RODES, Sir Edward (1600-66), of Great Houghton, Darfield, Yorks.

Rodes belonged to the junior branch of a ‘very ancient’ Derbyshire family that had settled at Great Houghton, near Doncaster, at the end of the sixteenth century.37Hunter, S. Yorks. ii. 129-30. He received a gentleman’s education at Cambridge and the Inns of Court, commencing with his admission to Emmanuel College in May 1616.38Al. Cant. Emmanuel, under the mastership of the eminent Calvinist divine Laurence Chaderton, had a deserved reputation as the foremost puritan academy in England, and the fact that Rodes was sent there suggests that his family was one of the more godly in south Yorkshire.39J.T. Cliffe, Puritan Gentry, 92-4. There is ample evidence, certainly from his later career, that Rodes himself was a staunch Calvinist.

As the scion of a relatively minor Yorkshire gentry family, Rodes seemed destined for an unremarkable career in county government and could expect no greater preferment than a place on the West Riding bench. But this was to change late in 1632 with the marriage of his sister Elizabeth to Yorkshire’s most powerful political figure, Thomas Viscount Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†, the future earl of Strafford), the lord lieutenant of the county and president of the council of the north.40Sheffield City Archives, CM/410; Foster, Yorks. Peds. Wentworth had been on friendly terms with the Rodes family, his nearest gentry neighbours, for many years.41Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P2/46-7, 12/33. Elizabeth Rodes’s marriage to Wentworth was to prove of particular advantage to Rodes himself, who became head of the family following his father’s death in late 1633 or early 1634. In 1635, Rodes was knighted at Dublin Castle by Wentworth as lord deputy of Ireland), and it was almost certainly Wentworth who secured him a commission as a colonel in the West Riding trained bands.42Add. 28082, f. 80; Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 203. By 1638, Rodes had also been appointed a deputy lieutenant for the West Riding.43Add. 40132, f. 45.

But while Rodes clearly enjoyed Wentworth’s favour, he does not seem to have been part of his inner circle of friends, which included several Yorkshire gentlemen – notably, Sir John Hotham*, Sir Edward Osborne* and Sir William Pennyman*. Rodes is known to have written only one letter to Wentworth and seems to have showed little of that zealous attendance to duty in office which was characteristic of the lord lieutenant’s closest supporters in Yorkshire.44Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P14/65. He was certainly not an assiduous magistrate, attending few of the West Riding quarter sessions.45W. Riding Sessions Recs. ed. J. Lister (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. liv).

Rodes remained a loyal servant of the crown for most of the personal rule of Charles I, and it was only during the preparations for the first bishops’ war that he openly began to question the wisdom of royal policy – at least in so far as it applied to Yorkshire. In January 1639, following a royal order that the county’s trained bands muster for possible deployment against the Scots, Rodes signed a petition to the king from the Yorkshire deputy lieutenants and militia commanders, expressing their readiness to march to any rendezvous, but reminding Charles that their troops were ‘never ... once employed out of our county upon any remote service whatsoever’.46SP16/409/53, f. 141; SP16/409/67, f. 167; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 353-4. He signed a similar petition in March, in which the petitioners asked that their men be paid a month prior to mobilization.47SP16/414/92, f. 217. A year later, in March 1640, Rodes signed what Wentworth (by now the earl of Strafford) regarded as an insolent letter from the Yorkshire deputy lieutenants and militia officers to the privy council in which they had refused to send reinforcements to Berwick until the necessary money had been provided and due consideration had been given to ‘the last year’s past and great charge of this county’. Strafford vowed to give those responsible for this letter ‘something to remember it by hereafter’.48SP16/448/66i, f. 133; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 573; Strafforde Letters, ii. 408-9.

