BENTLEY, Jeremy (1615-65), of Elland, Halifax, Yorks.

Bentley was both the first MP for Halifax and the last before the Reform Act of 1832. A younger son of a prosperous Halifax clothier, he came from considerably humbler origins than most Yorkshire MPs of this period. His family’s fortunes were built to a large extent on the industry of his father, who succeeded in acquiring several houses and closes in Halifax and was sufficiently wealthy to lease from Sir Arthur Ingram* (the owner of the manor of Halifax) the Old Hall at Halifax and ‘divers other houses, tenements and hereditaments’.17Hanson, ‘Jeremy Bentley’, 355; W. Yorks. Archives (Calderdale), RU:447; WYC:1484/3/1/10/1-3; WYL100/HX/A/162; Borthwick, Prob. Reg. 38, f. 230. Like his father, Bentley became a clothier, and he may well have been a man of godly convictions.18W. Yorks. Archives (Calderdale), WYC:1484/3/1/10/6. He was apparently on friendly terms with his brother-in-law, John Foxcroft, the puritan minister of Gotham in Nottinghamshire.19W. Yorks. Archives (Calderdale), SH:4/T.HX/1638 Jul 12/2; Marchant, Puritans, 303. In 1642, he was chosen by a local patron of godly ministers, Nathaniel Waterhouse (a kinsman of Nathaniel Waterhouse the Cromwellian MP), as one of the supervisors of his will, who were charged by the testator with the oversight of his various charitable bequests, including the establishment of a lectureship at Halifax.20J. Watson, Hist. and Antiquities of Halifax (1775), 615, 626.

Bentley appears to have been acting as a receiver of public money in the West Riding of Yorkshire by the end of 1641.21SP28/189, pt. 1, unfol. In December 1642, the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*) appointed him receiver in the Halifax area of contributions for Parliament’s northern army – an office in which he worked tirelessly and zealously to the point of extracting money ‘by command’.22SP28/351, unfol.; CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 643; Jones, ‘War in north’, 137-8. It was probably on Fairfax’s recommendation that Parliament appointed Bentley one of nine commissioners for sequestering the church and vicarage of Halifax in March 1643, the proceeds of which also went to maintain the northern army.23LJ v. 666b-667a. Evidently trusted by Fairfax, Bentley was appointed treasurer-at-war and paymaster for the northern army in November 1643, and in that capacity he received and disbursed over £13,000 during his eighteen months or so in the office.24E113/7, pt. 2; W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), Tong/10/3. Among the parliamentarian officers whom Bentley furnished with money was Fairfax’s second-in-command in the West Riding, Colonel John Lambert*.25SC6/CHAS1/1190, unfol. (entry for 28 Feb. 1644). With the reorganisation and partial disbandment of the northern army in the summer of 1645, Bentley was obliged to relinquish his post as army treasurer-at-war – the equivalent office in the Northern Association army being taken by Lord Fairfax’s man-of-business, Thomas Stockdale*.26Infra, ‘Thomas Stockdale’.

Apparently a firm supporter of the commonwealth, Bentley was named to several local commissions during the early 1650s and was particularly active on the commission for charitable uses (along with Henry Arthington*, John Stanhope* and Henry Tempest*) and, more significantly, on the commission for tendering the Engagement, in which capacity he worked closely with Tempest.27C93/21/29; W. Yorks. Archives (Calderdale), HAS/B:22/27, ff. 2, 4-6; Kendall, ‘The civil war as affecting Halifax’, 81. Bentley’s prominence in local affairs was confirmed in 1652, when some of the inhabitants of Halifax, Leeds and Bradford, ‘for their ease and benefit’, petitioned the authorities that he and several other gentlemen be made farmers for the excise in the region; and in the spring of 1653 he was duly appointed one of the sub-commissioners for the excise in the West Riding.28E113/7, pt. 2.

Bentley and his colleagues may well have owed their good fortune in large part to the influence of Captain Adam Baynes*, whom Bentley would have known well from his time as receiver-general for the northern army. Baynes was the London agent of the northern brigade and its commander, Major-general John Lambert, and was to become a commissioner for managing the excise in 1654.29Supra, ‘Adam Baynes’. Bentley and his fellow exciseman John Baynes – Captain Baynes’s ‘loving friend’ and kinsman – wrote regularly to the captain during 1654, recounting their efforts to serve the ‘honest party’ in the region while ‘raising up as much money as we possibly could for the state’.30Add. 21422, ff. 220, 224, 305, 313, 323, 366. In March 1655, Tempest, Stanhope and Captain Roger Coates*, among others, asked Bentley and his associates to become farmers of the excise again, and Bentley wrote to Baynes to ‘let us know on what terms we might have it’.31Add. 21423, ff. 54, 57. In the event, Bentley appears to have found the terms unacceptable; there is certainly no evidence that he was involved in collecting the excise after March 1655.

