WEAVER, John (d. 1685), of Little Casterton and North Luffenham, Rutland, and Stamford, Lincs.

Background and early career

Contrary to the claims of contemporaries and of his modern biographers, Weaver was not the scion of a northern English family and nor was his father a Wiltshire alehouse-keeper.44[C. Walker*], Hist. of Independency (1648), 110 (E.463.19); BDBR ‘John Weaver’; Oxford DNB, ‘John Weaver’. In fact, he was descended from a family that had settled in the Welsh town of Presteigne, close to the border with Herefordshire, by the end of the sixteenth century.45Lincs. Peds. 1046. The Presteigne Weavers were almost certainly related to the Herefordshire gentry families that produced Edmund*, Richard* and Robert Weaver*.46Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 17-20.

Weaver’s father, Christopher Weaver, was living in the City parish of St Leonard, Foster Lane, when he married the daughter of a Rutland gentleman in 1600, and by the early 1610s he had established himself as a mercer in London.47St Mildred, Poultry, London, par. reg. (marr. entry 5 Jan. 1600); PROB11/120, f. 6v; REQ4/1/4/2, ff. 5-6; Carruthers, Hist. of Huntingdon, 259. In a suit brought in 1640 by Christopher Weaver – by then a resident of St Giles, Cripplegate – before the court of chivalry after he had been called ‘a base cheating knave’ by one of his neighbours, the prosecuting counsel stated that the Weavers had been gentry for 200 years.48BHO, Court of Chivalry website, 693. It is not clear why Christopher Weaver chose to marry into a Rutland family or to establish his country residence in nearby Stamford; although it is perhaps worth noting that, coincidentally or otherwise, he had followed broadly the same path as the town’s aristocratic patrons the Cecil family, who had moved from southern Herefordshire to Stamford a century earlier.49Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 282; Oxford DNB, ‘William Cecil, 1st baron Burghley’. Christopher Weaver died late in 1647, and in his will he left John two tenements in Stamford and made bequests in excess of £500. His legatees included his son-in-law, the Lincolnshire parliamentary officer Major Henry Markham*. Weaver considered himself virtually disinherited by his father’s will and attempted to challenge it in the court of chancery, but without success.50PROB11/204, ff. 168v-169; C. Holmes, Why Was Charles I Executed? (2006), 141.

Very little is known about John Weaver before the mid-1630s, when he and his family were living in Little Casterton, very close to Stamford.51Simpson, ‘Lincs. MPs’, 64. By May 1643, he was involved in supplying the parliamentarian forces defending Lincolnshire against the royalist army of William Cavendish, 1st earl of Newcastle.52WO55/460, p. 3. And in August, he was appointed treasurer for the fifth and twentieth assessments for the Eastern Association army of Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester; but how he had come to the attention of the earl and his staff is not clear.53SP28/139, pt. 1. f. 32. Nor is it known what motivated Weaver to side with Parliament in the civil war, although his allegiance was doubtless informed by his strongly puritan convictions. He was active as treasurer from August 1643 to the spring of 1645, when the Eastern Association army was incorporated into the New Model.54Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 628; Holmes, Eastern Assoc. 131-3. By the winter of 1644, he had evidently lost patience with his peace-minded commander-in-chief, for in December he gave evidence at Westminster in support of Oliver Cromwell’s* charges against Manchester, deposing that he perceived ‘some unwillingness’ in the earl to commit his forces against the royalists at Donnington Castle.55CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 152-3.

Parliamentary career, 1645-8

Weaver was returned as a ‘recruiter’ for Stamford in November 1645.56Supra, ‘Stamford’. He was elected on his own interest, it seems, as a long-time freeman of the borough and local gentry landowner, and he worked diligently on the town’s behalf at Westminster – the corporation thanking him in August 1646 for his pains in securing augmentation to the stipends of the town’s parish ministers.57Stamford Town Hall, Hall Bk. 1, f. 421v. He was named to perhaps as many as 90 committees before Pride’s Purge – the exact number being impossible to confirm because of the clerk of the House’s propensity for referring to both him and the Hereford recruiter Edmund Weaver as ‘Mr Weaver’. Given that Edmund Weaver did not take his seat until early 1647, was evidently absent from the House for much of 1647-8 and was the focus of investigation by the committee to receive information against MPs on suspicion of having been in arms against Parliament, it is likely that the majority of references in the Journals to ‘Mr Weaver’ relate to the Stamford MP.58Supra, ‘Edmund Weaver’; CJ v. 330a,