Nevertheless, during the second bishops’ war, Rodes subordinated his concern for the county’s welfare to his loyalty to Strafford. He and Sir William Lister* were involved in despatching Yorkshire militia troops to reinforce the garrison at Berwick in April 1640, and he declined to join his kinsman Sir John Hotham and other ‘disaffected’ Yorkshire gentry in their petitions to the king that summer and autumn, in which they complained about the local impact of the bishops’ wars – petitions that Strafford denounced as ‘mutinous’.49SP16/462, ff. 44-5; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1215, 1231; viii. 622. Moreover, late in August 1640, he and other loyalist gentry – including Lister, Sir Thomas Ingram* and William Malory* – were named to the Yorkshire commission of array that was drawn up by the king and Strafford in an attempt to mobilize the county’s trained bands against the invading Covenanters.50Add. 28088, f. 94. In September and October, Rodes was also one of a dozen or so Yorkshire deputy lieutenants and militia officers who signed warrants for levying an additional month’s pay for the regiments of the future royalists Sir Thomas Danbie* and Sir William Pennyman, which had been assigned, on the king’s orders, to defend the county’s northern border against incursions by the Scots.51N. Yorks. RO, ZFW, Wyvill of Constable Burton mss, Wyvill fam. pprs. to 1700 (mic. 1761); HMC 5th Rep. 331; D. Scott, ‘‘Hannibal at our gates’: loyalists and fifth-columnists during the bishops’ wars – the case of Yorkshire’, HR lxx. 288. Every member of this group, with the exception of Rodes, was to side with the king in 1642, although it was probably hostility to the Scots which served to unite them in 1640.

Rodes remained faithful to Strafford to the last. On 7 April 1641, during the lord lieutenant’s trial, he gave evidence on the 27th article – that Strafford had levied an illegal tax upon Yorkshire during the autumn of 1640 for the maintenance of the trained bands. Corroborating the testimony of Osborne and other Yorkshire Straffordians, Rodes claimed that the earl had obtained the consent of the greater part of the Yorkshire gentry for the levies and attested that ‘where he served as deputy lieutenant, he [knew] not of one man that complained or showed unwillingness’ to pay.52Procs. LP iii. 433, 438, 443, 450; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 620, 622. In fact, the levies appear to have been widely regarded as illegal, whilst the Scots saw them as part of a design by Strafford to plunge the two nations back into conflict.53Alnwick, Y.I.47 (The Scots’ charges against Strafford, 16 Dec. 1640).

Strafford’s execution in May 1641 marked an important turning point in Rodes’s career. His bond with Strafford had always owed more to personal and familial considerations, it seems, than shared political convictions. There is little evidence that he had been passionately committed to ‘Thorough’, for example. With Strafford removed from the scene he was a free agent, and his political path began to converge with that of other prominent Yorkshire Calvinists, and by February 1642, at the latest, he was busy as a commissioner for disarming recusants.54HMC 5th Rep. 7. In the early months of 1642, he signed three petitions from the Yorkshire gentry – the first, to the king, protesting at the attempted arrest of the Five Members and expressing support for a ‘perfect reformation in matters of religion’; the second, to the Commons, requesting, among other things, that the votes of the papist peers be abolished and that ‘ceremonial burdens’ in religion be removed; and the third, to the Lords, asking the peers to work more closely with the Commons for the relief of Ireland’s Protestants.55Eg. 2546, ff. 23-4; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 367-72; PA, Main Pprs. 15 Feb. 1642, f. 55; LJ iv. 587a. With the king raising troops in Yorkshire by the spring of 1642, Rodes and many of the county’s future parliamentarian leaders addressed a letter to Charles on 12 May, asking him to put his trust in the two Houses and to forbear raising any troops in the county.56A Letter from the...Committees of the Commons...at Yorke (1642), 9 (E.148.4). And he signed another petition to the king from this group in June, complaining about Charles’s abandoning Parliament and drawing together the county’s trained bands – illegally, as the petitioners conceived it.57PA, Main Pprs. 6 June 1642, ff. 84-5. Rodes was evidently regarded as one of the king’s most active opponents in Yorkshire, for he was among the magistrates removed from the West Riding bench that summer.58An Abstract from Yorke (1642).

