ALLANSON, Sir William (c.1587-1656), of St Michael le Belfrey, York, and later the deanery, York Minster close, and Crayke, Yorks.

Allanson was the scion of a yeoman family that had settled at Ampleforth, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, by the late sixteenth century. After serving his apprenticeship under the draper and York alderman, Robert Askwith – who served as the city’s MP in the 1604, 1614 and 1621 Parliaments – Allanson entered the York merchant tailors’ company and had prospered sufficiently by 1632 to take as his third wife the daughter of the West Riding landed gentleman Christopher Tancred, thereby becoming connected to several of the oldest families in Yorkshire. In the corporation, Allanson made steady progress, culminating in his election as lord mayor in 1633.50Yorks. Arch. Soc. Lib. Ms 371; York City Archives, Y/FIN/1/2/14, Chamberlains’ acct. bk. 1611, f. 58; Life of Marmaduke Rawdon ed. Davies, 125-6; HP Commons, 1604-29, ‘Askwith (Ayscough, Ascue), Robert’. His first term as mayor was marked by a visit from the king, who stopped at York in May on his way to Scotland. In his welcoming address to Charles, Allanson described him as ‘the light in his subjects’ eye’, a compliment the king repaid by knighting Allanson and standing godfather to his infant son, Charles.51York City Archives, York House Bk. 35, ff. 208-11; Life of Marmaduke Rawdon ed. Davies, 126; Wilson, ‘York’, 20. Allanson’s mayoralty was also notable for disputes with the vice-president of the council of the north, Sir Edward Osborne*, and with the archdeacon of York over the order of seating in the Minster and other churches in the city – Allanson claiming precedence for the mayor and corporation.52York City Archives, York House Bk. 35, ff. 193v-194, 203r-v, 208-11, 214, 218v, 219v-220, 221-2, 225, 229, 230.

As one of the corporation’s most senior and active members, Allanson figured prominently in its power struggle during the later 1630s with a group of Laudian clergy based in the Minster close and backed by Archbishop John Neile and, indeed, the king himself.53York City Archives, York House Bk. 35, ff. 246v, 286, 305, 324, 341v; 36, f. 27; VCH York, 174, 202-3. Although Allanson was never censured by the Laudian church authorities, as were several other York aldermen, he did have connexions with puritan ministers and was generally regarded as one of the leaders of the godly interest in the corporation.54VCH York, 202. In March 1640, he opposed the corporation’s choice of the president of the council of the north, Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†), as lord high steward of the city.55York City Archives, York House Bk. 36, f. 40. And when the citizens rejected Strafford’s candidates in the election at York to the Long Parliament that autumn, it was Allanson and another godly aldermen Thomas Hoyle who were returned for the city.56Supra, ‘York’.

Allanson was named to 13 committees between mid-November 1640 and 26 July 1641, when he made his last recorded intervention in the House’s proceedings before departing Westminster for his second leave of absence.57CJ ii. 31a, 51b, 55a, 73b, 82a, 85b, 93b, 99a, 107a, 139a, 152a, 156a, 186b, 197b, 219b. Several of these appointments suggest that he favoured reforming the perceived abuses of the personal rule of Charles I. Thus he was added on 19 November 1640 to the committee to investigate monopolists; and on 8 March 1641 he was included on a committee on a bill for disabling clergy from exercising temporal office.58CJ ii. 31a, 99a. But the majority of these committee nominations shed very little light on his political sympathies or alignment at Westminster. He made only three known contributions to debate before 1642, of which the most revealing was that of 26 July 1641, when he spoke for the minority in the House that favoured toning down the wording of the charge against the army plotter and future royalist Henry Percy* – the younger brother of the northern magnate and future parliamentarian grandee Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland.59Procs. LP v. 635; vi. 94, 95. Allanson was rather freer with his money at Westminster than with his words. In March 1641, he and Hoyle joined those Commons-men offering to bring in or provide security for money – in their own case, £500 (apparently between them) – to help pay the English and Scottish armies in the northern counties.60Procs. LP ii. 629. A year later, in March 1642, he would invest £300 as an Irish Adventurer and a further £150 under the doubling ordinance of July 1643.61Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 175.