John Weaver was certainly much the more puritan of the two MPs, and if his appointments are any guide, his priority from an early stage in his parliamentary career was the maintenance of a godly ministry and the reformation of manners.59CJ iv. 605b, 632a; v. 7b, 51b, 119b, 148b, 151b, 189a, 302a, 320b, 326b, 522b. He was named to several committees for keeping the ministry and the universities free of disaffected clergymen – reporting a declaration to this effect on 5 August 1646 – and was closely involved in drafting ordinances for preventing ‘delinquent’ ministers from preaching, for suppressing fornication, blasphemy and other scandalous behaviour, and for the stricter observance of the sabbath.60CJ iv. 605b, 635a; v. 112b, 119b, 189a, 320b, 519b, 522b. Godly zeal in the war against popery may partly explain his inclusion on committees for sustaining Parliament’s forces in Ireland and for relieving those Irish Protestants who had fled to England.61CJ iv. 516b, 641b; v. 168b, 322b, 373b; LJ ix. 482a. In December 1646, he was named to a seven-man committee for bringing in an enumeration of ‘those more crying national sins, for which the nation hath not yet been humbled before God’ – a task that was referred specifically to his care. His six colleagues on this occasion were men deeply committed to a strongly Presbyterian church settlement.62CJ v. 7b. Weaver himself was on friendly terms with the leading Presbyterian divine Simeon Ashe – one of Manchester’s former regimental chaplains – for on 26 January 1648 the House chose him to request Ashe to preach the next fast sermon.63CJ v. 443a. Yet Weaver’s Presbyterianism was apparently not so ‘rigid’ or ‘Scottified’ that he rejected the Independent grandees’ initiative in the autumn of 1647 to bring in a comprehensive church settlement that allowed toleration for tender consciences.64CJ v. 302a, 321b, 327b; J. Adamson, ‘The English nobility and the projected settlement of 1647’, HJ xxx. 596.

Despite his Presbyterian religious convictions, several of Weaver’s appointments suggest what the newsbooks of the time repeatedly asserted – that he was closely associated with the parliamentary Independent interest. On 10 July 1646, for example, he was named to a committee on the controversial ordinance for the sale of delinquents’ estates – the proceeds of which were earmarked for paying Parliament’s soldiers and the maintenance of the war in Ireland. This legislation was opposed by the Presbyterian grandees, who were conspicuous by their absence from the committee.65CJ iv. 613a; J. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics 1645-9’ (Cambridge Univ. PhD thesis, 1986), 162. And on 6 February 1647, he was named to a nine-man committee, dominated by the Independents and chaired by Harbert Morley, to ensure that Parliament’s commissioners with the king at Holdenby did not allow Charles to reconstruct his court there.66CJ v. 77b. Weaver seems to have remained at Westminster during the Presbyterian ascendancy in the spring and early summer of 1647, although it is difficult to disentangle his appointments during this period from those of Edmund Weaver. The ‘Mr. Weaver’ named to committees for investigating the London militants, handing control of the City militia to the capital’s Presbyterian governors and for subjecting soldiers who took unauthorised (by Parliament) free quarter to civilian penalties may have been the Hereford MP.67CJ v. 112b, 132b, 153a, 165b. On the other hand, assignments for settling lands on Cromwell and Sir Thomas Fairfax* were probably those of the Stamford man; and it was certainly John Weaver who played a leading role in preparing the legislation establishing the Committee for Indemnity – of which he was an active member.68CJ v. 162b, 166a, 167a, 171b, 174a; SP24/1, ff. 5v, 161v; SP24/2, ff. 1, 19. His motion on 5 July that the prohibition on former royalists sitting in the House should extend to anyone who had supported the king’s 1643 cessation with the Irish rebels, was perceived as an attempt to remove the Presbyterians’ Anglo-Irish ally Sir Philip Percivalle and was successfully countered by Sir Philip Stapilton.69HMC Egmont, i. 423.

Weaver was among those Members who fled to the protection of the army following the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster on 26 July 1647 and who signed their ‘engagement’ of 4 August, in which Fairfax and his men were eulogised for their ‘Christian, noble and public affection to the good, peace and prosperity of this kingdom and...faithfulness to the true interest of the English nation’.70LJ ix. 385b. In the fortnight following the army’s march into London early in August, he was named to committees for thanking its supporters in the capital, for investigating the July riots and for repealing the legislation passed during the Presbyterian ‘force’ upon the Houses.71CJ v. 268b, 269a, 272a, 278a. On 2 October, he was added to a committee for preparing a declaration reciting the offences of the Presbyterian rioters and Parliament’s justice and mercy in its proceeding against them.72CJ v. 324a. As part of the Common’s campaign that autumn to purge the ‘ill-affected’ from local office, Weaver and Colonel John Birch prepared an ordinance for preventing malignants participating in municipal affairs.73CJ v. 317b, 320a. On 8 November, Weaver chaired a meeting of the Committee for Indemnity at which the ‘well-affected’ inhabitants of Stamford presented articles of delinquency against several leading townsmen.74SP24/1, ff. 69v, 70; SP24/77. Under pressure from the committee, the corporation removed the accused men, and Weaver was among the comburgesses elected in their place.75SP24/1, f. 147v-148; SP24/2, f. 116; Stamford Town Hall, Hall Bk. 1, ff. 427v-429v.

