SUTTON, Robert (1594-1668), of Averham, Notts.

The Suttons had been lords of the manor of Averham (or Aram), near Newark-on-Trent, since the mid-thirteenth century.41G. Fellows, ‘The Suttons of Averham’, Trans. Thoroton Soc. xvii. 33; M.W. Barley, N. Summers, ‘Averham Park Lodge and its paintings’, Trans. Thoroton Soc. lxv. 47. Yet despite their long residence in Nottinghamshire only one member of the family had represented the county at Westminster before Sutton, and that had been Henry Sutton† in the early fifteenth century.42HP Commons 1386-1421. It is not clear whether our Sutton was returned in 1624 primarily on his own interest or that of one of the county’s electoral power-brokers like Sir Gervase Clifton*, who took the senior seat. In any event, he was largely inactive in the last Jacobean Parliament and was not returned again during the 1620s.43HP Commons 1604-1629. He evidently enjoyed the confidence of Nottinghamshire’s lord lieutenant William Cavendish†, Viscount Mansfield (created 1st earl of Newcastle in 1628) – serving as one of his deputy-lieutenants – and with Mansfield and Clifton was active in collecting the Forced Loan.44SP16/73/34, f. 45v; Notts. Co. Recs. 110; R. Cust, Forced Loan, 290. During the personal rule of Charles I he played a leading role in county government as a sheriff, deputy lieutenant and as a magistrate.45SP16/362/71, f. 114; Notts. RO, C/QSM/1/8-11, passim; Nottingham Univ. Lib. CL C 236; List of Sheriffs (L. and I. ix), 104.

Following the summoning of a new Parliament late in 1639, Sutton decided to stand for one of the shire places and wrote to Clifton in December soliciting his support

... and though it would suit better with my fortunes to spare than spend so much money, yet I can be content once more to wait of [sic] you. It is in your power ... to make me what you please, and I shall trouble very few besides yourself with this request. The times requires as much as ever our care in our elections, and I am not so fond of it but if a more devoted country man appear I shall resign.46Nottingham Univ. Lib. CL C 429/1.

By the time Sutton learnt that Clifton had already engaged his interest for Sir John Byron†, it was too late for him to withdraw his candidacy without loss of face.47Nottingham Univ. Lib. CL C 429/2, 715; P.R. Seddon, ‘The Notts. elections for the Short Parliament’, Trans. Thoroton Soc. lxxx. 66. He therefore asked Clifton ‘not to press your power against me, but leave the country to their free election’. Having failed to gain Clifton’s backing, Sutton switched his attentions to Nottinghamshire’s greatest landowner – and his uncle by his first marriage – Robert Pierrepont, 1st earl of Kingston. Kingston, although engaged on behalf of Sir Thomas Hutchinson* (and willing to support Sir John Byron if Clifton would back his son Francis Pierrepont* at East Retford), conceded that Sutton was a strong contender for the senior seat, ‘as being a constant country man, highly respected for his great abilities and continual country services’. By early February 1640, it seemed that the county elections would pit Byron against Sutton for the senior place, with Hutchinson, as Byron’s running-mate, standing for the second place. However, Byron pulled out of the race later that month, prompting Hutchinson to stand for the senior place. On election day, 23 March 1640, the voters returned Hutchinson and Sutton in that order.48Supra, ‘Nottinghamshire’; Nottingham Univ. Lib. CL C 294-5, 621, 684, 715. Despite the time, and possibly money, he had put into securing a seat, Sutton received no appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate. He and Clifton were among the Nottinghamshire deputy lieutenants who conscripted 300 men in the county that summer for service in the second bishops’ war.49SP16/462, ff. 35-6.

