WENTWORTH, Sir George II (1599-1660), of Woolley, Royston, Yorks.

Wentworth belonged to a junior branch of one of Yorkshire’s oldest gentry families, the Wentworths of Wentworth Woodhouse.30Foster, Yorks. Peds. ‘Wentworth of Wentworth Woodhouse’. He was third cousin to Sir Thomas Wentworth† of Wentworth Woodhouse (the future earl of Strafford) and to Sir Thomas’s younger brother, Sir George Wentworth I*, and was apparently on close terms with the senior branch of the family. His father, Michael Wentworth, had established the family’s principal residence at Woolley Hall, which was about ten miles south west of Pontefract and within easy travelling distance of Wentworth Woodhouse.31J.W. Walker, ‘The manor and church of Woolley’, YAJ xxvii. 274; Wentworth, ‘Wentworths of Woolley’, 8-9.

The foundation of Wentworth’s brief parliamentary career was laid in 1617-18 and 1630, when his father entailed almost his entire estate, both real and personal, on George, his third (but second surviving) son, thereby making him his heir.32Leeds Univ. Lib. MS/DEP/Wentworth Woolley Hall/10/1, no. 31; MS/DEP/Wentworth Woolley Hall/63; Wentworth, ‘Wentworths of Woolley’, 20-1. There is no clear indication as to why Michael Wentworth chose to disinherit his eldest son, Michael, in favour of George. The most likely explanation is that Michael Wentworth junior was a practising Catholic, like his parents, and that Wentworth senior settled the estate on George in an effort to protect the family from potentially ruinous recusancy fines.33HMC Var. ii. 371, 373; Miscellanea: Recusant Recs. ed. C. Talbot (Catholic Rec. Soc. liii), 179, 383-4, 389, 402-3; Wentworth, ‘Wentworths of Woolley’, 6-9. George Wentworth was certainly no Catholic – a fact made abundantly clear by his marriage in 1621 to a daughter of the trenchantly Protestant Yorkshire knight Sir Thomas (later 1st Baron) Fairfax† of Denton, the father and grandfather respectively of the future parliamentarian generals Ferdinando 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*) and Sir Thomas Fairfax*.34Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. ii. 322. No doubt eager to secure a match with one of Yorkshire’s oldest and wealthiest families, the Wentworths agreed to settle property worth £12,000 on Fairfax’s daughter by way of jointure.35Wentworth, ‘Wentworths of Woolley’, 21.

Wentworth remained on close terms with the Fairfaxes even after the death of his wife in 1624, and in the elections to the first Caroline Parliament in 1625 he canvassed for the return of his former father-in-law Sir Thomas Fairfax and of his cousin Sir Thomas Wentworth as knights of the shire.36Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 7-8. In 1626, Wentworth married again, this time to a daughter of Christopher Maltby of Maltby, near Yarm in north Yorkshire.37Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. ii. 322-3. His new wife, whose sister had married the future royalist Michael Warton*, brought with her a marriage portion of £5,000 and lands worth £133 a year.38Leeds Univ. Lib. YAS/DD57/C/C.40; Wentworth, ‘Wentworths of Woolley’, 24.

Wentworth appears to have profited from his association with Sir Thomas Wentworth, who was created Viscount Wentworth following his elevation to the presidency of the council of the north in 1628. He probably owed his knighthood and his addition to the West Riding bench in 1630 to his cousin’s influence at court. It was probably no coincidence that he obtained a captaincy in the West Riding militia regiment commanded by the lord president’s brother-in-law Sir Edward Rodes*.39Add. 28082, f. 80. In return, Wentworth helped to manage some of his cousin’s personal affairs while the latter was serving as lord deputy of Ireland.40HMC Var. ii. 371-2; Wentworth, ‘Wentworths of Woolley’, 26-7. He also proved himself a reliable instrument of ‘Thorough’ during the 1630s, serving dutifully as a West Riding magistrate and in several other local offices.41Add. 26739, f. 425v; W. Riding Sessions Recs. ed. J. Lister (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. liv), 35, 390. However, despite his closeness to his cousin on a personal level, he was not part of the lord deputy’s administrative cabinet in Yorkshire – a group that included Sir John Hotham*, Sir Edward Osborne* and Sir William Pennyman*.

Wentworth appears to have remained a loyal servant of the crown for most of the personal rule, 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 should muster for possible deployment against the Scots, he 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’.42SP16/409/53, 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.43SP16/414/92, f. 217. These petitions were signed by a number of the lord deputy’s closest adherents in Yorkshire, including Osborne, Rodes and Sir John Ramsden*.