Radical Independent, 1648-9

Weaver seems to have moved towards the more radical wing of the Independents during the course of 1648. On 4 January, the day after the vote of no addresses, he was included on a committee to prepare ordinances for the redress of grievances and the removal of burdens on the people’s liberties. Chaired by the prominent Independent MPs Alexander Rigby I and Thomas Scot I, this committee was apparently intended to appease reformist and radical constituencies in the army and in London.76CJ v. 417a. The next day (5 Jan.), Weaver was made responsible for drafting an ordinance to discharge delinquents with estates worth less than £200 from sequestration – and this initiative, too, may have addressed criticism in radical quarters of Parliament’s oppressive pecuniary measures.77CJ v. 419b. On 20 January, he was added to a high-powered and Independent-dominated committee for preparing a declaration justifying the vote of no addresses.78CJ v. 417a, 439a. Granted leave of absence on 4 April in order to take up his appointment of the previous autumn as a commissioner for regulating the affairs of the Channel Islands, he was declared absent and excused at the call of the House on 24 April.79CJ v. 525a, 543b. Who or what had recommended him for this assignment is not clear.

Weaver had returned to Westminster by 17 May 1648 – the day after a group of Surrey petitioners had skirmished bloodily with soldiers at Westminster – when he and two other MPs were entrusted with reviving a declaration prohibiting any ‘engagement’ (i.e. formal public agitation) against Parliament.80CJ v. 562b, 563a. Shortly afterwards, according to Clement Walker*, Weaver moved that ‘all Kent might be sequestered because they had rebelled and Essex because they would rebel’.81[Walker], Hist. of Independency, 97. When the House debated later that month whether to hold a personal treaty with the king, Weaver, John Blakiston and Thomas Scot were alleged to have ‘barbarously aspersed’ Charles.82NAS, GD 406/1/2467. One newsbook claimed that Weaver and Scot had declared that ‘it was fitter he [the king] should be brought to his trial and drawn, hang’d and quartered than treated with, he being the only cause of all the bloodshed throughout the three kingdoms’.83Mercurius Elencticus no. 27 (24-31 May 1648), 209 (E.445.23). Walker and other commentators repeatedly identified Weaver as a leading friend of the army and a vociferous critic of the Engager Scots, their English allies and of the prince of Wales in particular, whom be moved should be voted a traitor.84[Walker], History of Independency, 100, 110, 120, 122, 130, 135, 160; The Cuckoo’s-Nest at Westminster (1648), 6 (E447.19); A Letter from an Ejected Member of the House of Commons to Sir Jo: Evelyn (1648), 24-5 (E.463.18); Mercurius Melancholicus no. 49 (24-31 July 1648), 294 (E.455.12). This portrayal of Weaver is consistent with his nomination to committees that summer for defending Parliament in print and strengthening its hold on London and in the east Midlands.85CJ v. 574a, 585b, 631b, 633a, 633b, 643b, 651b, 657a; CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 177. Like other anti-Engager Presbyterians in the House, he favoured the demand that Charles’s assent to certain preconditions, including the establishment of Presbyterianism in England for three years, before any personal treaty.86CJ v. 637a; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 18 (25 July-1 Aug. 1648), sig. S3v (E.456.7).

If the royalist newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus can be credited, Weaver became more radical and outspoken as the summer and autumn of 1648 progressed. In August, he attacked the City Presbyterians as adherents of the crypto-royalist majority in the Lords; in September, he cried up a Leveller petition demanding justice against ‘the capital authors’ of the civil wars; in October, he urged the Commons to proceed against its ‘capital enemies, from the highest to the lowest’; and in November, he described the earl of Newcastle as ‘the greatest traitor in England except the king’.87CJ v. 637a; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 20 (8-15 Aug. 1648), sigs. Y2, Y3v (E.458.25); no. 25 (12-19 Sept. 1648), sig. Ii2v (E.464.12); no. 29 (10-17 Oct. 1648), sig. Rr2v (E.467.38); no. 34 (14-21 Nov. 1648), sig. Bb3 (E.473.7); Mercurio Volpone no. 2 (5-12 Oct. 1648), 15 (E.467.22). Nevertheless, despite his reported hostility to negotiating with Charles, he was named to three committees in September and October relating to the Newport Treaty, including that set up on 27 October to consider how to render the Covenant acceptable to the king. Presbyterians formed the majority on all three of these committees.88CJ vi. 29b, 62b, 63a.

Weaver was granted leave of absence on 11 November 1648 and received no further mention in the Journals until 31 January 1649 – the day after the regicide.89CJ vi. 74b. One newsbook listed him on 11 December among 30 or so MPs who were ‘downright for the army’.90Mercurius Elencticus no. 55 (5-12 Dec. 1648), 532 (E.476.4); Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 38 (12-19 Dec. 1648), sig. Ddd4v (E.476.35). Three days later (14 Dec.), the same source named Weaver with Cromwell, Scot, Henry Ireton, Henry Marten and 13 other Members who had voted against re-admitting those secluded MPs against whom there was no charge.91Mercurius Elencticus no. 56 (12-19 Dec. 1648), 539 (E.476.36). But these reports of Weaver’s presence among the radical Rumpers in the House are hard to reconcile with his failure to secure nomination to a single Commons’ committee during these weeks. Furthermore, although he was included on the commission to try the king, he attended none of the trial sessions. These facts strongly suggest that he absented himself from the House for much or all of the period between mid-November 1648 and late January 1649. Similarly, his unwillingness to make his dissent to the 5 December 1648 vote – that the king’s answers at Newport were a sufficient ground for a settlement – until 1 February implies that he had misgivings about the trial and execution of the king.92CJ vi. 126b; W. Prynne*, A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members (1660), 23 (E.1013.22). Either the newsbook-writers had exaggerated his militancy during the second half of 1648, or he neither anticipated nor welcomed the course the revolution had taken during the winter of 1648-9.