In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, Hutchinson and Sutton were again returned for the shire places.50Supra, ‘Nottinghamshire’. There is no evidence of a contest. Although Sutton did not figure prominently in debate, he was nominated to approximately 33 committees before the outbreak of the civil war – and this despite being granted leave of absence on four occasions during 1641 – and chaired a committee relating to Newark’s hospital.51CJ ii. 102b, 120a, 154a, 193a, 268a, 347a. A number of his early committee appointments likewise suggest a concern on his part to secure the kingdom’s liberties and to reform the perceived abuses of the personal rule.52CJ ii. 45b, 50b, 58a, 75a, 98a, 101a. As a ‘constant country man’, he was also concerned with the welfare of Nottinghamshire and the adjacent counties, where units of the English army had been quartered since the conclusion of the second bishops’ war in the summer of 1640. He was named to several committees in 1641 concerning the disbandment of the armies and for raising the necessary revenue to pay off the soldiers and relieve their reluctant hosts.53CJ ii. 107a, 152a, 294b, 298a, 308b. His concern to lighten the burden of quartering upon the northern counties probably explains his willingness to stand bond with Hutchinson in November 1640 and again in March 1641 for £1,000 towards securing loans from the City for the maintenance of the armies in the north and for paying off the Scots.54Procs. LP i. 232, 235; ii. 620. On 1 June, he presented a petition to the House for a scheme to raise £100,000 a year from royal revenues and was named to the committee to which this petition was then referred.55Procs. LP iv. 676; CJ ii. 164a.

During the summer of 1641, it appears that Sutton shared some of the concerns of the parliamentary leadership or ‘junto’. On 28 June, he was appointed to a committee for conferring with the Lords on the Ten Propositions, and on 14 August he was named with John Pym and other leading Commons-men to a committee for drawing up instructions for the parliamentary delegation to attend the king in Edinburgh.56CJ ii. 190b, 256b. Ostensibly, this committee was to liaise between king and Parliament, but its real purpose was to monitor Charles’s activities and to strengthen the leadership’s links with the Scottish Covenanters.57Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 321. In a debate that same day (14 Aug.) on the problems arising from the king’s absence, he argued that Charles should not grant commissions to the French and Spanish for raising men in Ireland for military service on the continent without the approval of Parliament.58Procs. LP vi. 420. He also expressed the view that the Lords should adjourn while the king was in Scotland, for with so many of the peers also absent ‘the bishops will overrule by their votes’.59Procs. LP vi. 421. This was precisely the fear of the junto members in the Lords, who attempted, two days later, to divest the bishops of their right to vote.60Harl. 6424, f. 92. He was sufficiently persuaded by the alarmist talk of Pym and his allies about popish plotting to secure nomination to the 26 March 1641 committee on the threat posed by Catholic recusants; and in August, he was appointed a commissioner for disarming Catholics in Nottinghamshire.61CJ ii. 113b, 267b; LJ iv. 385a. His staunchness in the fight against popery may have been a factor in his nomination to the standing committee set up in November to suppress Ireland’s Catholic rebels, and in his investment of £200 as an Irish Adventurer the following April.62CJ ii. 302a; CSP Ire. Adv. 244, 272; Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 192.

Yet if his committee appointments are any guide, Sutton showed little interest in godly reform or measures to purge the church of its Laudian innovations.63CJ ii. 101a. Indeed, he almost certainly helped to organise a Nottinghamshire petition in response to the county’s root and branch petition of April 1641. This counter-petition, which he presented to the House on 15 December, requested that ‘the long established government of the church may still continue and that the abuses and errors of some particular persons may not cause the alteration of the ancient government’ and that ‘the Book of Common Prayer, by law established, may continue in force’.64Supra, ‘Sir Thomas Hutchinson’; D’Ewes (C), 290; [T. Aston*], A Collection of Sundry Petitions (1642), 8-9 (E.150.28); Fletcher, Outbreak, 306. The petition’s promoters claimed that it had been signed by more than six thousand people.65J. Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Eng. (2000), 242. But the godly MPs Gilbert Millington and Sir Samuel Luke alleged that ‘very undue means and practices had been used in getting hands to that petition’, and after a long debate it was laid aside.66D’Ewes (C), 290. Sutton had already clashed with the godly interest in the House, for on 29 October he and the future royalist grandee Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland, had served as minority tellers against a motion to send for Sir John Coke* as a delinquent.67CJ ii. 298a. The majority tellers had been the leading puritan MPs Sir Thomas Barrington and Arthur Goodwin.