Bentley’s links with Baynes, and with Baynes’ influential patron, John Lambert, may partly explain why Halifax, and not the more important administrative and clothing centre of Wakefield, was joined with Leeds as the two new parliamentary constituencies for the West Riding under the Instrument of Government (of which Lambert was the architect) in December 1653.32D. Hirst, ‘The fracturing of the Cromwellian alliance: Leeds and Adam Baynes’, EHR cviii. 873. Lambert may have opted for Halifax in the knowledge that it would return a member favourable to his interests. On 12 July 1654, in the elections to the first protectorate Parliament, 59 of the parish of Halifax’s principal inhabitants returned Bentley as their first MP (Baynes was returned for Leeds).33Supra, ‘Halifax’. He presumably owed his return to the strength of his interest as one of the parish’s most prominent and politically experienced inhabitants. Three weeks after his election, he chaired a meeting of the parish’s inhabitants to petition for the establishment of a borough corporation, although no charter was ever obtained.34W. Yorks. Archives (Calderdale), HAS/B:22/27, ff. 153-4. Although clearly a big fish in local affairs, Bentley may have felt himself a little out of his depth at Westminster – hence, perhaps, his nomination to only one committee, that set up on 25 September 1654 on the ordinance to eject ‘scandalous’ ministers and schoolmasters.35CJ vii. 370a. His next, and only other, mention in the Journal was on 21 October, when he was granted leave of absence.36CJ vii. 377b. It is not known whether he attended the committee for privileges that month in support of Baynes’s (contested) return for Leeds as the captain’s friends were hoping he would.37Supra, ‘Adam Baynes’; Add. 21422, ff. 455, 460.

Bentley was returned for Halifax again in the elections to the second protectorate Parliament in the summer of 1656. However, he was excluded from the House, along with a hundred or so other MPs, as an enemy of the protectorate. How exactly Bentley had offended against the Cromwellian regime is not clear, but his exclusion suggests that he was no longer an intimate of Lambert and Baynes, who both supported the policy of excluding crypto-royalists and others opposed to the army. It has been argued that Bentley was excluded because some of his kinsmen were Presbyterians or had sided with the king during the civil war, and that he and the rest of the Yorkshire excisemen were considered ‘desperate cavaliers’ by Colonel Robert Lilburne*, Lambert’s second-in-command, and other Yorkshire Cromwellians.38Carroll, ‘Yorks.’, 361-2; E. Parsons, The Civil, Ecclesiastical...and Misc. Hist. of Leeds, ii. 128; TSP iv. 468. Some of Bentley’s kinsmen were certainly prominent West Riding Presbyterians, and he appears to have been on close terms with several of Baynes’s Presbyterian adversaries in Leeds.39Calamy Revised, 50; CSP Dom. 1672, pp. 575, 579. However, Bentley's willingness to serve under the Rump, and particularly as a commissioner for tendering the Engagement abjuring the king and House of Lords, suggests that he himself was not part of the ‘high kirk gang’ in the West Riding. Moreover, he appears to relinquished his post as an exciseman at least a year before his election in 1656. The excluded MPs for the West Riding – Henry Arthington, Stanhope and Tempest – were barred from sitting: primarily, it seems, because of their close association with the Fairfax interest and its opposition to the rule of the major-generals (some members of the protectoral council may also have suspected Fairfax’s circle, probably unjustly, of complicity in the 1655 Yorkshire royalist rising).40Supra, ‘Yorkshire’; Carroll, ‘Yorks.’, 362. Having served under the Fairfaxes in the 1640s, Bentley may have been excluded on the same grounds.

Back in the West Riding, it was feared that the exclusion of Bentley, Tempest and Stanhope would lead to civil unrest. One of Baynes’s correspondents warned him that it might be necessary to quarter troops at Leeds ‘if our unsatisfied Members be malcontent or unadmitted to the House’.41Add. 21424, f. 68. He would be ‘very glad of your admitting the suspected Members’, he informed Baynes, ‘but submit to my lord’s prudence in state affairs’. The ‘lord’ in question was almost certainly Lambert, who was known to oppose the admission of the excluded Members. In October 1656, the excluded Members returned to Yorkshire, where the same correspondent observed that ‘the return of these Members is not so much resented by the country as we expected, except by some very rigid ones, and the common body of people look upon them not with a good eye, as disobliging the present power’.42Add. 21424, f. 85.

Perhaps anxious to ingratiate himself with the Restoration government, Bentley served as a commissioner to collect the ‘voluntary present’ to Charles II in 1661.43E113/7, pt. 2. He died on 17 January 1665 and was buried at Elland three days later (20 Jan.).44Heywood Diaries ed. Turner, iii. 90; Elland Par. Regs. ed. Ormerod, 219. His obituary was supplied by the West Riding nonconformist minister Oliver Heywood.

Yesterday, being Jan. 17, 1664-5, Mr Jeremiah Bentley of Elland, being in good health, ate his breakfast, put on his boots to go to a dinner at Halifax, [and] about ten a clock lost speech and died the same day. He was a middle aged man, very witty, thriving in the world, and ‘tis said he has left an estate worth well towards £20,000 ... He had bought a wood that cost him £10,000, he built very stately malt houses at Halifax, had taken a lease of the four mills [and] of the two halls and intended to pull them down and build them up new, with shops under and dwelling houses above, and to make great alterations in the [Halifax] Corn Market. But in that day did all his thoughts perish.45Heywood Diaries ed. Turner, iii. 90.

Although Bentley was evidently an enterprising and affluent man, Heywood’s claim that he left an estate ‘worth well towards £20,000’ is almost certainly an exaggeration. According to Bentley’s will, his estate included a mortgage on property in Woodhouse, Halifax, worth £1,240; the lease of several houses and corn mills, ‘two halls called linen and woollen cloth halls’, one ‘corn shop’ and several closes in Halifax and neighbouring townships; and the lease on a deer park in Thornhill, about six miles east of Elland.46Borthwick, Prob. Reg. 47, f. 116v. The largest legacy he left was only £100, and the majority were much smaller. There is no mention in his will of a reversion on copyhold property in the Halifax townships of Soyland and Stanningden and an estate at Rastrick, near Elland, which he had acquired in the later 1650s.47Crossley, ‘The Dyson fam.’, 166, 168-9. None of Bentley’s descendants sat in Parliament, and but for the creation of the constituency of Halifax under the Instrument of Government, he himself would not have been returned.