Career in the Rump, 1649-53

Although Weaver apparently sought to distance himself from the events surrounding the establishment of the commonwealth, he was subsequently named to committees for abolishing kingship, for preventing Presbyterian ministers preaching or publishing against the new regime and for enjoining subscription to the Engagement against king and Lords.93CJ vi. 131b, 158a, 179a, 273b, 321b, 326b, 370b. Furthermore, he seems to thrown himself wholeheartedly into the Rump’s proceedings, receiving approximately 90 committee appointments – the vast majority between January 1649 and October 1650. The House turned to him on numerous occasions to chair committees and to draft legislation and orders. Among the many pieces of parliamentary business that were assigned wholly or in part to his care were measures for remodelling the commissions of peace (8 Feb. 1649), for abating the price of victuals (10 Feb., 5 Apr.), for deciding which bills to pass before the House went into summer recess (25 June), for repealing the statutes requiring attendance at divine service (29 June), for purging ‘ill-affected’ officeholders from municipal corporations (21 July), for drafting a declaration on ministers’ maintenance (2 Aug.), for removing burdensome public offices (27 June 1650) and for bringing in a new militia ordinance (10 July).94CJ vi. 134a, 137a, 158b, 179b, 183a, 242b, 244b, 245b, 246a, 249a, 267b, 272a, 273b, 279b, 280a, 327b, 328b, 368a, 382a, 385b, 388b, 423b, 427b, 429a, 432b, 439a, 439b, 440a, 468a; vii. 162a, 254a.

Weaver’s career in the Rump strengthens the impression that his overriding concern as an MP was the maintenance of a godly ministry and the suppression of vice. As well as contributing to the work of presenting ministers to vacant or sequestered livings, he was frequently enlisted by the Rump to man and chair committees and to draft orders, for encouraging godly preaching, propagating the gospel (both in England and in Ireland) and for introducing legislation to suppress adultery, swearing and fornication.95SP22/2B, ff. 241v, 330v; Add. 36792, f. 54v; LPL, Sion L40.2/E16, p. 2; CJ vi. 158b, 180b, 245b, 273b, 280a, 327b, 328b, 336a, 382a, 385b, 388b, 389a, 468a; vii. 244a. His most important contribution to the Rump’s religious policy came with his appointment as chair of a committee set up on 14 June 1650 for suppressing obscene and licentious practices under pretence of liberty of conscience.96CJ vi. 423b, 430a, 437b. A week later (21 June), he reported from this committee on the ‘several atheistical, blasphemous and execrable’ opinions of the Ranters, and that same day he was ordered to prepare a bill making their alleged practices capital offences.97CJ vi. 427b. As part of his responsibility in drafting this bill and steering it through the House, he reported the confession of the radical anti-Calvinist Lawrence Clarkson as to his authorship of the ‘scandalous’ tract, A Single Eye.98CJ vi. 437b, 439a, 444a, 444b, 474b.

The cause of godly reform dominated his work in the Rump. Slightly lower on his agenda – though evidently still important to him – were the interlinked issues of managing public revenues and attending to the needs and desires of the army.99CJ vi. 150b, 161b, 246a, 258b, 265a, 274a, 325b, 368a, 383b; vii. 154b, 164b, 254a. In June and July 1649 and again in February 1650, he was tasked with measures for securing arrears of army pay.100CJ vi. 246a, 249a, 258b, 368a. And on 16 August 1649, he and Cornelius Holland were ordered to draft an ordinance in response to a petition presented that day from the army, requesting that all statutes requiring attendance at public worship, ‘whereby many conscientious people are much molested and the propagation of the Gospel hindered, may be removed and some course taken that the spirit of Christ, flowing forth in his servants…may not be suppressed, but receive all due encouragement’.101CJ vi. 280a; The Petition of his Excellency Thomas Lord Fairfax, Lord General and His Councel of Officers (1649), 4-5 (E.569.22). The Rump clearly considered Weaver an expert when it came to improving the indemnity process.102CJ vi. 149b, 273b, 274a. And it is likely that initiatives for the relief and employment of the poor and for legal reform also claimed some of his time in the House (he would subsequently donate £20 to Stamford corporation for setting the poor on work and £100 as a stock for providing loans to poor tradesmen).103CJ vi. 137a, 171a, 327a, 330b, 374b; Stamford Town Hall, Hall Bk. 1, ff. 447, 450. Ireland, too, remained high among his priorities, and on 20 July 1649 he was added to the Star Chamber Committee of Irish Affairs*, from which he subsequently reported on Parliament’s forces in Munster.104CJ vi. 266b, 281a, 327b; vii. 162a, 278b, 280b. When the council of state was casting around in the summer of 1650 for candidates as commissioners for Irish affairs, Weaver was one of the men it lighted upon.105CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 339, 376; CJ vi. 435a, 479a-480a. He accepted this charge, which came with a salary of £1,000 a year, and early in 1651 he and his fellow commissioners – Miles Corbett*, John Jones* and Edmund Ludlowe II* – landed at Waterford.106CJ vi. 486a, b; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 376; Ludlow, Mems. i. 486. Weaver was almost certainly involved in persuading the Congregationalist minister Samuel Winter – who had married Weaver’s widdowed sister in 1648 – to re-locate to Dublin, where he was appointed provost of Trinity College in 1652.107St Mary, Lambeth par. reg. (marr. entry 13 June 1648); J. Weaver, The Life and Death of the Eminently Learned, Pious and Painful Minister of the Gospel, Dr. Samuel Winter (1671), 7; Oxford DNB, ‘Samuel Winter’.

