MARTEN, Henry (c.1602-80), of Beckett, Shrivenham, Berks.

Background and early career

Henry Marten’s parliamentary career was marked by a great deal of sound and fury that for much of its duration signified relatively little. His well-deserved reputation as the most outspoken and overtly ‘republican’ Commons-man during the early 1640s has tended to obscure perhaps his most substantive contribution to the parliamentary war effort – his work as a member of Parliament’s first major executive, the Committee of Safety* (a body that he criticised for abuse of power even as he signed its warrants). In August 1643, having finally established himself as a front-rank politician, he was promptly expelled from Parliament and did not regain his former prominence until after Pride’s Purge – and even then he was not trusted with the kind of ministerial responsibilities that were assigned to the likes of Thomas Scot I* and Sir Henry Vane II*. His preference for political combat over constructive compromise is clear from his 185 tellerships during the period 1640-60 (only the equally combative Sir Arthur Hesilrige* and Denzil Holles* would exceed this tally), and it is a measure of his dogged adherence to lost causes that he was on the minority side in 129 of these divisions – a rate of defeat that was even more striking in the eight years preceding Pride’s Purge, when he won a mere 11 of the 55 divisions he contested.

The argument that Marten’s radical grand-standing in the early 1640s was intended to ‘accustom parliamentary minds to the idea that the king was ... the very chief of malignants’ and that the Commons was capable of governing the kingdom without him, may well be correct, but as a proselytising tactic it was generally counter-productive.72C.M. Williams, ‘Extremist tactics in the Long Parl. 1642-3’, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, xv. 138, 142, 149-50. Marten’s words and antics seem to have offended far more Parliament-men than they persuaded. Moreover, his sometimes incendiary behaviour repeatedly embarrassed John Pym* and his fellow war-party grandees, hindering their pursuit of a political programme that was essentially a more achievable and realistic version of Marten’s own.73C.M. Williams, ‘The anatomy of a radical gentleman: Henry Marten’, in Puritans and Revolutionaries ed. D. Pennington, K. Thomas (Oxford, 1978), 136-7. Marten’s contention that Parliament could have nipped the civil war in the bud simply by declaring the king a ‘common rebel’ from the outset, was not that of a practical politician.74[Marten], A Word to Mr Wil. Prynn Esq (1649), 9 (E.537.16).

There are also problems with identifying Marten as the Levellers’ most committed ally at Westminster during the late 1640s (Thomas Lord Grey of Groby* and Thomas Scot II* look more convincing in this respect).75E. Vernon, P. Baker, ‘What was the first Agreement of the People?’, HJ liii. 43, 45, 48, 56-7, 58, 59. Although he was clearly on close personal terms with several leading Levellers, he showed only fleeting enthusiasm for the central Leveller concept of an ‘Agreement of the People’ by which the power of Parliament would be limited and regulated. Except for a brief period during the second half of 1648, he was a staunch Commons supremacist, who looked to the House as ‘the legal and traditional representative of the sovereign people’ and was willing to invest it with almost unlimited authority. The Levellers, by contrast, looked beyond the Commons to the sovereign people themselves.76Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 142, 143, 174, 254, 259, 263, 269, 282-3, 285, 386-7, 390.

Marten was descended from an obscure but – by the mid-sixteenth century – prosperous London family. His grandfather was a baker in the City parish of St Michael, Bassishaw, and his father, Sir Henry Marten, maintained a London residence in nearby Aldersgate Street.77Infra, ‘Sir Henry Marten’; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 23 (indenture 16 May 1640); box 50 (indenture 8 Apr. 1623). Marten was born in Oxford, where his father (an alumnus of New College) and uncle William owned and leased property, patronised local churches and enjoyed close professional and personal connections with the academic community.78Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 39, item 30; box 40 (indenture 11 Feb. 1633); box 67, item 33; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 43-4; Ath. Ox. iii. 1237; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 84; Cole, ‘Henry Marten’, 27; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 450. Sir Henry was on friendly terms by the late 1620s with two of the university’s rising clerical stars – William Laud’s Oxford intelligencer William Chillingworth and Jasper Mayne.79Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 67, item 88; vol. 88, f. 3. According to Anthony Wood, Marten received a grammar school education somewhere in Oxfordshire.80Ath. Ox. iii. 1237. But another near-contemporary source claimed that he had been under his father’s tutelage in Aldersgate.81Gayton, Marten’s Familiar Letters, sig. A3. Either way, Marten almost certainly profited considerably from his father’s wide learning and varied scholarly interests.82Infra, ‘Sir Henry Marten’; Sheffield Univ. Hartlib pprs. 6/4/79-80; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 74-5, 86, 88.

Sir Henry used the wealth and royal favour derived from his career as a prominent civil lawyer to build up one of the largest estates in Berkshire – much of it in the Abingdon area – that was worth in excess of £3,000 a year by 1640.83Ath. Ox. iii. 17; Gayton, Marten’s Familiar Letters, sig. A2v; HP Commons, 1604-29; VCH Berks. iii. 107; iv. 457, 464, 466, 467, 470, 530, 533, 535, 538; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 10, 15, 470-2; Durston, ‘Berks. and its County Gentry’, ii. 102, 107. He represented the Cornish borough of St Germans in the 1625 and 1626 Parliaments, Oxford University in 1628 and another Cornish borough – St Ives – in the Short Parliament.84HP Commons, 1604-29. Marten began to emerge from his father’s shadow in the late 1620s, with his appointment to the Berkshire bench in 1628 and his purchase that year of the manor of Eaton Hastings from the countess of Berkshire for £4,000.85VCH Berks. iv. 530; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 9 (indenture 12 May 1628). Although it was almost certainly Sir Henry’s influence at court that secured a grant of the royal manor of Hinton Waldrist in 1627, it was Marten who was described as ‘farmer’ (i.e. crown tenant) of the property from the late 1620s.86Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 7, items 159, 177, 181; Coventry Docquets, 244; CSP Dom. 1627-8, p. 136; VCH Berks. iv. 464. His first wife was not, as is often stated, Margaret Lovelace – who married Sir George Stonhouse* – but her sister, Elizabeth, daughter of the Berkshire peer Richard 1st Baron Lovelace, who appointed Marten and Stonhouse executors of his will.87Infra, ‘Sir George Stonhouse’; Hurley par. reg.; PROB11/166, ff. 42, 42v.

Elizabeth Marten died in April 1634, shortly after the birth of the couple’s third daughter, and in December of that year Marten married Margaret Stanton, who was both the daughter and widow of wealthy London grocers.88St Bartholomew the Great par. reg.; PROB11/148, f. 57. Aubrey would claim that Marten’s second marriage had been arranged by Sir Henry and that the groom had tied the knot ‘somewhat unwillingly’.89Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 44. Although the marriage would prove an unhappy one, Margaret Stanton came with a portion of about £10,000 and bore Marten five children.90Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 40, items 22, 72; vol. 88, f. 4v; Gayton, Marten’s Familiar Letters, 79. Marten was described in the register of St Bartholomew the Great, London, where the wedding took place, as a gentleman of Barcote, although it seems that Beckett, in the parish of Shrivenham, was his principal country residence by the later 1630s.91St Bartholomew the Great par. reg.; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 23, item 1075 (indenture 16 May 1640); box 63 (indenture 16 Apr. 1639); Cole, ‘Henry Marten’, 39.

The Martens invested some of Margaret Stanton’s marriage portion by lending it out at interest. Yet far from encouraging financial prudence in Marten, the money seems to have fuelled his profligacy.92Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 67, items 15-16. In 1638, it was reported that Sir Henry was subsidising Henry’s spending and that of his younger brother George – ‘a very debauched, spendthriftly fellow’ – to the tune of £1,500 a year.93Harl. 163, f. 376; CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 590. The Marten brothers began to increase their borrowing from the late 1630s, either by mortgaging or selling parts of their estate – often lands that were already ‘divers ways clogged, charged and encumbered’94Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 42 (indenture 1664). – or by taking out substantial loans.95LC4/202, ff. 284v, 287v; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 5 (indenture 10 June 1642); box 8, items 30, 117; box 22 (June 1651 estate valuation; list of statutes and judgements against Marten for debt); box 23, item 1048; box 26, item 853; box 28, item 549; box 39, items 16, 20; box 39 (Mr Wildman’s encumbrances; encumbrances on estate of Mr Henry Marten); box 40, items 34, 36, 37, 53, 55, 88; box 40 (bond 24 June 1641); box 43 (indenture 22 Feb. 1659); box 50 (indenture 20 Feb. 1667); box 53, item 998; box 60 (indenture 4 Nov. 1639); box 63 (indenture 16 Apr. 1639); box 66 (20 Nov. 1640); box 67, item 10; box 68, items 3, 4; box 72, items, 184, 518; vol. 13 (indenture 17 July 1692, ref. to bond 14 Nov. 1638); vol. 35 (‘The title of Sir George Wilmot’s lease of Eaton’); vol. 125 (indenture 20 Jan. 1659); Wood, Life and Times, 253. These debts were incurred to cover not only their regular expenses but also their purchase – apparently during the late 1630s or early 1640s – and maintenance of a merchant-cum-privateering vessel, which they named The Marten (the assertion that the Martens had owned this vessel since the 1620s appears groundless).96Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 67, item 22; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 120. The brothers’ creditors obtained a succession of court rulings from the late 1630s, authorising the seizure of various of their properties in order to recoup unpaid loans.97Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 16, item 185; box 22 (June 1651 estate valuation; statutes and judgements against Marten), and items 149, 154, 208; box 32, item 928; box 39 (Mr Wildman’s encumbrances; encumbrances on estate of Marten); box 42 (indenture of 1664); box 57 (indenture 26 Feb. 1674). By April 1642, the two brothers had run up debts of £8,200, for which Henry was principally liable – and by 1647 that figure had risen to about £20,000.98Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 22 (June 1651 estate valuation; statutes and judgements against Marten); box 32 (1654 bill in chancery, Marten v. Hampson); box 40, item 65; box 67, items 14, 23.

Marten and the reformist cause, 1640-1

The protection that parliamentary privilege afforded Commons-men against their creditors was possibly among the considerations that moved Marten to stand for Berkshire in the elections to the Short Parliament. For one who would emerge at the forefront of opposition to personal monarchy during the 1640s, it is curious that he had raised no notable objection to the Forced Loan of 1626-7, distraint of knighthood, or Ship Money. Moreover, during the 1630s, he had been among the more diligent of Berkshire’s commissioners for collecting contributions towards the re-edification of St Paul’s Cathedral – a project cherished by the king and Archbishop Laud but denounced by the puritan physician John Bastwick as ‘making a seat for a priest’s arse’.99LMA, CLC/313/I/B/004/MS25474/001, p. 22; K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, CT, 1992), 322-6.

Marten’s removal from the Berkshire bench in 1638 and his refusal to contribute money to the king’s war chest during the first bishops’ war in 1639 suggest that he was taking a bolder stand against the personal rule of Charles I by the late 1630s.100Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 912; Durston, ‘Berks. and its County Gentry’, i. 120. But perhaps more important electoral assets than any reputation he may have enjoyed as a court opponent were his family’s many connections among the Berkshire gentry and its sizeable estates close to Abingdon, the customary venue for county elections.101CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 162; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 13, 15. That said, the fact that Marten and John Fettiplace* – who may have been electoral partners – were associated with opposition to the king’s Scottish war probably stood them in good stead on election day, when they were returned apparently without opposition.102Supra, ‘Berkshire’; CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 161-2. A story related by John Aubrey, that the king had publicly denounced Marten as an ‘ugly rascal’ and ‘whore-master’, and that it was this ‘sarcasm’ directed against a prominent resident of the county that had turned Berkshire’s voters against the crown interest, cannot be substantiated.103Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 44. Unlike his father, who was returned for the Cornish borough of St Ives, Marten made no recorded impact upon the proceedings of the Short Parliament.

Fettiplace and Marten were re-elected for Berkshire in the autumn of 1640 – again, apparently without a contest.104Supra, ‘Berkshire’. After a slow beginning at Westminster, which saw him named to only six committees in the opening three months of the Long Parliament, he emerged during the first half of 1641 as one of the most vocal and combative Members of the House.105CJ ii. 51b, 58a, 59b, 64a, 73b. Between November 1640 and the September 1641 recess, he was appointed to 54 committees, helped to manage or report 14 conferences and served as messenger to the Lords twice.106CJ ii. 109a, 111b, 123b, 125b, 139a, 153a, 192a, 232b, 240b, 243b, 257a, 261a, 267b, 269b, 281a, 285b; LJ iv. 192a, 363b. His first significant contribution on the floor of the House appears to have occurred on 1 February 1641, when the Commons was preparing to debate the particulars of the ministers’ remonstrance – a petition from a large group of parochial clergy, calling for the reform of the episcopate. Marten moved that those MPs who had subscribed the new Laudian church Canons, which included an oath not to alter the established church government, should withdraw from the House. This provoked what the godly MP Sir Simonds D’Ewes described as an ‘unseasonable dispute’ in which John Pym seconded Marten’s motion.107Procs. LP ii. 332-3, 333, 334, 336.

Marten was more circumspect in the debate on the root and branch petition on 8 February 1641, merely declaring that the question of whether to refer it to a committee be deferred until the next day.108Procs. LP ii. 391. The debate concluded on 9 February with the referral of the ministers’ remonstrance and the root and branch petition to the committee for the state of the kingdom (known as the ‘committee of twenty-four’), but not before the House had divided on whether to add six additional members to the committee, including the three godly Commons-men Nathaniel Fiennes I, Denzil Holles and Sir Henry Vane II. It was at this point that Marten’s taste for political dispute first became apparent, for he was recorded in the Journal as a majority teller with Sir William Carnabye in support of adding the six new members; although D’Ewes’s account of this division raises the possibility that the clerk of the House muddled the tellers and that Marten and Carnabye were in fact minority tellers against the addition of new members.109CJ ii. 81b; Procs. LP ii. 401; Gardiner, Hist. of England 1603-42, ix. 287. Certainly the Scottish Presbyterian minister Robert Baillie saw this vote as a victory for the root and branch interest at Westminster, and the opposing tellers, Sir Edward Dering and Sir John Clotworthy, were far more godly-minded than were Marten and Carnabye.110Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. i. 302. Indeed, Carnabye would soon emerge as a supporter of the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) and was to become a royalist.111Supra, ‘William Carnabye’.

Marten was at the centre of political contention again early in March 1641 in the debates over how best to pay off the Scottish forces occupying Northumberland and county Durham. When the comptroller of the king’s household, Sir Thomas Jermyn, criticised the London MP and alderman Isaac Penington for failing in his assurances to secure a substantial loan from the City, Marten, in turn, attacked Jermyn, ‘and so much heat followed upon it as had scarce happened before in the House’, with the two men assailing each other with ‘foul language’.112Procs. LP ii. 614, 619; D’Ewes (N), 433; R. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), 335-6. Marten and his father pledged £1,000 apiece on 3 and 4 March towards securing a City loan, and they also joined a group of Berkshire Commons-men (Fettiplace, Sir Francis Knollys I, Francis Knollys II, Edmund Dunch and Cornelius Holland) to advance money ‘for the service of the commonwealth’.113CJ ii. 273a; Procs. LP ii. 620, 628; vi. 569-70; SP28/1C, ff. 64v, 65; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 40, item 81.

A number of Marten’s committee appointments and speeches in 1640-1 indicate his support for reforming the perceived abuses of the personal rule and punishing their authors.114CJ ii. 91a, 92a, 99a, 105b, 128b, 129a, 134a, 157a, 157b, 197b, 205b, 230b; Procs. LP iv. 581, 590, 594, 630; v. 436 He was among the pack of MPs eager to bring down the earl of Strafford, receiving several appointments for investigating the earl’s alleged misdemeanours and for expediting his trial.115CJ ii. 58a, 98a, 103a, 109a, 112b; LJ iv. 192a. His first notable contribution to the numerous debates on how to proceed against Strafford was his proposal with Arthur Goodwin on 18 February 1641 that the Commons should adjourn in protest at the Lords’ decision to grant the earl extra time to prepare his defence.116Procs. LP ii. 479, 483. Marten may have been working in concert here with the parliamentary leadership – or ‘junto’ as it was known – for Goodwin was closely allied to Pym’s friend and collaborator John Hampden.117Infra, ‘Arthur Goodwin’; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 264; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 196-7. Similarly, on 20 March, Marten backed the attempts of the junto’s reformist allies in the City, led by Penington, to withhold a loan from the City ‘until justice were done upon the earl of Strafford’.118Procs. LP ii. 828. In pushing so determinedly for Strafford’s prosecution, Marten seems to have shared the junto-men’s acute concern at the threat posed by the Catholic-dominated army that the earl had raised in Ireland to fight the bishops’ wars.119Adamson, Noble Revolt, 190, 197. On 23 March, he proposed, with typical disregard for constitutional niceties, that if the Lords refused to act speedily in pressuring the king to disband the Irish army and remove Catholics from court then the Commons should proceed without them.120Procs. LP iii. 85. Such outbursts did not prevent his appointment that spring to several conference-management and reporting teams to discuss these and related issues with the Lords.121CJ ii. 111b, 139a.

Marten briefly headed the pack pursuing Strafford when, on 12 April 1641, he urged that a bill for the earl’s attainder – introduced two days earlier by another of the junto’s collaborators, Hesilrige – be given its second reading.122Procs. LP iii. 511, 513. In repeatedly advising the House ‘to go on with the agitation of the bill of the attainder’, Marten was at one with those junto-men determined to bring Strafford to the block, even at the risk of a complete breakdown in relations with the king.123Procs. LP iii. 479, 566, 584; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 244. On 23 April, he cooperated with the junto again, securing the introduction of a ‘protestation’ intended to clear Pym of culpability in losing an important piece of trial evidence against Strafford.124CJ ii. 127a; Procs. LP iv. 75-6. After the earl’s execution in May, Marten would join Nathaniel Fiennes I and other Commons-men in agitating for the punishment of George Lord Digby* for his published condemnation of the act of attainder.125Supra, ‘Nathaniel Fiennes I’; CJ ii. 209b; Procs. LP v. 79, 80, 617.

Marten also worked with the ‘men who governed the House’ in 1640-1 in supporting policies calculated to appeal to their Scottish allies. It was Marten who, on 3 February, proposed the huge figure of £300,000 for the ‘brotherly assistance’ – the payment that Parliament made to the Scots by way of recompense for their role in toppling the personal rule.126Procs. LP ii. 352, 353. His claim on this occasion that the Scots’ invasion of northern England had been ‘necessary’ as well as ‘just’ was too much for Digby, who moved (without success) that Marten be called to the bar [of the House] for that expression’.127Add. 31954, f. 183. In mid-May, Marten urged legislation to enact a Scottish proposal for prohibiting future conflict between England and Scotland unless it was sanctioned by the Westminster or Edinburgh Parliaments, although ‘divers spoke against this proposition as very dangerous and as trenching upon the king’s prerogative’.128Procs. LP iv. 461, 463. His tellership with Holles on 19 June against making Parliament the judge of whether to send Scottish ‘incendiaries’ home for trial is further evidence of his willingness to forward Scottish interests at Westminster. Three days later, on 22 June, he was included on a bicameral committee, headed by some of the junto peers, to liaise with the Scots for payment of the brotherly assistance.129CJ ii. 155a, 181a, 182b; Procs. LP v. 238-41; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 335 and fn. 16.

There is nothing in Marten’s private papers to indicate that he was on close terms with any of the leading junto-men in 1640-1, and it seems unlikely that he was party to their private counsels.130Dudley, Lord North, A Narrative of Some Passages in or Relating to the Long Parliament (1670), 96. After the Restoration, the earl of Clarendon (Edward Hyde*) remembered confiding to Marten that ‘he [Hyde] did not think him to be of the opinion or nature with those men who governed the House’. To which Marten had responded that he thought them ‘knaves’ – which was probably his label for any politician whom he believed willing to sacrifice the people’s liberties in their quest for power. However, he had then shocked Hyde by declaring that ‘I do not think one man wise enough to govern us all’.131Clarendon, Life, i. 75-6. In other words, Marten wanted an end to personal monarchy, just as the junto did. The monarchy was, as he put it, ‘an artificial thing’: an office constructed by the community to serve the common good.132PJ iii. 217. What was radical about his thinking in 1641 and set him apart from most of the junto-men was his apparent desire to vest the monarchy’s prerogative powers not in a reconstituted court or privy council – as the junto would have preferred – but wholly in Parliament.

Assailing monarchy, 1641

The king’s attempted seizure of the Tower of London (and release of Strafford) early in May 1641, and revelations shortly afterwards about a plot to bring the royal army southwards, afforded Marten an opportunity to move closer to the centre of events – and and policy-making – at Westminster. With Parliament seemingly facing imminent dissolution on 3 May, he called for ‘an association amongst us for the defence of king and church’ – which proposal, it was claimed later, he made in defiance of the private resolutions of the junto grandees.133Procs. LP iv. 180-1; North, Narrative of Some Passages, 96. He referred to his fellow Commons-men as ‘honest [but] disjointed fellows’ and urged them to ‘unite ourselves for the pure worship of God [and] the defence of the king and his subjects in all their legal rights’.134Verney, Notes, 67. Clearly Marten was well versed in the language of the ‘commonwealth’, in which political proposals of a quasi-republican nature were often dressed up as initiatives to defend ‘king and church’. At the conclusion of the debate on 3 May, Marten was named to a 12-man committee that included Pym, Hampden and several other junto-men to prepare ‘a declaration of the unanimous consent and resolution of this House for the defence of the religion established, of the king’s person and the liberty of the subject’. This committee’s response to the threat of dissolution and the army plot was the Protestation – effectively ‘an oath of association to resist a potential coup’.135CJ ii. 132b; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 294.

Marten seems to have chaired a committee established on 11 May 1641 to draw up heads for a conference concerning the tumults in London occasioned by the army plot and for measures to ensure the safety of the visiting queen mother, Marie de Medici.136CJ ii. 143b; Procs. LP iv. 316-17, 320-1, 394. Reporting from this committee on 18 May, he confirmed the House’s readiness to protect the queen mother, ‘holding themselves obliged thereunto as well by the rules of public faith and honour, as for that special interest this kingdom has in the queen her daughter and the royal issue’. But he and the committee thought it advisable that she

may be moved to depart this kingdom. The rather for the quieting of those jealousies in the hearts of his Majesty’s well-affected subjects occasioned by some ill instruments about the queen’s person, by the flowing of priests and papists to her house and by the use and practice of the idolatry of the Mass and exercise of other superstitious services of the Romish church, to the great scandal of true religion.137CJ ii. 149b.