Wentworth’s was one of six Yorkshire militia regiments that the king ordered to be mobilized against the Scots early in April 1640.44Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland ms vol. 1608-1700, N33 Car. I: the king to Sir Edward Osborne, 4 Apr. 1640. However, with the second bishops’ war causing severe hardship in Yorkshire, Wentworth joined the county’s ‘disaffected’ gentry in their petition to the king of 28 July, complaining about the local impact of military charges. When the lord deputy (now the earl of Strafford) saw this petition he exclaimed that ‘for them, at such a time as this is, thus to complain when an invasion is threatened by the Scots, it seemed to be a mutinous petition’.45SP16/461/38, f. 58; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1215. Although some of those who signed this petition did so partly in an effort to undermine Strafford, it is most unlikely that Wentworth was one of them. His apparent failure to sign the second such petition, in August, in which the petitioners pleaded poverty in the face of royal requests to mobilize the trained bands, may indicate that he wanted no further truck with those who sought to weaken Strafford’s position or the war effort. And while he did sign the last of the gentry’s petitions to the king, in mid-September, he retracted his signature after Strafford objected to a clause requesting that Charles summon Parliament.46Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 621.

In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, Strafford recommended Wentworth for a seat at Scarborough, but without success.47Supra, ‘Scarborough’. In the event, Wentworth was returned for Pontefract with his cousin – Strafford’s younger brother – Sir George Wentworth II.48Supra, ‘Pontefract’. Strafford was Pontefract’s principal electoral patron, and it is very likely that Wentworth was returned on the earl’s interest. Like most of the Yorkshire Straffordians, Wentworth adopted a low profile at Westminster. He appears to have been entirely inactive in the early months of the Long Parliament, there being almost no mention of him in the Journal or in any of the parliamentary diaries before 3 April 1641, when Strafford petitioned the Commons that Wentworth and several other Yorkshire gentlemen be called as witnesses at his trial, whereupon the House ordered that the gentlemen in question ‘might give testimony for him as they would’.49Procs. LP iii. 362. When the House took notice on 6 April that he had been among those who had applauded a ‘long speech’ made by Strafford at his trial on 5 April, he ‘stood up and excused the matter as not to have been done purposely, and so it was passed over’.50Procs. LP iii. 413. On 7 April, he gave evidence at the trial on the 27th article – that Strafford had levied an illegal tax upon Yorkshire for the maintenance of the trained bands. Corroborating the testimony of Osborne, Pennyman, Sir William Savile and other Yorkshire Straffordians, Wentworth affirmed that the Yorkshire gentry had willingly conceded to the earl’s request for a levy to maintain the trained bands, and said that the money had been ‘cheerfully paid’.51LJ iv. 210a; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 623; Procs. LP iii. 433-4, 438, 443, 451. On 21 April, Wentworth was one of only seven Yorkshire MPs who voted against the bill for Strafford’s attainder.52Procs. LP iv. 51; Verney, Notes, 58. His only known contribution to the House’s proceedings during May and June 1641 was to take the Protestation, on 3 May.53CJ ii. 133a.

It was probably Wentworth, rather than Strafford’s brother, who was named to a committee set up on 2 July 1641 on a bill for securing the billet money due to the inhabitants of the northern counties.54CJ ii. 196a. But this would be his only committee appointment in the House. On 19 July, he was granted leave of absence, and, on departing Westminster, he may well have abandoned his seat altogether.55CJ ii. 216a. At Woolley by early 1642, settling the family’s affairs following the death of his father, he wrote to his former brother-in-law Ferdinando Lord Fairfax, asking that he explain his absence to the House should the subject arise. His intention was to let as much of his estate as possible ‘until I can become a ... countryman again, which I desire much to be’.56Bodl. Fairfax 32, f. 58. He wrote to Fairfax again on 21 January 1642, thanking him for certain (unspecified) ‘great favours’ and reporting that Yorkshire was in the grip of ‘a general distraction and apprehension of fears, and no cause known’, except ‘strange reports’ concerning the county’s Catholics. He referred, jokingly, to the fact that he, Francis Nevile* and another West Riding magistrate had been appointed to search the house of a local Catholic gentlewoman, who was supposedly concealing a ‘multitude of arms and soldiers’.57Bodl. Fairfax 32, f. 64. He was confident, he informed Fairfax, that the ‘greatest danger will be ... the appearance of two or three rich and fair widows’. Clearly, he did not set much store by rumours of an impending popish uprising. His attitude contrasts sharply with that of another of Fairfax’s correspondents, godly Yorkshire squire Thomas Stockdale*, who was convinced that the Catholics were plotting mischief and took his duty to search their houses very seriously.58Supra, ‘Thomas Stockdale’.