Weaver and his fellow commissioners arrived in Ireland while the parliamentary campaign of re-conquest was still in progress, and much of their work was concerned with ordering and managing the war-effort – an issue on which Weaver was soon at odds with a powerful section of the army, including Cromwell. According to Ludlowe, Weaver was ‘very active’ in opposing the efforts of Cromwell, John Lambert* and other senior officers to have the commander-in-chief in Ireland vested with the title and powers of lord deputy.108Ludlow, Mems. i. 319, 494-512. Having returned to England early in 1652 to report the state of affairs in Ireland to Parliament, Weaver assured the House ‘that upon his knowledge, all the sober people of Ireland and the whole army there, except a few factious persons, were not only well satisfied with the present government, both civil and military, but also with the governors who managed the same’.109CJ vii. 129a; HMC Portland, i. 644-7; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 231; Ludlow, Mems. i. 319; Worden, Rump Parl. 309. Like Ludlowe and other ‘commonwealthsmen’, Weaver evidently believed that the reconquered Ireland should be under civilian and parliamentary rule and that the office of lord lieutenant or deputy was ‘more suitable to a monarchy than a free commonwealth’.110Ludlow, Mems. i. 318. It was partly thanks to Weaver that Cromwell’s efforts to have his office as lord lieutenant continued, or Lambert sent over as his deputy, came to nothing. To add insult to injury, the Rump subsequently named Weaver first to a committee (which he probably chaired) for satisfying the Irish Adventurers and paying the arrears of the army in Ireland.111CJ vii. 162a. Moreover, on 24 August, it was resolved that Weaver and his fellow commissioners be continued in office.112CJ vii. 167a.

The government of Ireland became one of the army’s main grievances against the Rump, and in February 1653, Sir Hardress Waller* and other officers in the Irish army petitioned Parliament demanding Weaver’s removal. The officers alleged, among other things, that Weaver had tried to persuade his fellow commissioners to keep the command of the army to themselves and not to entrust it to any single person, and that he had exploited false reports of Anabaptists infiltrating the high command to attack ‘eminent godly persons in this army’.113Bodl. Carte 67, ff. 289-95; HMC Portland, i. 671-2. Anxious now to salve its reputation with the army, the Rump probably put pressure on Weaver to resign his post, and on 22 February it accepted his request to this effect.114CJ vii. 261b. By way of compensation for his lost office and reward for his services in Ireland, order was made on 14 April that forfeited Scottish lands to the value of £250 a year be settled upon him, although this grant was effectively frozen by the army’s dissolution of the Rump a week later.115CJ vii. 278a.

Weaver and the protectorate, 1654-8

There seems little doubt that Weaver opposed army intervention against Parliament in April 1653 – just as he seems to have done in December 1648 – and at some point during the summer he was required to re-take the Engagement as a pledge of loyalty to the new regime.116CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 62. Given his dislike of single person rule, it seems unlikely that he approved of the establishment of the protectorate. Nevertheless, he was returned for Stamford in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654 and was named a month later as an lay ‘ejector’ for Rutland.117Supra, ‘Stamford’. Shortly after his election, the protectoral council revived the Rump’s order of April 1653 granting him lands in Scotland.118CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 260, 276. However, the trustees of forfeited estates in Scotland claimed that the lands were so encumbered with debts and other charges as to be of little or no value.119TSP iv. 549.

A correspondent of the Norfolk gentleman John Buxton* claimed in mid-September 1654 that Weaver and the leading commonwealthsmen John Bradshawe* and Sir Arthur Hesilrige* had been forward in opposing the Instrument of Government and would probably be denied admittance to the House.120CUL, Buxton pprs. 59/100. But although all three men were allowed to take their seats, like most other leading republicans they quickly withdrew from the House in conscientious refusal to sign the Recognition pledging loyalty to the protectoral settlement.121Ludlow, Mems. i. 392; Burton’s Diary, iv. 164; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 86. Weaver received just one appointment in this Parliament – to the committee of privileges, on 5 September.122CJ vii. 366b. Secretary John Thurloe* believed that Weaver was involved in republican plotting against the protectorate during the winter of 1654-5, but took no action against him.123TSP iii. 147. Weaver’s attendance at meetings of the governors of Westminster school during the mid-1650s ensured that he kept in touch with many of his former colleagues in the Rump, among them Bradshawe and Ludlowe.124SP28/292, unfol. And he certainly used Winter and his other contacts in Ireland to encourage opposition there to the Cromwellian administration during the later 1650s.125T. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, 113, 115-16, 126, 129; Oxford DNB, ‘John Weaver’.

