the Barringtons who arranged his marriage in about 1620 to the Suffolk heiress Anne Rolfe, whose father agreed to settle a ‘large inheritance’ upon his son-in-law.53WARD9/94, f. 650 Granted custody of the Bourchier estate by the crown in 1624, Sir John owed the court of wards £2,200 in rents by 1626.54WARD9/677, ff. 5-6; Cliffe, Yorks. 350. He should not be confused, as he sometimes has been, with his uncle and namesake who was returned for Hull in 1614, or with the Sir John Bourchier who was returned to the Irish Parliament in 1613.55HP Commons, 1603-29, ‘Sir John Bourchier (Bowcher)’; ‘P. Taylor, ‘The Restoration Bourchiers of Beningborough Grange’, Yorks. Arch. Jnl. lx. 127.

Bourchier’s addition to the magistrates’ bench of all three Yorkshire ridings in the summer of 1625 was not sufficient to ensure his compliance with the Forced Loan in 1627 – the North Riding loan commissioners informing the privy council that ‘he cannot satisfy himself to consent to subscribe to the loan or to pay the money’.56SP16/71/64, f. 94. It is not known what action, if any, the council took against him. His resistance to the Forced Loan was probably linked to his godly religious convictions. The influence of the Barringtons, not to mention that of his mother, who had been raised in the godly household of Henry Hastings, 3rd earl of Huntingdon, inspired in Bourchier a life-long commitment to the advancement of the Reformed religion.57C. Cross, The Puritan Earl: the Life of Henry Hastings, Third Earl of Huntingdon (1966), 59; Cliffe, Yorks. 347. Through the Barringtons he was linked with some or the kingdom’s leading puritans, and he had talks early in 1631 with two of the family’s kinsmen, Oliver St John* and Sir William Masham*, about a possible match between a cousin of Masham’s and the godly East Riding knight Sir William Strickland*.58Barrington Lttrs. 35, 181, 182, 251; Cliffe, Yorks. 310. Bourchier’s puritan sympathies are also evident in his patronage of godly ministers. In 1631, he presented the nonconformist minister William Williamson to his rectory of Newton-on-Ouse (although Williamson’s incumbency was successfully challenged by the crown); and in 1643, he would write to his cousin, the leading Essex parliamentarian Sir Thomas Barrington*, recommending the godly preacher Thomas Calvert for a vacant living.59IND1/17000, f. 32v; C2/CHAS1/E7/52; C2/CHAS1/E2/56; Eg. 2647, f. 306; Marchant, Puritans, 292. ‘All I aim at’, he told Barrington, ‘is the glory of God’. He would write in a similarly evangelical vein to the Yorkshire parliamentarian grandee Ferdinando 2nd Baron Fairfax* in 1647, urging him to help settle a ‘learned and conscionable ministry’ upon the ‘ignorant and sottish people’ of Yorkshire ‘that the gospel may flourish in these parts’.60Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 337-8.

Having refused to pay the Forced Loan in 1627, Bourchier fell further into royal disfavour early in the personal rule, when he was proceeded against by Thomas Viscount Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†, the future earl of Strafford), the president of the council of the north, for encroachment upon the royal forest of Galtres, north west of York. Bourchier claimed that part of Galtres lay within his grange of Beningborough and that he had continued his grandfather’s practice of taking timber from the forest and grazing sheep there.61VCH N. Riding, ii. 160; Cliffe, Yorks. 302-3. In 1632, the crown obtained a judgment in the court of exchequer against Bourchier, although the court agreed to grant him 95 acres in the forest in full settlement of his ‘pretended’ claims.62E126/4, ff. 37v-49; E134/7CHAS1/EAST11; C24/590, pt. 1, no. 23; SP16/211/31, ff. 45-63; CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 268. Bourchier later alleged that his consent to this settlement had only been ‘wrested from him and yielded unto [in order] to free himself from suits and oppressions’.63CJ vi. 613b His resentment at what he regarded as the distraint of his inheritance became clear in the spring of 1633, when he ‘riotously’ broke down the king’s newly-made enclosures within the forest.64Strafforde Letters, i. 86, 249; R. Reid, Council in the North (1921), 421. Bourchier was promptly imprisoned for seven weeks and then tried by the council of the north, which fined him £1,800 and detained him at its pleasure.65Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P24-5/36; Strafforde Letters, i. 249.

