ANLABY, John (1615-61), of Etton, Yorks.

Anlaby’s family, which took its name from the manor of Anlaby, near Hull, had settled at Etton, about 4 miles north west of Beverley, by the end of the fifteenth century.35HMC 14th Rep. ix. 488; VCH E. Riding, iv. 106. Although his father was fined £30 for distraint of knighthood in the early 1630s – suggesting that his estate was valued at more than £500 a year – and was named to successive commissions of peace for the Yorkshire liberties of Cawood, Wistow and Otley, he was not considered worthy of a place on the East Riding bench.36E407/35, f. 67; C181/2-5, passim.

By 1640, Anlaby had joined the ‘disaffected’ gentry in the East Riding – a group headed by his brother-in-law Sir John Hotham*. Like Hotham, Sir Hugh Cholmeley*, John Alured* and other prominent East Riding gentlemen, he signed the petitions to the king from the Yorkshire gentry on 28 July and 24 August, complaining about illegal billeting and pleading poverty in the face of royal efforts to mobilise the trained bands for service against the Scottish Covenanters during the second bishops’ war.37Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1215, 1231. On 12 September, he signed the county’s third such petition, in which, after complaining about Ship Money, illegal billeting and various other ills, the petitioners reiterated the demand made by a group of dissident English peers, late in August, that Charles should summon a Parliament.38Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland Ms vol. 1608-1700, N38 Car. I. On 5 October, Anlaby signed the Yorkshire county indenture returning two of the summer’s leading petitioners, Ferdinando Lord Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*) and Henry Belasyse, to the Long Parliament.39C219/43/3/89.

In 1642, Anlaby was a signatory to four further county petitions – the first, in January, to the king, protesting at the attempted arrest of the Five Members and expressing support for a ‘perfect reformation in matters of religion’; the second, in February, to the Lords, asking that they work more closely with the Commons for the relief of Ireland’s Protestants; the third, in May, pleading with Charles to put his trust in the two Houses and to forbear raising any troops in the county; and the fourth, in June, complaining about Charles’s abandoning Parliament and drawing together the county’s trained bands – illegally, as the petitioners conceived it.40Eg. 2546, ff. 23-4; PA, Main Pprs. 15 Feb. 1642, f. 55, 6 June 1642, ff. 84-5; LJ iv. 587a; A Letter from the...Committees of the Commons...at Yorke (1642), 9 (E.148.4). In the spring of 1642, Anlaby was commissioned by Hotham as a captain in the garrison at Hull and probably had his first taste of combat during the royalist siege of the town that summer.41SP28/138, pt. 4, unfol.

At the outbreak of civil war, Anlaby aligned with what was initially the more aggressive wing of the Yorkshire parliamentarian faction, a group led by Hotham and his son Captain John Hotham*. On 8 October 1642, he signed a declaration organised by the Hothams, denouncing the Yorkshire treaty of pacification – an abortive attempt by a group of West Riding gentry, led on the parliamentarian side by the Hothams’ rival Lord Fairfax, to keep the county neutral.42A True and Exact Relation of...the Siege of Manchester (1642), 13-14 (E.121.45); A. Woolrych, ‘Yorkshire’s treaty of neutrality’, HT vi, 696-704. Hotham and his allies attacked the treaty as being contrary to the privileges of Parliament and an attempt to sever Yorkshire from ‘the common cause’. The 20 or so signatories to the declaration, who were mostly from the East Riding, also included Anlaby’s future father-in-law, Sir Matthew Boynton*, who would be returned as a ‘recruiter’ MP for Scarborough in 1645.

