OGLE, Henry (1600-c.1669), of Eglingham, Northumb.

Ogle’s ancestors – a junior branch of an extensive Northumberland family – had settled at Eglingham, near Alnwick, by the early sixteenth century.27Ogle, Ogle and Bothal, 190. Although little is known of his immediate family background and upbringing, the fact that he was required to compound for knighthood during the personal rule of Charles I – paying £13 6s. 8d – confirms his place among the middle-ranking Northumberland gentry.28E407/35, f. 143v. His later career suggests that he was a man of godly convictions, and during the second bishops’ war of 1640 he was evidently the ‘Henry Ogle of Edlingham’ (a parish adjoining Eglingham) who was ‘represented to some great ministers in our court for a very ill-affected person’.29CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 533, 573. Edward Conway, 2nd Viscount Conway, the governor of Newcastle, questioned Ogle’s parish minister and one of the Northumberland deputy lieutenants, who both told him that Ogle was ‘a very honest gentleman’ and that he ‘came duly to church both to sermon and prayers’. Nevertheless, Ogle’s admission that the Covenanters resented his refusal to send them intelligence suggests that the authorities were not unjustified in questioning his loyalties. Moreover, his eldest son had married a Scotswoman and ‘stout Covenantrix’.30CSP Dom. 1640, p. 548. Although Conway was convinced that Ogle was an honest man and that the allegations of collaborating with the Covenanters were groundless, the king demanded that Ogle be sent down to Oatlands (where the privy council was then sitting) to undergo a more thorough examination.31CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 558, 566, 573. Ogle was reportedly on his way southwards by mid-August, but the English defeat at Newburn and the subsequent calling of the Long Parliament probably spared him further interrogation and punishment.32CSP Dom. 1640, p. 581.

At the outbreak of civil war, Ogle was one of relatively few Northumberland gentry to side with Parliament.33CJ ii. 757a, 853b. His appointment in 1641 as a commissioner for disarming recusants in the county suggests that fear of popery was a factor in determining his allegiance.34LJ iv. 385b. He was regularly named to local parliamentary commissions during the 1640s and was an active member of the Northumberland county committee.35Add. 5508, f. 111; SP28/240, f. 28; Bodl. Nalson V, f. 121; Nalson XIV, f. 118; Tanner 59, ff. 173, 387, 528; Tanner 60, f. 82; Recs. of the Cttees. for Compounding...in Durham and Northumb. ed. R. Welford (Surt. Soc. cxi), 77, 98. His loyalty to Parliament seems to have won him the approval of Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland – the county’s lord lieutenant and leading parliamentary figure – who was almost certainly behind his nomination by the Lords as a deputy lieutenant in November 1644.36LJ vii. 77a. A year later, Ogle was among the handful of men named as parties to the election indenture returning William Fenwicke as knight of the shire for Northumberland.37C219/43/2/88. In December 1645, he signed a letter from the county committee to Speaker William Lenthall, bemoaning the fact that ‘in 60 large parishes we cannot raise above one classis’ and requesting that the House send down ‘godly and able ministers’ to help settle Presbyterian church government in the county.38Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, ii. 365-6.

The oppressions of the Scottish troops in the north during the mid-1640s apparently helped to push Ogle towards the Independents; and during the late 1640s he emerged as a close political associate of Sir Arthur Hesilrige*, the governor of the four northern counties from 1648.39Add. 5508, f. 111; C54/3571/14; C54/3820/43; SP28/240, ff. 24, 25, 28; Bodl. Tanner 59, f. 387; Northumb. RO, ZSW 7/77; HMC Portland, i. 363-4; Cttees. for Compounding...in Durham and Northumb. ed. Welford, 55, 77, 78, 80, 83. Ogle commanded a troop of horse in the Northumberland forces commanded by Hesilrige during the second civil war, and by 1650, at the latest, he was a captain in the regiment of Colonel Francis Hacker*.40Moderate Intelligencer no. 175 (20-7 July 1648), sig. Oooooooo6; Wanklyn, Reconstructing the New Model Army, ii. 57. Hesilrige was probably involved in securing Ogle’s appointment as a sequestration commissioner for Northumberland in 1650.41CCC 172; Cttees. for Compounding...in Durham and Northumb. ed. Welford, 80. Ogle is said to have entertained no less a person than Oliver Cromwell* at Eglingham in July 1650 – just a few days before the lord general led the New Model Army across the Tweed into Scotland.42Hedley, Northumb. Fams. ii. 197; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 447. Ogle did his county a much greater service soon afterwards in having the witch-finder Matthew Hopkins arraigned at the quarter-sessions, whereupon Hopkins fled to Scotland. Had Ogle not acted against him it was conceived that Hopkins ‘would have made most of the women in the north witches for money’.43R. Gardiner, Englands Grievance Discovered in relation to the Coal Trade (1655), 108-9.