When Wentworth (who had by this time taken up his office as lord deputy of Ireland) was informed of Bourchier’s transgression he showed little surprise.

As concerning Sir John Bourchier his insolent carriage, it is his daily bread. The man is little better than mad. One more grain would weigh him down to a direct fury, and if anything [can] save him it must be by letting him feel his fault fondly, for so ... they use men in Bedlam.66Strafforde Letters, i. 88.

In the summer of 1633, Wentworth, at the council of the north’s request, interceded with the king for a reduction in Bourchier’s fine. Bourchier, he claimed, had acted

rather out of animosity towards me ... than with the least insolent thought towards his Majesty. Besides, he comes of a mad kindred, his father having many years lived and died a lunatic, this gentleman [is] generally observed to inherit a frenzic [sic] constitution from his parent and to be more than half mad already; out of which reason, I confess, I do not desire to see his ruin and that which is more, the overthrow of his lady with a great number of children.67Strafforde Letters, i. 249.

Bourchier’s fine was reduced accordingly to £1,000, and although still in the council’s custody he was allowed to journey to Ireland at some point during 1634, probably to crave Wentworth’s pardon. On the lord deputy’s advice, Bourchier petitioned the council, requesting bail upon the security of Sir Henry Slingsby† of Scriven, but his request was denied.68Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P14/246. Bourchier was permitted to return to Beningborough in October 1634 on his own security and that of his friend, the godly North Riding gentleman Henry Darley* (Bourchier and Darley were captains in the same North Riding militia regiment, and Bourchier had made Darley, the future royalist Henry Slingesby*, and Bourchier’s cousin, the future regicide Thomas Mauleverer*, trustees of his estate).69Add. 28082, f. 80v; C54/2882/9; Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P14/246. He was required to pay his fine by regular installments – and, in support of a later claim for compensation, alleged that upon his failure to make one payment he had been sued by the attorney-general ‘and £800 ... decreed against him, with costs and damages, and contempts followed against him, so that he was forced ... to make present payment or else he should have been imprisoned’.70CJ vi. 612b. Bourchier wrote to Wentworth in January 1635, pleading with him to intercede with the king for the fine to be waived altogether, and by September he was contemplating another trip to Ireland. He was still seeking to have his fine lifted or reduced in 1637, when he petitioned the king asking that his case be referred entirely to Wentworth’s consideration.71Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P17/267, 24-5/36.

Bourchier’s complex relationship with Wentworth – based either on fear or a sense of obligation towards him – may partly explain his failure to join Darley, the Fairfaxes and many other Yorkshire gentlemen over the summer of 1640 in obstructing the efforts of Wentworth (by now earl of Strafford) and the king to mobilise the county’s trained bands against the invading Scottish Covenanters. But if he did feel in any way grateful towards Strafford, the opportunity to exploit the latter’s unpopularity at the beginning of the Long Parliament proved too much for him to resist, and in February 1641 he petitioned the Lords for relief against the earl, accusing him of having taken away his inheritance in the forest of Galtres and having caused him to be fined and imprisoned unjustly.72CJ vi. 612b. Nevertheless, it is significant that although Bourchier’s case was used by the prosecution at Strafford’s trial in April 1641 to illustrate the earl’s allegedly ‘exorbitant and unlawful’ exercise of power as president of the council of the north, this charge, as Strafford observed, was ‘not insisted upon’ by Bourchier himself.73Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 137-8, 146. Nor did Bourchier testify against Strafford, despite the fact that his claim for compensation depended partly on the earl’s successful prosecution.74CJ vi. 612b.