Anlaby retained his captaincy following the arrest of the Hothams in the summer of 1643, and in the spring of 1644 he was made lieutenant-colonel of a new regiment of foot commanded by the East Riding gentleman Robert Overton. As an officer in Lord Fairfax’s northern army, it is likely that Anlaby fought at the battle of Marston Moor in July 1644.43Jones, ‘War in north’, 368; Oxford DNB, ‘Robert Overton’. He was also active on several of the Yorkshire county committees during the mid-1640s.44CJ iii. 586a, 606a; SP20/1, f. 256v; HHC, C BRL/354, 364. However, he is know to have signed only one of these committees’ numerous letters to Parliament in 1645-6, complaining about the abuses committed by the Scottish army in the northern counties and requesting that it be removed from the region.45Bodl. Nalson IV, ff. 212-13; LJ vii. 640b. At some point in the mid-1640s he married one of Boynton’s daughters – probably by October 1645, when he was made a supervisor in his father-in-law’s will.46PROB11/200, f. 98. After Boynton’s death in March 1647, Scarborough corporation elected Anlaby in his place on 19 May.47Supra, ‘Scarborough’. The claim that Anlaby was a native of the town is apparently groundless.48J. B. Baker, Hist. of Scarbrough, 435. Owning no property in or near Scarborough, he was returned there on the interest of his brother-in-law, Colonel Matthew Boynton, the town’s governor.

Anlaby’s first appointment at Westminster was not until 11 August 1647, when he was named to a committee on an ordinance for repealing the legislation passed during the Presbyterian ‘counter revolution’ of late July and early August.49CJ v. 272a. A week later (18 Aug.), he was appointed to a committee on the same ordinance as amended by the Lords.50CJ v. 278a. Of his four appointments that autumn the most important were to committees on an ordinance establishing a new Committee for the Army* and to draft a peace proposition (as part of Parliament’s continuing efforts to agree terms with the king) ‘concerning the settlement of the Presbyterial government’ for exempting ‘such tender consciences as cannot conform to that government’.51CJ v. 272a, 278a, 291a, 295b, 298b, 327b. Granted leave of absence on 20 October, he had returned to the House by 4 January 1648, when he was nominated to a large committee, headed by the Independents Alexander Rigby I and Thomas Scot I, to prepare ordinances for redressing the people’s grievances ‘in relation to their burdens, their freedoms and liberties and of reforming of courts of justice and proceedings at law’.52CJ v. 337a, 417a. He received only one more committee appointment before being granted further leave of absence on 14 March (he was declared absent and excused at the call of the House on 24 April).53CJ v. 447b, 497a, 543b.

Anlaby, his fellow Scarborough MP Luke Robinson, and Richard Darley* were employed by the Derby House Committee* during the summer of 1648 to negotiate with Colonel Boynton, in what proved to be an unsuccessful effort to forestall his defection to the royalists and persuade him to resign as governor of Scarborough.54CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 170, 172, 221; J. Binns, Yorks. in the Civil Wars (Preston, 1996), 136. On 28 July, Anlaby signed a letter from the Yorkshire militia committee to the Speaker, relating news of Boynton’s ‘revolt’ at Scarborough and its fear that ‘the design of the enemy is ripe for the landing of the prince’s [the Prince of Wales’s] there or thereabouts’.55Bodl. Nalson VII, f. 203. Anlaby was declared absent and excused at the call of the House again on 26 September and does not appear to have returned to Westminster until after Pride’s Purge on 6 December.56CJ vi. 32a, 34b.

Anlaby’s first committee nomination in the Rump, on 23 December, was followed two days later (25 December) by his appointment as a messenger to carry up to the Lords a series of Commons’ resolutions concerning the surrender of Scarborough Castle.57CJ vi. 103a, 104b. He was committed on 29 December on an ordinance for a special court to try the king; and when the Lords rejected this ordinance, the House set up a further committee – to which Anlaby was named – on 3 January 1649 to bring in a second ordinance for erecting a high court of justice.58CJ vi. 106a, 110b. Appointed to the trial commission in this ordinance, he attended only one of its meetings – that of 29 January at which the king’s death warrant was signed. Anlaby was one of only four men who attended the meeting but then failed or refused to sign the warrant.59Muddiman, Trial, 227; A.W. McIntosh, ‘The number of the English regicides’, History, lxvii, 215. That same day (29 January), however, he made his dissent to the 5 December 1648 vote – that the king’s answer to the Newport propositions were an acceptable basis for settlement – in the company, among others, of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton and Luke Robinson.60CJ vi. 124b. Why he failed to sign the warrant but then went some way towards condoning the regicide by making his dissent the day before the king’s execution is a mystery.