According to D’Ewes, Marten was appointed to manage the anticipated conference with the Lords. But given that most of the peers apparently regarded the queen mother rather more charitably than did than Marten and his committee, it is perhaps not surprising that the Commons decided to let the matter drop. There is certainly no record that this conference took place.138Procs. LP iv. 440.

Like the junto, Marten appreciated the inter-connectedness and necessity of advancing ‘the great business of the treaty [with the Scots]... of disbanding the armies [the king’s and Scots’ armies in northern England] and providing money’.139Procs. LP iv. 95. During the spring and summer of 1641, he was recruited to numerous committees and conference management teams on matters relating to the disbandment of the English army, the withdrawal of the Scottish army and finding the necessary funds to pay for both.140CJ ii. 107a, 111b, 123b, 125b, 143a, 152a, 153a, 172b, 178b, 180a, 188b, 197b, 240b, 269b. He was named to, and active on, the bicameral committees established under the subsidy, further subsidy and assessment acts of 1641-2 for paying the king’s army in the north and reimbursing those, like himself, who had lent money for its supply.141SP28/1C, ff. 1v-2, 3v-4, 5v-6, 7, 23v-24; SP28/237, unfol. (order 15 July 1642). At the same time, he was happy to support measures that divested the king of his prerogative revenues and to punish those – such as the customs farmers – who had been complicit in collecting these ‘unparliamentary’ levies.142CJ ii. 155b; Procs. LP iv. 549, 553, 630. On 29 June, in another calculated swipe at personal monarchy – but also, it seems, at the exercise of executive authority more generally – he offended ‘divers’ in the Commons by wittily observing ‘that seeing the [privy] council table had been turned altarwise, it might be abolished’.143Procs. LP v. 402; Williams, ‘Extremist tactics’, 143.

Marten was part of that group of leading Commons-men that liaised with the Lords during July and August 1641 concerning the junto’s proposal for the appointment of a custos regni and other measures deemed necessary for the kingdom’s governance during the king’s impending visit to Scotland.144CJ ii. 192a, 227a, 243b, 249a, 261a, 264b, 281a; Procs. LP v. 387; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 339-40. In debate on 6 August on whether to appoint a parliamentary commission to pass bills in Charles’s absence, Marten again sought to make further inroads upon the royal prerogative by suggesting that ‘a commissioner may have power to pass any act agreed on by both Houses’ and not merely – as the Lords were proposing – a limited list of bills to be agreed on in advance.145Procs. LP vi. 250. The establishment of a commission upon this narrow basis, he argued, would be to ‘cast shackles upon the Parliament’.146Procs. LP vi. 317, 323. His involvement later that month in Parliament’s introduction of an ordinance for disarming recusants was motivated partly, it seems, by his desire to cut the king out of the legislative trinity.147CJ ii. 267b, 268a. Indeed, ‘he proceeded so far as to say that he wished we might account such an ordinance to be of equal force and power with an act of Parliament’.148Procs. LP vi. 582. Given his readiness to extend parliamentary authority at the expense of the prerogative, Marten was probably an eager participant in Parliament’s efforts in August and September to countermand the king’s licence to the French and Spanish to recruit troops from the recently disbanded British and Irish armies.149CJ ii. 257a, 282a, 284a, 285b; LJ iv. 363b; Procs. LP vi. 420.

On most of main policy initiatives during the summer of 1641, Marten seems to have remained in step with the junto, and this is particularly evident in his appointment to committees set up in July and August with at least one eye on assuring the Scots of Parliament’s continuing commitment to the cause of godly reform. With the recess looming and still no substantive legislation for the reform of church worship, a high-powered Commons committees was established on 31 August – to which Marten was named, along with Pym and other junto-men – to frame an order against innovations in religion.150CJ ii. 230b, 278b. When the two Houses went into recess on 9 September, Marten was also among those named to the Commons’ Recess Committee*, chaired by Pym.151CJ ii. 288b.

Marten was included on a royalist list of the king’s leading opponents at Westminster by the autumn of 1641, along with Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, Pym, Hampden, Vane I and II, Holles, Penington, Oliver St John and other members or allies of the junto.152HMC Salisbury, xxiv. 277. Yet the signs of his future disagreements with the parliamentary leadership are detectable in his acute distrust of executive power not exercised under the authority and close supervision of Parliament and in the distaste he had shown on several occasions that summer for the privileges and authority claimed by the Lords and peerage.153Procs. LP vi. 386, 570. He diverged from the junto, too, in his willingness to act upon the distinction that many Commons-men were probably prepared to make in private between popery (i.e. Catholicism as a political threat) and the peaceable exercise of the Catholic religion. After succeeding on 4 August in the remarkable feat of having a bill for mulcting recusants laid aside, he took the bold, if quixotic, step on 8 August of presenting a petition to the Commons from a group of lay Catholics, pleading their readiness to defend the liberties of Parliament and the subject and requesting mitigation of ‘the rigour of those penal laws that either ruin us and our posterity or cast a thralldom on our consciences’.154CJ ii. 236a; Procs. LP vi. 200, 296, 299; To the…Commons… The Humble Petition of the Lay-Catholiques Recusants of England (1641, 669 f.4.23). Predictably, Sir John Clotworthy, Alexander Rigby I and other godly Members responded by condemning ‘this petition presented at this time with a high hand’ and moving that an act be prepared for prohibiting recusants having any say in the education of their children aged seven or more.155CJ ii. 245a; Procs. LP vi. 299. Marten would show a similar lack of tact the following November, when he presented the Commons with a request for bail from the royal chaplain-in-ordinary and alleged ‘popish innovator’ William Fuller, who had been taken into parliamentary custody on charges of using ‘superstitious cringing and bowing to the communion table and the name of Jesus’. Once again the godly – this time in the person of Sir Thomas Barrington – raised objections to showing clemency to their religious opponents.156D’Ewes (C), 111-12; ‘William Fuller’, Oxford DNB. In contrast to the puritanical Barrington and his like, Marten beat the drum for godly reform and the suppression of popery entirely for political – indeed, politique – reasons. He was, as Aubrey put it, ‘as far from a puritan as light from darkness’ – or as Aubrey described Marten’s friend Thomas Chaloner*, ‘as far from a puritan as the east from the west ... and one who loved to enjoy the pleasures of this life’.157Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 159; ii. 44.

Wresting power from the king, 1641-2

Marten was at his busiest and most politically effective at Westminster in the months between his first committee nomination after the recess, on 25 October 1641, and his leave of absence, granted exactly a year later, in order to muster forces for the defence of Reading.158CJ ii. 294b, 823a. During this most hectic and – from Marten’s perspective – exciting and hopeful period in the kingdom’s affairs, he was named to 120 or so committees and to 26 conference-management or reporting teams.159CJ ii. 325a, 335a, 388a, 419a, 432a, 468b, 495b, 501a, 510a, 510b, 522a, 525b, 553a, 575a, 587b, 591a, 615a, 620b, 731a, 733b, 740a, 753a, 754a, 789a, 817a, 822a. He was sent as a messenger to the Lords on 19 occasions.160CJ ii. 319a, 338a, 431b, 464b, 468a, 477a, 498a, 564b, 579a, 655a, 656a, 657b, 663b, 665b, 705a, 719a, 754a, 767a, 817b; LJ iv. 445b, 469b, 584a, 622a, 628b, 643a, 672a; v. 55b, 72b, 186b, 187a, 189b, 195b, 200b, 263a, 294a, 340b, 354b, 413a And he served as a teller in 13 divisions.161CJ ii. 311b, 314a, 469b, 477b, 507b, 508b, 539a, 687b, 694a, 721a, 724b, 739b, 750a. The controversial proceedings of the Recess Committee had in no way shaken his conviction as to the fitness of Parliament to assume the reins of government, and when, on 21 October, Sir Edward Dering criticised the parliamentary order of 8 September – concerning the removal of communion tables, rails, crucifixes and scandalous pictures – on the grounds that the voters had not elected Commons-men ‘to rule and govern them by arbitrary, revocable and disputable orders, especially in religion’, Marten moved that Dering should withdraw from the Commons while it ‘considered of his offence for presuming to arraign and question the order of the House’.162Supra, ‘Sir Edward Dering’; D’Ewes (C), 19-20.

A number of Marten’s appointments during the autumn and winter of 1641 indicate his continuing support for the junto’s programme of wresting control of the levers of power from the king. Late in October, he was named to committees concerning ‘the sequestering the bishops from their votes in Parliament’ and for deterring Charles from appointing five new bishops and thereby bolstering the fledgling king’s party in the Lords.163CJ ii. 295b, 298b. More revealing still is his appointment to the junto-dominated committee of 3 December that threatened the royalist majority in the Lords with a de facto parliamentary coup unless it agreed to pass the bills sent up to them ‘for the preservation of the kingdom’ – a euphemism for control of the kingdom’s armed forces.164CJ ii. 330b; D’Ewes (C), 228; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 438; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 459; cf. Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 3-4. Later that same month, he was involved in Parliament’s attempts to counter the king’s appointment of Colonel Thomas Lunsford as constable of the Tower of London.165CJ ii. 354a, 356b, 357a; D’Ewes (C), 336. He cooperated with the junto, too, in his willingness to exploit revelations of supposed papist or court plotting to good political effect. He certainly seems to have appreciated the advantages of playing up the popish threat – as he showed on 16 November, when he and John Venn* (responding to information submitted to the House by Pym) agreed to search the house of a Catholic peer on Aldersgate Street for priests and Jesuits.166CJ ii. 317a; D’Ewes (C), 149, 152. A week later (23 Nov.), Marten succeeded in securing the Speaker’s warrant for the employment by the House of Robert de Luke – who would later serve as Marten’s regimental quartermaster – ‘for the searching, apprehending and seizing of priests and Jesuits etc’.167CJ ii. 323a; D’Ewes (C), 187-8.

The most significant of the perceived popish plots on which the junto sought to capitalise after the 1641 recess was the Irish rebellion. After news of the rebellion reached London late in October, Marten was prominent in parliamentary initiatives to put the junto and its Scottish allies at the forefront of the British military response.168CJ ii. 319a; LJ iv. 445b. On 12 November, he was a teller with Sir Walter Erle against those who preferred to limit Scottish involvement in Ireland to a mere 1,000 troops (rather than the 10,000 the Scots were now offering), and on 17 November he carried up to the Lords legislation for securing Catholics and placing the kingdom’s trained bands under the command of the junto grandees the earl of Essex and Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland.169CJ ii. 314a, 319a; LJ iv. 445b; D’Ewes (C), 130, 162. He was also named to Parliament’s first executive standing committee for prosecuting the war effort in Ireland – set up early in November – and to a four-man Commons’ committee in mid-December for collecting MPs’ contributions for the relief of Irish Protestant refugees.170CJ ii. 302a, 344b; SP28/2A, f. 683. The godly Cheshire knight Sir William Brereton* evidently regarded Marten as a figure of influence in the Commons’ counsels on Ireland, addressing at least two open letters to him that December reporting the spread of the rebellion and advising how best to succour the Irish Protestants.171CJ ii. 340b; D’Ewes (C), 276, 328. Eager, like Brereton, to strengthen the Anglo-Scottish military axis, Marten offered to lease his house on Aldersgate Street for the use of commissioners sent from Scotland to negotiate terms for Scottish help in Ireland – only for Venn to inform the Commons that the Scots required more spacious accommodation.172CJ ii. 352a; D’Ewes (C), 331, 337; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 417-18.

But although Marten was generally willing to advance the junto’s and reformist party’s political agenda, he could still not resist giving rein, once in a while, to his libertarian instincts and sympathy for those whom he thought had been unjustly treated. He argued that the bills for impressing soldiers and mariners (legislative precedents that anticipated the Militia Ordinance) that were presented to the House in November 1641 and February 1642 respectively were ‘against the liberty of the subject’, and he urged that they be rejected – although with Ireland in the grip of Catholic rebellion even the fastidiously legal-minded D’Ewes conceded the necessity of passing these laws, ‘though we shall for the present waive a part of our liberties’.173D’Ewes (C), 83; PJ i. 239. Indeed, Marten, too, would play a part in the Commons’ efforts to have these bills passed by the Lords.174CJ ii. 335a, 338a, 419a; LJ iv. 469b. But his libertarian convictions re-surfaced late in December 1641, when he brought in a bill for ‘the confirmation of the subjects’ liberties in their persons’.175CJ ii. 356b; D’Ewes (C), 346. The drafting of this legislation had been entrusted, it seems, to Bulstrode Whitelocke and John Wylde back in July.176CJ ii. 195b. How Marten had become associated with it is a mystery. His timing, again, was not the best in view of the parliamentary leadership’s growing determination to override the subjects’ liberties if they presented an obstacle to military mobilisation. Marten’s bill was given its first reading on the day he presented it (24 Dec.) but had to wait until 7 January 1643 to receive a second reading – and thereafter it disappeared without trace.177CJ ii. 918b.

In the aftermath of the attempted arrest of the Five Members early in January 1642, Marten was named to committees, conference teams and as a messenger to the Lords in furtherance of Parliament’s endeavours to vindicate its privileges and to carry the fight to the king’s more belligerent supporters – notably George Lord Digby*.178CJ ii. 376b, 383b, 384a, 388a, 396a, 431b, 432a, 436a, 436b, 464b; iv. 458b. In the debates early in 1642 over how Parliament should respond to the deepening divide between king and Parliament, the junto could generally rely on Marten to take a tough line against Charles and any who were thought to adhere to him or, in the case of Dering, to criticise the Commons.179CJ ii. 507b; PJ i. 262, 271, 297; ii. 11, 104, 368; ‘Richard Lloyd’, Oxford DNB. Petitions to the House in support of godly reform and the authority of Parliament he welcomed and, indeed, sponsored. On 4 February, he called for the reading of a petition from London’s gentlewomen and tradesmen’s wives in support of abolishing of the bishops’ votes in the Lords and the practice of holding mass in the queen’s court, and in March he arranged for the presentation to the Commons of a petition from Berkshire, declaring support for Parliament’s progress towards ‘a full and perfect reformation in the government of this church and commonwealth’.180LJ iv. 627b; PJ i. 273-4, 277, 499.

If Marten occasionally let his distrust of the Lords and impatience with their political conservatism get the better of him, the Commons was inclined to overlook the fact.181PJ i. 273-4, 379. He was treated leniently even following an outburst on 8 February 1642 in which he argued that the king’s negative voice (legislative veto) was included in the Lords’ votes ‘as the whole commons of England was included in ours, because he elected peers as the commons did us’. Although D’Ewes ‘was very much moved with this dangerous and ignorant speech … yet because I took him to be an honest man, I did avoid all bitter expressions in the refutation of him’.182PJ i. 313. D’Ewes would react more indignantly a few months later when Nathaniel Fiennes also insisted that the king had no negative voice.183PJ ii. 119, 120.

For a man suspicious of the peers’ political authority and privileges, Marten showed unwonted restraint in the Commons’ debates in February 1642 concerning the nomination of lords lieutenants in the Militia Ordinance. Instead of decrying the system of lordly preferment or arguing for the appointment of commoners, he successfully recommended John Manners*, 8th earl of Rutland, as lord lieutenant of Derbyshire and put in a good word for David Cecil*, 3rd earl of Exeter, who was nominated as lord lieutenant of Rutland.184PJ i. 342, 350. It seems that Marten appreciated the importance of noble patronage in the effective execution of the Ordinance.185CJ ii. 687b, 700a, 705a; PJ iii. 11, 255. The lord lieutenant of Berkshire, the earl of Holland, thought well enough of Marten to grant him a commission as a captain of foot in the county’s trained bands in May 1642.186Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 35, item 1110.

Marten played little part in drafting and steering the Ordinance through Parliament – his support for this controversial legislation being largely confined to his work on declarations defending this initiative and in urging, on 28 February 1642, that the Ordinance be published (even though it had yet to pass the Lords).187CJ ii. 461a, 485a; PJ i. 487. Arguments advanced by ‘Honest Hall’ in a committee set up on 14 March – to which Marten was named – for preparing heads for a declaration justifying Parliament’s proceedings concerning the Ordinance, have plausibly been attributed to Marten. ‘Where the king is in nonage [i.e a minor], prison, or absent’, he argued, ‘the Parliament hath a legislative power’, and likewise when ‘the king is drawn away by ill counsel. In cases of impossibility to have the royal assent, when we acknowledge it and desire it, we may supply it by authority of Parliament’. Anyone who had advised the king to withdraw from Parliament or who raised forces against the Ordinance should be declared traitors, insisted Marten, and proceeded against accordingly.188Verney, Notes, 162; ‘Henry Marten’, Oxford DNB. He vehemently opposed an attempt by king in April and backed by the Lords and the more irenic Commons-men, to have the two Houses pass a royally-approved militia bill that would supersede the Militia Ordinance. By accepting this bill, insisted Marten, ‘we should condemn our own act and vilify the ordinance we had made … we should seem to give way to the king’s evil counsellors who had now advised the way of [a] bill’.189PJ ii. 191; iii. 194. In July, he would be named to a committee for preparing a declaration to prevent the reading of this bill obstructing the execution of the Ordinance.190CJ ii. 663b.

Marten featured regularly on committees, conference teams and as a messenger to the Lords in Parliament’s propaganda war against the king during 1642, although the extent of his involvement in penning the Houses’ contributions to these ‘paper skirmishes’ is impossible to determine.191CJ ii. 384a, 394a, 400a, 419b, 439b, 446b, 463a, 464b, 467a, 468a, 468b, 478b, 484a, 495b, 498a, 504b, 512a, 522a, 525b, 531a, 549a, 550b, 562a, 594a, 643a, 722a, 725b, 744a, 764a, 771a, 789a; PJ i. 297, 515; ii. 120; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 501. On 2 April, he was a minority teller with John Glynne in favour of retaining the word ‘scandal’, rather than using the more neutral ‘causeless imputation’, in a rejoinder that Pym had drafted to one of Charles’s declarations.192CJ ii. 508b. Evidently Marten believed that Parliament should present as bold a front in its communications with the king as he did in his own speeches, in which he reportedly declared (according to royalist sources) that ‘the happiness of the kingdom did not depend on his Majesty or upon any of the royal branches of that root’.193Clarendon, Hist. ii. 149. It was for pronouncements such as this, rather than for anything he actually did, that he would earn a place by August on the king’s list of the ‘particular men’ in Parliament who were guilty of high treason.194Clarendon, Hist. ii. 281.

Marten’s appointments and speeches during 1642 also highlight his continuing commitment to sustaining the war effort in Ireland – which was recognised by the Commons with his nomination in February for membership of the bicameral commission for Irish affairs established in April. Marten was an active member of this commission, which functioned as a prototype ‘war cabinet’ during the spring and early summer of 1642.195CJ ii. 391a, 400a, 453b, 468b, 477a, 486a, 493b, 536b, 564b, 582a, 588a, 591a, 700a, 703a, 750b; LJ iv. 643a; v. 15b, 55b; PJ i. 266-7, 272-3; ii. 295, 362; CSP Ire. 1633-47, pp. 375, 380; PJ iii. pp. xxiii, 363, 438. As well as extending his own and his late father’s several loans to Parliament, Marten was willing to advance another £600 of his own money for the service of Ireland.196CJ ii. 408b, 465a, 670b. He also invested £300 - £1,200, according to John Rushworth* – that spring as an Irish Adventurer.197Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 564; Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 186.

The prospect of financial reward to help cover such expenditure may well have spurred Marten’s efforts early in 1642 to have The Marten taken into the state’s service as part of the navy’s summer fleet. The Commons acceded to this request, as did the lord admiral (Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland), although not without observing that he could see no ‘occasion of further strength at sea’. Marten was apparently guilty of trying to secure a higher leasing fee by claiming that the vessel was rated at 800 tons. The navy commissioners reckoned its displacement was 600 tons, and the shipwrights company put the figure at 532 tons.198Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 67, item 22; CJ ii. 456b, 458a, 460b; PJ i. 372; CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 555, 560; Civil War Docs. 1642-1648, 70. His ownership of The Marten may help to explain his connections among London’s mercantile community (Penington, Rowland Wilson*, Maurice Gethin, Tempest Milner, among others) and the regularity with which he was named to committees during the early 1640s on maritime affairs and overseas trade.199Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 23, item 1048; box 40, item 50; box 67, items 15-16, 82; CJ ii. 64a, 141b, 152b, 251a, 319b, 422b, 491b, 666a, 808a; D’Ewes (C), 165.

Marten’s involvement in Parliament’s naval affairs does not seem to have begun in earnest until his tellership on 7 March 1642 with Hampden against giving consideration to the king’s request for the inclusion of the three-decker the Prince Royal in the summer fleet.200CJ ii. 469b; PJ ii. 4. That same day (7 Mar.), the Commons tasked Marten and Alexander Carew with pressing Northumberland to have the squadron that had carried the queen to the Low Countries returned speedily to the English Channel.201CJ ii. 470a. Marten chaired a committee set up on 24 March for drafting a petition to the king from both Houses, requesting that Charles appoint the earl of Warwick to command the fleet in place of the incapacitated Northumberland. As reported by Marten on 26 March, the petition referred to Warwick as ‘a person of such quality and ability as in whom they [the two Houses] might best confide’, and it requested the king to put the safety of the commonwealth before ‘any particular respect to any other persons whatsoever [Charles had appointed the future royalist Sir John Penington to stand in for Northumberland]’.202CJ ii. 495b, 499b; PJ ii. 92. Marten’s enduring interest in preserving the Forest of Dean and other woodlands for the state’s use probably derived in large part from a concern to maintain a healthy supply of timber for naval-shipbuilding.203CJ ii. 403b, 439b; vi. 342a; vii. 231b, 648b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 52, 346, 447, 466, 467, 471; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 16, item 167; vol. 92, f. 49; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 31.