The king’s attempted arrest of the Five Members on 4 January 1642 appears to have alarmed Sutton deeply, and for a brief period he again made common cause with Charles’s leading opponents at Westminster. On 17 January, he was named to a committee for investigating the king’s attempt to seize the magazine at Hull.68CJ ii. 383b. And on 25 January, he was named to a 12-man committee to wait on Charles with proposals from the Commons for settling the peace of the kingdom, including the controversial request that the militia should be placed in such hands as Parliament could confide in.69CJ ii. 393b, 394a. The House sent Sutton to the king again on 18 February, this time with Mildmay Fane†, 2nd earl of Westmorland, and Sir William Pennyman to present Charles with Parliament’s propositions for raising money for the reduction of Ireland.70CJ ii. 440a. By that spring, however, Sutton’s support for the parliamentary leadership was beginning to weaken. In mid-March, he, Hutchinson and Clifton persuaded Parliament’s newly-appointed lord lieutenant for Nottinghamshire, John Holles, 2nd earl of Clare, not to nominate them to the Commons as his deputies – likely evidence that that they did not approve of the Militia Ordinance.71HMC Cowper, ii. 309. And on 27 May, Sutton was named to a committee for the safety of the kingdom and the prevention of civil war, which it was thought by some at Westminster would facilitate an accommodation with the king.72CJ ii. 589; PJ ii. 376-7. Sutton himself was clearly worried by the deteriorating political situation, and on 31 May he procured a Commons order allowing him to send ten muskets to Averham.73CJ ii. 596b. His last appointment in the House was on 14 June.74CJ ii. 623a. Shortly thereafter he abandoned his seat, and on 2 September, the Commons suspended him from sitting pending investigation by the committee for absent Members.75CJ ii. 750a. Whether he was fully committed to the king’s cause by this stage is not clear. On 29 September, Millington informed the Commons of Sutton’s excuses for his absence, which suggests that he may have been trying to keep a channel open to his former colleagues at Westminster.76CJ ii. 787a. But he had certainly joined the ranks of the Nottinghamshire royalists by December, when he assisted the forces of William Cavendish, 1st earl of Newcastle, in garrisoning Newark for the king.77Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 75; Wood, Notts. 29-30. Sutton’s decision to side with the king was consistent with his keeness to preserve the church ‘by law established’.

Sutton was an important figure in the counsels and administration of the royalist garrison at Newark and helped to raise substantial sums for its maintenance.78Harl. 6852, ff. 16-17v; C6/134/163; C6/135/169; C6/138/195; C9/4/45; SP28/133/1, ff. 117-19; Notts. RO, M/9796; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 313; 1661-2, pp. 215, 216, 296; 1670, pp. 297-8; HMC Var. vii. 371-2. Reports in November 1643 that he had submitted himself to Parliament in dismay over recent royalist defeats in the region and the king’s cessation with the Irish rebels were almost certainly groundless.79The Scottish Dove no. 4 (3-10 Nov. 1643), 30-1 (E.75.21); The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer no. 31 (7-14 Nov. 1643), 237 (E.75.31). Indeed, the following month he was involved in an attempt to bribe Colonel John Hutchinson* to surrender Nottingham Castle, whereupon the Commons disabled him from sitting as an MP.80A Perfect Diurnall no. 23 (25 Dec. 1643-1 Jan. 1644), 178 (E.252.13); Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 103; CJ iii. 353a. He attended the Oxford Parliament early in 1644, although he arrived too late to sign its letter to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, urging him to compose a peace.81Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 575; HMC Hastings, ii. 124. His standing within the king’s party was made clear early in 1645, when Charles nominated him to a commission that he proposed should command the kingdom’s militia as part of the projected settlement at the treaty of Uxbridge.82Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 217. In November of that year, Sutton was created Baron Lexinton of Aram by the king – an honour that Lucy Hutchinson alleged Sutton had purchased with money raised for the defence of Newark.83CP; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 184. That same month, however, with the war clearly lost, he tried to surrender himself to Colonel Sednham Poynts, the commander of the parliamentarian forces besieging Newark.84SP23/201, pp. 699, 709. Lacking permission from the Houses to proceed on such overtures, Poynts refused his request, and Sutton remained in the Newark garrison until its surrender (which he helped to negotiate) in May 1646.85SP23/201, p. 709; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 270. He compounded on the Newark articles and was fined at a third of his estate, which was reckoned at £4,861.86CCC 1336; CJ v. 429b; LJ x. 15b. It took him several years to pay off this fine, his house at Averham having been almost totally destroyed during the final parliamentarian siege of Newark and his estate plundered by the Scots to the tune of £4,500.87SP23/201, pp. 702, 715; CCC 1337.