Within a year of Strafford’s execution in the spring of 1641, Bourchier’s political path had begun to converge with that of other prominent Yorkshire Calvinists. In January and February 1642, he signed three petitions from the Yorkshire gentry. The first, to the king, protested at the attempted arrest of the Five Members and expressed support for a ‘perfect reformation in matters of religion’.75Eg. 2546, ff. 23-4. The second, to the Commons, requested, among other things, that the votes of the papist peers be abolished and that ‘ceremonial burdens’ in religion be removed.76Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 367-72. The third, to the Lords, asked peers to work more closely with the Commons for the relief of Ireland’s Protestants.77PA, Main Pprs. 15 Feb. 1642, f. 55; LJ iv. 587a. At about the same time, he contributed the impressive sum of £20 to the collection for Ireland’s ‘distressed’ Protestants.78SP28/195, unfol. With the king raising troops in Yorkshire by the spring of 1642, Bourchier and many of the county’s future parliamentarian leaders addressed a letter to Charles on 12 May, asking him to put his trust in the two Houses and to forbear raising any troops in the county.79A Letter from the...Committees of the Commons...at Yorke (1642), 9 (E.148.4). Bourchier signed another petition to the king from this group in June, complaining about Charles’s abandoning Parliament and drawing together the county’s trained bands – illegally, as the petitioners conceived it.80PA, Main Pprs. 6 June 1642, ff. 84-5. At a meeting of the Yorkshire freeholders on Heworth Moor, near York, the royalist peer Thomas Viscount Savile (Sir Thomas Savile†) came across Bourchier gathering support for the June petition and a violent altercation ensued in which Savile accused Bourchier of attempting to sow sedition among the people.81LJ v. 111b; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 413; G. Duckett, ‘Civil war procs. in Yorks.’, Yorks. Arch. Jnl. vii. 64-5. Later that day, when Bourchier was discussing this incident with Sir Richard Darley – Henry Darley’s father – Savile sent one of his officers to confront him in what Bourchier interpreted as an attempt to provoke him into fighting a duel.82LJ v. 111b; PJ iii. 28, 33.

Bourchier sided with Parliament at the outbreak of civil war, and early in September 1642 he was forced to abandon his residence in York after being threatened by the royalists.83The Last True Newes from Yorke, Nottingham, Coventry and Warwicke (1642), sig. A3 (E.116.9). A month later, however, he was seized by royalist troops and taken back to York, where he remained a prisoner until well into 1643.84Terrible Newes from York (1642), 2 (E.123.14); CCC 1920; CCAM 936. He had been released or exchanged by June 1643 and took refuge in the parliamentarian stronghold of Hull, where he was involved in the arrest of the Hothams.85LJ vi. 126b; Hull’s Managing of the Kingdoms Cause (1644), 11 (E.51.11). Although there is no evidence that he ever bore arms against the king, he wrote several letters to Parliament from Hull in July and August 1643 requesting munitions and money for Lord Fairfax’s beleaguered northern army.86Eg. 2647, f. 142; CUL, Mm.1.45, p. 399. Bourchier’s detention by the royalists almost certainly explains his failure to secure appointment to any of the Yorkshire parliamentary commissions before February 1645. Thereafter, he rapidly made up for lost ground, emerging as an active member of the North Riding sequestrations committee and an assiduous magistrate.87Yorks. Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. J. W. Clay (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. xv), 44, 192; Yorks. Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. Clay (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. xviii), 51, 190; N. Riding QS Recs. ed. Atkinson (N. Riding Rec. Soc. iv), 237, 244, 267, 272; N. Riding QS Recs. ed. Atkinson (N. Riding Rec. Soc. v), 1, 11, 13. Bourchier was also a prominent figure on the Yorkshire county committee, and between October 1645 and September 1646 he signed very nearly every one of its letters to Parliament, complaining about the ‘infinite oppressions and extortions’ of the Scottish army in the north and pleading that it be removed from the county.88Bodl. Nalson IV, ff. 212-13, 244, 309; Nalson V, f. 16; Nalson VI, f. 14; Tanner 59, ff. 75, 195, 218, 266, 294, 357, 366, 389, 473, 550; Tanner 60, f. 556; LJ vii. 640b, 642b.

Bourchier was returned to Parliament for the West Riding borough of Ripon some time between mid-March 1647 and mid-May 1648. He possessed no estate in the immediate vicinity of the town and almost certainly owed his election there to the influence of the Fairfaxes – Lord Fairfax having been appointed steward of Ripon’s manorial courts in September 1646.89Supra, ‘Ripon’. Bourchier was named to only three committees before Pride’s Purge (all in 1648) and remained far more active in Yorkshire, where he helped to mobilise the county’s forces against the royalists during the second civil war.90CJ v. 557b; vi. 53b, 87a; Add. 36996, ff. 47, 66, 76; Bodl. Nalson VII, ff. 22, 126, 203; Tanner 57, ff. 109v, 282; HMC Portland, i. 478. There is no evidence that he commenced regular attendance at Westminster until late November 1648, when he was appointed to request the Independent divine Thomas Brooks to preach to the Commons on the next day of public humiliation.91CJ vi. 91b, 107a.