Preparing for war, 1642

Marten’s maritime interests and belligerence towards the king found a common focus that spring in the political and military struggles over Hull. His considerable contribution to parliamentary measures for securing and supplying Hull under Sir John Hotham* had commenced in mid-January 1642, when he was a manager of a conference concerning the king’s own attempts to seize the town and its magazine.204CJ ii. 388a. In April, May and well into the summer, he was named to committees and conference teams – usually with Pym, Holles, Hampden and other leading junto-men – and as a messenger to the Lords concerning the defence of Hull.205CJ ii. 510a, 531a, 542b, 549a, 553a, 560b, 577a, 655a, 656a; LJ v. 186b, 187a. It was Marten who pushed hardest on 16 April for a Commons’ vote that Hull’s magazine be removed to London, and thereby beyond the king’s clutches, and that the Lords be pressed to support this resolution and to require Northumberland to provide the necessary shipping.206CJ ii. 531a; PJ ii. 181. Since February 1642, at the latest, Marten had been involved, in a private capacity, in recruiting and shipping men to France for military service – possibly as a business partner of the freelance recruiting officer, Colonel Philip Hill.207PJ i. 83, 143, 150, 331; PA, Main Pprs. 8 Apr. 1642; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 67, item 19. In the spring and summer of 1642, he transferred these skills to the very public business of providing troops and supplies to maintain Hotham’s garrison at Hull – a task that brought him into close, or closer, contact with some of London’s leading merchants and financiers.208Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 40, items 49, 50; box 44 (petition of Col. Walter Owen); box 67, item 82. Again with Pym, Hampden and other junto-men, he was among the relatively select group of Commons-men who liaised with the commissioners that Parliament sent to York in May to monitor the king’s activities.209CJ ii. 570b, 583b, 609b.

The military confrontation at Hull seems to have stiffened Marten’s resolve not to flinch in the face of royal aggression. On 4 May 1642, he took exception to Pym’s admission, while reporting the instructions for the commissioners to be sent to York, that some members of the drafting committee had objected to a clause authorising the sheriff of Yorkshire to proclaim anyone, including Parliament-men, who had assembled to attack Hull as traitors.210PJ ii. 274. Two days later (6 May), he reckoned it a breach of parliamentary privileges for the king to detain the Commons-men Endymion Porter and John Ashburnham at York in defiance of the House’s summoning them to Westminster. Anticipating the recruiter election scheme by several years, he moved that the House ‘might ease them of further attendance here, and that a warrant might be issued forth for new writs to be sent out for two new Members to be chosen in their places’.211PJ ii. 282.

From the end of May 1642, Marten was regularly named to committees and conference teams for overseeing Parliament’s military preparations or frustrating the king’s own assembling of forces in Yorkshire. These appointments included nomination to important bicameral committees set up on 27 May and 10 June charged with raising an army for Parliament and securing a City loan for that purpose.212CJ ii. 586a, 588b, 589a, 594a, 608b, 615a, 617b, 620a. Granted leave on 30 May, he had returned to Berkshire by 22 June, when he mustered his militia troop at Abingdon as part of a county-wide effort by him and some of his fellow Berkshire Commons-men to implement the Militia Ordinance (this was probably the occasion on which he publicly tore up a copy of the commission of array).213CJ ii. 595a; Harl. 164, f. 401; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 40, item 24; Gayton, Marten’s Familiar Letters, sig. A3; Durston, ‘Berks. and its County Gentry’, i. 136. Having returned to the Commons by 30 June, he tried to interest the House in dispatching Parliament’s newly-raised cavalry northwards to prevent the king’s party seizing Newcastle – but without success.214PJ iii. 155.

Marten’s collaboration with the junto and his work on military supply for Ireland and Hull were recognised by his appointment to the Committee of Safety* (CS) on 4 July 1642.215CJ ii. 651b. The Commons’ contingent on this new bicameral executive was made up almost exclusively of leading junto-men – Pym, Fiennes, Hampden, Holles – hardliners such as Marten, and MPs (Sir John Meyrick, Sir Philip Stapilton) with close connections to the peer who would shortly be appointed, at the committee’s instigation, commander-in-chief of Parliament’s field army: the earl of Essex. Much of the committee’s work would relate to the pay and recruitment of Essex’s army (to which Marten contributed three horses and equipment, valued at £24), and it thus began life as a vehicle for those at Westminster determined to confront the king from a position of maximum military strength.216Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’; SP28/131, pt. 3, f. 120v. Marten made at least six reports from the committee in the six weeks following its establishment in which he relayed the latest military news from Hull, delivered a draft ordinance for raising 2,000 men for the town’s defence and presented resolutions for raising and paying 10,000 volunteers in the City (in effect, Essex’s infantry) and an order for issuing £10,000 upon the proposition money to such persons and uses as the committee should direct.217CJ ii. 655a, 656a, 657b, 663a, 665b, 685a; LJ v. 196b-197a; PJ iii. 175, 178-9, 185, 191, 192, 193, 197-8, 241, 249. It was Marten, as a messenger from the Commons, who carried the Hull ordinance and the resolutions for raising Essex’s army and providing money for the CS up to the Lords for their concurrence.218CJ ii. 656a, 657b, 663b, 665b; LJ v. 187a, 189b, 195b, 200b.

It was in his capacity as a member of the Committee of Safety that Marten was assigned at least £8,000 (mostly, it seems, for the supply of Hull) by the army treasury, the propositions treasury and through the CS during July and August 1642, including a warrant from the committee for £2,000 to raise 2,000 men – 1,000 of whom were to be shipped to Hull.219CJ ii. 704b; SP28/1A, f. 272; SP28/261, f. 22; SP28/170, pt. 3, unfol. His private papers reveal that he was also assigned £500 by the CS in July for intelligence work, and it was from this money that he made numerous disbursements to couriers and other persons in Parliament’s employ that summer (he never acted as the CS’s treasurer, as one authority has stated).220Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 40, items 15, 28, 42, 43, 51, 58; box 44 (petition of Col. Walter Owen); box 78, item 5; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 4. When D’Ewes criticised a declaration drafted by Nathaniel Fiennes in the CS, on 23 July, Marten was among the ‘violent and fiery spirits’ on the committee who called for him to withdraw from the House. D’Ewes had expected more charitable usage from Marten at least, ‘whom I had once or twice brought off in the House [from] being questioned ... for indiscreet words’.221PJ iii. 257-8. Later that same day (23 July), Harbert Morley called upon the CS to ‘take care for our security’, to which Marten responded, confidently, ‘that we have the strength at sea ... we have the City, and we have the hearts of the people, who are ready whensoever we shall hold up our finger’.222PJ iii. 262.

Godly reform was pushed into the background at Westminster amid these warlike preparations. Nevertheless, the junto’s keenness to court the Scots as military allies ensured that there was some progress during 1642 towards bringing the Church of England into closer conformity with the Kirk – notably, with work on establishing an assembly of divines ‘for the settling of the government and liturgy of the church’. Marten served as a teller with Sir Walter Erle on 23 April against nominating the Yorkshire clergyman Matthew Levet – ‘a forward man for the late [Laudian] innovations’ – to the assembly.223CJ ii. 539a; PJ ii. 209. And in May, he carried up to the Lords the bill that would eventually constitute the Westminster Assembly, along with a declaration to the Scottish privy council pledging Parliament’s resolve to preserve the ‘mutual affection betwixt the two kingdoms’.224CJ ii. 579a, 587b; LJ v. 72b, 74b-75a. At some point that summer, he joined the earl of Warwick, Viscount Saye and Sele and 37 other Parliament-men – puritans almost to a man – in a letter to John Cotton and two other godly divines in New England, requesting they return home to attend the projected assembly and assist in the great work of church reform.225J. Winthrop, Hist. of New England ed. J. Savage (Boston, MA, 1853), ii. 91-2; T. Hutchinson, Hist. of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay ed. L.S. Mayo (Cambridge, MA, 1936), i. pp. 100-1. He may also have helped to draft the House’s declaration to the General Assembly of the Kirk in September, relating ‘the mischiefs that have come to this church and state by episcopacy’.226CJ ii. 748a, 751a, 754a; LJ v. 340b.

Marten and the fiery spirits, 1642

It was during the late summer and early autumn of 1642 that Marten established his credentials as the archetypal ‘fiery spirit’. He apparently endorsed the junto’s policy of forging an Anglo-Scottish military alliance, and he worked hard to put Essex’s army in the field and to strengthen Warwick’s command of Parliament’s navy following the defection of most of the king’s warships in July. His involvement in Parliament’s naval affairs could be said to have culminated in his appointment to the first Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports* (CACP) that was set up in October 1642 to manage fleet operations, for there is no evidence that he signed any of its orders or attended its deliberations (The Marten disappears from navy lists after the spring of 1643 and was either removed from service, lost or captured at sea, or sold and renamed. In late 1645, George Marten was described as the captain and owner of a privateer, the Hopewell of London).227Supra, ‘Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports’; CJ ii. 650b, 737a, 767a, 812b, ; LJ v. 354b, 407b; HMC Portland, i. 321.

But what most distinguished Marten as a ‘fiery boutefeu [incendiary]’, to use D’Ewes’s phrase, was not his work in making Essex’s army and Warwick’s fleet battle-ready, but his seemingly reflexive hostility to any moves by either the king’s party or his fellow Parliament-men to seek a negotiated settlement of the kingdom’s troubles.228PJ iii. 330. In response to a call in the Commons on 25 July 1642 for an accommodation, Marten seconded Pym’s insistence that Parliament should continue its military build-up. Moreover, he proposed that ‘there be a declaration made to the people that we have petitioned for peace but ‘tis denied us upon such conditions as is worse than war. That though the king be king of the people of England, yet he is not master of the people of England’.229PJ iii. 265. He figured prominently, as a teller (with William Strode I) and as a member of several conference teams, in the Commons’ rejection of the peace overture that the king sent to Westminster by Sir John Culpeper* late in August.230CJ ii. 739b, 740a, 752a, 753a; PJ iii. 321. As far as Marten was concerned, the time for trying to communicate with the king was past. ‘We say [in Parliament’s declarations] the king is kept from us’, he observed on 20 September, but ‘if so, it will be to no purpose to petition him, but [we] should rather petition the cavaliers to let him go’.231Add. 18777, f. 6v. To concede any ground to the king – such as sending a parliamentary delegation to Charles that did not include men (such as Marten) whom he had declared traitors – was apparently anathema to Marten, Pym and other Commons militants.232CJ ii. 795b; LJ v. 384b-385a, 387a; Add. 18777, f. 18v.

Not content with measures to suppress royalist activists in the provinces, Marten also sought to flush out and remove from office or from the Commons anyone not wholly committed to a military solution.233CJ ii. 719a, 732b, 733b, 743a, 750a, 767a, 785b, 805a; LJ v. 294a; PJ iii. 310, 330. It was Marten and John Gurdon – or ‘Henry Marten’s “aye”’, as D’Ewes called him – who secured the appointment of a Commons committee on 12 September 1642 to discover and report to the House those MPs had not yet contributed to the propositions for maintaining Essex’s army.234CJ ii. 763a; PJ iii. 351. Following revelations on 22 September that D’Ewes’s brother was involving in raising troops for the king, Marten – branded by D’Ewes on this occasion as one ‘who had long affected an infamous fame by making fiery and indiscreet motions’ – initiated another attempt by the more bellicose Members to force D’Ewes into a compromising political position.235Harl. 163, ff. 376, 381v, 382v. Predictably, Marten condemned the Yorkshire neutrality pact that Lord Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*) and his allies negotiated late that September. ‘When the commonwealth is in combustion’, Marten declared, ‘the neuter is the worst’, and he urged the Commons to move Essex to send troops to assist Captain John Hotham* (with whom Marten was corresponding at that time).236CJ ii. 801b; Add. 18777, f. 19v.

Marten’s membership of the war party at Westminster had begun to register beyond the two Houses by early October 1642, when a pamphlet was published that urged the king to put his faith in his ‘best subjects’ – that is, Essex, Warwick, Pym, Marten and other leading Parliament-men – or suffer the fate of ‘former kings of Israel and Judah’ who had defied ‘the truth of God’s word’. Marten defended this publication when it was brought to the House’s attention on 5 October. But there was ‘so general a detestation’ of it among his fellow Commons-men that they voted to have it publicly burnt.237CJ ii. 795a; A Speedy Post from Heaven, to the King of England (1642, E.121.6); Harl. 163, ff. 418v-419. The libertarian concerns he had evinced a year earlier during Parliament’s preparations for war in Ireland had apparently abated in the face of war against the king in England. When a suspected ‘delinquent’ invoked the Petition of Right in his defence on 11 October, Marten retorted that the petition ‘and all the statutes mentioned in it, were at first framed to restrain the oppression of the kings of this realm ... not to suppose any such thing in the Parliament whom they had trusted’.238Harl. 164, f. 14v.

A few days before the battle of Edgehill, on 20 October, the two Houses – ably steered by Marten, Pym and other members of the CS – ‘did conceive ... that there was a necessity that the kingdom should be quickened and throughly [sic] awakened’, and to this end they ordered the committee to prepare a declaration ‘encouraging all well-affected subjects to enter into a strict association of mutual assistance against the common danger’. This proposal for a ‘solemn oath and covenant’ to defend God’s cause ‘with the hazard of our lives, against the king’s army’, was made in deliberate imitation of the Scottish National Covenant.239Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’; CJ ii. 817a, 817b, 819b; LJ v. 413a. Appointed to the committee set up on 22 October to bring in this oath, Marten reported it to the Commons on 24 October – the day after the battle of Edgehill. As recorded by the parliamentary diarist Walter Yonge, Marten’s ‘protestation and covenant’ read as follows

whereas an army under pretence and colour of the king’s authority is now on foot, by which we do justly fear popery and tyranny are intended to be produced [sic] among us; and whereas in public cases and calamities the Lord doth call for repentance and reformation of life as a special means to avert His judgement: I (A B) in humility and reverence of His divine majesty do here declare my hearty sorrow for my own sins and the sins of this nation ... and my true intention, with God’s grace, from henceforth to amend my own ways. And I do further promise that for the preservation of the true reformed religion and just liberties of the people of England, I will assist with my personal estate the Lords and Commons in Parliament and the authority and forces raised and to be raised in defence of the same and will assist everyone that shall join in this promise and association against all opposers whatsoever.240Add. 18777, ff. 41v, 42.

Consideration of this oath of association was deferred by the Commons until the following day (25 Oct. 1642), when Marten brought in a paper to ‘open the eyes of the king that he may perform the duties of his calling’.241CJ ii. 821a; Add. 18777, f. 42v. Referring to a clause for preserving the king’s person in the earl of Warwick’s parliamentary commission as ‘captain general’ of the City and adjoining counties, Marten had declared on 22 October that he himself would ‘expose his wife and all he hath so long as his Majesty shall govern according to law. The king owes [us] protection, which if he withdraw [it], shall we say we will defend the king’s person, when he deserts us?’242Add. 18777, f. 40v. Assuming Marten’s paper of 25 October ran along these lines, it would not have been welcome to many of his fellow Commons-men – particularly given the uncertain military outcome at Edgehill. There is certainly no indication in the Commons Journal that Marten’s paper or the oath he had reported were debated by the House.

Marten and the war party, 1642-3

At this critical juncture in Parliament’s military fortunes, with Berkshire now threatened by the king’s forces, Marten decided that it was time to translate his fighting talk into action. On 25 October 1642, he was granted leave by the House to return to Berkshire ‘for the safety of the county and the service of Parliament there’.243CJ ii. 823a. Early in September, he had been commissioned as a colonel of foot – probably by Essex – and been assigned £600 out of the army treasury to raise 1,200 troops.244SP28/2A, f. 135. Using this regiment – which he claimed he had raised at his own charge – and probably acting on the CS’s orders, Marten hastily garrisoned Reading late in October in the hope of holding this strategically important town until he could be reinforced by Essex’s army or parliamentary forces from further down the Thames valley. But although Marten commanded a force of 200 dragoons and 800 infantrymen (on which he spent £631 in arms and equipment), the approach of a party of royalist horse put the defenders in such ‘great terror’ that they fled the town for the safety of the parliamentarian garrison at Windsor.245Add. 18777, f. 50; Add. 34326, f. 65; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 388-9. The London press glossed this humiliation by claiming that Reading was untenable against artillery and that many of its leading inhabitants were disaffected.246Speciall Passages and Certain Informations from Severall Places no. 13 (1-8 Nov. 1642), 111 (E.126.26); Perfect Diurnall no. 21 (31 Oct.-7 Nov. 1642), sig. V3v (E.242.5); England’s Memorable Accidents (31 Oct.-7 Nov. 1642), 72 (E.242.6).

In his report to the Commons on 4 November 1642 concerning the loss of Reading, Marten complained about how little help he had received from the townsmen. But he was also angry that having sought help from the earl of Essex and other parliamentarian commanders, none had been forthcoming. His fellow CS committeeman Anthony Nicoll retorted that Marten had commanded over 1,000 men, which the committee had apparently felt sufficient for him not only to hold Reading but also to comply with its orders for sending a party to destroy the bridge over the Thames at Henley.247Add. 18777, f. 50. Marten had conspicuously failed to do either, and it was apparently a demoralising and traumatic experience for him. But in contrast to another of his fellow CS committeemen, Holles (who would part company with the fiery spirits after the destruction of his regiment at Brentford on 12 November), Marten reacted to defeat with even greater resolve to push for outright victory and to oppose those at Westminster who favoured accommodation.

The great majority of Marten’s parliamentary appointments and speeches in the months after Edgehill are consistent with his concern to inject greater urgency into the war effort by a more general mobilisation of Parliament’s military resources and with his desire to shape – and, ideally, to frustrate – Parliament’s treaty negotiations with the king at Oxford in the spring of 1643. Between his return from Reading in November 1642 and his expulsion from the Commons in August 1643, he was he was named to approximately 70 committees and to 20 conference-management or reporting teams.248CJ ii. 862b, 933a, 957b, 958a, 971a, 974a, 979b, 981b, 983b, 984a; iii. 2a, 9b, 24b, 26b, 30b, 32b, 35a, 40b, 44b, 50b. He was sent as a messenger to the Lords on four occasions, and he served as a teller in 22 divisions.249CJ ii. 862b, 881b, 902b, 907b, 947a, 950b, 967b, 969b, 973a, 976a, 977b, 983b, 985a, 999a; iii. 1b, 4a, 8a, 17a, 27b, 31a, 33a, 97a, 103a, 141a, 165b, 196a; LJ v. 584a, 608a, 619a, 649b. This rise in the number of his tellerships and fall in his appointments as a messenger – relative, that is, to these figures in the preceding ten months of his parliamentary career – reflect his increasingly fractious relations with many of his fellow Parliament-men, particularly in the House of Lords. His last ever appointment as a messenger would be in March 1643, and his nomination to conference teams in 1643 ceased after mid-April.

After the junto divided in November 1642 into rival war and peace parties, Marten frequently cooperated with the war-party grandees and broadly favoured their plans for a Westminster-Edinburgh military axis. However, he refused to play the politician, as they did, by courting the Lords and the strong pro-Irish war lobby, and nor did he share the grandees’ conviction that the CS was an essential component of the war effort and must therefore be retained at least until the Scots could come to Parliament’s assistance. The idea that he headed his own rival ‘war party’, which was committed to abolishing monarchy or the House of Lords is without substance.250J.R. Hexter, The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge, MA, 1941), 9, 49, 59, 67, 70, and passim. His fellow fiery spirits Cornelius Holland, Sir Henry Mildmay, Alexander Rigby I, William Strode I and Sir Peter Wentworth were no more – or rather, no less – ‘republican’ in their thinking at this stage in the war than were Pym and St John. Marten and his fellow hard-liners did not constitute an organised and cohesive faction in their own right; they were merely the most vocal members of a group of militant MPs that shared the war-party grandees’ strategy but disagreed over the necessity of sticking with Essex and the CS as its principal military components.251D. Scott, ‘Party politics in the Long Parliament’, in Revolutionary England ed. G. Southcombe, G. Tapsell (2017), 39-40.

Marten’s collaboration with the war-party grandees and Essex’s officers in the Commons emerges most clearly in their shared determination to frustrate moves to open meaningful negotiations with Charles. Repeatedly during November 1642, Marten, Strode ‘and other hot spirits’ joined Pym and his colleagues in questioning the king’s commitment to peace and in trying to re-focus the House’s attention on strengthening Parliament’s war machine.252Add. 18777, ff. 52, 63, 65; Harl. 164, ff. 99v, 101v. Marten’s tellerships during November, December and January – which saw him paired with Hampden, Sir Thomas Barrington and other war-party figures – breathe this same spirit of belligerence and refusal to compromise.253CJ ii. 862b, 881b, 902b, 907b, 947a. The majority of his appointments during late 1642 and early 1643 were for listing volunteers in London, encouraging Essex and Warwick in their military endeavours, and for finding money to supply Parliament’s armies.254CJ ii. 838a, 838b, 840a, 841a, 845b, 847b, 860a, 866a, 873a, 882a, 890b, 901b, 943b, 953b, 965b. He also chaired a committee set up on 13 November to treat with a group of City petitioners who were offering to raise horse and foot for the war effort. Claiming to speak for the ‘godly and active part of the City’, the petitioners declared their readiness, if necessary, to ‘make their own captains and officers and [to] live and die with the House of Commons’ – an implicit criticism of the lord general’s military competence.255CJ ii. 847b, 853a; D. Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford, 2018), 140-1. Marten would be part of the Commons’ reception committee for a similar City initiative in February 1643.256CJ ii. 943b; Add. 18777, ff. 133r-v; Como, Radical Parliamentarians, 157-8. His appointment that month to the Committee for Advance of Money both reflected and reinforced his closeness to the war-party grandees and their allies in the City.257Supra, ‘Committee for Advance of Money’; CJ ii. 965b.

Like the war-party grandees, Marten recognised that victory was unattainable without the introduction of more draconian financial measures. On 13 December 1642, he and Sir Peter Wentworth supported Pym and St John in arguing that ‘public necessity’ required the introduction of an oath to discover the true extent of taxpayers’ estates.258Harl. 164, ff. 248r-v. Marten made clever use of the issue of war-finance to attack those Parliament-men pushing for peace negotiations. On 9 February 1643, he provocatively proposed that ‘whereas there were divers Members of the House that had not yet contributed to the maintenance of our army and [that] some of them were now present in the House, they might have no voice in the making of peace who had not had a hand in supporting the war’.259Harl. 164, f. 292v. He returned to this theme on 28 March, joining Pym, Strode ‘and other violent spirits’ in arguing that ‘such Members of the House as had not sufficiently contributed upon the propositions [for the maintenance of Essex’s army]... should be taxed to contribute according to the twentieth part of their revenue’. Although it was conceded that this measure would raise little money in itself, the example of MPs contributing to the war effort would supposedly ‘advance the business much’.260Harl. 164, f. 345v. In a debate on 18 April concerning the state of Parliament’s finances, Marten urged measures to allow the House to seize plate with very few questions asked and to ‘intercept’ the revenue belonging to the court of wards.261Harl. 164, ff. 373v, 372. As a committeeman, teller, reporter and manager of conferences and as a messenger, he was busy from February to May 1643 in promoting the introduction of the weekly assessment and in pressuring the Lords to process ‘divers ordinances for money remaining with their lordships, unpassed’.262CJ ii. 967b, 971a, 973a, 977b, 983a, 983b, 984a; iii. 18b, 32b; LJ v. 608a, 619a. Although it was not he but Gilbert Millington who chaired a committee for sequestering the estates of royalists (3. Feb.), on 25 March he was named first to a six-man committee, consisting entirely of pro-war militants, for seizing the personal estate of anyone in arms against Parliament.263CJ ii. 953b; iii. 18b; c.f. Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 9. In Marten’s opinion, Parliament ‘might justly take both estate and life [from delinquents]. Whatever they suffer below the highest punishments should seem mercy to them’.264Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 78, f. 2.