The majority of Anlaby’s 28 committee appointments in the Rump fell between late December 1648 and March 1649.61CJ vi. 103a, 106a, 109a, 110b, 113b, 116a, 120b, 127a, 127b, 131b, 132a, 134a, 142a, 147b, 148b, 150b, 154a, 158a, 325a, 325b, 327b, 357b, 368a, 605a; vii. 226b, 229b, 244a, 250b. During those months he was added to the Committee for Indemnity* and to ad hoc committees for prohibiting sermons and publications that were critical of the House’s proceedings in trying the king, and on an ordinance for abolishing kingship.62CJ vi. 113b, 131b, 158a. By late March, however, he had returned to Yorkshire, where he seems to have spent much of the next four years.63The Petition and Presentment of the Grand-Juries of the County of York (1649), 3 (E.548.26). He was assigned various tasks by the council of state during the early 1650s in relation to the government of Hull and the slighting of Wressle Castle on the western edge of the East Riding.64HHC, U DDHO/1/65; C BRB/4 (Hull Bench Bk. 1650-67), p. 49; Alnwick, Alnwick pprs. 16, letters 1642-56, f. 130; CSP Dom. 1650, p.11; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 210, 297; Scarborough Recs. 1641-60 ed. Ashcroft, 148; Yorks. Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. J. W. Clay (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. xx), 4. In the spring of 1650 it was reported that both he and Robinson were residing at Scarborough; and in the autumn of 1652 he was appointed one of the town’s bailiffs on the understanding that it would not compromise his service to the House. During his term as bailiff he worked with Robinson to promote the setting up a workhouse in the town.65Scarborough Recs. 1641-60 ed. Ashcroft, 155-6, 201, 208.

If his pattern of appointments at Westminster is any guide, Anlaby’s attendance in the Rump after March 1649 was intermittent and of short duration. Indeed, he was named to only nine committees between the spring of 1649 and the Rump’s dissolution in April 1653. And although added to the Committee for the Army* in February 1650 and named in the Army Committee ordinances of January and December 1652, he attended few if any of its meetings.66CJ vi. 357b. His last four appointments in the Rump were in December 1652 and January 1653, which was probably his busiest period in the House after March 1649. On 6 December the Rump assigned the work of a committee for retrenching the offices of the commonwealth specially to the care of Anlaby and Nicholas Lechmere – an appointment that added Anlaby to this committee and put him in Robinson’s place as its joint chairman.67CJ vii. 138b, 226b. And he attended at least three meetings of the committee (to which he was added on 15 December) for treating with delegates from Scotland about the terms of the new Anglo-Scottish commonwealth.68CJ vii. 229b; SP25/138, pp. 36, 48. His last appointment in the Rump was to a committee established on 25 January 1653 for investigating complaints against the trustees for the sale of Charles I’s goods.69CJ vii. 250b.