Bourchier retained his seat at Pride’s Purge and was one of only 70 or so MPs who were listed as still sitting in the House by mid-December.92Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 38 (12-19 Dec. 1648), sig. Ddd7 (E.476.35). He entered his dissent to the 5 December vote (that the king’s answers at Newport were a sufficient grounds for a settlement) on 20 December – the day on which the dissent was introduced as a test of the Rump’s membership.93[W. Prynne*], A Full Declaration of the true State of the Secluded Members Case (1660), 21 (E.1013.22). Appointed one of the judges in the high court of justice, he was among the most zealous of the trial commissioners, attending 12 of the 18 meetings of the trial commission and all four sessions of the trial itself.94Muddiman, Trial, 20, 228. His fellow commissioner John Downes would later name Bourchier among those of the king’s judges who were ‘much unsatisfied’ with the majority’s determination on the last day of the trial to proceed to sentence (ignoring a request from the king for audience with members of both Houses), ‘yet durst not speak’.95J. Downes, A True and Humble Representation of Iohn Downes Esq (1660). But whatever the truth of this story, Bourchier (like Mauleverer) signed the king’s death warrant, and on the day of the regicide, 30 January 1649, he was named to a committee for repealing legislation relating to the law of treason and the powers of the monarchy.96Muddiman, Trial, 228; CJ vi. 126a.

Bourchier was moved to regicide, it has been argued, from a desire to be revenged upon Charles for the fine and imprisonment he had suffered at the hands of the council of the north.97Reid, Council in the North, 422; W.L.F. Nuttall, ‘The Yorks. commrs. appointed for the trial of King Charles the First’, Yorks. Arch Jnl. xliii. 150. Bourchier certainly believed that the crown had robbed him of his inheritance and that he had been fined and imprisoned unjustly. However, this may not have been his only motive for king-killing. While there is little in his career to suggest that he supported the overturning of the established social and political order, it is likely, given his godly background and zeal, that he shared the militant puritan notions concerning the workings of providence and the emancipation of the Saints that were common to a significant number of the regicides.

Bourchier was an active and committed member of the Rump, receiving appointment to approximately 83 committees and serving as a teller on no less than 21 occasions.98CJ vi. 160a, 167b, 170b, 197b, 348b, 363b, 439a, 528a, 595a, 596b, 598b, 604b; vii. 1a, 2a, 78b, 92a, 137a, 144b, 148b, 259b, 274a. His most frequent partner as teller, serving together in four divisions, was the former Caroline courtier Sir Henry Mildmay.99CJ vi. 363b; vii. 2a, 92a, 259b. Although Bourchier seems to have showed little interest in ‘radical’ initiatives and legislation – that is, relating to social and legal reform or the abolition of monarchy and the Lords – he generally sided with those Rumpers keen to adopt a tough line against delinquents – most notably in March 1649 and again in August 1651, when he was a teller against respiting the executions of the prominent royalist delinquent Sir John Owen and the Presbyterian minister and conspirator Christopher Love respectively.100CJ vi. 160a; vii. 2a.

Bourchier’s prominence in the Rump was acknowledged with his election to the third council of state in February 1651 and to the fifth council in November 1652. A relatively diligent councillor, he attended 114 of the third council’s 249 meetings and 56 of the fifth council’s 121 meetings.101CJ vi. 533a; vii. 221a; CSP Dom. 1651, p. xxxv; 1652-3, p. xxxiii. He was named to several conciliar committees, including the ordnance committee (19 June 1651) and the admiralty committee (30 Dec. 1652), but he is known to have delivered only one report from the council to the House and was clearly only a minor figure at Whitehall.102CJ vii. 12b; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 63, 66, 149, 260; 1651-2, p. 21; 1652-3, pp. 63, 97, 147, 199, 216, 242, 245.