Even more controversial than the war party’s financial schemes was its strategy of seeking military support from the Scots – and again, Marten generally aligned with Pym and his confederates on this issue. Between late 1642 and August 1643, he was named to half a dozen committees (one of which he reported from and may have chaired) for maintaining good relations with Edinburgh and for strengthening the hand of Parliament’s friends in Scotland against their domestic and Irish opponents.265CJ ii. 901b, 949b; iii. 37b, 78a, 79a, 127b, 188b; North, Narrative of Some Passages, 48-9. In debate on 24 December, he proposed that the House ‘send some Members into Scotland that so we may understand what friends or foes we have there’ – which suggests that he appreciated the value of Scottish assistance.266Add. 18777, f. 103v. But his support for a Scottish alliance, like most aspects of his political thinking, was coloured by his deep distrust of kingly power and of the influence exerted by the House of Lords (which was dominated by the peace-party peers from November 1642). On 1 May 1643, in response to a call from Pym for a parliamentary initiative to obtain military assistance from Scotland and the United Provinces, Marten moved that Parliament should approach neither country ‘in the condition we were now in, but that we should give ourselves power to send as from ourselves [i.e. as a sovereign, parliamentary state] and to declare publicly that we will take the people into our protection’. According to D’Ewes, this motion was ‘scorned not only by the honest moderate Members of the House but slighted by Pym himself and the other fiery spirits of his party as tending to the utter subversion of this monarchy and the dethroning of the king’.267Harl. 164, ff. 381v-382; Mercurius Aulicus no. 19 (7-13 May 1643), 236-7 (E.103.10).

Marten’s incendiary comments concerning the king were deeply embarrassing to Pym and his friends in their struggle to maintain the facade that the war was being fought to reform and preserve the ancient constitution, not overturn it. Much to their consternation no doubt, Marten was impatient of such politic considerations. He worked boldly to create a constituency at Westminster and among the public in favour of radical constitutional change. His only apparent concession to the conservative sensibilities of most Commons-men was his use of ‘many levities to stir up laughter’ and thereby soften the impact of his words.268Harl. 164, f. 295v. Sometimes he did not sugar the pill sufficiently, however. In a debate on 22 November 1642 concerning Parliament’s peace terms, for example, he urged the Commons to add one more proposition to the list – that if the king return to Westminster, Parliament ‘would settle the crown upon his head – with some other bold and irreverential expressions’. This was too much for St John, Sir Henry Vane I and even for Marten’s regular confederate Sir Henry Mildmay, who said that Marten’s words were ‘not fit to be spoken’. D’Ewes opined that not since Parliament’s foundation had words ‘of so high a nature’ been uttered in the Commons. Strode and Wentworth defended Marten, ‘having been formerly themselves guilty of such expressions’, while Mildmay and Hesilrige objected to the Speaker demanding that Marten explain himself.269Harl. 164, ff. 106, 108v; Williams, ‘Extremist tactics’, 140-1.

In fact, Marten’s anti-monarchical ‘expressions’ in late 1642 and early 1643 suggest that he did not object to the office of king as such, so long as the holder was rendered entirely subordinate and accountable to Parliament. At what point before early 1649 he came to regard the kingly office itself as ‘unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous’ is not clear. Personal monarchy, however, he equated, by 1643 at the latest, with idolatry: ‘the national sin of this kingdom, viz. to make a god of man’.270Add. 18777, ff. 52, 112v, 115. On 9 February, he brought in ‘short bill’ for ‘preventing inconveniences that may happen by hindrance in repealing of old statutes and enacting of new’ – which the House conceived, correctly, was designed to remove the king’s negative voice. The royal legislative veto was, in Marten’s opinion, ‘but a puntillo [i.e. punctilio] when the people’s weal or safety is at stake’. His aim, it seems, was to have this bill included in the projected settlement that Parliament would put to the king in the impending treaty at Oxford. But it was considered impolitic by the House and rejected.271Add. 31116, p. 37; Add. 18777, f. 121; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 78, f. 1v.

Almost as discomfiting to the war-party grandees as Marten’s disdain for the king’s person and prerogative would have been his open commitment to advancing the authority of the Commons both in real terms and relative to that of the Lords. It has been calculated that he publicly belittled, questioned or defied the authority of the Lords on at least 30 occasions between early 1641 and August 1643.272Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 169. He was content, for example, to ignore the Lords’ concerns in December 1642 that the creation of a military association in the midlands under Thomas Lord Grey of Groby* would provoke Parliament’s lords lieutenants in the counties concerned to surrender their commissions. Rather than seek a conference with the Lords on the matter, as was proposed by Sir William Armyne, he urged the Commons to move the earl of Essex to grant Lord Grey the necessary commission; as for the lords lieutenants’ commissions, ‘we should not need much to trouble ourselves, for as they were granted by the consent of both Houses, so they could not surrender them without the consent of both Houses’.273CJ ii. 881b; Harl. 164, f. 244v. He proposed a similar course of action in mid-March 1643, when he urged that Essex be ordered to execute martial law upon offenders regardless of legal niceties or the approval of the Lords, insisting that the Commons ‘might make that a crime which had not formerly been a crime and appoint new ways of trial’.274Harl. 164, f. 326. Angered by the Lords’ failure to pass the assessment and other ‘money’ ordinances, Marten repeatedly moved ‘that they [the Commons] might send no more of their orders to them [the Lords] but pass them in their own House, by their sole authority’.275Harl. 164, f. 317; Mercurius Aulicus no. 10 (5-11 Mar. 1643), 126; no. 19 (7-13 May 1643), 238-9, 244; no. 32 (6-12 Aug. 1643), 424 (E.65.26). Speaking for the Commons during a conference on 6 April concerning the Lords’ failure to pass the assessment ordinance, he bluntly informed the peers that as ‘all matter of supply or levying money upon the subject ought to proceed from the House of Commons ... therefore their lordships were bound and tied to assent to whatsoever in that kind should pass in the House of Commons unless they could shew some sufficient reason to the contrary’. ‘Divers’ peers, notably the peace-party grandees the earl of Holland and Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, took great offence at this denial of the Lords’ negative voice, and Marten rubbed salt in their wounds the next day (7 Apr.), when he advised the Commons to ignore the Lords’ scruples concerning their privileges and to proceed without their concurrence, ‘lest ... we should seem to submit our judgements to their opinions’.276LJ v. 696a, 697b; Harl. 164, ff. 358v, 359v.

Yet despite such pronouncements, it is by no means certain that Marten was committed at this stage to sidelining the Lords altogether. His Commons supremacist rhetoric may have been targeted more at the peace-party majority in the Lords than at the peers generally. Indeed, it is not impossible that he was concerting scare-tactics with the war-party grandee Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester, who had revived the threat that the junto had employed in December 1641 and early in 1642 – i.e. that the ‘diligent lords’ would join with their allies in the Commons to pass legislation regardless of the obstructionist majority in the Upper House.277CJ ii. 330b; His Majesties Declaration to All his Loving Subjects (1642), 55-7, 71 (E.115.11); Mercurius Aulicus no. 19, 238. The most vivid illustration of Marten’s contempt for, and distrust of, the peace-party peers was his violent altercation at Westminster on 18 April with the earl of Northumberland, who struck Marten with his cane for opening some of his private correspondence. Presumably, Marten had acted on suspicion that the letter contained incriminating evidence of the peace-party grandees’ secret dealings with the king’s counsellors during the Oxford treaty.278CJ iii. 51a, 52b; LJ vi. 11a, 11b Harl. 164, ff. 372v-373, 373v-374v; Add. 31116, p. 88; Mercurius Aulicus no. 16 (16-22 Apr. 1643), 202-3 (E.100.18); Clarendon, Hist. iii. 9; Williams, ‘Extremist tactics’, 146-7.

Marten was also out of step with the war-party grandees – and, indeed, with the majority of his fellow Commons-men – when it came to parliamentary policy towards Ireland. On several occasions during the second half of 1642 he called for the replacement of Robert Sidney, 2nd earl of Leicester (Northumberland’s brother-in-law) as lord lieutenant of Ireland, and in the process he clashed with Pym and St John, who feared the consequences of such a drastic step: ‘if we oppose it [Leicester’s appointment] at this time we know not what breach it may make ... what distractions and hindrances will that be to the service’. But Marten had made up his mind – Leicester, he claimed, had ‘opposed the auxiliary help of the Scots’ in Ireland and had amply demonstrated his adherence to the king and faithlessness to the commonwealth.279Add. 18777, ff. 10v-11, 23; CJ ii. 687b; PJ iii. 255.

In the aftermath of the Edgehill campaign, Marten’s thinking on Irish policy seems to have moved well beyond merely replacing Leicester as lord lieutenant. When, on 10 December 1642, John Goodwyn requested permission to make a report from the Committee for Irish Affairs concerning ‘matters of great weight’, Marten ‘conceived we had at this time more cause to look to the safety of England then to the safety of Ireland, and therefore [he] moved that this report of Mr Goodwin’s might be laid aside’. After an indignant response from D’Ewes to this motion, Goodwyn was allowed to read his report.280Harl. 164, f. 246. Unabashed, Marten spelled out his meaning more clearly on 28 January 1643 during a debate on whether Parliament should petition the king to dispatch Leicester to Ireland. Cutting through a disagreement over whether this matter should be digested into one or more votes, Marten ‘moved to have it wholly rejected and that we should not send to his Majesty at all about it, nor take any further care of Ireland, but declare to the world that during these troubles at home we can do nothing to relieve that kingdom’.281Harl. 164, f. 284. The priority for Marten was to secure the king’s defeat in England, without which he conceived that the war against the Irish rebels could not be won.

Whatever his views as to the desirability of extirpating Irish Catholicism, Marten was clearly sensitive to the political value of promoting godly religion at home – as he had demonstrated on 31 December 1642 in proposing that ‘malignant ministers’ in London be removed from their livings and replaced by ‘godly and well-affected ministers’ who had been plundered by the royalists.282Add. 18777, f. 108v; CJ ii. 909b. But in contrast to godly Members such as Pym, or Parliament’s Scottish allies, Marten seems to have perceived the fight against popery largely in terms of a domestic conflict against kingly power and the superstitions he associated with it, not as part of a pan-European, apocalyptic struggle against the Romish antichrist. His lack of fervour in the Protestant cause is evidenced, perhaps, by his objections to Parliament paying court, or money, to the queen of Bohemia and the elector palatine.283CJ ii. 989a; iii. 31a, 141a; Add. 18777, ff. 169v, 171v; Harl. 164, f. 312; Harl. 165, ff. 114v-115; Harington’s Diary, 17, 29.

Marten and the Committee of Safety, 1642-3

Another source of tension in Marten’s relations with the war-party grandees, and with the Lords, during 1642-3 was his criticism of the Committee of Safety – which was doubtless lent a sharper edge by his experience at Reading in November 1642. When evidence emerged on 23 November that ‘divers’ peers on the CS had issued a warrant allowing the shipment of provisions to Newcastle for the queen’s use, Marten called for the committee’s dissolution. According to D’Ewes, Marten had ‘often before spoken for dissolving them’, but ‘now he renewed that motion with much eagerness upon occasion of this warrant, saying that many such like warrants had been passed by them, which had not been put to the vote in the committee’. His motion was seconded by the fiery spirit Alexander Rigby I but also by the crypto-royalist Edmund Waller, who apparently calculated that the abolition of the committee would throw Parliament’s affairs into complete disarray. The addition of nine peers to the committee in September and the subsequent emergence of the earls of Northumberland, Pembroke and Holland, Holles, William Pierrepont and other leading members of the CS as peace-party grandees had significantly blunted its warlike intent to the point where Marten evidently believed that the committee had become a vehicle for the pro-peace peers to sabotage the war effort. The war-party grandees, however, were apparently of the same mind as the majority of Commons-men – that although the CS ‘did some things amiss, yet ... the kingdom was now in a desperate condition, and that therefore it was not a fit time to discontent the Lords or to dissolve the committee’.284Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’; Harl. 164, f. 122v. Marten attacked the committee again on 14 December, following the earl of Essex’s complaint to the House that the CS had detached a troop of horse from the army without his knowledge. Adding his voice to that of Cornelius Holland, who had said that it was ‘a great scandal to this House to suffer all the monies which were now expended to be disposed of by them [the CS]’, Marten argued that it was ‘high time to dissolve this committee and ... that a pint pot could not hold a pottle [half a gallon] of liquor, nor they be capable to dispatch so much as was committed to them’. Holles rebutted these criticisms, however, and the House let the matter drop.285Harl. 164, f. 254v. A report to the Commons in mid-February 1643 that the CS had granted a pass to a ‘dangerous person’ to travel to France prompted Marten to move that ‘we daily observing the inconveniencies which happened by reason of this committee far to exceed any good we had by it, and that therefore we should speedily dissolve it’. He was seconded on this occasion by Holland, Rigby and Harbert Morley.286Harl. 164, f. 297v.

Battle over the CS was joined again on 23 February 1643, when Edmund Prideaux I and Sir Henry Mildmay moved that ‘money gotten by the labour of this House be not issued by the close committee [i.e. the CS] without assent of this House’.287Add. 18777, f. 161v. This prompted a division on whether the committee should be reduced to its original membership – namely, those peers and MPs appointed on 4 July 1642. The tellers for the yeas, Marten and Waller, defeated Holles and Sir Richard Onslow, but the Lords successfully called the Commons’ bluff by ordering that either the committee should continue as then constituted or, ‘if it be of no use, that it be dissolved’.288CJ ii. 976a; LJ v. 619a. Having failed to destroy the committee, Marten and the fiery spirits had apparently decided to ‘reduce it to the first number ... partly because that many of the supernumerary lords [those added since its creation] were suspected to be turned malignants, partly the multitude of those who were last admitted [in September 1642, for example] made it to be a common and no close committee’. Above all, according to Mercurius Aulicus, Marten and his friends calculated that with most of the peers removed, and those who were still members being either absent (Essex) or seldom attending, the committee would once again be dominated by ‘others who are most concerned and very diligent in their attendance’ – that is, Pym and Essex’s other supporters.289Mercurius Aulicus no. 9 (26 Feb.-4 Mar. 1643), 112-13 (E.86.41). Although Marten and the fiery spirits believed that the committee did more harm than good, they seem to have recognised that an active and influential group among its original members – Saye, Pym, Hampden, Stapilton, Fiennes and Glynne – shared their commitment to winning the war and obstructing moves towards a negotiated settlement. If the committee could not be abolished then better to restore it to something like its warlike vigour of July and August 1642 than to leave it at the mercy of ‘malignants’.290Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’; L. Glow, ‘The cttee. of safety’, EHR lxxx. 307. It is also worth noting that Marten remained an active member of the CS throughout late 1642 and well into 1643. He reported from the committee in December 1642 and (possibly) January 1643, and it was almost certainly on the basis of his membership of the CS that the House entrusted a series of executive orders relating to military supply and command during the winter of 1642-3 to his care.291CJ ii. 874b, 875b, 892b, 898b, 902a, 930b; A Letter from Mercurius Civicus to Mercurius Rusticus (1643), 2 (E.65.32). He also continued to sign CS warrants until early August 1643.292SP28/3A, ff. 4, 96; SP28/3B, ff. 331, 375, 489; SP28/4, f. 201; SP28/6, f. 27; SP28/264, f. 213; WO55/460, unfol. (warrants 29 July, 4 Aug. 1643).

Frustrating the peace process, 1643

The differences in political outlook and style between Marten and the war-party grandees were to some extent obscured during the first half of 1643 as a result of their common opposition to an accommodation with the king. From early January to the end of April, Marten featured regularly, sometimes conspicuously, in the Commons’ preparations and debates concerning the Oxford treaty. As a teller, committeeman and as a member of conference teams, he joined with Hampden, Pym and their confederates on initiatives that often had the effect of delaying or frustrating the peace process. Much the same group of Commons-men also worked to ensure that Essex, as lord general, and Warwick, as admiral of the fleet, had the necessary authority and resources to maintain the fight against the royalists.293CJ ii. 911a, 921b, 933a, 941a, 950b, 958a, 963a, 967b, 974a, 979b, 980a, 981b, 983b, 986b, 991b, 994a, 1001b; iii. 1b, 2a, 9b, 26b, 27a, 30b, 35a, 40b, 41a, 44b, 50b, 58a; LJ v. 584a. In divisions during February, March and April on Parliament’s peace propositions and the management of the treaty, Marten served as teller for those opposed to negotiations or determined to take a hard line at Oxford. His fellow tellers were invariably war-party grandees and their allies – namely, Hampden, Mildmay, Strode, Vane II, Sir Robert Harley and Marten’s ‘good friend’ Sir Henry Ludlow. One of the opposing tellers on every occasion was the peace-party grandee Denzil Holles.294CJ ii. 969b, 983b, 985a, 999a; iii. 17a, 27b, 33a; Ludlow, Mems. i. 65.

Perhaps the most significant of Marten’s tellerships in relation to the treaty was on 17 February 1643, when he partnered Hampden in opposing a motion that effectively circumvented the war party’s call for a disbandment of all armies prior to negotiations – a proposal that D’Ewes, Sir Thomas Rowe* and a variety of commentators conceived ‘was to propose an impossibility against the making of peace’.295CJ ii. 969b; Harl. 1901, f. 58v; Harl. 164, ff. 295, 296v, 300, 301v, 302; Mercurius Aulicus no. 7 (12-18 Feb. 1643), 85-7 (E.246.39); no. 8 (19-25 Feb. 1643), 95 (E.246.41); CSP Ven. 1642-3, p. 215. In debate, Marten was sometimes willing to collude with the war-party grandees in trying to obstruct the treaty without seeming to oppose the peace process – in backing, for example, the idea of a general disbandment before negotiations.296Add. 18777, f. 147v; Harl. 164, ff. 296v, 300, 301v, 302. But he was always liable to stray from the script – as on 11 February, when he declared that ‘if we meant to give way to this treaty, we must resolve to serve the Devil’.297Harl. 164, f. 295v. In response to information the House received two days later (13 Feb.) that the queen was preparing to return to England from the Low Countries, he made a ‘long oration’ in which he declared that she was ‘no Majesty; she is a subject. We can have but one king. If she comes over and we suffer her to make head against us, we may [as well] lie down our heads to the block’.298Add. 18777, f. 153v; Mercurius Aulicus no. 9 (26 Feb.-4 Mar. 1643), 109. A message from the king later that month which the Lords chose to interpret as ‘gracious’, Marten described as ‘an alarm to actions of hostility’ – which was also the opinion of Wentworth and William Cage.299Harl. 164, f. 308v.

News in mid-March 1643 that royalist troops had comprehensively plundered one of Marten’s country residences – he would later refer to the ‘burning of his houses and the plundering of his estate’ – in no way cooled his ardour against the treaty.300Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 32, item 928; vol. 92, ff. 35, 38; Harl. 6852, f. 108; Luke Jnl. 36; HMC 13th Rep. IV, 386. On 18 March, he was named first to a five-man committee for removing the Capuchin friars and all ‘superstitious monuments’ from the queen’s chapel at Somerset House, in what was rightly perceived as an attempt to poison the negotiations at Oxford. When the French king’s diplomatic agent in London objected that such actions would constitute a breach of the marriage articles between Charles and Henrietta Maria, Marten was a minority teller with Wentworth against giving him an audience.301CJ iii. 8a; Harl. 164, ff. 348v, 361v; Mercurius Aulicus no. 12 (19-25 Mar. 1643), 144 (E.247.26). But French diplomacy and opposition from the Lords secured merely a stay of execution. On 30 March, Marten, Rigby, Sir John Clotworthy, Denis Bond and John Gurdon entered the queen’s chapel and ‘caused all the idolatrous pictures and statues there to be taken down and defaced’. Later that same day (30 Mar.), he reported from a conference that the Lords had called in a vain attempt to stay these proceedings.302CJ iii. 24b; Harl. 164, ff. 348v, 361v; Mercurius Aulicus no. 14 (2-9 Apr. 1643), 172-3 (E.97.10).

Scenting victory in the long campaign to frustrate the treaty, Marten moved on 3 April 1643 that Parliament should order the recall of its negotiating team at Oxford within the week unless the Houses received ‘a positive answer from his Majesty touching the disbanding of the armies’; by which ‘desperate motion’, according to D’Ewes, the king would be ‘put upon impossibilities and a most unjust and pernicious occasion sought to break off all further treaty of peace’. Marten was seconded by Bond, Holland, Wentworth ‘and other violent spirits’, who won the subsequent division to turn this motion into a Commons resolution.303CJ iii. 28; Harl. 164, f. 352.

But if Marten’s intervention on this occasion was judiciously timed and attuned to majority feeling in the House, his final salvo against the treaty, on 10 April 1643, represented the needlessly provocative and counter-productive side to his parliamentary behaviour. Reacting to Pym’s report of a draft reply to several of the king’s messages concerning the treaty, Marten

not content to alter the form of …[that reply], moved...that we might not trouble ourselves to send any answer to those two messages but rather answer them with scorn, as being unworthy of our further regard. At which words Sir Henry Mildmay … though he had been very fierce for the proceeding of the war ... took exception and said that the uttering of such words amongst [us] did only advantage our enemies and hurt ourselves [but] that it was a very unfit expression and that he desired that such language might be forborne for the time to come.304Harl. 164, ff. 366v-367; Mercurius Aulicus no. 16, 202.