Anlaby was one of eight men summoned by Cromwell and the council of officers in June 1653 to represent Yorkshire in the Nominated Assembly. What recommended him to the council for this employment cannot be established with any certainty, although his career during the 1640s, and in particular his close association with Sir Matthew Boynton, Colonel Robert Overton and Luke Robinson, suggests that he was a man of strongly godly convictions. Like Robinson, he was sympathetic towards the Quakers, and he would be listed by an anonymous pamphleteer in 1654 among those MPs who were opposed to a publicly-maintained ministry.70Infra, ‘Luke Robinson’; W.C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (Cambridge, 2nd edn.), 119; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 410. Moreover, on 27 July 1653 he was a minority teller with the religious radical John Carew in favour of referring the issue of allowing liberty of preaching in public meeting-places to the consideration of a committee.71CJ vii. 290b; Several Procs. of Parl. no. 2 (26 July-2 Aug. 1653), 14 (E.708.13). His four subsequent tellerships, however, were in divisions of no great political significance, and in three of them he partnered ‘moderates’ – namely, John Clarke (twice) and William Sydenham.72CJ vii. 290b, 302b, 315a, 322b, 345b. He received seven committee appointments in the Nominated Parliament, including a re-nomination to the Committee for the Army.73CJ vii. 287a, 287b, 293b, 328a, 337b, 339b, 340a. As chairman of a committee established on 20 July for prisons and prisoners, he made at least six reports to the House and was apparently instrumental in securing the passage on 5 October of a bill for the relief of creditors and poor prisoners.74CJ vii. 293a, 302b, 316b, 319b, 322a, 325a, 330; HMC Var. iii. 224; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 292-3. On 14 October, he chaired a committee of the whole House to address the issue of inequalities in taxation and reported its resolution that the next assessment should be by a fixed rate upon each county.75CJ vii. 334b. He was popular enough with his fellow Members to secure appointment to the council of state – although only just. In the elections to the council, on 1 November, he and three others tied in last place with 52 votes, and in the subsequent draw to decide who should fill the three remaining seats, his was one of the names that came out of the hat.76CJ vii. 344a. He attended 15 meetings of the council before it and the Nominated Parliament were dissolved in mid-December.77CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. xl.

Anlaby was named to the East Riding and Hull assessment commissions under the protectorate and was active on the East Riding bench during the mid-1650s, but he does not appear to have sought election to the first or the second protectoral Parliaments.78Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Br P/64/2-3, 12, 14-15. In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, he was returned for Beverley – probably on his own interest as one of the area’s most prominent parliamentarian gentlemen. He received no committee appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate.

Having returned to Westminster following the restoration of the Rump in May 1659, Anlaby was named to 16 committees between June and early September that year.79CJ vii. 676b, 678b, 682a, 688b, 700b, 702a, 706a, 717b, 726a, 728a, 751b, 757a, 766a, 767a, 767b, 775b. On 18 June he and either Henry or Richard Darley were added to a committee to which was referred the petition of Anlaby’s old commander Robert Overton, who had been imprisoned by Protector Oliver for four years without charge on suspicion of plotting against the government.80CJ vii. 688b. Anlaby would be added in July to the committee for the relief of prisoners of conscience.81CJ vii. 728a. His appointment to a committee set up on 1 July to consider legislation for punishing those who disturbed church services suggests that he did not approve of the Quakers’ aggressive proselytizing tactics, even though he may have looked sympathetically on some aspects of their message.82CJ vii. 700b. He and Robinson were apparently not favourably disposed towards the Quakers’ chief persecutors among the more ‘orthodox’ godly, acting as tellers on 21 July against appointing the prominent Presbyterian Sir Robert Barwick, recorder of York, to the Yorkshire militia commission.83CJ vii. 727a. On 8, 22 and 24 August, Anlaby was named to committees for sequestering the estates of those involved in Sir George Boothe’s* royalist-Presbyterian rebellion.84CJ vii. 751b, 766a, 767b. The fallout from Boothe’s rebellion exacerbated tensions among the Rump’s leading politicians, prompting the House to establish a committee on 8 September – to which Anlaby was named – ‘in order to the settlement of the government of this commonwealth’.85CJ vii. 775b. The next day (9 September), he was granted leave of absence for six weeks and does not appear to have returned to Westminster following the second restoration of the Rump late in December.86CJ vii. 776a.

Anlaby died intestate late in 1661 and was buried at Etton on 19 December 1661.87Etton par. reg. The administration of his goods, which were inventoried as worth over £500, was granted to his son and heir Thomas, whose daughter was the mother of Arthur Onslow, the Speaker of the Commons from 1728 until 1761.88Borthwick, Harthill Deanery Act Bk., f. 88v; HP Commons, 1715-54, ‘Arthur Onslow’.