Rodes was one of the first Yorkshire parliamentarians to appear in arms against the king and was apparently raising money for this purpose by late August 1642.59Supra, ‘John Bright’; Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Br P185d(i)/27; Hotham Pprs. 59-60. His zeal in the parliamentarian cause was quickened early in September as a result of an attack upon his house at Great Houghton by a party of royalist horse. On learning that Rodes ‘did affect the Militia [Ordinance]’, the royalists burnt his out-houses, plundered his goods to the tune of £600, maltreated his wife and killed one of his servants.60Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 413; Hunter, S. Yorks. ii. 131. In response, Rodes raised a regiment of foot and took to the field with his second cousin Captain John Hotham* (the son of Sir John, the parliamentary governor of Hull), who had marched from Hull to his assistance.61LJ v. 374a; Add. 18777, f. 13. Late in September, the two men led their forces from Doncaster – which they had garrisoned for Parliament – northwards towards York, ostensibly with the aim of enforcing the militia ordinance, although their main motives, it seems, was to undermine the Yorkshire ‘treaty of pacification’ that a group of leading West Riding gentry had signed on 29 September in an effort to prevent the county sliding into war.62Speciall Passages no. 10 (11-18 Oct. 1642), 88 (E.123.5); no. 11 (18-25 Oct. 1642), 96 (E.124.14); A. Woolrych, ‘Yorkshire’s treaty of neutrality', HT vi. 696-704; A. J. Hopper, ‘The Extent of Support for Parliament in Yorks. during the Early Stages of the First Civil War’ (York Univ. DPhil.. thesis, 1999), 33-4, 35. The driving force behind the treaty on the parliamentarian side was the Hothams’ rival Lord Fairfax, whom Parliament had appointed commander of its northern army. On 1 October, Rodes and Captain Hotham wrote to Parliament, denouncing the treaty as ‘most disadvantageous ... both to the service of the kingdom and to the safety of this county’.63Supra, ‘John Hotham’; Bodl. Nalson II, f. 157; Add. 18777, f. 19; Hotham Pprs. 60-1. When the treaty was debated at Westminster that same day (1 Oct.) it was likewise condemned by John Pym, Henry Marten, Sir Henry Vane II and others of the ‘violent party’, and there were numerous calls for Hotham junior to be supplied with money and additional men.64Add. 18777, ff. 19-20. On 3 October, the House invested Hotham and Rodes with the power to raise money and horse in Yorkshire and to seize all delinquents.65CJ ii. 792a, 792b; LJ v. 386a; Speciall Passages no. 15 (15-22 Nov. 1642), 130 (E.127.35). The next day (4 Oct.), the two men stormed and plundered Cawood Castle, the country seat of the archbishops of York.66CJ ii. 801b; Add. 18777, f. 24v; The Declaration of Captain Hotham (1642), 1-4 (E.121.32); Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 414-20.

Rodes seems to have attached himself to the Hothams during 1642-3 with the same fervent loyalty he had shown towards Strafford. And, as with Strafford, he let family and personal ties take precedence over his religious scruples, for the Hothams were among the least godly of the leading Yorkshire parliamentarians.67Supra, ‘John Hotham’; ‘Sir John Hotham’. Rodes’s allegiance to the Hothams was reflected in his insubordination towards Lord Fairfax. During January 1643, Fairfax complained repeatedly to the Commons that Captain Hotham, Rodes and their officers had refused to obey his orders or to provide him with men and supplies.68LJ v. 527b; Add. 18777, f. 137. It is not clear how far, if at all, Rodes was involved in the Hothams’ secret negotiations with the royalists during the first half of 1643 for the surrender of Hull. As commander, under Sir John Hotham, of the parliamentarian forces in Beverley by the spring of 1643, he was certainly in close contact with the Hothams.69SP24/3, ff. 35, 41v; SP28/138, pt. 3, f. 2. And a gunner in the Hull garrison later alleged that he had overheard Rodes and another officer discussing which gate the king’s forces would enter the town.70J. D. Legard, The Legards of Anlaby and Ganton, 45. But this seems to have been about the only evidence that Rodes was in any way complicit in the Hothams’ treachery. On the other hand, he was very much involved in their feud with Colonel Oliver Cromwell*, which erupted late in June 1643 when Cromwell had Captain Hotham imprisoned at Nottingham for holding secret correspondence with the queen and other misdemeanours. Rodes attended a council of war called by Sir John Hotham at Hull to decide upon an appropriate course of action and subsequently signed Sir John’s high-handed letter to Parliament, denouncing Captain Hotham’s captors as ‘rogues’ and ‘anabaptists’ and demanding justice against Cromwell.71J. Tickell, Hist. of Hull (1798), 458-60; Clarendon SP ii. 184. Given his intimacy with the Hothams, it is not surprising that when parliamentarian loyalists seized Sir John Hotham at Beverley on 29 June for plotting to betray Hull, they also detained Rodes.72A True Relation of the Discoverie of a...Plot for the Delivering up...of Hull (1643), 4-5 (E.59.2); Hotham Pprs. 106. Captain Hotham was taken on the same day and all three men were subsequently conveyed by sea to London.73J. Vicars, God on the Mount (1643), 370-1 (E.73.4); Add. 31116, p. 118; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 275-6.