Mildmay’s reaction here captures the sense of exasperation with Marten’s inflammatory rhetoric that the war-party grandees must also have felt on numerous occasions. Marten blotted his copy book again that day (14 Apr.), after he had been ordered to prepare a letter from Parliament for recalling its negotiating team from Oxford. On reading Marten’s draft, the House deemed it unacceptable and ordered him to re-write it – and even then it required a vote before the re-drafted letter was passed.305CJ iii. 44a, 45a.

Marten helped to hammer a final nail into the coffin of peace by joining Pym and other war-party zealots in May 1643 in calling for the queen’s impeachment. In a debate on this proposal, he urged the House not to be deterred ‘by the dignity of her person, for he knew no person so high (he excepted none) but was subject to the law’. When Whitelocke and several other MPs objected that to impeach the queen would be to obliterate ‘all hopes of peace’, Marten answered that ‘she hath been the cause of all our idolatry, and now we shall make her an idol[ator] to us’.306CJ iii. 100b; Harl. 164, f. 391v; Somer’s Tracts, iv. 500-1.

The lord general’s plunder-master, 1642-3

Marten’s preference for military victory over a negotiated settlement was probably the main basis for the good working relationship he seems to have formed with the earl of Essex. In his report to the House in November 1642 concerning the loss of Reading, Marten may well have been critical of Essex’s failure to send him reinforcements, and later that month he successfully rebuffed the earl’s request that the Commons vindicate two of his officers for their alleged failure to prevent the sack of Brentford, arguing that ‘if they were guilty it was not our vote but their future brave actions that must vindicate them’.307Harl. 164, f. 177v. He struck at the lord general directly on 5 December, when he declared that Parliament’s military setbacks proceeded from the earl’s (justifiable) preference to rest his army after the Edgehill campaign. For while Essex’s troops had gone into winter quarters at Windsor, some of Parliament’s regional forces were still in the field, prompting Marten to complain that ‘it was summer in Devonshire, summer in Yorkshire and only winter at Windsor, and therefore [he] desired that we might speedily send to the lord general to move forward’.308Harl. 164, f. 243.

Yet this is the only known occasion on which Marten publicly criticised Essex’s generalship, and it does not seem to have caused a permanent rift between the two men. Had it done so, it is very unlikely that the House would have selected Marten to accompany one of Essex’s officers, Walter Long*, to Windsor on 20 December 1642 to urge the earl to do all in his power to advance the war, notwithstanding peace propositions then in hand.309CJ ii. 897b. Marten was in communication with Essex again in March 1643, after the House, upon his own motion, ordered him to write to the lord general for a commission of martial law that would empower Nathaniel Fiennes to try royalist conspirators in Bristol.310CJ iii. 3b, 12b; Mercurius Aulicus no. 11 (12-18 Mar. 1643), 138 (E.95.25). On 4 April, the Commons selected Marten and Glynne to prepare an ordinance for settling the sequestered estate of the royalist peer Arthur Capell*, 1st Baron Capell, upon Essex.311CJ iii. 29a. The only reason that Marten was in a position to open Northumberland’s correspondence later that month was because he had been at Windsor attending the lord general, who had entrusted him to deliver a package of intercepted letters, among them Northumberland’s, to the earl of Manchester.312Harl. 164, f. 373v; Williams, ‘Extremist tactics’, 145-6.

At some point in April 1643 – possibly while Marten was at Windsor – the lord general granted him a ‘general commission’ to raise a regiment of horse at his own charge.313SP28/147, pt. 3, f. 546; Harl. 164, f. 383; Mercurius Aulicus no. 19 (7-13 May 1643), 238. Armed with this commission, Marten and his officers set about seizing any horses they could readily lay their hands on, including those belonging to several peers and to the royal stable at The Mews. The House of Lords was outraged, and early in May it complained to the Commons at Marten’s lèse-majesté and affront to its privileges. Marten stood upon his authority as an MP and claimed a warrant from the lord general for his proceedings. More provocatively, he declared that ‘we had taken the king’s ships and forts for the defence of the kingdom and might as well take his horses, lest they might be employed against us’. The Commons defended his actions and desired Essex not to revoke Marten’s commission as the Lords had requested.314CJ iii. 48b, 68b-69a, 89a; LJ vi. 3b, 28, 36a, 75b; Add. 31116, pp. 94-5, 96. Essex’s subsequent failure to take any action against Marten led D’Ewes to conclude that the earl was ‘more pliable to satisfy them [the fiery spirits in the Commons] then to satisfy the House of Peers’.315Harl. 164, f. 383. Essex may have made a half-hearted attempt to secure a Commons order for the return of horses that Marten’s men had appropriated from Countess Rivers, but otherwise he was apparently content to allow Marten – who was soon being dubbed the ‘plunder-master general’ – to seize horses, money and plate to recruit and equip his regiment.316CJ iii. 109a, 144a; LJ vi. 186a; Eg. 2646, f. 255; SP28/7, ff. 159, 483, 485; Mercurius Aulicus no. 21 (21-7 May 1643), 269 (E.105.12); no. 23 (4-10 June 1643), 299 (E.55.14); Letter from Mercurius Civicus, 31. In a letter to Marten on 23 May, Essex’s scoutmaster-general, Sir Samuel Luke*, referred approvingly to ‘your orders’ and those of the lord general ‘for the raising of forces for the defence of the kingdom’.317Brotherton Lib. ML mss, vol. 92, f. 41. A number of Marten’s parliamentary appointments in May, June and July suggest that he was identified at Westminster as one of the lord general’s friends, and there is certainly evidence that the earl looked to Marten and Strode I for favours at Westminster.318CJ iii. 80a, 107a, 165a, 178b; Bodl. Nalson III, f. 18. With Essex apparently reluctant to offend Marten, it was left to the two Houses to try to curb the ‘great misdemeanours and insolencies daily committed’ by Marten’s troops.319CJ iii. 118b, 125a, 152a, 195b; LJ vi. 89b, 107a, 111b. Marten may also have been emboldened by the example of Colonel Edmund Harvey I* and his ‘London boys’ – the City horse that was repeatedly used to disperse citizen peace petitioners – while his officers probably targetted much the same group of ‘malignants’ as the London sequestration committee.320SP20/6, f. 2v; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 53, item 26; K. Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, 1997), 310, 331; ‘Edmund Harvey’, Oxford DNB.

Marten’s enthusiasm for supplying Parliament – and his own regiment in particular – from the goods of the king and his followers may well account for a Commons’ resolution on 2 June 1643, authorising him and Mildmay to search the treasury at Westminster Abbey and report their findings to the House.321CJ iii. 112b. Wielding this resolution, Marten and ‘a rabble of his raking up’ forced their way into the abbey that day (2 June) and ‘made much spoil upon the utensils and ornaments of the church’. Assisted (it was alleged) by William Wheler* and Thomas Fauconberge*, Marten also attempted to seize the royal coronation regalia, but the earl of Holland, Holles, D’Ewes and other MPs, having notice of his proceedings, came to the abbey and persuaded him to forbear (‘during their discourse with him’, observed D’Ewes, ‘he looked as pale as ashes’). After a division the next day (3 June) which Holles and the peace interest lost by one vote, the House appointed Marten, Mildmay, Gurdon and Sir John Holland to take an inventory of the regalia and place new locks upon the door of the strong-room where they were kept. A week later, according to royalist reports, Marten plundered ‘the great iron chest’ in the abbey ‘in which the public ensigns of the sovereignty have been so long kept’.322CJ iii. 114b; Harl. 165, f. 9v; Mercurius Aulicus no. 23 (4-10 June 1643), 301-2; no. 24 (11-17 June 1643), 313 (E.56.11); Ath. Ox. iii. 1238.

By the summer of 1643, the war-party grandees were apparently tiring of Marten’s plunder-prone antics, for on 26 June, Pym moved that he ‘might speedily repair to his Excellency [Essex]... and if he had not his whole regiment of horse ready, nor could instantly go himself, yet that at least those horses which were completed [sic] might go’. But Marten claimed that ‘he had not yet any troop complete’, and so the matter was laid aside.323Harl. 164, f. 233v. Nevertheless, on 12 July the Commons ordered the CS to reimburse Marten for any expenses he had incurred in raising his regiment and then to send his troops to the lord general.324CJ iii. 164a. According to the accounts that he later submitted to Parliament, Marten disbursed £1,963 on his regiment in 1643 for which he received only £453 by way of sequestered property and parliamentary grant.325Add. 34326, ff. 59-60.

The ‘general rising’ and expulsion, July-Aug. 1643

The earl of Essex’s growing frustration with his war-party allies during June and July 1643, and Marten’s prominent role in the movement for a ‘general rising’, opened a political chasm between the two men that would swallow Marten’s parliamentary career until 1646. Despite being on relatively good terms with Essex – certainly compared with the great majority of fiery spirits – he shared the resentment of many Commons-men at the lord general’s refusal in June to advance until he had received proper assurance that his army would be adequately supplied. In a debate on 29 June concerning Pym’s draft of a letter from the Commons to Essex, which was criticised for being too obsequious, Marten urged that it be laid aside altogether ‘as not being fit for us to send’. Although he does not seem to have questioned Essex’s competency as a general – at least publicly – he did object to the omission of any reference to the vow and covenant in the earl’s most recent letter to the House, ‘although we had formerly sent to him that it might be taken in the army’.326Harl. 165, f. 101.

Marten regarded the Commons’ June 1643 vow and covenant, as he doubtless had the Protestation, as a necessary ‘instrument of discrimination in times of perplexity’.327Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 78, f. 2. Yet rather than join with the fiery spirits that summer in attacking Essex, he preferred to help St John and Strode hound the earl of Northumberland over his complicity in the Waller plot – the occasion for the vow and covenant’s introduction.328Harl. 165, f. 103v. His only reported objection to the earl’s letter of 9 July suggesting that Parliament should seek a treaty with the king was its expression of concern for Charles’s safety in the event of continued military action. ‘If the king would not withdraw’ from the field of battle, Marten is alleged to have said, ‘but put his finger to be cut, they could not help it. What was that to them?’329Mercurius Aulicus no. 29 (16-22 July 1643), 375 (E.63.2).

It is far from clear that Marten became involved in the scheme for a general rising with a fixed intent to replace or circumvent Essex as commander-in-chief. Appointed by the Commons on 20 July 1643, the committee for the general rising was set up in response to a petition from a group of City militants and was assigned the task of mobilising and maintaining an army of citizen volunteers under the command of an officer to be commissioned by the lord general. Parliament’s dire military predicament by the summer of 1643 seemed to the petitioners reason enough to raise this new force, notwithstanding their professed confidence ‘in the faithfulness and courage of his Excellency our noble general and in the undaunted spirits of those under his command’. In flagrant violation of the Commons’ privileges, the petitioners had presumed to name the committee’s membership, and the result was a body made up almost exclusively of the fiery spirits, among them Marten, Gurdon, Penington, Rigby and Strode. The committee took its name from its authorised meeting place in the City, the Merchant Taylors’ Hall.330CJ iii. 176a, 177a; Harl. 165, ff. 128r-v; Add. 18778, ff. 6r-v; To the Right Honourable the Knights, Citizens, and Burgesses in Parliament Assembled (1643, 669 f.8.15); Certaine Informations no. 28 (24-31 July 1643), 221 (E.62.16); Lindley, Civil War London, 314-16.

Back in December 1642, during a Commons debate on an earlier petition from the City militants, Marten had been reprimanded by the Commons for arguing that the House should ‘receive instructions for our proceedings from the people’.331Add. 31116, p. 27; Lindley, Civil War London, 306-7. Belatedly, with the establishment of the committee at Merchant Taylors’ Hall, Marten obtained his wish – indeed, it is very likely that he had been a leading figure in the July petition’s genesis. Two days after the committee’s establishment, on 22 July, Marten and two more of its members, John Blakiston and Edward Bayntun, licensed the publication of the petition for the general rising.332Regs. of the Worshipful Co. of Stationers (1913), i. 64; Como, Radical Parliamentarians, 188. And on 25 July, Marten licensed the pamphlet A Memento to the Londoners, in which the author (who was either Marten or one of his associates) urged the citizens to support the committee’s work.

You must all rise or nothing can be done to any purpose. The poor will shortly want bread, and what their wants will necessitate them to, let the rich consider. You have talked a great while that nothing can preserve you but a general rising, and in private discourses every man concludes that it is the only thing necessary – now show that you are not mere talkers. The countries [i.e. counties] will come in to you, who long to be up and doing; they await but your leading them the way...333A Memento to the Londoners (1643, 669 f.8.16); Regs. of the Worshipful Co. of Stationers, i. 65.

Residing in London and collaborating with the City’s war-party leaders and godly militants may well have shaped Marten’s political thinking. In mid-July 1643, a few days after presenting the petition for the general rising, the City radicals re-published their remonstrance of the previous spring, outlining what they saw as the ‘undoubted fundamentals of our government’. In terms and tenor strongly reminiscent of those used by Marten in the House, this document boldly asserted the supremacy and omnicompetency of Parliament, which ‘being limited by no customs, no precedents, nor statutes made by former Parliaments ... may justly do whatsoever is good in their understandings for the safety and freedom of the people’, and ‘from whose judgements there is no appeal’. The king, as Marten had insisted, was merely the ‘chief magistrate or officer of the kingdom’, and his prerogative powers were no more than ‘a matter of form annexed to his office’ and could be rightfully exercised by Parliament if he refused to do so.334Remonstrans Redivivus (1643, E.61.21); Mercurius Aulicus no. 14 (2-9 Apr. 1643), 170-1; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 458; Lindley, Civil War London, 307-8; Como, Radical Parliamentarians, 159-67. The likely author of this remonstrance ‘to confirm certain infallible maxims of free government’ was the future Leveller leader William Walwyn, who would refer to Marten in 1645 as ‘that just and zealous patriot of his country’.335Lindley, Civil War London, 307; The Writings of William Walwyn ed. J.R. McMichael, B. Taft (Athens, GA, 1989), 151, 176-7.

Marten was chairman of the committee at Merchant Taylors’ Hall and presumably signed the ‘divers warrants’ it issued ‘for the collecting of monies’.336Harl. 165, ff. 191v-192; CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 652. His first report to the House from the committee was on 22 July 1643, when he presented some of its initial resolutions: ‘but imperfect ones, so as there were no names of commanders, nor subordinate officers, nor of any form of proceedings therein resolved upon’.337Add. 31116, p. 129. To remedy this situation, the committee convened a general meeting of Londoners at Merchant Taylors’ Hall on 27 July, at which the ‘well-affected persons of London’ requested the appointment of Sir William Waller* as commander of the army then to be raised.338A Declaration of the Proceedings of the…Committee…at Merchant-Taylors Hall (1643), 3-8 (E.63.10); Mercurius Civicus no. 9 (20-8), 72 (E.62.4); Certaine Informations no. 28 (24-31 July 1643), 223. Marten reported the Londoners’ choice of Waller, which the House ‘very well approved’ of but insisted that he receive his commission from the lord general ‘and to command under him’.339CJ iii. 183a; Harl. 165, ff. 130v-131; Add. 31116, pp. 131, 133.

The Commons’ and the Committee of Safety’s proceedings in late July and early August 1643 suggest not (as several authorities have argued) indifference to the general rising or a desire to give Marten and his radical friends enough rope with which to hang themselves, but rather a policy of trying to steer the scheme for maximum military and minimum political impact.340Glow, ‘Cttee. of safety’, 304, 309; I. Gentles, ‘Parliamentary politics and the politics of the street’, PH xxvi. 152-3. Given the weakened state of Essex’s army and the royalists’ seemingly inexorable advance on all fronts, the parliamentary leadership could ill afford to discontent their allies in the City. Thus the Commons passed a series of orders adding further powers and members to the committee and, on 21 July, appointed Marten and six other Commons-men (all members of the committee at Merchant Taylors’ Hall) to liaise with the London militia committee for the defence of the City.341CJ iii. 177a, 186a, 194a, 197b, 201b, 220a. The CS ordered local authorities near London to raise men and money towards the establishment of ‘a considerable force of horse and foot’ under Sir William Waller ‘to relieve some parts of the kingdom in distress’ and protect London.342Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’; Eg. 2647, f. 80; HMC 7th Rep. 556. And on 29 July, John Glynne reported from the CS ‘that they thought it very expedient that Sir William Waller should be made commander in chief’ of this new force, although subject to the authority of the lord mayor and the London militia committee.343CJ iii. 187a; Harl. 165, f. 131v. That same day (29 July), the CS committeemen the earl of Manchester, Pym and Marten commended the general rising at a meeting of London’s Common Hall. Marten described the initiative as ‘a work which the House of Commons conceives to be the only hopeful means under God to preserve our religion, our laws, our liberties and that which is left of our estates’.344CJ iii. 186b, 187b; Three Speeches Delivered at a Common-hall (1643, E.63.8).

Marten reported to the Commons from the committee for the general rising on 3 August ‘that the business went very slowly forward, and the reason was because the lord general had not yet granted a commission to ... Sir William Waller’.345Harl. 165, f. 134v. If Pym and his allies had indeed been anxious to wash their hands of the general rising, here was their opportunity. Instead, they appointed a four-man delegation, headed by Pym and St John, to desire Essex to grant a commission to Waller ‘according to the former desire of both Houses’. They also gave assurances to Marten and the committee at Merchant Taylors’ Hall that Waller’s military authority would not be unduly constrained by his dependence upon forces raised in and by the City.346CJ iii. 193a; Harl. 165, ff. 134v-135; Add. 18778, ff. 8r-v. Towards the end of the Commons’ proceedings on 3 August, Marten reported a declaration from the committee at Merchant Taylors’ Hall, ‘that for the present defence of religion and the kingdom, every one shall be enjoined to give assistance either in person or purse’.347CJ iii. 193a; Add. 18778, f. 9; Declaration of the Proceedings of the…Committee, 3-8.

It was the earl of Essex’s endorsement of the Lords’ peace propositions of early August 1643, and his evident determination to interpret the general rising and Waller’s appointment as a slight to his authority, that caused Marten to appear openly against the lord general. In a dramatic re-alignment of political forces in the Commons, the lord general’s officers, headed by Stapilton, now made common cause with Holles and the peace-party grandees. In several divisions on 5 August, Holles and Stapilton were tellers in favour of the propositions; Marten and Strode were minority tellers against giving them any further consideration.348Infra, ‘Sir Philip Stapilton’; CJ iii. 196a. To counter this powerful new alliance, the war-party grandees and the City militants mobilised the London crowd to overawe the peace interest, and on 7 August the Commons duly rejected the propositions. The next day (8 Aug.), Marten reported from the committee for the general rising what D’Ewes described as ‘very strange conditions before they [the citizens] would engage themselves to contribute any help’.349Harl. 165, f. 149. At the meeting at Merchant Taylors’ Hall on 27 July, the committee had rejected calls from the citizens for it to assume a ‘compulsive power, by which all men should be compelled to go in person or to contribute monies’.350Add. 18778, f. 8v; Declaration of the Proceedings of the Honourable Committee, 6. By conscripting troops the general rising would effectively become a rival to the lord general’s army rather than an adjunct to it, competing directly with Essex for vital military resources. But with evidence that Essex had sold out to the peace party, the committee had acceded to the wishes of the lord general’s enemies in the City. Marten was now happy to report the citizens’ demands that Waller be set up as ‘an independent general of himself’, in despite of Essex’s authority, and that Londoners be compelled to enlist under him.351Harl. 165, ff. 149r-v; Add. 18778, ff. 11r-v; Mercurius Aulicus no. 32 (6-12 Aug. 1643), 425-6. The Commons duly ordered that Essex be desired to grant Waller a commission to levy ten regiments of horse and ten of foot and ‘to be serjeant-major-general, and commander in chief of those forces’. But it stopped short of giving him or the committee power to conscript forces.352CJ iii. 198b; Add. 18778, f. 13; Add. 31116, p. 139.

Essex’s reluctance to grant Waller this enlarged commission, along with the earl’s and the war-party grandees’ desire to patch up their differences in the wake of the aborted August 1643 peace initiative, seems to have robbed the general rising of its momentum. The committee at Merchant Taylors’ Hall continued to meet after mid-August but volunteers were few in number, and on 14 September, at the committee’s own request, the Commons assigned its papers and assets to other hands and assumed direct responsibility for the ‘future subsisting’ of Waller’s army.353CJ iii. 201b, 220a, 240a, 240b, 241a; Harl. 165, ff. 135r-v, 191v-192; Mercurius Aulicus no. 32, 427-8; no. 33 (13-19 Aug. 1643), 441-2, 449-50. Yet although the general rising ‘took not its proper effect’, Marten’s collaborator at Merchant Taylors’ Hall, William Walwyn, would contend that it ‘set all the wheels at work at home [and] was the spring of more powerful motions and good successes’.354Writings of William Walwyn ed. McMichael, Taft, 177; Lindley, Civil War London, 319.

Marten would not be present in Parliament to witness his committee’s demise. On 16 August 1643, he once again let his tongue run away with him – this time, in defence of the godly minister and opponent of an accommodation John Saltmarsh, who had been brought to the bar of the Commons for having written certain propositions that seemed to countenance the destruction of the king and royal family. Echoing Saltmarsh’s words, Marten ‘stood up and said he knew no cause why the destruction of any one family should be put in the balance with the destruction of the whole kingdom’, whereupon the peace-party adherent and admirer of the earl of Essex, Sir Nevill Poole, ‘took exceptions at these words’, prompting the House to demand that Marten explain himself. Presuming that his wonted friends in the House would stand by him, he ‘spake much worse upon his second standing up than before for the extirpating of the royal race and the utter subverting of the monarchical government’. On this occasion, however, he had gone too far, and the House commanded him to withdraw, and it was put to the question that he should be sent to the Tower and disabled from being an MP. Both questions were carried in the affirmative, ‘so he was called to the bar upon his knees and had judgement given accordingly’. Not only was he expelled from the House and imprisoned but he also suffered the indignity of ‘his whole life being ripped up … Master Pym himself falling foul upon him in a long speech, saying he was a man extremely guilty of injustice and lewdness’.355CJ iii. 206b; Harl. 165, f. 180b; Add. 18778, f. 15; Add. 31116, pp. 140-1; Mercurius Aulicus no. 33 (13-19 Aug. 1643), 452; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 208; Burton’s Diary, iii. 212. The House then gave order for securing the horses and equipment of Marten’s regiment and for replacing him on the CACP with Robert Reynolds.356CJ iii. 206b. Three of his troops of horse, including his own, were assigned to the lord general and one to Waller.357CJ iii. 212a. He remained in the Tower until 2 September, when he was released by the Commons on petition.358CJ iii. 226a.