Weaver stood for Stamford again in the elections to the second Cromwellian Parliament in the summer of 1656, declaring to the townsmen ‘that his mind was altered from what it was the last Parliament’ and that he now supported the protectorate.126TSP v. 299. Major-general Edward Whalley*, for one, was not persuaded by this volte-face, but his suspicions made little headway among the Stamford voters, who duly returned Weaver.127Supra, ‘Stamford’; TSP v. 296, 299. However, the protectoral council was no more convinced of Weaver’s change of heart towards the ‘present government’ than Whalley had been and duly excluded him from the House, along with 120 or so other Members, as an opponent of the government.128CJ vii. 452b.

At the beginning of the second session, in January 1658, Weaver was allowed to take his seat (along with the rest of the excluded Members) and promptly joined the commonwealthsmen in attacking the protectoral settlement, and in particular the constitutional validity of the Cromwellian Other House. As he informed the Commons on 28 January, he was willing to let the Other House exercise a limited and de facto authority, ‘but as to that power co-ordinate with you, it will bide some debate before that be yielded. We know with what difficulty good laws passed the natural lords in former times’.129Burton’s Diary, ii. 377. On 29 and 30 January and again on 3 February, he supported motions by Hesilrige and other prominent commonwealthsmen to have the issue of the Other House debated in a committee of the Whole, hoping thereby to delay and, ideally, to frustrate recognition of the protectoral settlement in toto.130Burton’s Diary, ii. 392, 399, 422-3. When Cromwell dissolved Parliament shortly afterwards, Weaver wrote an open letter to his friends in Ireland, complaining that the protector had acted upon ‘groundless fears’ and ‘a mere arbitrary power’.131TSP vii. 243. But as Thurloe complained, this was mere polemic,

for he and several other [sic] of that party made it their business [in Parliament] to persuade to a commonwealth and were confident that they should carry it … and there was not a forwarder man in all England in this than Weaver, and therefore one would think he should blush to write that the fears were groundless, whereas there was such tamperings as these are to overthrow the government and bring us into blood.132TSP vii. 269.

Commonwealthsman, 1659-60

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, Weaver was returned for Stamford again.133Stamford Town Hall, Hall Bk. 2, f. 3v. He was named to just five committees in this Parliament – two of which related to the ministry – and on 28 January he spoke in favour of nominating the Presbyterian divine Edmund Calamy to preach on the next day of humiliation.134CJ vii. 594b, 600b, 609a, 615a, 616a, 644b; Burton’s Diary, iii. 12. At a meeting late in December 1658 to work out their strategy in the forthcoming Parliament, Weaver, Thomas Scot and other leading commonwealthsmen had decided that to undermine the protectoral settlement they must endeavour to make the Commons the ultimate arbiter of constitutional grey areas, and this is precisely what they did.135TSP vii. 550; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 50-1. Throughout the debate on the Bill of Recognition (the bill confirming Richard Cromwell’s title as protector), which took up most of February, Weaver worked with Hesilrige, Scot, Thomas Chaloner and other republicans in their efforts to impede its progress. On 7 February, he expressed the hope that the protectorate’s supporters would allow the House to debate the bill from scratch, arguing that he and many other Members had been denied this right by reason of their ‘dishonourable’ exclusion in September 1656.136Burton’s Diary, iii. 76. Speaking in support of Hesilrige the next day (8 Feb.), Weaver attacked the bill directly:

I am against the bill wholly, not because it came from a private hand. Yet it had been more honourable if it had moved first from the House. All liberty and power are fundamental in the people … A gentleman [possibly Major Robert Beake] looked more like a parasite of France than an Englishman, that said we could not take away the constitution, nor meddle with the [Humble] Petition and Advice.137Burton’s Diary, iii. 142-3.

When it came to questions concerning the Commons’ membership and therefore the relative strength of the court interest and its opponents, Weaver regularly backed republican initiatives to have pro-Cromwellian MPs and those with royalist pasts expelled from the House. He participated in the mud-slinging campaign on 12 February 1659 against Edmund Jones, MP for Brecon, and Thomas Street, MP for Worcester, and he even went so far as to suggest that Brecon should have its franchise withdrawn.138Burton’s Diary, iii. 239, 240, 242-3, 255. After a vote for the expulsion of Jones, Weaver informed his fellow MPs that it was ‘the best day’s work you yet did’.139Burton’s Diary, iii. 253.