Allanson had returned to Westminster by 23 December 1641, and the next day (24 Dec.) he attempted to amend an assertion he had made in the House the previous evening to the effect that the king’s appointee as lieutenant of the Tower, Colonel Thomas Lunsford – who had been Allanson’s guest in York that summer as an officer in the royal army in the north – had not attended church on Sunday afternoons. Allanson ‘now added that he [Lunsford] went constantly to church to the Minster there [in York] in the forenoons’, but could not comment on the colonel’s church attendance more generally because he (i.e. Allanson) was in London, attending Parliament. However, both Sir Gilbert Gerard and Sir William Masham – who were aligned with the parliamentary leadership in seeking to discredit Lunsford – insisted that Allanson had ‘answered only in general that he never knew him [Lunsford] go to church’.62D’Ewes (C), 334, 342-3.

Although Allanson seems to have attended the House during the first three months of 1642, he was named to only three committees during that period and made no recorded contribution to debate.63CJ ii. 376b, 383b, 474a, 493b. Granted leave of absence on 2 April and again on 6 August, he was an even more peripheral figure at Westminster during the spring and summer of 1642, receiving just one committee appointment and apparently making no commitment to contribute either money or horses to Parliament’s field army under Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.64CJ ii. 507b, 634a, 706a. On 24 November, having spent at least a month that autumn in York, Allanson apprised the House of his belief that Parliament’s northern army under the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*) comprised 10,000 men.65York City Archives, York House Bk. 36, ff. 74v, 76v; Add. 18777, f. 69. That Allanson favoured the vigorous prosecution of the war is suggested by his majority tellership on 8 December with the noted militant Henry Marten in favour of hearing a report from Sir Thomas Barrington (an ally of John Pym*) concerning the establishment of the East Midlands association – a proposal that some Parliament-men feared would undermine the authority of the lord lieutenants. One of the minority tellers was Lord Dungarvan, who would join the royalists in 1643.66Infra, ‘Sir Richard Boyle, Viscount Dungarvan’; CJ ii. 881b; Harl. 164, f. 244v. On 16 December, Allanson was named to a ten-man committee, dominated by Members associated with the war party, to raise money and 1,000 dragoons for the war effort in the north.67CJ ii. 891b.

Allanson seems to have been slightly more active in the House during 1643 than in previous years, receiving appointment to 11 committees, including several concerned with raising money for Lord Fairfax’s forces.68CJ ii. 978b, 994a, 997b; iii. 41a, 47b, 153a, 257b, 260b, 275a, 333a, 350b. By mid-February, he was attending the standing Committee for Irish Affairs, where the Commons had ordered that ‘Adventurers of the House shall be admitted to have a voice’, and in April he was added to a similar body, chaired by Sir Henry Vane I, for costing the war effort in Ireland and finding new resources to sustain it.69Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’; CJ ii. 750b; Add. 4782, f. 83v. On 7 March, he and the war-party stalwart William Strode I were majority tellers for those Members who supported the rigorous levying of the weekly assessment, although later that year he would side with the minority in the House that was opposed to increasing the excise duty on soap.70CJ ii. 992b; Harl. 164, f. 315; Harl. 165, f. 255v.