John Lilburne and Walwyn would later claim that the man primarily responsible for Marten’s fall had been the parliamentarian propagandist William Prynne* – but this is hard to credit given that Prynne was not a Commons-man at that stage.359J. Lilburne, Two Letters Writ by Lieut. Col. John Lilburne (1647), 6 (E.407.41); Writings of William Walwyn ed. McMichael, Taft, 151; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 239. D’Ewes was probably nearer the mark in insisting that the ‘true and only cause’ of Marten’s expulsion from the Commons was ‘his almost constant opposing and often wittily jerking at old Pym, who, by the help of his friends, took this opportunity to join with the cordate [prudent] party to set Marten besides the saddle’.360Harl. 165, f. 152. The editor of the royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus further alleged that Marten had also made ‘improvident speeches’ to the effect that Pym had been enriching himself from the public purse.361Mercurius Aulicus no. 34 (20-26 Aug. 1643), 455-6. Yet if Pym was indeed instrumental in securing Marten’s disgrace it is likely that he was motivated less by personal pique than by a desire to conciliate the lord general at a vital point in the war effort. With the war-party grandees now desperate to sign Essex up to lead the expedition to relieve Gloucester, there could have been few better sacrifices to the earl’s sense of honour and wounded pride than the chairman of the committee at Merchant Taylors’ Hall.

Marten out of Parliament, 1643-6

Marten’s removal from the House in 1643 curtailed his military career, such as it was, and he did not seek to revive it until 1648. The ‘Colonel Martin’ who was appointed governor of Aylesbury in 1644 and who served in the second battle of Newbury campaign that year was the experienced officer Francis Martyn – not Henry Marten, as one authority has stated.362CJ iii. 503b; SP28/1A, f. 66; 28/9, f. 187; Add. 31116, pp. 245-6; Williams, ‘Anatomy of a radical gentleman’, 120; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 10; ‘Henry Marten’, Oxford DNB. Marten helped to raise troops for the defence of Reading in the summer of 1644, but though he was occasionally styled ‘Colonel Marten’ during the mid-1640s, that seems to have been an honorific reference to his 1643 commission.363CJ iv. 423a, 461a; Durston, ‘Berks. and its County Gentry’, i. 176. That aside, there is nothing to corroborate D’Ewes assertion that Marten was ‘awhile after [his expulsion from the Commons] employed at Abingdon as a colonel of a foot regiment’.364Harl. 165, f. 152.

The new focus of Marten’s activity in the parliamentarian cause was the committee for the three associated counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire that Parliament established in June 1644. He was a regular attender of the committee – which sat in the Inner Star Chamber in the Palace of Westminster – where he rubbed shoulders with Scot I, Whitelocke, William Ball*, Daniel Blagrave*, James Fiennes*, Simon Mayne*, Sir Thomas Wenman* and other serving and future MPs.365SP28/251, pt. 2, unfol.; Add. 61682, ff. 56, 58; Mercurius Academicus no. 4 (5-10 Jan. 1646), 34-5 (E.314.17); Durston, ‘Berks. and its County Gentry’, i. 182, 183. He also developed what seems to have been a healthy respect for the parliamentarian governor of Abingdon, Richard Browne II*, despite Browne’s Presbyterian sympathies.366Supra, ‘Richard Browne II’; CJ iv. 461a; v. 476b, 477b. Marten’s work on the committee may well have contributed to his political rehabilitation at Westminster in 1646 – a process that was apparently underway by July 1645 when the committee appointed in August 1643 to state Marten’s accounts re-convened.367Add. 63101, f. 47. He may well have had need of this committee’s good offices, for his removal from Parliament had left him at the mercy of his creditors, obliging him to take on additional debts in order to buy himself time as well as money.368LC4/202, ff. 284v, 287v; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 22 (June 1651 estate valuation; statutes and judgements against Marten); Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 205.

The friendships and connections that Marten made or sustained through membership of the committee for the associated counties were probably important in securing his election as a ‘recruiter’ for Abingdon on 25 October 1645 in place of his former brother-in-law Sir George Stonhouse, who had been disabled from sitting by the Commons as a royalist.369Berks. RO, TF41, f. 169. Marten’s failure to take his seat after his election is revealing and suggests that he sought not simply a return to Westminster but some form of acknowledgement from the Commons that his expulsion had been invalid. According to a post-Restoration account of the Commons’ debate on 6 January 1646 concerning Marten’s case, it was objected that ‘he was a person dead civilly and could not be restored to life’. But the Independent grandee Sir Henry Vane II countered that ‘the matter was very easy to be effected, by expunging out of the Journal-book that order whereby he [Marten] had been cast out, and that the House was ever understood to be mistress of her own orders’.370North, Narrative of Some Passages, 98. Whereupon it was voted that the order for Marten’s expulsion in August 1643, ‘by reason of some mistakes in the entry’, should be made void and erased from the Journal, and that he should be allowed to resume his seat as a knight of the shire for Berkshire. One of the arguments advanced for overturning the August 1643 order was that Parliament ‘had continued this war in maintenance of as much, in effect, as Mr Marten had said’.371CJ iv. 384b, 388b, 397b; Add. 31116, p. 504; [C. Walker*], Hist. of Independency (1648), 99 (E.463.19). The political Independent – and Marten’s likely friend – William Ball, was returned for Abingdon in his place later that month.372Supra, ‘William Ball’.

Marten and the Independents, 1646

Marten resumed his seat in the House on 7 January 1646 – the day after the Commons annulled the 16 August 1643 order.373CJ iv. 399a. During the next year and a half – that is, until the Presbyterian counter-revolution of July 1647 – he was named to approximately 94 committees and to three conference teams and served as teller in ten divisions.374CJ iv. 498b, 521a, 547b, 590b, 657a, 658a, 667a, 691a; v. 45a, 175a, 211a, 238b. Clearly, he played an active and highly visible role at Westminster after his return to the House. But he was peripheral to many of the major legislative and political initiatives during this period, and he was not added to any of the standing executive committees that had been established after 1642.

Marten’s political preoccupations at Westminster during 1646-7 place him firmly in the camp of the parliamentary Independents. A significant proportion of his Commons’ appointments during this period relate in one way or other to Parliament’s dealings with the king and the Scottish Covenanters. A profound distrust of both Charles and the Presbyterian interest probably underlay Marten’s nomination to committees in 1646 for finalising and dispatching the Newcastle peace propositions, persuading the prince of Wales to surrender to Parliament, and for prosecuting the Commons’ grievances against the Scots, their French allies and their ‘Covenant-engaged’ adherents in London.375CJ iv. 423a, 428a, 462b, 478b, 479b, 481b, 485b, 490a, 491a, 507b, 548b, 553b, 560b, 570b, 576a, 584b, 587a, 641a, 650b, 673b; v. 1b, 12a. The Independents’ fears of a secret treaty between Charles and the Scots, and the Commons’ determination to eradicate the last remnants of royalist resistance, prompted the establishment of a committee on 10 April, under the joint chairmanship of Marten and Whitelocke, to bring in an ordinance for summoning the king’s remaining garrisons and punishing ‘such as shall obstinately hold them out’.376CJ iv. 505a, 537a.

Marten was well to the fore in another cause championed by the Independents – that of asserting Parliament’s authority against the clericalist claims of the Presbyterian-dominated Westminster Assembly. He and the Independent grandee Sir Arthur Hesilrige were given charge of a committee set up on 16 April 1646 to examine the breach of parliamentary privilege inherent in the assembly’s petition to Parliament of 23 March.377CJ iv. 511a. It is therefore likely that Marten had a hand in the ‘narrative’ that the committee drew up, affirming that as ‘the supreme judicatory’, Parliament ‘hath jurisdiction in all causes, spiritual and temporal, and ... when they have declared their judgements and given their directions in a law, the same is binding to all persons of this kingdom, of what quality soever’.378CJ iv. 518a; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 18 (25 July-1 Aug. 1648), sig. S3 (E.456.7). After reading this narrative on 21 April, the House set up another committee, to which Marten was also named, for expanding its conclusions and communicating them to the assembly – a task in which Marten reportedly took the lead.379CJ iv. 518b; Mems. of the Great Civil War ed. Cary, i. 32.

Marten was also involved in giving expression to the Commons’ fears and ‘jealousies’ concerning the king. Appointed on 25 April 1646 to an Independent-dominated committee for countering Charles’s attempt to secure more favourable terms – specifically, by suborning parliamentarian officers (notably, Henry Ireton*) at the siege of Oxford – Marten reported the committee’s recommendations later that same day. The House then translated these proposals into votes to the effect that the king’s ‘addresses, in such a way, are indirect and do hinder the proceedings of the Parliament for peace in a right way and may administer occasions of ill designs against the Parliament and their army’.380Supra, ‘Henry Ireton’; CJ iv. 523a, 523b, 524a. Anticipating opposition on this matter from the Lords, the House, on 27 April, selected the Independent quartet of Marten, Hesilrige, Fiennes and Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire to prepare reasons justifying the 25 April votes at a conference.381CJ iv. 524b.

This was not the first occasion in 1646, nor would it be the last, on which Marten was involved in clashing between the two Houses or in demanding the Lords’ compliance with measures for boxing in the king while extending Parliament’s control over the kingdom’s financial and legal apparatus.382CJ iv. 442a, 444a, 541b, 548a, 650b, 667a, 669a; v. 33a, 70a. The fact that the earl of Essex’s Presbyterian faction had gained an ascendancy in the Lords by the spring of 1646 would doubtless have heightened Marten’s distrust of lordly influence at Westminster. On 28 August, he was a teller with the Independent MP Sir Peter Wentworth in favour of reproving the sheriffs of London for presuming to advise the Commons that the case of a royalist prisoner in their charge be placed under the jurisdiction of the Lords.383CJ iv. 657a; Add. 31116, p. 563. Marten was in some ways the obvious candidate to chair the so-called ‘committee for the liberty of the commons of England’ – otherwise known as the committee ‘to receive the commoners’ complaints against the House of Lords’ – which was established on 3 October 1646 with a remit that extended to investigating perceived breaches of the Commons’ privileges by the Lords in imprisoning or otherwise exercising authority over commoners.384CJ iv. 681b; R. Overton, An Arrow against all Tyrants and Tyrany (1646), 19 (E.356.14); J. Lilburne, An Anatomy of the Lords Tyranny and Injustice (1646, E.362.6); Lilburne, Rash Oaths Unwarrantable (1647), 4 (E.393.39)

Marten’s position on the Lords had probably not changed that much since 1643. It is still not clear that he favoured dispensing with the Upper House altogether, and nor is it evident at what point between 1646 and early 1649 he would wholeheartedly embrace that idea. Moreover, he seems to have been on cordial terms with individual peers – notably, his former brother-in-law John, 2nd Baron Lovelace, the earl of Rutland and the former parliamentarian turncoat Jerome Weston, 2nd earl of Portland – and was happy to borrow money from the earl of Warwick and from William Cecil*, 2nd earl of Salisbury.385Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 67, item 86; vol. 85, f. 44; vol. 92, ff. 74, 78; vol. 93, f. 42; PJ ii. 342; CJ vi. 199a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 66; HMC 13th Rep. IV, 388, 393. Nevertheless, he was adamant that ‘when we [the Commons] have sought concurrence of [the] Lords and they will not [comply], we have lawful power to do it of ourselves’.386Harington’s Diary, 46.

When news of the king’s flight to the Scottish army at Newark reached Westminster on 6 May 1646, the Independents reacted angrily, while Marten – according to the secretary to the Scots commissioners, John Cheislie – ‘after his usual manner, talked treason’.387NAS, Clerk of Penicuik mss, GD 18/3110. The History of Parliament is grateful to Sir John Clerk of Penicuik for permission to publish extracts from this manuscript. Cheislie may have had to answer directly to Marten for these words after the letter in which he wrote them was intercepted by Parliament and a committee set up, on 8 May (to which Marten was named), for examining their author.388CJ iv. 540a. During the week that followed, Marten was a prominent member of the Commons’ team that sought to pressure the Scots and their allies in the Lords to hand over the king for incarceration in Warwick Castle.389CJ iv. 541b, 545b, 547b, 548a, 548b. In taking the Covenant on 24 June, Marten, Edmund Ludlowe II and other Independent Commons-men publicly interpreted the oath as a rebuke to the king for violating its terms.390CJ iv. 586a; Ludlow, Voyce, 141. Marten re-joined the battle against the ‘Scottified’ interest as a majority teller with Hesilrige on 27 June in favour of a declaration (probably penned by Fiennes) asserting the power of Parliament to alter the Newcastle propositions regardless of the wishes of the Scots.391CJ iv. 590b, 601b; LJ viii. 409a; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 57.

Marten and the London militants, 1646-7

Marten’s first public association with that scourge of the Presbyterian interest, John Lilburne, occurred on 9 July 1646, when he was named to another Independent-dominated committee – of which he was made chairman – to examine the circumstances surrounding the radical controversialist’s recent imprisonment at the hands of the Presbyterian faction in the Lords.392CJ iv. 611b; J. Peacey, ‘John Lilburne and the Long Parliament’, HJ xliii. 636-7. Although Marten was named two days later (11 July) to a committee for discovering those responsible for A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens – the ‘founding manifesto of the Levellers’ – which declaimed against Lilburne’s ‘illegal and barbarous imprisonment’, his sarcastic remarks that day about the City’s Presbyterian leadership reveal where his true sympathies lay.393CJ iv. 616a; ‘Richard Overton’, Oxford DNB. At the beginning of the civil war, declared Marten, the City fathers had stood tall in the defence of English liberties like ‘good Christians and true Englishmen’. Since then, however, they had abandoned honesty for self-interest and were now seeking merely to protect their ‘considerable estates’ and to procure royal pardons.394Ludlow, Mems. i. 142-3. Claims that The Remonstrance and several other proto-Leveller pamphlets – notably, The Interest of England Maintained – were co-authored by Marten, in collaboration with Walwyn and another future Leveller leader Richard Overton, rest on little more than the appearance in these works of overtly political content that does not feature in other Leveller tracts.395Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution ed. D. M. Wolfe (New York, 1944), 8-9, 109, 111; D.R. Adams, ‘The Religion of Richard Overton, the Leveller, 1642-9’ (Queen’s Univ. Ontario Ph.D. thesis, 1998), 127, 130, 139, 153, 154, 161. Certainly a work as critical of the Commons as the Remonstrance is not a strong candidate for addition to Marten’s corpus.396Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 226-7; Writings of William Walwyn ed. McMichael, Taft, 223.

Marten’s chairmanship of the 9 July and 3 October 1646 committees reflected, in part, his close acquaintance with Lilburne and – by that autumn at the latest – Overton. Lilburne claimed that by mid-1646 he had often enjoyed Marten’s company and had admired ‘those gallant discourses for the liberty of this nation that have flowed from you’. At that time, he had regarded Marten as ‘one of the great pillars of the liberties of the commons of England’, a man whose speeches since his re-admission to the House had won him national renown. Lilburne would commend Marten for his ‘fair and just play’ as chairman of the committee for the liberty of the commons. But like most of Lilburne’s parliamentary heroes, Marten soon fell from grace. By mid-1647, Lilburne was complaining bitterly that though the 9 July committee had passed ‘gallant and excellent votes [on his behalf]... yet you [Marten] (by your negligence and delay, if not willfulness) exasperated the spirits of the House of Lords against me and exposed me to their merciless fury and devouring indignation by delaying my report’.397J. Lilburne, The Resolved Mans Resolution (1647), 26-7 (E.387.4), The Juglers Discovered (1647), 1-2, 3, 4, 5 (E.409.22), Rash Oaths Unwarrantable, 2-4. Lilburne grew so angry at what he saw as Marten’s ‘dilatory and unjust delaying to make my report to the House’ that he published an open letter to him, asserting ‘that I cannot now style you either a friend to me, the commonwealth, or to justice, truth, or honesty, and of all men in the world, I should least have dreamed to have found such unworthy and unjust dealing from you’.398J. Lilburne, A Copy of a Letter Written to Collonell Henry Marten (1647, 669 f.11.46), Jonahs Cry out of the Whales Belly (1647), 9, 16 (E.400.5).

Yet much of Lilburne’s criticism of Marten was unjustified. Marten was by no means the most negligent and willful of Commons-men, and one obvious explanation for his perceived ‘remissness and slackness’ was simply that the House’s affairs were – as Marten put it in his draft reply to Lilburne – ‘so weighty, so various, so difficult [and] so continual’ as to make such delays inevitable.399Lilburne, Rash Oaths Unwarrantable, 56; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 78, f. 1. Realising, as he undoubtedly did, that the majority of Commons-men did not share his radical sympathies, Marten may well have arranged for the publication of one of Lilburne’s pamphlets late in 1646 – and possibly another in Lilburne’s defence by Marchamont Nedham – in an attempt to gather support more widely.400J. Lilburne, The Grand Plea of Lieut. Col. John Lilburne (1647), 1-2 (E.411.21); Peacey, ‘John Lilburne’, 639-40. In a pamphlet that has been attributed to Marten, published anonymously that November, the author referred approvingly to Lilburne and Overton as ‘the two prerogative archers of England’.401[?H. Marten], An Unhappie Game at Scotch and English (1646), 23-4 (E.364.3); Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 170; Barber, ‘The people of northern England and attitudes towards the Scots, 1639-51’, NH xxxv. 110-11. This propaganda campaign aside, Marten was apparently playing the long game in the Commons by withholding his report until he could be confident that the House would not reject it and thereby confirm the Lords’ authority in such cases as Lilburne’s – which was a very likely outcome given the Presbyterian majority in the Commons by early 1647. The self-obsessed Lilburne, however, was willing to have that precedent established so long as he could name and shame the Commons-men who had voted for it.402Lilburne, The Resolved Mans Resolution, 27; R. Overton, An Appeale from the Degenerate Representative Body the Commons of England (1647), 8 (E.398.28).

Overton, too, addressed several printed jeremiads to Marten as chairman of the 9 July and 3 October 1646 committees. In both Overton’s and Lilburne’s accounts of their dealings with the 3 October committee, Marten emerges in an ambiguous light – fully endorsing their conviction that the Lords had no valid jurisdiction over a commoner but willing for the moment to leave the two men ‘to their lordships’ arbitrary power’. Apparently Marten was anxious to avoid embroiling his committee in a head-on confrontation with the Lords. Overton conceded that Marten’s failure to deliver the report on Lilburne’s case had not arisen, as was generally supposed, through negligence or weakness in the face of lordly influence, but he warned that only diligent and faithful service could preserve Marten from ‘the tincture of such unjust and calumnious suspicions’.403R. Overton, The Commoners Complaint (1647), 1, 3, 10-12 (E.375.7); Overton, An Arrow against all Tyrants, 19, An Appeale, 7; Lilburne, Two Letters, 2; Lilburne, Anatomy of the Lords Tyranny, 21.

Whereas Lilburne appears to have parted political company with the Independent grandees in mid-1646, Marten’s tactful chairmanship of the 9 July and 3 October committees, and his tellerships with Hesilrige and Evelyn of Wiltshire, suggest that he remained broadly aligned with the New Model army’s leading patrons at Westminster for at least another year.404CJ iv. 521a; v. 45a, 238b; D. Holles, Mems. (1699), 60; Peacey, ‘John Lilburne’, 638. But it is very unlikely that he was privy to the grandees’ cabinet counsels – as is clear from the highly unusual spectacle of his tellership on 12 October 1646 with the Presbyterian leader Denzil Holles in a division concerning a report delivered by Oliver St John on the Newcastle propositions. The opposing tellers were the Independent grandees Hesilrige and William Pierrepont.405CJ iv. 691a.

The Irish question and settling religion

Although Marten was every bit as ‘fierce against the Scots’ as the Independent grandees could have wished, he remained equivocal as to the merits of prosecuting the war in Ireland.406Harington’s Diary, 30. On 24 April 1646 he was a teller with Hesilrige against providing funds for Ireland from the excise and compounding revenues – perhaps because this was an initiative of the Presbyterian-dominated Star Chamber Committee of Irish Affairs*.407Supra, ‘Committees for Ireland’; CJ iv. 521a. He may have been involved, at least peripherally, in sending forces and money to Ireland that summer – apparently as part of the Independents’ attempt to establish a military power base there under Parliament’s recently-appointed lord lieutenant Philip Viscount Lisle* – the earl of Leicester’s son and the earl of Northumberland’s nephew.408CJ iv. 628b, 641b.

Marten’s past criticism of both Leicester and Northumberland may help to explain his low profile in Irish affairs at Westminster during 1646-7. But his private papers also reveal his deep misgivings about the wisdom and justice of continuing the war in Ireland. In what was perhaps an effort to satisfy his own mind on this issue rather than to persuade his fellow Parliament-men, he drafted a position-paper late in 1646 by way of an ‘additional instruction’ to Viscount Lisle in which he made the case for making peace overtures to the Irish rebels. To those urging full-scale military commitment in Ireland, he warned that the king’s party in England – ‘viz. the greater part of the nobility, gentry and clergy of the kingdom’ – had been ‘quieted indeed, not reconciled, but waiting an opportunity to break out again and pursue their corrupt interests, directly opposite to the interest of the people’. Among his other arguments for seeking a negotiated settlement in Ireland were the growing division at home between Presbyterians and Independents, the rebels’ many strongholds and military experience, England’s financial exhaustion after the civil war and the ‘formidable growth of the French monarchy, [which] may give us cause to be as good husbands as we can of our men and ammunition’. To those who perceived the war in Ireland in terms of a godly crusade ‘and thinks this way to make all Christendom a Protestant’, he offered the sarcastic observation that they were surely descended ‘from those gallant ancestors that lie buried in Palestine, [whither] they were carried with a fervent desire to recover the Holy Land and beat the whole world into Christianity’. ‘Upon the whole matter’, he concluded, ‘I conceive it most acceptable to God and Christ, most agreeable with common justice, most consistent with the rules of policy, if not to grant them [the Irish rebels] almost any terms for peace, at least to hearken to their demands ... which for aught we know may be reasonable’.409Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 78, ff. 11-13. How the Commons would have reacted had Marten dared broadcast such controversial opinions is not hard to imagine.