Sutton was still trying to clear his estate from sequestration in 1649 when he and other former royalist commissioners at Newark were sued in chancery over a dispute involving the money they had raised by bond for the garrison during the civil war.88C9/4/45; CCC 1337; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 184-5. This legal dispute seems to have gone against Sutton, for by 1655 he was a prisoner in the upper bench for a debt of £4,000.89CCC 1337. In December 1655, he petitioned the protector, requesting that he be exempted from paying the decimation tax, having been forced to convey much of his estate to trustees to clear his debts, leaving him with only £300 a year for his subsistence (his estate before the war had been worth about £1,800 a year).90CCC 1337; TSP iv. 345. When Major-general Edward Whalley* learnt of this petition, he wrote to Secretary John Thurloe*, urging that no leniency be shown to Sutton.

He is in this county [Nottinghamshire] termed the devil of Newark. He exercised more cruelty ... than any, nay, than all of that garrison, against the Parliament soldiers, when they fell into his power. Should he escape your law, it would be looked upon like the spider’s web, only to take the little flies and let the great ones go.91TSP iv. 364.

In the spring of 1660, Sutton joined Clifton and other nobility and gentry ‘now residing in and about the city of London’, in a declaration thanking General George Monck* for his courage in asserting ‘the public liberty’. The signatories also renounced any intention to take revenge upon their parliamentarian enemies and declared their loyalty ‘to the present power, as it now resides in the council of state’.92A Declaration of the Nobility and Gentry that Adhered to the Late King (1660, 669 f.24.69). Shortly after Charles II landed in Dover late in May 1660, Sutton, Clifton, William Pierrepont* and other Nottinghamshire grandees signed a congratulatory address to the king ‘for your so happy regaining at once both the affections and obedience of your people’.93SP29/1/42, f. 82. At the Restoration, Sutton was restored to the Nottinghamshire bench, re-appointed a deputy lieutenant and recovered some of his material losses from the estate of the regicide Colonel Hutchinson.94LJ xi. 125b, 167b, 189b; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 231, 233.

Sutton died on 11 October 1668 and was buried the next day in Averham church.95Averham par reg.; Holden, Two Sermons, 1. In his will, he affirmed that he died ‘of the catholic Church of England, which I look of [sic] as the most exact copy of the primitive church of all the churches of the world’. He charged his estate with annuities of over £600 a year and stipulated that if his only son died before coming of age, his executors should raise £20,000 from his estate as a marriage portion for his eldest daughter. His executors included Sir Clifford Clifton* and ‘the wise and honest’ Robert Butler of Southwell – the earl (now duke) of Newcastle’s principal man-of-business.96PROB11/331, f. 367. Sutton’s personal estate was said to be worth £4,000.97C5/58/92. His only son, Robert Sutton, 2nd Baron Lexinton, sat in the Lords as a tory peer, and two of his great-nephews, Richard Sutton† and Sir Robert Sutton†, represented Newark and Nottinghamshire in the early eighteenth century.98HP Lords 1660-1715; HP Commons 1715-54.