In the summer of 1643, Allanson took unofficial leave of absence to move his wife and children from royalist-occupied York, ‘who were there under a great burden of misery’, to the parliamentarian stronghold of Hull. Present at Hull late in June when Sir John Hotham* and Captain John Hotham* attempted to defect to the royalists, Allanson was involved in their arrest and then returned ‘post haste’ to Westminster by ship to deliver an eye-witness account of the whole episode and copies of incriminating letters found among Sir John’s correspondence.71CJ iii. 153a; LJ vii. 117b; Harl. 165, ff. 106v-107; Add. 19398, f. 146; Add. 31116, p. 118. On 3 July, he was appointed one of the managers and reporters of a conference with the Lords on the Hothams’ arrest, and the next day (4 July) he was added by both Houses to the committee for the government of Hull.72CJ iii. 153a; LJ vii. 119a. He spent some of July and August attending to his duties in Hull, where the town’s new governor, Lord Fairfax, appointed him a commissioner for sequestering local delinquents.73Hull Hist. Cent. C BRS/7/11; C BRL/319; The Hull Lttrs. ed. T.T. Wildridge (Hull, 1887), 47. But on 19 August, the Commons ordered Allanson to return to Westminster.74CJ iii. 211b. On 14 September, he pledged to bring in £100 to enable the army commanded by Sir William Waller* to take to the field; and he was among those Commons-men who were reported to have taken the Solemn League and Covenant on 22 September.75CJ iii. 241a; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 480.

Allanson was named to 19 committees during the first eight months of 1644, making this one of the busiest periods in his parliamentary career. A significant proportion of these appointments concerned the regulation of Parliament’s financial machinery and the raising of money and troops – particularly for the parliamentary war effort in Ireland and northern England.76CJ iii. 356a, 390a, 396b, 408a, 434a, 440b, 442a, 507b, 508b, 515b, 523b, 579b, 599b, 601a, 602b, 605a, 609a. On 31 May, John Lisle brought in an ordinance for making Allanson clerk of the hanaper – a lucrative office in chancery to which belonged the fees paid by litigants, and anyone who had business at the great seal, for sealing charters, patents and writs. The draft ordinance granted the clerkship to Allanson for life, ‘but after much debate [in the Commons] and Mr. [Richard] Whithed’s saying plainly that he was sorry to see the Members of the House thus to gape after offices...it was put in only during the pleasure of both Houses’. The Lord passed this ordinance on 5 June.77CJ iii. 511b; LJ vi. 579a; Harl. 166, f. 67v. The identity of Allanson’s patron on this occasion is not clear. His friend and fellow York MP Thomas Hoyle was a member of the Committee for the Revenue*, which enjoyed extensive powers of patronage, but there is no evidence that the clerkship was in its gift.78Supra, ‘Committee for the Revenue’. Allanson’s new office was reputedly worth £1,000 a year, although he had little chance to reap the benefits before the self-denying ordinance obliged him to relinquish it in the spring of 1645.79[Walker] Hist. of Independency, 167. In June, he was included among those Members awarded the £4 weekly allowance for their ‘present maintenance’.80CJ iv. 161a. In May 1647, the clerkship was restored to him by parliamentary ordinance, but it then emerged that the profits and papers belonging to the office had been appropriated by his late deputy. Allanson sued the deputy’s heir in 1649 and apparently succeeded in recovering at least some of the money.81CJ v. 182a; LJ ix. 208b; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 96.

Allanson had returned to York by late September 1644 – three months or so after the city’s surrender to Parliament – when he, Hoyle and other parliamentarian office-holders resumed their attendance at corporation meetings. And he was one of the senior-office-holders who passed an order on 25 October for tendering the Covenant to members of the corporation and other leading citizens.82York City Archives, York House Bk. 36, ff. 106v, 110v. Having returned to Westminster by 19 November, he was sent as a messenger to the Lords to request their concurrence with a Commons resolution concerning the Committee of Both Kingdoms*.83CJ iii. 700a. On 10 December, Allanson, Sir Thomas Widdrington (the recorder of York), Sir Philip Stapilton and Gilbert Millington were assigned the task of preparing an ordinance for removing Sir Roger Jaques* and five other York aldermen from the corporation for their disaffection to Parliament.84CJ iii. 719b. Between December 1644 and early August 1645, he was named to a further 19 committees, including those concerning the Self-Denying Ordinance, managing the excise and sequestered estates and for establishing a preaching ministry in York and the northern counties.85CJ iii. 717b, 719b, 722a, 728b; iv. 28b, 52b, 88a, 97b, 107b, 112a, 121b, 123b, 178b, 197a, 198b, 201a, 203a, 211b, 228b. He attended the York and county committees for the Northern Association regularly during the late summer and autumn of 1645, signing several of their letters to Parliament in which they complained about the abuses committed by the Scottish army in the north and pleaded that it be removed from the region.86York City Archives, Y/ORD/4/2, E/63, f. 1; Bodl. Nalson IV, ff. 108, 187, 212-13, 214, 240, 246, 261, 282. When he returned to the House early in November, he brought with him the royalist correspondence seized at the battle of Sherburn, Yorkshire, in mid-October.87CJ iv. 329b; HMC Portland, i. 295. The last of his three appointments between November and April 1646 – when he was granted leave of absence – was to a committee, dominated by the Independents, for stating Parliament’s grievances against the Scottish army in the northern counties (20 Mar. 1646).88CJ iv. 332a, 347b, 481b, 515b. In Yorkshire during May 1646, he signed several more of the county committees’ letters to Parliament for the removal of the Scots from the region.89Bodl. Tanner 59, ff. 168, 195, 216. Back in the Commons, he was named on 9 June to a committee headed by the Independent grandees for stating ‘what cause this House has of complaint and jealousies’ in relation to the Scots.90CJ iv. 570b.