Marten’s preferences when it came to a settlement of religion during the mid-1640s were not as idiosyncratic as his position on the war in Ireland – but nor were they entirely mainstream at Westminster. He described the ‘division concerning matters of religion’ among Parliament’s supporters as a quarrel ‘betwixt those [i.e. the Presbyterians] who seek to force all their brethren into one way of worship and those [i.e. the Congregationalists and sectaries] who would preserve their own liberty in opinion and practice so [long] as none be injured thereby’.410Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 78, f. 12. He thus favoured liberty of conscience and ‘practice’ (i.e. church worship) for all Protestants – and, indeed, for Catholics – so long as they posed no threat to civil order and parliamentary authority.411Williams, ‘Anatomy of a radical gentleman’, 125-6. On that basis, he could not tolerate jure divino Presbyterianism, but there is no evidence that he was wedded to any particular form of church government as an alternative.412Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 40-1.

No systematic theology or detailed programme of religious settlement can be reconstructed from Marten’s writings, and it is unlikely that he developed either. For Marten, the essentials of Christian belief were not hard to grasp – as he explained in a draft response to one of Lilburne’s diatribes: ‘let us be thankful that He [God] hath been pleased to make all those points very plain to us wherein our salvation is concerned’. To lead a Christian life, he believed, was simply a matter of rationally apprehending and obeying the divine law (i.e. natural law) that God had implanted in all men: ‘I believe that Jesus Christ was appointed by God the father rather to fulfill and expound the old law [natural law] then to make a new – if you [i.e. Lilburne] mean the moral law to which all men that ever were or shall be must be subject’.413Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 78, f. 2v; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 38-9. Lilburne, however, subscribed to a more radical strain of Protestant thought in which Christ was ‘the perfect law-maker and law-giver’, whose teachings left ‘no room at all ... for kings, Parliaments or any other power on earth to add to or detract from what he, by the eternally and everlasting assignment of his father, was to do in that particular’. Lilburne accounted it the highest form of treason to set up any earthly power as ‘supreme governor ... in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes’.414Lilburne, Rash Oaths Unwarrantable, 15. Marten, by contrast, was a trenchant Erastian.

His Apostles ... [were sent] expressly to reform our ordinary communication, not to restrain the magistrate from taking the best course he can to prevent offences ... I see no reason but any law that concerns men and is not contrary to God’s law may be enacted and executed by men ... When I shall have admitted the disclaiming of Christ’s kingship to be high treason, I have not confessed the putting the civil magistrate over ecclesiastical causes to be any such disclaiming.415Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 78, f. 2v.

Whereas Lilburne held that all matters of religious practice lay beyond the jurisdiction of the magistrate, Marten retorted that ‘when your church grows visible ... it is tangible, too, and comes within the purlieu [i.e. the limits] of the secular conusance [i.e. jurisdiction]’.416Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 78, f. 2v. Parliament had the right and authority to supervise church government, Marten insisted, but the church itself should not endeavour to coerce people’s consciences: ‘when Christ is contented to tolerate the tares among the corn’, he advised the Presbyterians in 1647, ‘I would not have you call toleration accursed, especially since you may be deceived in discerning tares from corn’. He favoured toleration – even for that ‘most damnable heretic and blasphemer’ (as Prynne termed him) Paul Best – because coercion was anti-Christian and humans were prone to error in discerning ‘the ways of salvation’. But his evident belief that the divine nature was unknowable cannot be construed as evidence of a scepticism so profound that he thought the distinction between ‘tares’ and ‘corn’ was purely a matter for speculation and was, for practical purposes, invalid to all but God alone.417Add. 71534, ff. 85v, 86; [W. Prynne], New Presbyterian Light Springing out of Independent Darkness (1647), 8 (E.400.24); Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 69-72.

Marten’s committee appointments in 1646-7 place him among that overwhelming majority in the Commons that was eager to use parliamentary authority to purge the universities and the church of ‘malignant’ ministers and to promote a godly preaching ministry.418CJ iv. 595b, 625b, 719b; v. 51b, 121a. At the same time, he was critical of the Presbyterians’ campaign to remove ministers they deemed insufficiently ‘godly and orthodox’ and to suppress unordained preachers: ‘as if nobody might labour in God’s husbandry, though they ask no wages, but such as have a humane title ... unto the tenth sheaf [i.e. tithes]’.419Add. 71534, f. 86. It was his Erastianism, however, rather than any positive commitment to Congregationalism or sectarianism that prompted him to join Hesilrige and Cornelius Holland in August and September 1646 in speaking against the ordinances for ordination of ministers and for preventing the spread of ‘heresy and blasphemy’.420Harington’s Diary, 34. Both pieces of legislation had been drafted in close consultation with the Westminster Assembly and were designed to augment the authority of the Presbyterian clergy. On 12 December, he was named to a committee for examining Jus Divinum Regiminis Ecclesiasticia – a controversial publication by London’s Presbyterian ministers in favour of jure divino Presbyterianism.421CJ v. 11a. The majority of MPs – Marten undoubtedly among them – were insistent that Parliament should remain the final arbiter on questions of church government.

Unhappy games as Scotch and English, 1646-7

Marten and his friend Thomas Chaloner emerged in the autumn of 1646 in the vanguard of the Independents’ war of words with the Scots over custody of the king. Responding to papers from the Scots commissioners concerning Charles’s future disposal, Chaloner made a speech in the House on 26 October in which he refuted the Scots’ right to any valid interest in the king’s person whilst he remained on English soil. Although aimed ostensibly at the Scots, this so-called ‘speech without doors’ was as much a critique of the parliamentary Presbyterians for backing the Scots’ insistence that Charles should be allowed to come to London to conclude a personal treaty.422Supra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’; An Answer to the Scotch Papers...Concerning the Disposal of the King’s Person (1646, E.361.7). When Chaloner’s speech was published in November, it provoked a minor pamphlet war.423A.N.B. Cotton, ‘London Newsbooks in the Civil War’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1971), 144. Numerous writers leapt to Chaloner’s defence or to refute the Scots’ papers – among them, Marten.

Marten’s first published contribution to the speech-without-doors controversy was a pamphlet rebutting one of Chaloner’s critics. At several points in this work, Marten demanded the king’s execution.

Shall a poor indigent, wretched, inconsiderate man suffer death ... for a particular offence, against a particular law? And shall he [the king] and his escape scot-free that for sixteen years without intermission brake the law, turned the government upside down, null’d Parliaments and, when craft and cruelty would not suffice, raised a most unnatural war against this Parliament, intermixing the most devilish plots that ever were to destroy both Parliament and City, murthering and destroying the most religious and peaceable people in all places.

Did not the Covenant itself, asked Marten, require Parliament to bring Charles

to condign punishment as the chief of all delinquents? Can the death of Strafford, [the archbishop of] Canterbury or any of the rest be justified if he escape that set them on work and hath infinitely transcended them in treasons against the commonwealth? ... It could not be just to defend his person in the opposition and destruction of true religion and the liberties of the people, but [rather] to destroy him as any other, nay, as the king and the chief captain of the destroyers.

‘Willful murthers’, insisted Marten, demanded a just reckoning, notwithstanding ‘all king-craft, clergy-craft and court-craft in the world’. Scottish claims to a joint interest in the king’s disposal he dismissed partly on the basis of what amounted to might is right: ‘If England and Scotland be truly measured, England is by far the greater and much more populous, and in all societies the major part is conclusive or they can never come to any determination, and then England’s resolution in this cause ought rather to conclude Scotland’.424A Corrector of the Answerer to the Speech out of Doores (1646, E.364.9). Although the Independent grandees shared Marten’s dismissive attitude towards Scottish confederalist claims, they would have been horrified by his assertion that the Commons’ vote of May for confining the king to Warwick Castle implied an intent to have him executed.425Corrector of the Answerer, 6.

What was probably Marten’s second published contribution to the speech without doors controversy – a pamphlet entitled An Unhappie Game at Scotch and English – was addressed directly to the Scots commissioners. His main purpose here was to portray the Scots as slaves to the king’s will, which he contrasted with Charles’s ‘legal will’ by which he was required to comply with the ‘orders and determinations of his great council, the two Houses of Parliament ... the sovereign power of the land’. Marten advised ‘gude brother Jockie’ that English

laws, lives and liberties are more precious then to be prostitute to the exorbitant boundless will of any mortal Stuart under the sun ... for we will spend a little more of our blood before that come to pass. You may as well twirl up your blue caps and hurl them at the moon as to expect England’s assent unto that. No, no, dear brethren, we are neither such fools nor such cowards or yet such traitors to ourselves or to our posterities, to our laws or to our liberties, as – after we, by the blood of us and our children, have gained a conquest over that arbitrary faction – so basely to return like sows to the mire or dogs to the vomit.

To Marten, the king’s flight to the Scottish army at Newark and the Scots’ demand for a personal treaty with Charles were a deep-laid Presbyterian and French design ‘to subjugate the necks of the freemen of England to your Scotch monarchical yoke of bondage’.426An Unhappie Game at Scotch and English, passim. Anxious to frustrate this perceived plot, Marten secured membership of four committees during the winter of 1646-7 to justify the Commons’ terms for receiving Charles – which included his confinement to Holdenby House – in the face of objections from the Lords and the Scots.427CJ v. 30a, 33a, 42b, 65a.

The impact of Marten’s contribution to the Independents’ campaign against the Scots and their allies in 1646 is hard to assess. An Unhappie Game at Scotch and English certainly angered the Commons, which declared it a ‘scandalous’ and incendiary work and ordered the Committee for Examinations* to discover its author and publishers.428CJ iv. 731b-732a. When it came to Parliament’s official communications with the Scots, the House put its trust in Chaloner, Fiennes and Pierrepont rather than in Marten. His publications may well have heightened English dislike of the Scots, but they were counter-productive insofar as they helped to convince Edinburgh that the Independents’ radical agenda extended to removing and possibly executing the king.

Marten and the City radicals, 1647

The rate at which Marten received appointments in the Commons fell markedly during the Presbyterian ascendency at Westminster in the early months of 1647. He was named to only two committees in February, two in March and two in April.429CJ v. 70a, 75b, 105b, 117b, 151b, 153a. On 20 March, he presented a petition to the Commons from a group of City radicals in response to the House’s imprisonment the day before (19 Mar.) of Nicholas Tew and Major Alexander Tulidah for promoting the so-called ‘large petition’, requesting (among other things) complete freedom of religious expression and the removal of the king’s and the Lords’ negative voice. The 20 March petitioners denied all suggestion that the large petition was ‘scandalous or seditious’ and they complained at the hard usage of Tew and Tulidah by the Commons committee set up to investigate it. The House gave the 20 March petition a reading but otherwise ignored it altogether.430CJ v. 118b, 119a; Add. 31116, pp. 609-10; Bodl. Clarendon 29, f. 165; The English Levellers ed. A. Sharp (Cambridge, 1998), 73-87.

It is evident from Marten’s committee appointments and tellerships during the spring and summer of 1647 that he was firmly aligned with the army in its quarrel with the Presbyterian interest. However, there is no evidence that he was in close political contact with militant elements among the soldiery or was party to their talks with the City radicals.431CJ v. 162b, 166a, 175a, 190b, 201b, 211a, 237b, 238a, 238b, 255b. He undoubtedly welcomed the army’s seizure of the king early in June, and he was a minority teller with the Independent Sir Michael Livesay on 15 June against ordering Sir Thomas Fairfax* to return Charles to parliamentary custody. The majority tellers were the Presbyterian grandees Holles and Glynne.432CJ v. 211a. On 24 June, Marten reported, and may well have drafted, a brief letter to Parliament’s commissioners with the army, apprising them of votes of both Houses that, in effect, gave the king permission to stay at Fairfax’s headquarters.433CJ v. 222a; LJ ix. 292a.

Although granted leave of absence on 22 July 1647, Marten was named the next day (23 July) to an Independent-dominated committee to prepare a parliamentary declaration against the ‘solemn engagement’ that a group of London Presbyterians had taken the day before, pledging to restore Charles on the basis of his letter of 12 May (in which he had promised to abandon episcopacy for three years and the militia for ten).434CJ v. 253b, 255b; Juxon Jnl. 161. Reported by Marten that same day (23 July), the declaration was approved by the Lords and ordered to be published. Marten’s declaration denounced the engagement as ‘tending to the embroiling the kingdom in a new war’ and warned that any who subscribed it ‘shall be deemed and adjudged guilty of high treason’.435CJ v. 256a; LJ ix. 354b; [Prynne], New Presbyterian Light, 8; A Message from His Excellency Sir Thomas Fairefax and the Councell of Warre (1647), 6 (E.399.31). This heavy-handed response to the engagement very probably helped to trigger the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster on 26 July. Marten was among those Parliament-men who fled Westminster for the protection of the army, and he signed this group’s declaration of 4 August in which Fairfax and his men were eulogised for their ‘Christian, noble and public affection to the good, peace and prosperity of this kingdom and ... faithfulness to the true interest of the English nation’.436LJ ix. 385b. Having resumed his seat after the army’s triumphal march into London a few days later, he was named to committees on 11 and 18 August for repealing the votes and legislation passed during the absence of the Speaker and the other fugitive Members.437CJ v. 272a, 278a.

Between returning to Westminster in August 1647 and abandoning the House in May 1648 to resume his military career, Marten was named to 37 committees and served as a teller in seven divisions.438CJ v. 314b, 335b, 337a, 338a, 360a, 371a, 376b. With the Presbyterian ascendancy broken, he tendered a petition to the Commons on 20 August from divers ‘well-affected’ London citizens on behalf of Lilburne and Overton, who were still prisoners at the Lords’ pleasure. After giving this petition a reading on 26 August, the House referred it to ‘the committee where Mr Marten has the chair’ – probably the 3 October 1646 committee – and charged him with reporting the whole matter to the House within a fortnight.439CJ v. 279b, 285a. However, it was not until 14 September that Marten was allowed to make his report, which included the committee’s recommendation that Lilburne receive reparations for his hard usage by the Lords. Evidently the House did not like what it heard, for it referred the report back to Marten’s committee with an order (possibly secured by Cromwell) to ‘search precedents [of] what has been done in cases of like nature’.440CJ v. 294a, 296a, 297a, 301a; J. Lilburne, The Additional Plea of Lieut. Col. John Lilburne (1647), 22-3 (E.411.12); Lilburne, Two Letters, 2; Perfect Occurrences, no. 37 (10-17 Sept. 1647), 253 (E.518.33); Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 193. It would seem that Marten had tried to make a case for Lilburne with reference to more radical arguments than the House had found agreeable. After further delays, Marten made his second report on 15 October, and the reception he met with this time was apparently even frostier. The House read the Lords’ charges against Lilburne and then referred his case to a new committee, chaired by John Maynard, to which Marten was the last man named.441CJ v. 327a, 329b, 331b, 334a.

On 28 October 1647, Marten made a last attempt to move the House for Lilburne’s release, but it ‘took no effect at all’.442Lilburne, Additional Plea, 17. Lilburne would later refer to Sir John Maynard* (no relation to John Maynard) as ‘my true friend’ and credited him rather than Marten with securing his eventual release.443Infra, ‘Sir John Maynard’; J. Lilburne, The Legall Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England Revived (1649), 19 (E.560.14). But in the autumn of 1647, Lilburne declared himself Marten’s ‘assured, reconciled, faithful friend ... your late endeavours to make my report hath given me full satisfaction for your former negligence about that very business’.444Lilburne, Two Letters, 1, 6. Another reason for this improvement in relations between Marten and Lilburne was their convergence that autumn in common opposition to the Independent and army grandees’ continuing efforts to treat with the king on the basis of the Heads of Proposals.445Lilburne, Two Letters, 4-5; Peacey, ‘John Lilburne’, 642-3.

Leading the radical Independents, 1647-8

Having warned the Independent grandees in August 1647 that if they sought to ‘enslave the people they should be Jews, Turks etc. to him’, Marten broke openly with them in September.446Harington’s Diary, 58. His addition to the second Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports on 9 September, together with Vane I, Fiennes, Mildmay and Thomas Rainborowe, suggests that the grandees still trusted him in the front-line of their assault upon the Presbyterians’ power base at Westminster.447CJ v. 297b; LJ ix. 403b; Indeed, Marten would emerge as one of the most active members of the CACP and played an important part in securing Rainborowe’s appointment as vice-admiral of the fleet in place of the Presbyterian sympathiser William Batten.448Supra, ‘Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports’; CJ v. 317b, 428b, 505b, 518b. But when, on 23 September, it was moved to re-open peace negotiations with the king, Marten broke decisively with the grandees, serving as a teller with Sir Peter Wentworth against the motion (the winning tellers were Hesilrige and Evelyn of Wiltshire).449CJ v. 314b. In the debate that accompanied this division, Marten made his thoughts on the issue very plain: ‘you disable an accessory, who is in arms against you, being constable [of the Tower], and still this man [Charles], who is the principal, he will be a king. I hope ... that God so harden his [Charles’s] heart that he refuses your propositions’.450‘Boys diary’, 149.

The vote on 23 September 1647, and a similar division the previous day, marked the emergence at Westminster of a faction of radical Independents – headed by Chaloner, Grey of Groby, Marten, Mildmay, Morley, Rainborowe, Scot II and Wentworth – that stood vehemently opposed to any further treating with Charles.451Bodl. Clarendon 30, ff. 171, 189; Clarke Pprs. i. 230-1; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 85; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 198. In October, Marten lashed out not only against Charles but also Cromwell, whom he described as ‘king-ridden’.452Mems. of the Great Civil War ed. Cary, i. 355. So violent were Marten and his radical friends against the king ‘and all eminency’, that it was believed some of Cromwell’s party ‘are like to side with them out of fear’.453Bodl. Clarendon 30, f. 171.

Successfully challenging the grandees’ ‘lordly interest’ would require the cultivation of allies in the army, and it was perhaps with this in mind that Marten found his way onto committees during the autumn and winter of 1647-8 for redressing the soldiers’ grievances over pay and conditions. He also secured joint chairmanship, with Sir Thomas Dacres, of the committee to recompense soldiers’ widows.454CJ v. 320a, 322a, 334a, 348a, 360a, 397b; Vernon, Baker, ‘What was the first Agreement of the People?’, 49. Cromwell suspected that Marten and Rainborowe were behind the publication by radical elements in the army of ‘several printed papers’, including the Agreement of the People, which went to press early in November. Marten’s cipher-keys for late 1647 and what we know about his circle of friends during the late 1640s and early 1650s certainly put him in close political proximity with those now regarded as the architects of the Leveller movement – namely, Rainborowe, Edward Sexby (a private trooper) and their civilian advisers and agents Maximillian Petty and John Wildman*.455LJ x. 410b; HMC 13th Rep. IV, 401-2; E. Vernon, ‘‘A firme and present peace; upon grounds of common right and freedome’, in The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution ed. P. Baker, E. Vernon (Basingstoke, 2012), 197; Vernon, Baker, ‘What was the first Agreement of the People?’, 45, 55-9.

Yet although Marten undoubtedly shared many of the constitutional concerns of this group, his writings and political activities in the six months after the collapse of the Presbyterian counter-revolution in August 1647, do not give the impression that he had lost all faith in the Commons or was now committed to the establishment of a foundational constitution that would be beyond parliamentary reach. According to several royalist sources, Marten and other (un-named) Parliament-men met with a large number of what were variously described as ‘sectaries’, ‘agitators’ and ‘weaver Levellers’ in mid-November at a tavern in Aldersgate, ‘where speeches were made against the king and the Parliament’. This meeting was part of a radical campaign in which papers were posted in many churches ‘and upon several gates and ports throughout the City’ on 14 November, ‘in the name of a hundred thousand freeborn subjects of England’, demanding deliverance ‘from their bloody taskmasters that had sat these seven years [i.e. the Long Parliament]’. It is worth noting, however, that there was no mention in these reports of the recently published Agreement. And although accused in the House of inciting the people to raise tumults, Marten had apparently encouraged the Aldersgate radicals to petition or otherwise press the Commons for redress of their grievances.456CJ v. 359b; Add. 78198, f. 21; Mercurius Elencticus no. 3 (12-19 Nov. 1648), 20-1 (E.416.13). In February 1648, he would be implicitly critical of the standard Leveller line, as ‘preached in some pamphlets’, that ‘all the quarrel betwixt the Parliament and the king were ... which of them should domineer over the people’. Before 1648, it seems, he continued to regard Parliament – or at least those of its members not corrupted by Presbyterianism or grandee blandishments – as a shield against monarchical tyranny rather than, as the Levellers did, a tyrannical authority in its own right.457Marten, The Parliaments Proceedings Justified, in Declining a Personall Treaty with the King (1648), 15 (E.462.2); Williams, ‘Anatomy of a radical gentleman’, 131.

Marten’s opposition to negotiating with Charles did not preclude his appointment to five committees in the autumn of 1647 relating to Parliament’s re-drafted peace propositions.458CJ v. 321b, 327b, 336a, 346b, 351b. On 16 October, he partnered Cromwell as a teller on what seems to have been a non-partisan division concerning ‘the manner of the address to be made to the king’.459CJ v. 335b. Determined, as ever, to make any peace terms as severe as possible, he was a teller on 20 October in favour of increasing the number of royalists named in the propositions who would be exempted from royal pardon.460CJ v. 337a. In the debates on the religious component of this projected settlement, he joined John Selden in advocating toleration for Catholics. A spiritual tyrant abroad (i.e. the pope), insisted Marten, posed less of a threat to the state than the temporal ambitions of Presbyterian clergy at home.461Add. 15393, ff. 412v-413, 425v-426; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, iii. 376-7. In typically provocative fashion, he chose a debate on the propositions on 5 November – Guy Fawkes’ night – to offer a petition to the House, requesting liberty of conscience for Catholics. Cornelius Holland supported him, but Holland’s grandee associate Sir Henry Vane I noted that ‘formerly one presenting a petition on behalf of papists should be expelled from the House’.462‘Boys diary’, 150.