Although Rodes was initially regarded with great suspicion at Westminster, the fact that he was never brought to trial and continued, after a brief hiatus, to be named to local parliamentary committees, indicates that the Commons was satisfied of his innocence. Indeed, by the summer of 1644 he had been commissioned as a captain in Lord Fairfax’s regiment of horse and, as such, may well have fought at Marston Moor.74E121/5/5/19; Jones, ‘War in north’, 398, 411. The question of Rodes’s involvement with the Hothams arose again in the autumn of 1645, probably as a result of the seizure of royalist correspondence at the battle of Naseby. But though the Commons ordered the House Northern Association Committee* to examine him in connection with the charges against the Hothams (who had been executed in January 1645), nothing ever came of this investigation.75CJ iv. 296a. Even supposing that evidence against him had been uncovered, it is doubtful whether he would have been brought to trial, for by October 1645 he seems to have found powerful new friends among the Independents at Westminster. In February of that year he had been granted the wardship of one of his nephews – a windfall he could not have enjoyed without the approval of the Independent grandee Viscount Saye and Sele, the master of the court of wards.76WARD9/556, p. 943. And by mid-1646, at the latest, Rodes had also ingratiated himself with another prominent Independent peer, the earl of Northumberland.77Alnwick, O.I.2(f), unfol.: Northumberland to Hugh Potter*, 10 June 1646. Rodes’s alignment with the supporters of the New Model army may have owed something to their common hostility towards continuing Scottish intervention in English affairs. During 1646, he signed numerous letters from the parliamentary committees at York – of which he was one of the most active members – relating the Scots’ ‘oppressions’ and ‘many cruelties’ in Yorkshire and pleading that it be removed from the county.78LJ viii. 135b-136a; SC6/CHASI/1190; Bodl. Tanner 59, ff. 75, 168, 195, 218, 266, 357, 389, 399; Nalson VI, f. 14.

Early in 1648, Rodes was appointed county treasurer for the monthly assessment, and soon afterwards he was nominated by the soldiers of the Northern Brigade to state their accounts, being seen as one who would be ‘faithful and just both to state and soldiers’.79SP28/215, pt. 2, unfol.; SP28/250, ff. 122, 159, 254, 257, 310; Add. 21427, f. 24; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 987. During the second civil war, he was prominent in efforts to mobilize Yorkshire against the royalists, receiving a commission from Parliament to raise a regiment of militia horse in the county.80Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 29; Nalson VII, ff. 22, 203; Sheffield City Archives, CM/1568. He and his forces saw service on several fronts during the war, notably at the siege of Pontefract Castle (June 1648-March 1649) and in the mopping up operation after Cromwell’s victory at Preston in August.81Add. 36996, ff. 12, 20, 122; Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 378v; Nalson VII, f. 188; HMC Portland, i. 489; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 1238; VCH Yorks. iii. 429; Fox, Three Sieges of Pontefract Castle, 108, 117. He remained active in local and military affairs after the regicide and attended the Yorkshire spring assizes in March 1649.82SC6/CHASI/1190; SP28/353, f. 297; Add. 21417, f. 152: Add. 21418, f. 111; The Petition and Presentment of the Grand-Juries of the County of York (1649), 3 (E.548.26). In fact, by 1649 he had emerged as one of the most influential figures in the West Riding, although according to the author of the republican pamphlet The Countrey Committees Laid Open, he was disaffected to the new regime.83The Countrey Committees Laid Open (1649), 1 (E.558.11). That Rodes declined to acquire any church or crown estates, and that his only known purchase of forfeited lands (in September 1651 in partnership with John Rushworth*) was in order to preserve them in trust for their original owner, the northern royalist Richard Tempest, is probably an indication that he was not wholly committed to the commonwealth.84Sheffield City Archives, CM/1575; CCAM 931; T. D. Whitaker, Hist. of Craven (3rd edn.), 98. Nevertheless, the Rump trusted him sufficiently to appoint him sheriff of Yorkshire in 1650.85List of Sheriffs (L. and I. ix), 164. A further allegation made by the author of the Countrey Committees Laid Open – that Rodes had used his position as a ‘farmer of delinquents’ estates’ to rob the public purse – is contradicted by the fact that Rodes seems to have emerged from the interregnum heavily in debt and could only purchase Tempest’s estate by mortgaging part of his own.86Sheffield City Archives, CM/610.