Bourchier’s main sphere of activity during the commonwealth was undoubtedly the Commons, where – if his tellerships and committee appointments are any guide – his primary concern was the punishment of delinquents and the financial exploitation of forfeited and sequestered property. Beginning in mid-January 1649, when he was named to a committee for raising £200,000 from the sale of dean and chapter lands for the use of the navy, he was named to a series of committees for managing and improving the composition and sequestration revenues and for the sale of crown and church lands.103CJ vi. 116a, 127b, 146b, 150b, 167b, 201a, 205b, 218b, 330b, 358b, 436b, 457b, 528a; vii. 46b. He was an active member of the commission for removing obstructions on the sale of bishops’ lands and of the Committee for Compounding* and probably also of the commission for removing obstructions on the sale of forfeited estates.104A. and O ii. 152, 523; CJ vi. 227a; SP23/6, pp. 30, 254; SP23/6, p. 12; LPL, Comm Add 1, ff. 89, 90. A significant proportion of his tellerships related in one way or another to the sale of expropriated property, with Bourchier generally representing the more hard-line element in the House.105CJ vi. 167b, 197b, 348b, 528a, 596b, 598b, 604b; vii. 78b, 92a, 144b, 148b, 274a. The one delinquent for whom Bourchier did show favour was his kinsman and neighbour Sir Henry Slingesby, whom he kept apprised of legislation in the House that threatened the sale of his sequestered estate.106C6/25/21, 89; Slingsby Diary ed. D. Parsons (1836), 347-8.

Despite endorsing the Rump’s exploitation of forfeited estates, Bourchier’s only known purchase of such property was in April 1650, when he acquired fee farm rents in Yorkshire and Derbyshire worth a very modest £11 16 a year.107SP28/288, f. 3. Moreover, the only profit he seems to have sought from the commonwealth was by way of compensation for the losses he had endured during the 1630s. In July 1650, Augustine Garland reported the opinion of the committee for removing obstructions on the sale of crown lands (to which Bourchier’s petition for compensation had been referred) that the land claimed by Bourchier in the forest of Galtres was indeed part of his inheritance, that he had been unjustly punished by the council of the north and that he be awarded £6,000 out of Strafford’s estate.108CJ vi. 440a, 612a-613b. But the House referred consideration of Bourchier’s claim back to the committee, and he was probably still awaiting compensation when he served as a minority teller with Sir Henry Mildmay on 18 February 1652 in favour of a proviso in the Act of Oblivion that it should not extend to Strafford’s property.109CJ vi. 613b; vii. 92a.

Prominent among Bourchier’s motives in seeking appointment to committees on the sale of forfeited property, and for maximising sequestration and other revenue streams, was almost certainly a concern (shared by many Rumpers) to improve pay and conditions for the soldiery. He signalled his commitment to the soldiers’ interests relatively early in the Rump, partnering Henry Marten on 21 March 1649 as a teller in favour of continuing the existing level of assessment demanded of each county for another six months.110CJ vi. 170b. Added to both the Committee for the Army* (4 Feb. 1650) and the Committee of Navy and Customs* (17 Oct.), he was also named to a number of ad hoc committees for regulating the armed forces and for the provision of maimed soldiers.111CJ vi. 127b, 205b, 209b, 357b, 484b, 569b; vii. 58a. He was a diligent member of the Army Committee during 1652-3 and continued to sign its warrants several weeks after the Rump had been dissolved.112SP28/84-92, passim; SP28/92, f. 130. He was also active on the standing committee for excise – which handled revenues devoted largely to maintaining the navy – although he was never formally added to this body.113Bodl. Rawl. C.386, unfol.

Another of Bourchier’s priorities in the Rump was the establishment of a godly preaching ministry in England and Wales and the suppression of licentious and blasphemous opinions and practices – issues that accounted for many of his appointments in the House.114CJ vi. 116a, 213a, 352a, 359a, 365b, 420b, 423b, 458b; vii. 86b, 147a, 205a. He was closely involved in the task of settling ministers in vacant, sequestered or former crown and church livings.115Add. 36792, ff. 35, 37v, 42v, 57v, 59, 60v, 65v. And when the Independent minister John Owen* and his clerical allies presented a petition to the Rump in February 1652, urging tougher action against radical sectarian and heterodox beliefs and the more effective propagation of the gospel, Bourchier was included on the committee to which the Rump referred the ministers’ proposals for settling church government.116CJ vii. 86b; ‘John Owen’, Oxford DNB. He was a leading member of the committee for regulating (reforming) the universities – an important instrument for settling a godly ministry – chairing many of its meetings, and by December 1651 he had been added to the Committee for Plundered Ministers*, which he attended regularly until April 1653, although, again, there is no record of his formal appointment to this body.117CJ vi. 201a; SP22/2B, passim; LPL, Sion L40.2/E16, passim.

