CRANFIELD, James, Lord Cranfield (1621-51), of Copthall, Essex.

Although he belonged to one of England’s wealthiest families and was the heir of an earl, Cranfield (styled Lord Cranfield) seems to have received little in the way of formal education. Like his younger brothers, he was admitted neither to the universities nor the inns of court, and nor did he undertake the grand tour.11‘Lionel Cranfield, 1st earl of Middlesex’, Oxford DNB. How he acquired the learning and polish to earn the friendship of the philosopher and poet Sir Kenelm Digby is therefore something of a mystery.12HMC 4th Rep. 295-6, 303; Prestwich, Cranfield, 519.

Although Cranfield was still a minor in 1640, his father – the out-of-favour former lord treasurer Lionel Cranfield, 1st earl of Middlesex – was keen to secure him a seat in the Short Parliament. He tried to exert his proprietorial interest at Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, on his son’s behalf, but the town bailiffs declined his advances, claiming that they were taking ‘an extraordinary care in elections at this time, when religion is so much concerned and the good of the commonwealth never more [so]’.13J.K. Gruenfelder, Influence in Early Stuart Elections (Columbus, 1981), 195. Rebuffed at Tewkesbury, Middlesex had to rely on the electoral patronage of others, but he nonetheless succeeded in having his son returned for both the Sussex borough of Bramber and for Liverpool. Cranfield may have owed his election at Bramber to the influence of Middlesex’s friend Sir Edward Sackville†, 4th earl of Dorset.14Supra, ‘Bramber’. Similarly, his election at Liverpool was almost certainly secured through the backing of another of his father’s friends Lord Newburgh (Sir Edward Barrett†), chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster.15Supra, ‘Liverpool’; PROB11/194, f. 128v; ‘Edward Barrett, Lord Barrett of Newburgh’, Oxford DNB. On 23 April (ten days after the Short Parliament had convened), the Commons took note of Cranfield’s desire to waive his election at Bramber and to sit for Liverpool.16CJ ii. 9b. He received no committee appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate.

In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, Middlesex tried again to have Cranfield returned for Tewkesbury, only to be rebuffed once more – the town bailiffs explaining that ‘this Parliament being of infinite consequence both to church and commonwealth’, the electors had ‘an extraordinary care to choose gentlemen of age and experience’.17Supra, ‘Tewkesbury’; HMC 4th Rep. 303; D.C. Beaver, Par. Communities and Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 190-1. Nor were any of Middlesex’s aristocratic friends able to serve him on this occasion, leaving Cranfield without a seat in the Long Parliament.

Little is known of Cranfield’s activities during the first half of the 1640s. Although his father, Sir Kenelm Digby and Cranfield’s brother-in-law Richard Sackville, Lord Buckhurst* were briefly imprisoned in the autumn of 1642 for allegedly trying to raise forces for the king in Kent, there is no evidence that Cranfield, too, was suspected of malignancy, as one authority has claimed.18Infra, ‘Richard Sackville, Lord Buckhurst’; N. Bourne, A [sic] Exact and True Relation of the Battell Fough…at Acton (1642), 6-7 (E.127.8); HMC 4th Rep. 296; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 427; Prestwich, Cranfield, 567. Assessed for £800 by the Committee for Advance of Money* in March 1644, he was discharged in May after insisting that his estate, excluding clothes and horses, was worth less than £100.19CCAM 361.

With the death of his father in August 1645, Cranfield succeeded to the earldom and inherited an estate worth £4,600 a year, although encumbered with debts of £20,000, his mother’s jointure of £1,200 a year and annuities of £400. His annual income of roughly £3,000, on paper – probably much less as a result of the civil war – was half the amount his father had enjoyed in 1618.20PROB11/194, ff. 126v-128v; Prestwich, Cranfield, 542, 587-8. Cranfield took his place in the Lords on 23 August and three days later (26 Aug.) took the Covenant.21LJ vii. 547b, 549b. On 8 May 1646, he joined the Independent peers in entering a protest at the Lords’ rejection of a vote for wresting the king from the Scottish army at Newark and placing him in custody in Warwick Castle.22LJ viii. 309b. But some adroit political management by the Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex – the leader of the Presbyterian interest in the Lords – encouraged Cranfield to switch sides, and by early June he was part of a group in the upper House that was ‘hostile to what was perceived as the political ambitions of the [New Model] army and anxious to effect a restoration of the king on terms which imposed few limitations upon his power’.23LJ viii. 355a, 355b, 543b, 563a, 708a; ix. 127b, 131b, 239a, 298b-299a, 322a; J. Adamson, ‘The English nobility and the projected settlement of 1647, HJ xxx. 568; ‘Parliamentary management, men-of-business and the House of Lords, 1640-9’, in A Pillar of the Constitution: The House of Lords in British Politics, 1640-1784 ed. C. Jones (1989), 41-2, 43.

So closely were Middlesex and his confederates involved in the July 1647 Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster that in September, with the army and Independents back in control, the Commons voted that he and six other peers ‘be impeached of high treason, for levying war against the king, Parliament and kingdom’.24A Charge Consisting of Severall Heads: Whereupon the Earle of Lincolne [etc.]...are Impeached of High-Treason (1647); CJ v. 296a, 377b. Articles of impeachment were accordingly drawn up against the peers and sent to the Lords in February 1648, whereupon they were excluded from the House and required to post bail. In June, however, with the second civil war raging and the two Houses anxious to conciliate the Presbyterian interest, particularly in London, the Commons dropped its charges against the peers and they were allowed to resume their seats.25LJ x. 12a, 15a, 33b, 307b. In August, Cranfield was among those peers who voted against a resolution that those in England who had invited the Scottish Engagers to invade were traitors.26LJ x. 406b, 408a.

Cranfield was closely involved in the treaty of Newport in the autumn of 1648, being the senior member of the parliamentary delegation that informed the king in August of Parliament’s willingness to hold unconditional peace talks and as one of the commissioners of both Houses who then negotiated with Charles on the Isle of Wight.27LJ x. 417b, 429a, 435a, 492b. He ceased attending the Lords after Pride’s Purge, which effectively ended his political career.28LJ x. 641a.

Cranfield died early in September 1651 and was buried near his father in Westminster Abbey on 13 September.29PROB11/218, f. 113; CP. Dying without sons, he left the bulk of his landed estate – having first charged it with bequests of £14,000 and annuities of £400 to his two daughters – to his brother Lionel, who sat as the 3rd earl of Middlesex in the 1660 Convention and the Cavalier Parliament.30PROB11/218, f. 113v.