Wentworth may have returned to the Commons at some point early in 1642 – as he informed Lord Fairfax that he would – but on 25 March, he was granted further leave of absence.59CJ ii. 496b; Bodl. Fairfax 32, f. 64. There is no mention of him in the Journal or in any of the parliamentary diaries between March and 17 June, when Sir Guy Palmes, a former friend of Strafford’s, moved that Wentworth be allowed to depart for Yorkshire.60PJ iii. 92. The matter was debated, and it was resolved, upon the question, to grant Wentworth leave.61CJ ii. 628b. His appointment the next day (18 June) to the Yorkshire commission of array suggests that he had already decided to join the king.62Northants. RO, FH133. With his Catholic connections, his links with the executed Strafford, and his undoubted lack of sympathy with further reformation in religion, Wentworth was a natural royalist; the claim that he was appointed a quarter-master of artillery in the earl of Essex’s parliamentarian army is a case of mistaken identity.63The List of the Army Raised under the Command of His Excellency, Robert Earl of Essex (1642), sig. A4 (E.117.3); Wentworth, ‘Wentworths of Woolley’, 27.

During the summer of 1642, Wentworth was commissioned as a colonel in the king’s army – having raised a regiment of foot in Yorkshire at his own expense – and early in August he signed a petition to Parliament from the county’s royalist gentry, protesting at the ‘public acts of hostility committed by Sir John Hotham* and the garrison of Hull’.64LJ v. 273b-274a; Wentworth, ‘Wentworths of Woolley’, 28. On 6 September, the Commons disabled him from sitting for neglecting the service of the House and for signing the August petition.65CJ ii. 754b. That autumn he was among the group of prominent Yorkshire royalists that invited the commander of the king’s northern army, the earl of Newcastle, to secure the county against the Hothams and their allies.66Newcastle Mems. ed. Firth, 189, 190. He was closely involved in efforts to raise money for Newcastle’s army, and in February 1643 he was party to the so-called Yorkshire engagement, by which the signatories pledged their estates as security on loans for the supply of the earl’s troops.67CCAM 908. He himself lent £300 and signed bonds on the engagement for large sums of money.68Add. 15858, f. 237; Bodl. Tanner 62, ff. 655-6; Doncaster Archives, DD/CROM/11/6.

Wentworth and his regiment fought at several major engagements in Yorkshire during 1643, including the battle of Adwalton Moor and the sieges of Wakefield and Leeds.69Add. 26739, f. 426; LJ v. 580a; Wentworth, ‘Wentworths of Woolley’, 28. Having attended the Oxford Parliament early in 1644, he signed its letter to the earl of Essex, urging him to compose a peace.70Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 574-5. He would later claim that his reason for going to Oxford had not been ‘to sit in the assembly’, but to obtain a pardon for his elder brother, Michael, who had killed a royalist colonel in a duel.71Wentworth, ‘Wentworths of Woolley’, 10. That done, he had returned to Yorkshire – and was certainly in the county by the summer of 1644 and may have fought at the battle of Marston Moor in July.72SP23/199, p. 117. By the end of 1644, he was serving alongside Sir John Ramsden in the besieged royalist garrison at Pontefract, and in July 1645 the two men were among the royalist commissioners in the negotiations for the surrender of Pontefract Castle.73The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer no. 109 (15-23 July 1645), 872 (E.293.21); N. Drake, ‘A jnl. of the first and second sieges of Pontefract, 1644-5’, ed. W.D.H. Longstaffe, in Miscellanea (Surt. Soc. xxxvii), 3-5, 78, 80-1. After the castle’s surrender, Wentworth, like Ramsden, made his way to the royalist stronghold of Newark.74SP23/199, p. 117. He had apparently lost all hope in the royalist cause by the autumn of 1645, but his efforts to secure a pass to go to London to compound were refused, and he remained at Newark until the town’s surrender in May 1646.75SP23/199, pp. 147, 155.

Wentworth petitioned to compound on the Newark articles in June 1646. The principal charges against him were that he had been in arms against Parliament, had sat in the Oxford Parliament and had moved ‘from garrison to garrison held against the Parliament, as to Leeds, Wakefield, Halifax, Sheffield, York and last to Newark’. In March 1647, the Committee for Compounding fined him at a third of his estate – calculated at £4,302 – a sum that Wentworth thought exorbitant.76SP23/199, pp. 117, 132; CCC 1326. In the autumn of 1647, he petitioned the committee, requesting that his fine be reduced to a more ‘moderate proportion’, claiming (wrongly) that it was ‘the greatest fine that hath been set upon any beyond Trent’.77SP23/199, p. 128. His fine was disproportionately large, he argued, because the Yorkshire county committee had overvalued his estate – as Lord Fairfax, Sir Henry Cholmley* and other members of the committee certified.78SP23/199, p. 129. With Fairfax’s help, Wentworth succeeded in having his fine reduced to £4,052; and in April 1648, Parliament passed an ordinance granting him a pardon and removing the sequestration on his estate.79SP23/199, pp. 129, 133, 155; Belvoir Castle, PZ.3, f. 35; Bodl. Fairfax 32, f. 126; CCC 1326; CJ v. 486a; LJ x. 170a; Wentworth, ‘Wentworths of Woolley’, 30, 31. Wentworth was still not satisfied, however, and after he had petitioned the House again, the Rump reduced his fine by a further £864, to £3,188.80CJ vi. 208b; CCC 1326.