A favourite tactic of the republicans in their efforts to scupper the Bill of Recognition was to question the presence of the Scottish and Irish Members, whose right to sit in the Commons was grounded solely (or so the republicans argued) upon the will of the protector. On 18 February 1659, Weaver declared that ‘sixty persons sit among you that have no vote in your legislature. Any sixty persons that walk in Westminster Hall may as well sit … They have no right at all to sit, by law’.140Burton’s Diary, iii. 29, 346 He expanded on this theme on 17 March, arguing that if it were admitted that the Scottish and Irish Members had a right to sit merely because the protector had summoned them, then ‘you pull up the people’s liberties by the root’.141Burton’s Diary, iv. 164-5. The Cromwellian Act of Union was a mere ordinance, he argued, ‘made without the consent of the people’ and ‘illegal without Parliament’. Yet the exclusion of MPs from the 1654-5 and 1656-8 Parliaments had rendered them illegal in Weaver’s eyes – the 1659 Parliament was ‘the first free Parliament’ – and thus incapable of legitimising the Union.142W.A.H. Schilling, ‘The parliamentary diary of Sir John Gell, 5 Feb.-21 Mar. 1659’ (Vanderbilt Univ. MA thesis, 1961), 226-8. The vote on 21 March confirming the Scottish Members in their places merely prompted the commonwealthsmen to renew their calls for the Irish Members to withdraw. On 23 March, he insisted that there could be no

greater violation of the rights and liberties of the people, than to bring in persons hither to impose laws upon you. I have a particular relation to that nation [Ireland] and shall serve them in aught, but cannot admit them to sit, till you declare it by law. I would rather they should have a Parliament of their own. I shall acquiesce in your vote for Scotland, though I must still say they have no right of law.143Burton’s Diary, iv. 240.

Weaver also widened his attack upon the Other House to include its membership as well as its constitutional footing, or lack of it.

Gross exceptions are against many that sit there … Many of the [protectoral] council, such as have laid taxes upon the people, are unfit for sitting in Parliament. The officers are generally good; but divers are not fit to sit there. A little gentleman in London [Thurloe] shall never have my consent to sit there.144Burton’s Diary, iv. 66-7.

Weaver conceded that a second chamber, subordinate to the Commons, might be serviceable, but not in the form prescribed in the Humble Petition and Advice, which he regarded as a return to an hereditary House of Lords.145Burton’s Diary, iv. 67. His hostility towards any perceived lordly or courtly interest at Westminster was equalled by his concern to defend the government’s republican opponents. He supported the efforts of Hesilrige and other commonwealthsmen in March to secure the release of Colonel Robert Overton, who had been imprisoned for disaffection to the protectorate.146Burton’s Diary, iv. 153. And in the debate on the double return for the Yorkshire borough of Malton, he favoured the republican candidates Robert Lilburne* and Luke Robinson* over their Cromwellian rivals.147Burton’s Diary, iv. 44.

It is not known whether Weaver approved of the army’s dissolution of Richard Cromwell’s Parliament in April 1659. Nevertheless, he responded positively to Speaker William Lenthall’s summons to attend the restored Rump, writing from North Luffenham on 18 May that he would resume his seat shortly and that in the meantime his prayers were ‘for the Lord’s guidance of that assembly … to act those things which may advance His honour and the settlement of the nation upon firm bases for its future peace and tranquillity’.148Bodl. Tanner 51, f. 63; Clarke Pprs. iv. 279. He was named to only 12 committees that summer, although one of these was the revived Committee for Plundered Ministers*, from which he made two reports to the House.149CJ vii. 678b, 684b, 689b, 691a, 694b, 697b, 702b, 705a, 709a, 711a, 714b, 733a, 756b. The most notable of his three tellerships in the restored Rump saw him partner Harbert Morley on 21 June against countenancing a group of Congregationalist (possibly sectarian) petitioners from Hull ‘who, through grace, have been kept sensible of and mourned for ... the late apostasy from the good old cause’.150CJ vii. 690b, 734a, 754b. Weaver and Morley, who almost certainly represented the ‘Presbyterian party in the House’, lost this division to the radical tolerationists Sir Henry Vane II and Nathaniel Rich.151Supra, ‘Harbert Morley; CJ vii. 690b.

Granted leave of absence on 6 August 1659, Weaver was probably away from the House when it was again forcibly interrupted by the army, on 13 October.152CJ vii. 749b. During the brief rule of the committee of safety in the last months of 1659, he sided with Hesilrige’s faction against Lambert’s army group and its civilian allies. Early in December, Weaver, Scot, Thomas Fitch* and several other commonwealthsmen hatched a plot for handing control of the Tower to forces loyal to the Rump, but the design was betrayed to Lieutenant-general Charles Fleetwood*.153Mercurius Politicus no. 598 (8-15 Dec. 1659), 954 (E.195.45); Clarke Pprs. iv. 186, 188. In an open letter to Fleetwood on 16 December, Weaver and the other ringleaders warned him and the rest of the Wallingford House ‘junto’ that nemesis was approaching in the shape of General George Monck* and that the Rump was ‘the sole lawful authority … which can only be hoped to make the sword subservient to the civil interest and settle the government in the hands of the people’.154A Letter from Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, Thomas Scot, Jo. Berners, and John Weaver Esquires, Delivered to the Lord Fleetwood (1659), 4, 5, 6. With the support of the City they managed to secure the Tower at the second time of asking (24 Dec.), and on 26 December the restored Rump awarded Weaver and the other signatories to the letter £250 each and ordered that the government of the Tower be committed to their care.155Public Intelligencer no. 208 (19-26 Dec. 1659), 971, 972 (E.773.33); Whitelocke, Mems. iv. 383; CJ vii. 797a. On 29 December, Weaver, Scot and several more of Hesilrige’s republican allies were returned the thanks of the House for having ‘acted in the service of Parliament during the time of its late interruption’.156CJ vii. 799a.