Bourchier attended only three of the North Riding quarter sessions under the Rump and was not the important figure in Yorkshire’s affairs that he had been before 1649.118N. Riding QS Recs. ed. Atkinson (N. Riding Rec. Soc. v), 37, 109, 115. In fact, he appears to have resided more or less permanently in London from late 1648 through to at least the spring of 1653.119The Mystery of the Good Old Cause Briefly Unfolded (1660), 21 (E.1923.2). Named regularly to committees in the Rump on London issues, he was appointed with the leading City figures Isaac Penington and Francis Allein in August 1651 – as the Scots marched towards Worcester – to thank the lord mayor and corporation of London for their loyalty to the commonwealth.120CJ vi. 53b, 118a, 137a, 151a, 198a, 206b; vii. 6b. Nevertheless, his ties with Yorkshire’s leading parliamentarians remained strong, and in 1649 he secured a match between his eldest son Barrington Bourchier† and a daughter of Sir William Strickland.

It is unlikely that Bourchier approved either of the army’s dissolution of the Rump in April 1653 or of the subsequent establishment of the protectorate. Nevertheless, he retained his place on the three Yorkshire benches and was accounted sufficiently committed to the Cromwellian church settlement to secure appointment as an ejector for the North Riding in August 1654.121A. and O ii. 971. However, he was omitted from the Yorkshire assessment commission in November 1653 and attended none of the North Riding quarter sessions between October 1654 and April 1657.122N. Riding QS Recs. ed. Atkinson (N. Riding Rec. Soc. v), 167, 236. Nor does he appear to have sought election to any of the protectoral Parliaments.

Bourchier returned to national politics following the restoration of the Rump in May 1659, and between June and September he was named to 14 committees, including those on legislation for the government of Ireland and for the continuation and collection of the monthly assessments upon England, Ireland and Scotland.123CJ vii. 673b, 678a, 678b, 684b, 691b, 702a, 706a, 706b, 708b, 717b, 752b, 767a, 780a, 782a. His most revealing appointment was his tellership with fellow Yorkshireman William White on 14 July against appointing the prominent Quaker, George Bishop, to the Bristol militia commission. Bourchier and White won the division from Sir Henry Vane II and Henry Neville, two ardent advocates of toleration for all Protestants.124CJ vii. 717b. Bourchier received only three more appointments after the final restoration late in December 1659, the last of which, appropriately enough, was to a committee set up on 2 March 1660 on a bill for presenting ministers to vacant livings.125CJ vii. 833b, 843b, 858b.

In accordance with the king’s proclamation demanding that the regicides turn themselves in on pain of exemption from pardon or indemnity, Bourchier surrendered himself to Parliament on 18 June 1660.126LJ xi. 32b, 52b; CJ viii. 66a. During August, while the Houses quarrelled over who was to be excepted from the Act of Oblivion, Bourchier fell ill and, being ‘aged and sick’, was allowed to lodge at the town house of one of his daughters. ‘And the symptoms of death appearing on him’, recounted his fellow regicide Edmund Ludlowe II*,

his son and some other of his relations, conceiving that his acknowledging himself mistaken in having been instrumental in the late king’s death would tend to the procuring of them favour from the present powers, pressed him earnestly thereto. But he sitting in his chair, though not able to stand without help, receiving new life and strength from the satisfaction he had in his appearing therein, forceth himself upon his legs, saying “I tell you, it was a just act, and God and good men will own it”. In a short time after he had borne this faithful testimony, he departed this life.127Ludlow, Voyce, 183.

He was buried on 8 August at St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street, London.128St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street, 57. No will is recorded. His estate, like those of all the regicides, was forfeit to the crown, but in March 1661 it was granted to Barrington Bourchier at the request of his uncle Sir Henry Cholmley*, who had persuaded his nephew to support Sir George Boothe’s* Presbyterian-royalist rebellion in August 1659 ‘on assurance that his father’s offence [in signing Charles I’s death warrant] would be no prejudice to him if he would so assist’.129CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 446, 501, 557; OPH xxiii. 8; HP Commons, 1660-90; Taylor, ‘The Restoration Bourchiers’, 130-1. Barrington Bourchier represented Thirsk in the 1660 Convention.130HP Commons, 1660-90.