No sooner had Wentworth reached a settlement with the Committee for Compounding and Parliament than he found himself facing further financial demands from the Committee for Advance of Money sitting at Haberdashers’ Hall. In May 1650, he was summoned by the committee to show good cause why he should not pay his proportion of the Yorkshire engagement, which, like all debts due to royalists, was deemed payable to the state.81CCAM 896. At some point in the early 1650s, he and several other Yorkshire royalists, including Francis Nevile, wrote to Sir Thomas Ingram*, Sir Paul Neile* and two other Yorkshire gentlemen living in London, asking for their assistance in dealing with the commissioners at Haberdashers’ Hall.82Notts. RO, DD/SR/221/94/43. In May 1654, Wentworth, Nevile and several other engagers petitioned the lord protector, requesting that those who had paid their proportion of the engagement – of whom Wentworth was presumably one – should be discharged and indemnified.83CCAM 903. But Wentworth’s royalist past caught up with him again the following year, when he was required to pay £35 in decimation tax.84Leeds Univ. Lib. MS/DEP/Wentworth Woolley Hall/16; Wentworth, ‘Wentworths of Woolley’, 33.

Between 1646 and the Restoration, Wentworth avoided all public engagements and appears to have taken no part in royalist intrigue. His friends among the parliamentarian gentry included not only Lord Fairfax – who bequeathed £10 to Wentworth’s eldest son in his will – but also, it seems, Fairfax’s son-in-law Sir Thomas Widdrington*, his brother Colonel Charles Fairfax and leading members of the Fairfax interest in the West Riding – notably, Henry Arthington* and John Stanhope*.85Add. 36996, f. 83; Leeds Univ. Lib. YAS/DD12/I/20/13; WYAS (Bradford), SpSt/4/11/18/1; Abstracts of Yorks. Wills ed. J. W. Clay (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. ix), 7; Wentworth, ‘Wentworths of Woolley’, 22. Most of his time during the interregnum was probably taken up with managing his own estate and that of Strafford’s heir, William 2nd earl of Strafford, who entrusted Wentworth and another kinsman with the administration of his affairs while he was on the continent.86Add. 24475, ff. 115-118v; HMC Var. ii. 374-8; Wentworth, ‘Wentworths of Woolley’, 32.

Wentworth welcomed moves towards a restoration of monarchy, signing a petition to General George Monck* in February 1660 from the Yorkshire gentry ‘who adhered unto his late Majesty’, requesting a free Parliament.87WYAS (Wakefield), C176/2. Shortly after the Restoration, he was offered the command of his old West Riding militia regiment, but declined on the grounds that he was ‘extremely ill-disposed in my health’ and desired ‘ease and no further trouble in military matters’.88Wentworth, ‘Wentworths of Woolley’, 34-5. Nevertheless, it was probably Wentworth, rather than his cousin and namesake (Sir George Wentworth I) who was appointed a deputy lieutenant for the West Riding in the summer of 1660.89SP29/42/66, f. 131; SP29/42/67, ff. 133v-34. But this would be his last appointment, for he died, without surviving male issue, on 19 October 1660 and was buried at Woolley three days later.90St Peter, Woolley par reg.; Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. ii. 322.

In his will, Wentworth bequeathed lands worth between £300 and £400 a year to his three daughters. His manors of Woolley, Notton and Darton had been entailed upon his brother John some years earlier. He instructed his executors to pay off his debts (which, with those of his deceased son Michael, amounted to £1,322) out of a rent charge of £150 a year issuing from his manor of Notton and from the sale of property in Woolley and Notton worth £2,100.91Borthwick, Prob. Reg. 44, f. 309; C33/218, f. 29; C33/220, ff. 229v-230. Despite claims that ‘very near £600 per annum had gone from the family’ as a result of the civil war, surveys of Wentworth’s estate in the late 1650s and early 1660s appear to indicate that it was worth about £1,250 a year – that is, about £250 a year more than in the 1630s.92C33/220, ff. 229v-230; Leeds Univ. Lib. MS/DEP/Wentworth Woolley Hall/40, 48; Wentworth, ‘Wentworths of Woolley’, 160. Although none of his own immediate descendents sat in Parliament, his nephew, Michael, represented the Yorkshire borough of Aldborough as a tory between 1685 and 1696.93HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Sir Michael Wentworth’.