From power to obscurity, 1660-85

Weaver played a prominent part in the final days of the commonwealth. Indeed, a correspondent of Sir Edward Hyde* regarded Scot, Hesilrige and Weaver as ‘the main men’ in the House by early 1660. More specifically, he referred to Weaver, Morley and Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper as the leading opponents of Hesilrige’s efforts to revive and re-unite the commonwealth interest.157CCSP iv. 512, 520. Between late December 1659 and late January 1660, Weaver was nominated to the last council of state under the Rump (31 Dec. 1659) and appointed to the commissions for managing the army, for governing Ireland and for the admiralty and navy.158CJ vii. 798b, 800b, 815b, 825b. His Commons’ committee appointments included those for thanking Monck and settling an estate upon him, for imposing qualifications upon new recruiter MPs and for drafting a revised version of the Engagement – the so-called ‘oath of abjuration’ – which was ‘stricter than any that had ever been imposed and was by many disliked’.159CJ vii. 797b, 803a, 806b, 813a, 818b, 844a; Baker, Chronicle, 678. Unable to forgive the leaders of the army faction that had usurped the ‘civil interest’ in October 1659, Weaver was a minority teller on 2 January against including Lambert in a vote that all the soldiers in the ‘late defection and rebellion’ who submitted to Parliament before 9 January would be indemnified for their life and estate.160CJ vii. 802b.

By this stage, it seems, Weaver was more interested in wresting power from the army and its sectarian allies than in restoring it to the Rump. He attended none of the meetings of the Rump’s final council of state – reportedly from a disinclination to take the oath of abjuration – and he was identified by contemporaries, including Monck (who cultivated Weaver’s support at Westminster), among the ‘more moderate sort of men’, who ‘appeared much inclined to a conjunction with the secluded Members and well-disposed to monarchy’.161Clarke Pprs. iv. 250-1; Baker, Chronicle, 678. The day that the secluded Members were allowed to resume their seats, 21 February 1660, he was ordered to expunge from the Journals some of the Rump’s more controversial votes and resolutions, particularly those made in the aftermath of Pride’s Purge.162CJ vii. 847a. That same day (21 Jan.), he was ordered to inform the council of state that its powers were suspended.163CJ vii. 847a, 847b. Having thus turned his back on the Rump, he was elected to a new (and, as it proved, the final) council of state and would attend 30 of its sessions.164CJ vii. 849b; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. xxvi-xxvii; Add. 4197, f. 270. He was subsequently named to several committees for establishing the working parameters of the forthcoming Convention, and he played a leading role in bringing in legislation for settling Hampton Court and other properties on Monck.165CJ vii. 848b, 850b, 852b, 868a, 868b. Weaver’s endorsement of measures likely to end in the restoration of monarchy in some form did not preclude his nomination to the 10 March committee for inserting in the militia commissioners’ oath an acknowledgement that ‘the war undertaken by the Parliament against the forces raised by the late king and his adherents was just and lawful’.166CJ vii. 871a.

Among Weaver’s reasons for backing the re-admission of the secluded Members may have been the hope that it would facilitate a Presbyterian church settlement. Monck seems to have thought as much, recommending the London agent of the Scottish Kirk to pay court to Weaver and Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper.167W. Kennet, Register (1728), 59; G. Davies, The Restoration of Charles II 1658-60, 227-8. But if Weaver was indeed motivated by such pious considerations, he had reason to feel apprehensive by April, for as one of his correspondents lamented: ‘we are fallen into a sad condition; the good old cause is sunk and a spirit of profaneness, malignity and revenge rising up, trampling on all that have the face of godliness … The cavaliers threaten a routing of all’.168CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 414.

Weaver stood for Stamford in the elections to the 1660 Convention and was involved in a double return with a candidate backed by the Cecils. The Convention decided against Weaver, and on 9 May the alderman (mayor) of Stamford was called into the House and there amended the return for the borough, striking out Weaver’s name and inserting that of his rival.169HP Commons, 1660-90, ‘Stamford’. Weaver was still signing warrants as an admiralty commissioner as late as mid-June.170Add. 4197, f. 279; ADM2/1731, f. 154v. But shortly thereafter, he withdrew from public life. He was omitted from all commissions during the course of 1660, and in 1661 he resigned his office as comburgess.171Stamford Town Hall, Hall Bk. 2, f. 10v. He appears to have conformed to the Church of England, but his house at North Luffenham was among the preaching venues favoured by Stamford’s ejected Presbyterian minister John Richardson during the Restoration period.172Calamy Revised, 411. In 1671, Weaver published a posthumous life of his brother-in-law Samuel Winter – also an ejected minister – who had been buried at North Luffenham in 1666.173Weaver, Life and Death of…Samuel Winter; Calamy Revised, 539. Winter had appointed Weaver, Markham, the godly Northamptonshire gentleman Alexander Blake*, and a son of Andrew Broughton* as supervisors of his will.174PROB11/324, f. 327. Weaver himself died in the spring of 1685 and was buried at North Luffenham on 28 March.175Simpson, ‘Lincs. MPs’, 63-4. No will is recorded. He was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.