In all, Allanson was named to 37 committees between June 1646 and the Presbyterian ‘counter revolution’ of late July 1647.91CJ iv. 570b, 584b, 601b, 603a, 613a, 615b, 616a, 644b, 661b, 671a, 675a, 678b, 681b, 682a, 689b, 694b, 695a, 696b, 701a, 708a, 709a, 709b, 712a, 712b, 719b, 738b; v. 8b, 11a, 27a, 84a, 119b, 122b, 125b, 132b, 167a, 174a, 229a. Several of his nominations in July 1646 suggest that he was hostile to John Lilburne and the increasingly assertive radical interest in London, and that he favoured an ordinance for the sale of royalists’ estates to meet outstanding public debts – legislation blocked by the Presbyterian grandees in the Lords.92CJ iv. 601b, 613a, 615b, 616a; J. Adamson, ‘‘The Peerage in Politics 1645-9’ (Univ. of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1986), 162. But the majority of these appointments reveal no clear pattern in terms of his primary concerns at Westminster or his factional alignment there, supposing he had any. His selection by the Commons on 24 June 1646 to thank Dr Peter Smith, a member of the Westminster Assembly, for his sermon to the House that day is unremarkable, for Smith was a moderate Presbyterian who steered a middle course between Congregationalist and ‘Covenant-engaged’ divines.93CJ iv. 585b; R.S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord (Edinburgh, 1985), 94, 428. Similarly, his tellership on 25 September was in what was apparently a minor, non-partisan division.94CJ iv. 676b. It is noteworthy, however, that the ordinance re-appointing him clerk of the hanaper was introduced late in May 1647 – that is, at the height of the Presbyterian ascendancy at Westminster. That same day (25 May) an ordinance was also introduced for restoring the Presbyterian grandee Sir Walter Erle* to his former office as lieutenant general of the ordnance.95CJ v. 182a. Moreover, one of the orders that Allanson carried up to the Lords as a messenger on 14 July was for payment to the Presbyterian military commander Edward Massie* of £2,000 (the other order was for appointing Thomas Dickinson* governor of Clifford’s Tower in York).96CJ v. 243b. Perhaps even more revealing is the fact that Allanson remained at Westminster after the 26 July Presbyterian ‘riots’, rather than take refuge with the army as did many leading Independent Parliament-men and their allies. Thus on 2 August, he was named to a committee to investigate the ‘tumult’ at Westminster on the 26th.97CJ v. 265a. On 11 August – a week or so after the army had secured London and ended Presbyterian resistance in the capital – he was named to a committee on an ordinance for repealing the legislation passed between 26 July and 6 August.98CJ v. 272a.