Ogle’s links with Hesilrige did not prejudice his career after the fall of the Rump, and in May 1653 he was among four men selected by the council of officers to represent the northernmost counties in the Nominated Parliament – apparently with particular reference to Northumberland.44Supra, ‘Northern counties’. Three of the four men – Ogle, Henry Dawson and Robert Fenwicke – had been active members of the Rump’s commission for propagating the gospel in the northern counties.45LPL, COMM VIII/I, passim. Ogle and Fenwick wrote to Berwick corporation in August, requesting its support for the establishment of a university at Durham. They referred to the ‘cloud of darkness’ that had ‘long over-shadowed our northern counties’ as a result of depredations by the Scots ‘whilst they were a distinct nation’, and claimed that a seat of learning in the north would particularly benefit the region’s poorer inhabitants, who were not able to send their sons to Oxford or Cambridge. The corporation regarded this initiative as ‘a signal mercy from the Lord’ and felt assured that Ogle and Fenwick ‘make the glory of God and the good of this nation your aim and ends’.46Berwick RO, B9/1, Berwick Guild Letter Bk., f. 68. The corporation would write to the two men early in 1654, requesting that they consult with the godly divines Joseph Caryll, Thomas Goodwin and John Owen about preventing the town’s minister being poached by another parish.47Berwick RO, B9/1, ff. 73-4.

Ogle was named to just three committees in the Nominated Parliament, including the committee for Scottish affairs and a committee set up on 10 October 1653 to draw up a declaration for giving ‘fitting liberty to all that fear God ... and for preventing the abuses of speaking evil against magistrates and magistracy and the better preservation of the mutual peace of such as fear God among themselves, without imposing one upon another’.48CJ vii. 286b, 287a, 332b. This declaration breathes the spirit of the religious settlement sought by Cromwell as protector, and sure enough Ogle was named as an ejector for the four northern counties in 1654 – an appointment that he evidently took seriously.49TSP iv. 513. It was perhaps in his capacity as MP for Northumberland that he signed Ralph Gardner’s petition of October 1653 requesting that Parliament re-open its investigation into the Newcastle Hostmen’s monopoly on the River Tyne coal trade.50Monopoly on the Tyne, 1650-8 ed. R. Howell (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1978), 80. Ogle was deemed knowledgeable on the subject of collieries, and there is circumstantial evidence that he was friendly with Gardner.51Tyne and Wear Archives, MD.NC/2/1, Newcastle Common Council Order Bk. p. 220; Gardiner, Englands Grievance Discovered, 108-9.

Ogle apparently had no difficulty negotiating the transition from commonwealth to protectorate, and in the elections to the first Cromwellian Parliament in the summer of 1654 he was returned for Northumberland.52Supra, ‘Northumberland’. It was doubtless his prominence in county affairs since the mid-1640s that gave him such a strong electoral interest. However, he received no committee appointments in this Parliament, made no recorded contribution to debate, and it is far from certain that he took his seat. There is no evidence that he stood for election in 1656 or in 1659, although he seems to have remained a force in local government for the duration of the protectorate.53CSP Dom. 1656-7, pp. 41, 159, 272; 1657-8, p. 330; 1658-9, p. 69.

In 1659, Ogle was arrested and imprisoned in Newgate on the suit of a fellow parliamentarian for non-payment of a debt incurred when he had served as a commissioner for raising forces for the Northern Association army in 1645.54CJ vii. 698b, 701a. Ogle’s old colleague, Hesilrige, rallied to his support at Westminster, however, and on 2 July the restored Rump ordered his release.55CJ vii. 701a. Ogle reportedly helped to secure Northumberland against the royalists during Sir George Boothe’s* rebellion in August 1659.56Stowe 185, f. 161. But with the English army’s dissolution of the Rump in October, he made common cause with General George Monck*.57Clarke Pprs. iv. 90, 119. In November, he was reported as being ‘very forward in defence of the Parliament of England and hopes the general will stand for the liberties of the English nation, our laws and the gospel – that is now at the stake if the armies do bear sway’.58Clarke Pprs. iv. 119. He and his Northumberland militia troop had been added to Monck’s own regiment of horse by December 1659 and served in the bloodless campaign against Major-general John Lambert* that winter.59J. Price, The Mystery and Method of His Majesty’s Happy Restauration (1680), 66; Clarke Pprs. iv. 179, 210; v. 347; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 289.

Ogle supported the re-admission of the secluded Members in February 1660 and seems to have welcomed Restoration, signing the address of Monck’s officers to the general in May 1660 in which they pledged support for the king and the Convention and looked forward to ‘the enjoyment of much tranquility and happiness under his Majesty’s government’.60Baker, Chronicle, 689; The Humble Address of the Officers in Your Excellencies Army (1660). But Ogle was evidently not trusted by the restored monarchy, for he was removed from all offices, military and civilian, during the course of 1660. He died in about 1669.61Hedley, Northumb. Fams. ii. 198. His place and date of burial are unknown and no will is recorded. None of his immediate family followed him into the Commons.