By the spring of 1654, Rodes seems to have found yet another powerful patron – no less a figure than the lord protector himself, Oliver Cromwell, who commissioned him as a colonel of horse in March 1654.87Abbott, Writings and Speeches, iii. 652. In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Rodes stood for the newly created constituency of the West Riding, but was narrowly defeated on a poll for the sixth and final place by the republican candidate Martin Lister, who had enjoyed the backing of his powerful kinsman Major-general John Lambert*.88Supra, ‘Yorkshire’. The fact that Rodes had contested the place against Lister and had received support from Henry Tempest* and Edward Gill* (or at least from their followers) suggests that he was broadly aligned with the Presbyterian interest in Yorkshire. Rodes and his regiment were evidently stationed in Scotland by 1655, for in the summer of that year he was added to the Cromwellian council for the civil government of Scotland, presided over by Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle*) and General George Monck*.89Add. 21423, f. 109; Scotland and the Protectorate ed. Firth, 306. It is likely that Rodes owed this appointment largely to Broghill, and he was certainly identified as part of Broghill’s faction on the council.90P. Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland, 101, 127, 130.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Rodes was returned as knight of the shire for Perthshire.91Supra, ‘Perthshire’. Although in every sense a ‘foreigner’, he proved at least superficially popular with the Perthshire electorate – 29 men signed the election indenture, many of them magistrates, with the support of ‘divers others qualified to vote’.92Sheffield City Archives, CM/1572. But perhaps the decisive factor in his return was not his relations, good or otherwise, with the Perthshire electorate, but the fact that the election was held at Perth, ‘one of the five great citadels built by the army’, and that the returning officer was the town’s English military governor, Colonel William Daniel.93P.J. Pinckney, ‘The Scottish representation in the Cromwellian Parliament of 1656’, Scottish Hist. Review, xlvi. 103-4. In the same elections, Rodes’s son, Godfrey, was elected for Linlithgow shires – probably on Broghill’s and the council’s interest.94Supra, ‘Linlithgow Shires’; Little, Lord Broghill, 127. At Westminster, Sir Edward aligned with the civilian and Presbyterian element among the Cromwellian court party, as did most of the other Scottish Members. Several of his early appointments in the House suggest his close links with the court interest and, in particular, with its leading civilian member, Lord Broghill. On 22 September, Rodes was appointed to a committee, to which Broghill was second named, for attending the protector with a declaration ordaining a day of public humiliation.95CJ vii. 426b. The next day (23 Sept.), he was included on a committee for Scottish affairs, chaired by Broghill and spoke in favour of its most important initiative – the Scottish union bill.96CJ vii. 427a; Little, Lord Broghill, 130-1. Like Broghill and other senior Cromwellians, he was named to the committee set up on 26 September for the security of the protector’s person and was subsequently appointed to the commission for this purpose.97CJ vii. 429a; A. and O. Rodes’s ties with Broghill emerged clearly on 1 November, when the two men served as tellers in an apparently minor division concerning a bill for the recovery of small debts.98CJ vii. 449a. Rodes may also have been on close terms with Broghill’s second-in-command in Scotland, General Monck. One (possibly two), of Rodes’s younger sons was a trooper under Monck by the late 1650s, and the general may have helped Rodes to re-mortgage some of his lands in those years.99Add. 21425, f. 82; Sheffield City Archives, CM/611, 1576. On 30 December, Rodes was named to a committee for confirming the protector’s grant to Monck of the barony of Keniell and other Scottish lands.100CJ vii. 476b. But apart from this appointment, and his chairmanship of a minor committee set up on 22 December 1657 to consider the petition of Captain Edmund Lister regarding his wife’s marriage portion, Rodes seems to have shown little interest in the financial concerns of his fellow soldiers.101CJ vii. 472a, 548a; Burton’s Diary, i. 366; ii. 170, 183. Indeed, on two occasions (26 Mar. and 22 June 1657) he was a teller in favour of reducing the excise revenues from the sale of wine – money that largely went to maintain the army.102CJ vii. 512a, 568b.