Despite the apparent ease with which he had accommodated himself to the Presbyterian ascendancy during the first half of 1647, Allanson seems to have had no problem adapting to the Independents’ domination at Westminster after the collapse of the July counter-revolution. Between August 1647 and 28 March 1648, when he was granted leave of absence, he was named to 23 committees, including the Committee for Plundered Ministers* – the Commons’ principal executive for managing church affairs – and the Star Chamber Committee of Irish Affairs*, which he attended on at least three occasions.99CJ v. 272a, 289b, 298b, 300b, 347b, 352a, 356a, 360a, 363b, 364b, 365b, 366b, 367a, 383a, 396a, 407a, 417a, 425a, 434a, 470a, 471a, 480a, 519b; CSP Ire. 1633-47, pp. 746, 748; CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 5. Several of his appointments during the last four months of 1647 were to committees for addressing the army’s material grievances, suppressing Leveller agitation in the ranks and for investigating the July counter-revolution.100CJ v. 298b, 300b, 356a, 360a, 367a, 396a. On 14 September, he was a minority teller with Francis Rous in what appears to have been another minor, non-partisan division – this time concerning a sequestration order on the earl of Portland’s estate.101CJ v. 300b.

Declared absent and excused at the call of the House on 24 April and 26 September 1648, Allanson probably spent most of that summer and autumn in Yorkshire, where he was involved in efforts to mobilise Parliament’s forces during the second civil war.102CJ v. 543b; vi. 34b; Bodl. Nalson VII, ff. 22, 126, 203; Tanner 57, f. 282; Add. 35332, f. 108; Add. 36996, ff. 47, 66, 76, 107. He had returned to Westminster by 25 November, when he was named to a committee to decide which garrisons should be maintained, but that was his only appointment as a Commons’ committeeman between March 1648 and January 1649.103CJ vi. 87a. He survived Pride’s Purge, although it was later alleged that he had ‘voted for a personal treaty with the king’ – which was probably a reference to the vote on 5 December that the king’s answers to the Newport treaty were an acceptable basis for settlement.104Innocency Cleared, or the Case and Vindication of Col. George Gill (1651), 6. He was reportedly one of 72 Members present in the House on 12 and 13 December ‘that act the will of the army’.105Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 38 (12-19 Dec. 1648), sig. Ddd4v (E.476.35). But although he received several appointments in the Rump early in January 1649, he did not enter his dissent to the 5 December vote until 5 February 1649.106CJ vi. 107b, 112b, 113b, 114b; PA, Ms CJ xxxiii, p. 645. Appointed to the high court of justice for trying the king, he refused to participate in any of its proceedings.107Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 1379.

Allanson was named to approximately 65 committees in the Rump, and if these offer any guide, his principal areas of interest in the House were the improvement and management of the excise and the sale of forfeited estates; the supply of the army; the relief of the poor, particularly those imprisoned for debt; and the advancement of godly religion and the suppression of ‘the obscene, licentious and impious practices used by persons under pretence of liberty, religion, or otherwise’.108CJ vi. 137a, 161b, 196a, 218b, 229b, 231a, 262a, 270a, 274a, 327a, 330b, 352a, 358b, 365b, 416a, 420b, 423b, 427a, 430b, 528a; vii. 58a, 86b, 244a, 250b. He was an active member of the excise committee under the Rump, the Committee of Navy and Customs, the committee for removing obstructions on the sale of bishops’ lands, and of the Committee for the Army, to which he was added on 4 February 1650.109CJ vi. 357b; Bodl. Rawl. C.386, unfol.; Rawl. A.224, ff. 24, 53; LPL, Add. commonwealth recs., Ms 1, ff. 68v, 71; SP28/75, f. 649; SP28/93, f. 386. He would be named to one of the committees set up on 10 February 1652 in response to a petition from the Independent divine John Owen* (one of Oliver Cromwell’s* chaplains) and his clerical friends, urging tougher action against radical sectarian and heterodox beliefs, and the more effective propagation of the gospel.110CJ vii. 86b.

