WHALLEY, Peter (1605-56), of All Saints, Northampton, Northants.

The Whalley family had been settled in Northampton since the Elizabethan period. One Richard Whalley had served as mayor of the town in 1563-4 and 1571-2; and Whalley’s father had evidently been a freeman at the very least, for when Whalley was made free himself in 1625 it was by right of birth.17Northampton Bor. Recs. ii. 468, 551; Serjeantson, St Giles, 288. A stationer and bookseller by trade, Whalley was identified by the privy council in 1634 as a vendor of Histriomastix – William Prynne’s* scathing attack on stage plays.18Docs. Rel. to the Procs. against William Prynne ed. S.R. Gardiner (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xviii), 60. Whalley was a man of strongly godly convictions, which was doubtless a factor in his appointment as a sidesman and, from 1639 to 1641, churchwarden at All Saints, Northampton, under the parish’s trenchantly puritan vicar Thomas Ball.19Northants. RO, 223p/24, pp. 9, 24, 25; Diary of Robert Woodford ed. J. Fielding (Cam. Soc. ser. 5, xlii), 33, 162, 373, 382; J. Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts: the Diocese of Peterborough 1603-42’ (Birmingham Univ. PhD thesis, 1989), 20, 21, 42, 101, 123, 149, 205, 215, 217, 220, 229; Oxford DNB, ‘Thomas Ball’.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, both Whalley and Ball figured prominently in the Puritan-backed campaign for the return of the godly Sir Gilbert Pykeringe* for Northamptonshire. On 3 May, they and eleven other men were summoned by the council on charges of having smeared Pykeringe’s main challenger – a deputy lieutenant – as a court stooge and his supporters as papists. The council was particularly concerned that by using the electoral rallying cry “no deputy lieutenants”, Whalley and his confederates had ‘made an exception in the minds of the people, to the great hindrance of the levy of soldiers then in hand’ for the second bishops’ war.20Supra, ‘Northamptonshire’; Bodl. Bankes 42, f. 117; Bankes 44, f. 27; CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 299; Woodford Diary ed. Fielding, 84; T. Cogswell, Home Divisions, 264; Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts’, 245, 246. By September, Whalley and Ball were under investigation by their Laudian opponents in Northamptonshire for having refused to have prayers read in All Saints church for the king’s success against the Scots.21CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 109.

At the outbreak of civil war in August 1642, Whalley donated silver plate worth £11 12s to Parliament’s war chest.22SP28/172, pt. 3, unfol. By March 1643, the Northamptonshire county committee had appointed him an assessment collector; and in April, John Crewe I* and Richard Knightley* nominated him as receiver of sequestration revenues in the county.23SP28/199, ff. 214, 216; SP20/1, f. 5v. In 1646, the Committee for Revenue* appointed him receiver-general of crown revenues in Northamptonshire and Rutland.24CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 490; CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 137. From his dealings with the sequestrations and compounding authorities under the Long Parliament, the Rump and the protectorate, it appears that he was a conscientious and trusted administrator.25CCC 88, 317, 632, 686, 698, 712, 728, 736.

In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Whalley was returned for Northampton on the strength of his interest as one of the town’s aldermen.26Supra, ‘Northampton’; Northants. RO, Northampton assembly bk. 3/2, p. 128. Indeed, he had been a leading member of the corporation since the early 1640s and had served as mayor in 1646-7.27Northants. RO, Northampton assembly bk. 3/2, pp. 60, 69, 80, 83, 91, 100, 101, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 117, 121, 125, 126; Northampton Bor. Recs. ii. 345, 441, 496, 552, 562, 568. His tally of committee appointments in this Parliament was somewhere between zero and four – the clerk of the House apparently making no effort to distinguish between him and the Chester MP (and alderman) Charles Walley, referring to both men, it seems, as either ‘Mr Whalley’ or ‘Alderman Whalley’.28CJ vii. 369b, 371b, 373b, 397b. Whalley was the more godly of the two men, and therefore it was probably he rather than Walley who was added to the committee for maintenance of ministers, on 7 December, when it was instructed to consider a bill enabling towns and corporations to improve clerical maintenance by taxation.29CJ vii. 397b.

In the autumn of 1655, Whalley began his second term as mayor, and at about the same time he was appointed receiver of state revenues in Northamptonshire and the adjoining counties, although he was put to some charge in obtaining this place. It was during one of the journeys associated with this office that ‘he was suddenly taken from his labour’, dying on 8 April 1656.30CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 170; Serjeantson, St Giles, 288, 290. He was buried ‘with great solemnity’ at All Saints, Northampton on 12 April.31Serjeantson, St Giles, 290. His funeral sermon was preached by the Presbyterian minister (and former vicar of All Saints) Edward Reynolds, who described Whalley as

an old disciple, a professor of religion in the worst times, when piety was nick-named preciseness ... Our dear brother was a winter Christian, kept his religion in the storm. And as then he was, so he continued, a steady Christian, a ship well balanced with sound knowledge and rooted sincerity and love of the truth; not carried about with every wind of doctrine ... He was a great lover of an able minister and of the ordinances of Christ so dispensed.32Deaths Advantage; Opened in a Sermon Preached at Northampton, at the Funeral of Peter Whalley Esq (1657), 26, 27 (E.912.6); Oxford DNB, ‘Edward Reynolds’.

A local chronicler claimed that Whalley’s death was

very much lamented both by town and county by reason of his public spirit ... [he] spent his whole endeavours to settle peace amongst his neighbours and to do good to the whole town by maintaining their privileges to the utmost and also did strive to advance the public stock, with many other good deeds.33Serjeantson, St Giles, 290.

In his will, which featured a devoutly godly preface and pious advice to his family, Whalley charged his estate with bequests totalling £820 and annuities of £20.34PROB11/257, ff. 363-4; Serjeantson, St Giles, 291. Late in 1657, his widow petitioned the protector for an allowance out of Whalley’s salary arrears as receiver, ‘for the good ordering of which he underwent much travail and charge in journeys’.35CSP Dom. 1657-8, pp. 170, 171, 179, 197. Whalley was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.