When the Cromwellian grandees divided during the winter of 1656-7 over how to proceed against the Quaker evangelist James Naylor, Rodes evidently sided with those who favoured harsh measures against the alleged blasphemer.103Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 184. Thus on 28 February, he was a minority teller with another Scottish councillor (and ally of Broghill) William Lord Cochrane against a proposal to allow a softening of the conditions of Naylor’s imprisonment. The majority tellers were the Cromwellian courtier Lord Claypoole (John Claypoole*) and a member of the protectoral council in England, Walter Lord Strickland.104Supra, ‘William Lord Cochrane’; CJ vii. 497b. In the far greater controversy surrounding the Humble Petition and Advice, Rodes sided with Broghill and the civilian Cromwellians in urging the protector to accept the proposed new constitution and, with it, the title and office of king. On 7 April 1657, four days after Cromwell’s first refusal of the crown, Rodes was named to a committee, chaired by Broghill, to set up a meeting with the protector for the House to explain its adherence to the Petition and Advice.105CJ vii. 521a. Two days later (9 Apr.), he was named to a committee, to which Broghill was second named, for satisfying Cromwell’s doubts and scruples about accepting the crown.106CJ vii. 521b. His last appointment was on 24 June 1657, when he acted as a teller with the protectoral councillor and opponent of the Petition and Advice, Colonel William Sydenham, on the question of whether to introduce an oath of loyalty to the protector to be taken by MPs.107CJ vii. 572a. For reasons not entirely clear, Rodes was hostile to the introduction of such an oath. However, he and Sydenham were defeated by two members of the court party, Bulstrode Whitelocke and Secretary John Thurloe. Rodes probably opposed the oath for much the same reason that Sydenham (and Lambert) did – that it presented an obstacle to free debate and imposed unacceptable constraints upon the free workings of the conscience.108Infra, ‘William Sydenham’; Burton’s Diary, ii. 292.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, Rodes was again returned for Perthshire – evidence that he continued to enjoy a place on the council for Scotland – although he faced stiff competition from a Scottish rival.109Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 288. He seems to have been entirely inactive in this Parliament, receiving no committee appointments and making no recorded contribution to debate. With the fall of the protectorate in April 1659, he was probably stripped of his conciliar office and of his colonelcy. His support for the protectorate probably rendered him persona non grata in the eyes of the restored Rump, and it is significant that his name was omitted from the July 1659 militia commission. He was back at Great Houghton by late June, when he wrote to Lambert’s right-hand man Captain Adam Baynes*, asking that he use his influence to obtain a cornet’s place for his younger son, Edward, a trooper under Monck.110Add. 21425, f. 82.

At the Restoration, Rodes was apparently allowed to retire quietly to Great Houghton, where he spent his last years trying to discharge the heavy debts he had incurred (probably in the public service) during the 1640s and 1650s.111Hunter, S. Yorks. ii. 131. In 1661, he borrowed £2,500 from the former parliamentarian commander Sir John Bright*, and three years later he mortgaged a large part of his estate in Great Houghton to Bright for £1,700.112Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Br P111, unfol.; WWM/D673-4; CM/451-2, 1577; P. Roebuck, Yorks. Baronets 1640-1760, 214. He then leased the land back from Bright, paying the rent and the residue of the 1661 loan in annual instalments of £250. His debts were such that his wife and son Godfrey were forced to sell off a large part of the family’s estate in the late 1660s and early 1670s.113Sheffield City Archives, CM/458-9, 465, 469-76.

Rodes died on 19 February 1666 and was buried the next day (20 Feb.) at Darfield parish church.114Darfield par. reg.; Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. i. 90. In his will, in which he asked to be buried ‘without pomp or vanity’, he charged his un-mortgaged lands and personal estate with annuities worth £100 a year and bequests amounting to £1,700. His only legatees were his wife and children.115Borthwick, Wills in the York registry, Doncaster Deanery, June 1667; Sheffield City Archives, CM/1577. After the Restoration, and particularly, it seems, after Rodes’s death, his house – to which he had added a chapel in 1650 for the use of his household and tenantry – became a major centre for nonconformity and was regularly visited by Yorkshire’s leading ejected ministers.116Add. 21426, f. 117; Add. 24484, f. 48; Autobiog. of Rev. Oliver Heywood ed. J.H. Turner, i. 234, 259, 265, 291; Calamy Revised, 51, 121, 163, 232, 350, 477, 493; J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry Besieged 1650-1700, 112-13, 113-14, 120, 195, 223-4. His own brand of puritan piety seems to have straddled the amorphous boundary between Presbyterianism and Independency – hence his patronage of the leading Yorkshire divine Edward Bowles, who professed to approve of ‘Presbyterial government’ (although he did not find it ‘demonstrable in Scripture with undeniable clearness’), yet admired the Independents for desiring a ‘union of hearts, rather then a neighbourhood of houses, to make up a congregation’.117[E. Bowles], Manifest Truths, or an Inversion of Truths Manifest (1646), 63, 71-2 (E.343.1); Hunter, S. Yorks. ii. 131. Rodes seems to have shared Bowles’s puritan ecumenicalism, employing as his private chaplain both a Presbyterian, Thomas Johnson, and an Independent, Richard Taylor.118Calamy Revised, 300, 477. Rodes and his son Godfrey were the first and last of their line to sit in Parliament.