In the first of his three tellerships in the Rump, which all occurred in the spring and summer of 1649, Allanson and William Lord Monson defeated the army grandees Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Henry Ireton to secure the court martial of the Yorkshire royalist officer Browne Bushell, whom Parliament’s military men probably thought should be comprehended in the articles of war.111CJ vi. 165a, 195a, 257a. Allanson’s third tellership, on 9 July 1649, pitted him and Augustine Skynner against the formidable pairing of Cromwell and Ireton in a division on whether to retain a clause in a vote against ‘non-conformable’ (i.e. anti-government) preaching that required all ministers to observe days of public humiliation or thanksgiving. Allanson and Skynner were majority tellers in favour of having the question put on whether the clause should be retained (i.e. they did not want it retained). But when the main question was put, it passed in the affirmative, without a division, and the clause remained.112CJ vi. 257a.

Allanson made two reports to the House – on 16 February 1650 and 31 December 1651 – from the committee for removing obstructions on the sale of bishops’ lands, concerning the arrears owed to the officers in the northern army under Ferdinando 2nd Baron Fairfax.113CJ vi. 291b, 366a; vii. 59b. And on 31 July 1650, he reported the Northern Association committee’s discovery that one of Fairfax’s former officers, Major George Gill, had fraudulently taken advantage of a parliamentary order for doubling debentures, and recommended that the benefit of this order be extended instead to Matthew Alured* and another officer; whereupon the House divested Gill of the church lands he had purchased and advised the council of state to have him cashiered from the army.114CJ vi. 450. In 1651, Gill published a pamphlet in which he alleged that Allanson had pursued a vendetta against him because of his opposition in Leeds to Allanson’s brother Francis Allanson, who would emerge under the protectorate as a leading member of the town’s Presbyterian interest and an opponent of Major-general John Lambert* and Captain Adam Baynes*. Gill further alleged that Allanson had conspired to secure the transfer of Gill’s regiment to Alured.115Supra, ‘Leeds’; Gill, Innocency Cleared, 4-7, 10-11. Notwithstanding Gill’s insinuations that his opponents – among whom he also numbered Sir John Bourchier* and Henry Darley* – countenanced malignants, Allanson returned to Yorkshire in the summer of 1651 to help defend the county against royalist insurgency and Scottish invasion.116CJ vii. 5b, 18a.

Allanson continued to sign army-committee warrants until mid-June 1653 – two months or so after the dissolution of the Rump – when his lodgings at Whitehall were assigned to Walter Strickland*.117SP28/93, f. 386; CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 397. Allanson retained his clerkship of the hanaper after the fall of the Rump, although he claimed in 1655 that it was ‘charged with more payments then the receipts doth amount unto yearly very near unto a thousand pounds’.118SP18/97/85ii, f. 172; CSP Dom. 1654, p. 323; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 184. Gill was correct, however, in stating that Allanson ‘hath raised himself a very large estate’ through his purchases of church lands – most notably, the manor of Crayke, part of the manor of Howden and the deanery of York.119Gill, Innocency Cleared, 5-6; [Walker] Hist. of Independency, 142; Add. 21417, f. 338; Life of Marmaduke Rawdon ed. Davies, 127. His trustees in the purchase of these lands included Sir Thomas Widdrington and James Nelthorpe*.120Borthwick, Prob. Reg. 56, f. 90v; Coll. Top. et Gen. i (1834), 126.

Although Allanson apparently had no difficulty negotiating the transition from commonwealth to protectorate, and seems to have enjoyed the trust of the Cromwellian government, there is no evidence that he sought election to the first protectoral Parliament in 1654.121CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 79, 106. His last notable service to York was in serving a second term as lord mayor in 1655-6.122York City Archives, York House Bk. 37, f. 66v. He died on 6 December 1656 and was buried the next day (7 Dec.) at St Michael le Belfrey, York.123Add. 21424, f. 150; Regs. of St Michael le Belfrey, York ed. Collins (Yorks. Par. Reg. Soc. xi), 38. In his will (which for some reason was not entered in probate until 1675), he made bequests totalling about £400 and bequeathed the bulk of his estate, which included houses in York and properties scattered throughout Yorkshire, in reversion to his only surviving son Charles.124Borthwick, Prob. Reg. 56, ff. 90-1. None of Allanson’s immediate descendants sat in Parliament.