The king’s flight from Hampton Court on 11 November 1647 heightened ill-feeling between the radical Independents and the grandees. Appointed to committees on 12 November to investigate the king’s escape from parliamentary custody, Marten was a teller on 16 November against a motion backed by the grandees that the best place for Charles’s residence was Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight.463CJ v. 357a, 360a. Presumably, Marten endorsed the public prayer of the Independent divine Philip Nye that ‘it would please God to turn his [Charles’s] heart or else bring him [to London] with condign punishment’.464Bodl. Clarendon 30, f. 183v; Mercurius Elencticus no. 10 (26 Jan.-2 Feb. 1648), 71-2 (E.425.7). Marten and Rainborowe accused Cromwell and Henry Ireton* of complicity in the king’s escape and therefore felt justified in calling for the two officers’ impeachment on charges of treason.465Add. 78198, f. 21; Bodl. Clarendon 30, f. 183v; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, iv. 21. When Rainborowe and Thomas Scot II were reportedly suspended from the House on 18 November for having incited the army to mutiny at Corkbush Field, it was rumoured that Marten, Chaloner and Mildmay – ‘who are branded to be the most bloody minded against the king’ – would soon follow.466BL, Verney mss: A. Denton to Ralph Verney*, 18 Nov. 1647 (M636/8); Bodl. Clarendon 30, ff. 188-9. Marten clashed with the Independent grandees again on 27 November during a ‘great debate in the House of Commons from eight in the morning until eight at night’ over whether to agree with the Lords in sending the Four Bills to the king. ‘When one descends to fight or play with one’s servants’, he argued

they are then equal, but when the master [i.e. the king] had overcome his servant [i.e. Parliament], the master remains the master and the servant is still the servant ... You can treat with the Irish rebels, and if you reduce them to peace you are again over them. But if you treat with the king and bring him to peace, he is over you.467‘Boys diary’, 153.

At the end of this debate, Marten and Morley were tellers against sending the Four Bills, losing the division by nine votes to Algernon Sydney and Evelyn of Wiltshire. Marten and his fellow radicals took this loss badly and accused the grandees of being ‘altogether for the king’s interest’.468CJ v. 371a; Add. 78198, f. 28; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 306-7. On 7 December, he was a minority teller on a division concerning custody of the great seal in which the opposing tellers were Hesilrige and Evelyn.469CJ v. 376b.

Marten was prepared to cooperate with the grandees only when it came to defending Parliament’s proceedings concerning the king against the remonstrations of the Scots commissioners.470CJ v. 367a, 385a, 404a. In January and February 1648, he published (under his own name) two more trenchant rebuttals of the Scots’ confederalist claims to a joint interest in the settlement of affairs in England. The condition of English, he insisted, would be ‘lower and more contemptible if we should suffer you [the Scots] to have your will of us in this particular, [than] if we had let the King have his’. He criticised the Scots commissioners in particular as royal stooges and for their effrontery in seeking the ‘disposing, disbanding, dismembering, catechizing and reviling this army of ours – the greatest bulwark, under God, of our liberties, that yet had proved ineffectual if your counsels had been followed or your importunities regarded’.471Marten, The Independency of England Endeavored to be Maintained (1648, E.422.16); The Parliaments Proceedings Justified.

Following the king’s rejection of the Four Bills, the Commons set up a nine-man committee on 3 January 1648 – to which Marten and Chaloner were named in first and second place – to prepare a declaration justifying the vote of no addresses.472CJ v. 416a; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 22 (8-15 Feb. 1648), sig. Y2 (E.427.7). Widely perceived as a major step towards the Independents ‘settling the republic they have long since resolved on and modelled’, the vote was welcomed by Marten and his ‘regiment of new lights’ in the Commons – which, again, suggests that he had not yet abandoned faith in Parliament as an instrument of constitutional reform.473Bodl. Clarendon 30, ff. 288, 291; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 17 (4-11 Jan. 1648), sig. Rv (E.422.17). Rather than show forbearance towards the king and thereby ‘continue us for ever in our distractions’, Parliament would ‘settle the commonwealth without him who first deserted it and is to this day set in his heart upon being either an absolute tyrant over us or no king’.474Marten, The Parliaments Proceedings Justified, 14; [Marten], A Word to Mr Wil. Prynn, 12. To those, such as the earl of Northumberland, who saw the vote as a threat to the ancient constitution, Marten responded that ‘he would not have us approve of or stick to any government because it’s that we found, unless it be good and for the safety of the people’.475‘Boys diary’, 158. Rumours circulating in January that Marten had seriously contemplated assassinating Cromwell – who, with Ireton, had figured prominently in securing the vote of no addresses – are hard to credit. If there had been such a plot, Marten told the House, he had played no part in it and ‘disapproved of the business utterly’.476G. Masterson, The Triumph Stain’d (1648), 11-12 (E.426.18); ‘Boys diary’, 158. Similarly, a pamphlet published in January, relating a Commons’ speech that Sir John Maynard had supposedly made in answer to criticism by Marten of the king and the ‘fundamental laws’, was either bogus or delivered the previous autumn.477Infra, ‘Sir John Maynard’; A Speech in Answer to Mr Martyn (1648, E.422.32).

Marten received no Commons appointments in February 1648, but he seems to have remained in or about Westminster, where he doubtless heard the rumours that Cromwell and other Independent grandees were anxious to re-open talks with the king on the basis of the Heads.478Bodl. Clarendon 30, f. 291; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 24 (22-29 Feb. 1648), sig. Aa4v (E.429.12); ‘David Jenkins’, Oxford DNB. A correspondent of William Hamilton, 1st earl of Lanark, reported in February that ‘Cromwell desired a meeting to be reconciled to Marten, but they parted much more enemies then they met’.479Hamilton Pprs. ed. Gardiner, 148-9, 154. March would be one of Marten’s busiest months in the House since his re-admission in 1646. His two reports from the committee for major-generals, approving the pay claims of Richard Browne II (for over £9,000) and Grey of Groby, met with the House’s approval, and on 20 March he was entrusted with amending an ordinance prepared by Giles Grene for settling the jurisdiction of the court of admiralty, which he reported on 28 March and (probably) 1 April.480Supra, ‘Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports’; CJ v. 476b, 477a, 477b, 499b, 505b, 506a, 518b, 523a. Aside from the abortive bill of 1641-3 for ‘confirmation of the subjects’ liberties’, this was possibly the only major piece of legislation that Marten had a hand in drafting between the opening of the Long Parliament and Pride’s Purge.

Marten’s Leveller moment, 1648

The spring of 1648 seems to have marked an important shift in Marten’s political thinking. By late March, he was becoming impatient with Parliament’s failure to act more decisively on the vote of addresses, and he demanded ‘that they might go through ... with their work, and ... take order for deposing of the king, for as long as they did things thus by halves the rude multitude would always be unquiet until they knew what they must trust to’.481Bodl. Clarendon 31, f. 38v. But reports received that month by the Scottish Engager the earl of Lanark give a different impression of Marten – that he had urged the Commons ‘not to differ so much but either to be all for the king or all against him’, and that ‘if we must have that government [monarchy] we had better have this king and oblige him then to have him obtruded upon us by the Scots and owe his restitution to them’.482Hamilton Pprs. Addenda ed. S.R. Gardiner (Cam. Soc. n.s. liii), 20; Hamilton Pprs. ed. Gardiner, 170. More remarkable still, Lanark was informed that Marten, notwithstanding his ‘severe speeches and writings against the Scottish affairs’, had sent ‘a great confidant of his’ to the Scots’ English ally Lionel Copley*

entreating him to use his best endeavours to reconcile [Marten] to Scotland, and that he and his party (which would appear for monarchy) might be received into that of his Majesty, and that there is nothing which they would not do to destroy Cromwell and his party, who was the falsest of mankind.

If the Scots would support him, Marten allegedly assured Copley, he was confident he could lead four ‘mutinous’ army regiments against the Cromwellians. Copley reportedly encouraged Marten’s hopes of Scottish support, ‘and he doubted not to give him a good accompt, providing that he [Marten] would be as constant to these second thoughts as he had been to the first’.483NAS, GD 406/1/8277; Hamilton Pprs. Addenda ed. Gardiner, 24.

Nothing is known of Marten’s activities or whereabouts in April 1648. But early in May, two seemingly contradictory Commons speeches were fathered on him. In the first, published in a royalist newsbook, he declared his abhorrence of ‘the very name of monarchy and was resolved never to live under that government’.484Mercurius Elencticus no. 23 (26 Apr.-3 May 1648), 174 (E.438.7). In the second, as related by correspondents of both Lanark and Sir Edward Hyde, Marten admitted that

hitherto he had been against the king, but because they [the Commons] would have one, he was contented, as seeing no possibility to be governed without one, and therefore he proposed that, although they had very hardly used both the king and his party, yet that they might join to restore them and not to submit to the Scots, who would ruin them all.485Bodl. Clarendon 31, f. 87; Hamilton Pprs. Addenda ed. Gardiner, 34.

If these reports bear any relation to Marten’s actual words, it appears that he was in a state of considerable political perplexity by May 1648. The grandees’ renunciation, late in April, of the vote of no addresses, and the likelihood of an imminent Scottish invasion, had apparently rendered a restoration of the king, and even some kind of deal with the Scots, less unpalatable to him than the prospect of a victorious ‘military aristocracy’ under Cromwell and the grandees. That being the case, he appears to have moved closer to the Levellers during early 1648 and to have accepted, at least in part, their diagnosis of a Parliament corrupted beyond redemption and their readiness to view Charles as a counterweight to the power of the army and Independent grandees.

Marten was apparently present in the Commons on 10 May 1648, when he was named to a committee for preparing a letter to the Scottish Parliament.486CJ v. 555b. But by late May, he had ‘withdrawn himself from the City into Berkshire’, where (according to Mercurius Pragmaticus) he

bids defiance to the Houses and all their messages and preaches to the holy tribe of Levellers there and in the army, “come out of her my people” ... Harry vows to come on with his thousands against king and Parliament [and] to scourge the Members for their hypocrisy in voting [for] a king when he knows they were resolved to have no king.487SP28/205, pt. 3, ff. 2-3v; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 11 (6-13 June 1648), sig. L4 (E.447.5).

Ignoring orders from Parliament and ‘strange obstructions’ from the authorities in Berkshire, Marten raised, at his own expense, a troop of ‘honest men’ to fight ‘on the behalf of the people of England for the recovery of their freedom and for common justice, against [all] tyranny and oppression whatsoever’. He claimed authority for his actions – and, more specifically, to issue military commissions – not from Parliament but ‘by virtue of that right which I was born to as an Englishman and in pursuance of that duty which I owe to my said country’.488LJ x. 302b; Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 197; Clarke Pprs. ii. 56; S. Barber, ‘‘A bastard kind of militia’, localism, and tactics in the second civil war’, in Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution ed. I. Gentles, J. Morrill, B. Worden (Cambridge, 1998), 138-9; C. Durston, ‘Henry Marten and the high shoon of Berks.’, Berks. Arch. Jnl. lxx. 89-90, 93. These radical formulations and the ‘uncivil speeches’ of Marten’s troops towards Parliament are consistent with newsbook reports during the summer that Parliament’s resolve to have a personal treaty with Charles had turned Marten against not only the king and the Lords but also the Commons – all of which he now regarded as ‘confederate’ with the royalists and the Scots in ‘the enslaving of the people’. Marten, it was said, had become

mightily taken with a novel doctrine that the supreme power and authority is inherently in the people and to them doth ... daily preach in the habit of a Leveller, proposing unto them that they ought not to acknowledge any power above them or do homage or yield obedience to any, they being a free people, subsisting of themselves.489Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 21 (15-22 Aug. 1648), sigs. Aa3v, Bb2v (E.460.21); no. 22 (22-29 Aug. 1648), sig. A2v (counterfeit edn. not in Thomason); [Walker], Hist. of Independency, 139; Anarchia Anglicana (1649), 23, 34 (E.570.4); Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 18-19; ‘A bastard kind of militia’, 138-9, 140; Durston, ‘Marten and the high shoon of Berks.’, 92.

Marten’s troops, who included Levellers (or those who would later be described as such), certainly showed no respect for any higher authority, plundering parliamentarians and royalists apparently indiscriminately.490Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 199; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 21 (15-22 Aug. 1648), sigs. Aa3v, Bb2v; HMC Portland, i. 495; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 37; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 280; ‘William Eyre’, Oxford DNB; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 371; Durston, ‘Marten and the high shoon of Berks.’, 91; Barber, ‘A bastard kind of militia’, 139-40. In August 1648, the Commons, alarmed by reports coming out of Berkshire, summoned Marten to attend the House and declared his forces ‘disturbers of the peace’ and enjoined the county authorities to ‘apprehend them and proceed against them accordingly’.491CJ v. 673a, 676a. But ‘rebel Master Marten’ ‘pished at the news, refusing not only to come but to read or so much as hearken to their summons’.492Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 22, sig. A3 (counterfeit edn.); Mercurius Elencticus no. 40 (23-30 Aug. 1648), 326 (E.461.20). His letter to the Commons in mid-August, in which he explained and excused his proceedings, ‘could barely conceal the contempt he felt for that institution and its sensibilities’.493Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 197; Durston, ‘Berks. and its County Gentry’, i. 149. ‘Now they may truly be called the king’s two Houses’, he would later recall, ‘and as diligently act his part as if it were their own’.494[Marten], A Word to Mr Wil. Prynn, 13. In order to evade parliamentary forces sent into Berkshire to suppress them, Marten and his ‘mad boys’ withdrew first into Oxfordshire and then Leicestershire and, finally, into Nottinghamshire.495Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 22, sig. A3 (counterfeit edn.); no. 22 (22-29 Aug. 1648), sig. Dd2v (E.461.17); no. 23 (29 Aug.-5 Sept. 1648), sig. Ee2 (E.462.8); Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 179; Durston, ‘Marten and the high shoon of Berks.’, 93; Barber, ‘A bastard kind of militia’, 141-2, 144.

Marten had evidently sought to cure himself of the uncharacteristic political uncertainty that had gripped him in the spring of 1648 by abandoning his trust in the Commons and embracing a Leveller, or Leveller-like, position in which sovereign power derived immediately from the people, and Parliament was scorned as an instrument of oppression. A ‘Leveller’ manifesto published in August, England’s Troublers Troubled, was attributed to him by Clement Walker*, although it bears no resemblance stylistically to his other writings.496[Walker], Hist. of Independency, 139; Englands Troublers Troubled, or the Just Resolutions of the Plaine-men of England (1648, E.459.11); H.N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (1961), 340-2. And given his military escapades in Berkshire and the midlands during August and September, little credence can be attached to Marchamont Nedham’s claim that the Levellers’ petition to the Commons of 11 September was ‘of Harry’s own framing’.497Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 25 (12-19 Sept. 1648), sig. Ii2 (E.464.12); Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 232-4. Not surprisingly, Marten was declared absent without excuse when the House was called on 26 September.498CJ vi. 34a.

Pride’s Purge and the regicide, 1648-9

Marten had made his peace with the army, if not Parliament, by late November 1648, when he was nominated with senior officers (among them Ireton) and the Commons-men Chaloner, Rigby I and Scot I to the Levellers’ committee for redrafting the Agreement of the People. Of these ‘honest’ Commons-men, only Marten attended the committee’s meetings – the first of which was held at army headquarters at Windsor. Marten also joined Lilburne, Petty, Walwyn and Wildman after hours to work ‘in good earnest’ on the Agreement – although little progress had been made on this re-draft before the deliberations at Windsor were curtailed as a result of the officers’ decision to march on Westminster and purge Parliament.499J. Lilburne, The Picture of the Councel of State (1649), 22 (E.550.14); Lilburne, Legall Fundamental Liberties, 33-4; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 131.

Despite his Leveller friends’ opposition to the purge, Marten re-entered the Commons on 7 December 1648 – the day after Lieutenant-colonel Thomas Pride* had done his work – in the company of Cromwell, and he immediately proceeded to shift the Rump’s attention from the secluded Members to thanking the lieutenant-general for his ‘very great and eminently faithful services’.500CJ vi. 94b; Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 36 and 37 (5-12 Dec. 1648), sig. Ccc3v (E.476.2); [Walker], Anarchia Anglicana, 34. Marten attended the committee to redraft the Agreement when it reconvened at Whitehall in mid-December.501Lilburne, Legall Fundamental Liberties, 34. But the main focus of his political activity from the second half of December was the Rump. In a pamphlet attacking Prynne, published early in January 1649, he insisted that ‘the army was necessitated to what they have done [Pride’s Purge] and that the people could be no other way made safe, lying then upon the brinks of ruin’. He denied that the purge constituted a breach of parliamentary privilege, for had the secluded Members been intent on

their duty to the countries [sic] and towns, for which they were elected, they had not been [stopped]. But Mr Prynne and the rest of his imprisoned friends came with no such intention; they came to serve the common enemy ... For my part, I honour Parliaments so long as they act in order to the public good. But if, like standing pools, they only gather mud and filth, I think it very fit to cleanse them.502[Marten], A Word to Mr Wil. Prynn, 7, 14, 15.

In supporting Pride’s Purge and the army’s demand for trying the king, Marten effectively broke with the Levellers. The purge and an end to any further treating with the king were sufficient to restore his faith in the Commons and the army grandees. Overton would allege in 1649 that Marten had sold his loyalty to the Leveller cause for office and reward from the grandees.503R. Overton, Overton’s Defyance of the Act of Pardon (1649), 6, 7 (E.562.26); Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 22. But in truth, Marten’s support for the Levellers’ programme was always likely to be partial and problematic. His concept of freedom centred upon the doctrine of non-interference by non-representatives agencies (the king, the Lords, the Scots), and it was largely satisfied, therefore, by stripping the ancient constitution down to government by the people’s representative. His Commons’ supremacism certainly rested upon a vaguely conceptualised but passionately held theory of popular sovereignty. ‘The House of Commons’, he wrote, ‘though it be in nature the highest derived authority of England ... yet it is but derived of that and mediately [sic] of all the rest – being the people ...’. But his preference was that the people exercise this authority ‘representatively’, rather than through any direct constitutional intervention such as an Agreement of the People. ‘I always adored’ the Commons, he would later admit, and having never shown much interest in new constitutional forms, he was willing, after Pride’s Purge, to abandon the Levellers’ notion of a law paramount that regulated Parliament. As one of his biographers has argued, Marten was prepared to invest the Rump with almost unlimited authority, including the power to set aside the people’s wishes where they conflicted with the House’s own conception of the public good. For Marten, it was (in the words of one pamphleteer) not ‘vox but salus populi that is the supreme law’. Hence he tended to regard himself and his fellow Rumpers as the people’s ‘trustees’ – indeed, at one point in his writings he also used the phrase ‘overseers’.504Add. 71532, f. 19; Add. 71534, ff. 15, 15v; Ludlow, Voyce, 295; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 251-3, 254-5, 258-9, 263-4, 269, 282-3, 285, 272-4, 285, 317-19, 379-80, 386-7, 390; ‘Anatomy of a radical gentleman’, 130-1; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 266; B. Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2012), 287-8.

Marten, Thomas Chaloner and Thomas Scot I ‘stand out as the major parliamentary figures between the purge and the execution’.505Worden, Rump Parl. 37; God’s Instruments, 268. Marten was named to 28 committees between mid-December 1648 and the king’s execution, including the Committee for Plundered Ministers* (CPM) and the soon-to-be-abolished Derby House Committee*. He was also re-appointed to the Committee for Advance of Money, of which he was a frequent attender.506Supra, ‘Committee for Advance of Money’; CJ vi. 112a, 112b, 113b. His first committee appointment and tellership in the Rump, on 13 and 14 December respectively, signalled his keenness to repeal and disavow all proceedings concerning the treaty of Newport and to ignore the fate of the secluded Members.507CJ vi. 96b, 97a. According to one royalist newsbook, he joined Cromwell, Ireton, Scot and 14 other Members on 14 December in voting against re-admitting those secluded MPs against whom there was no charge.508Mercurius Elencticus no. 56 (12-19 Dec. 1648), 539 (E.476.36). Another newsbook lists him among those MPs who entered their dissent to the 5 December vote (that the king’s answers at Newport were a sufficient grounds for a settlement) on 20 December – the day on which this test of the Rump’s membership was introduced.509Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 39 (19-26 Dec. 1648), sig. Eee3 (E.477.30). However, his name does not appear on two much more authoritative such lists, and it is absent, too, from that in the draft journal of the House.510PA, MS CJ xxxiii, pp. 473-4; NLS, Adv. ms 35.5.11, f. 50; [W. Prynne], A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members Case (1660), 21, 23 (E.1013.22). Nevertheless, he was apparently present in the House on 20 December, for he was named that day to a committee for drafting a declaration justifying the dissent.511PA, MS CJ xxxiii, p. 474; Mercurius Elencticus no. 57 (19-26 Dec. 1648), 544 (E.477.31). It is not clear when he remedied his oversight – if such it was – in failing to take the dissent on 20 December, but it was very likely before the regicide.

Predictably, Marten was a leading figure in the Rump’s efforts to bring Charles to trial. Named to the 23 December 1648 committee ‘to consider how to proceed in a way of justice against the king’, he was also included on its successor of 29 December, which was to put into form the draft ordinance that Scot had reported the day before.512Infra, ‘Thomas Scot I’; CJ vi. 103a, 106a. It is likely that Marten chaired this second committee, for on 1 January 1649 he reported amendments to the ordinance.513CJ vi. 107b. When this first ordinance was rejected by the Lords, Marten was named with Scot, Augustine Garland, John Lisle and Gilbert Millington on 3 January 1649 to bring in a new ordinance to the same effect.514CJ vi. 110a. Anticipating that the Lords would reject the second ordinance for establishing a court to try Charles, the Rump set up a committee on 4 January, to which Marten was named first, for framing the three resolutions adopted later that day – that ‘the people are, under God, the original of all just power’; that the Commons, being chosen by the people, ‘have the supreme power in this nation’; and that ‘whatsoever is enacted or declared for law by the Commons, in Parliament assembled, hath the force of law, and all the people of this nation are concluded thereby, although the consent and concurrence of the king or House of Peers be not had thereunto’.515CJ vi. 111a. These republican propositions, which echoed standard phrases in Marten’s Commons supremacist rhetoric, may well have been of his own framing. ‘How many Members were of this mind a month ago’, asked one newsbook editor, ‘besides Henry Marten and seven more?’516The Moderate no. 26 (2-9 Jan. 1649), 245 (E.537.26); Worden, God’s Instruments, 279. Yet the 4 January votes were double-edged inasmuch as they cut against the Levellers as well as the king and Lords by determining that popular sovereignty should be exercised through the Commons. Marten’s name also headed the committee appointed later that same day (4 Jan.) to prepare a declaration justifying these votes, although particular care of this business was assigned not to him but to his friend Chaloner.517CJ vi. 111a.

Marten made what was perhaps his most distinctive contribution to the Rump’s republican lexicon as chairman of a committee established on 6 January 1649 to frame a new great seal.518CJ vi. 112b. He had championed the cause of Parliament having its own great seal since the early 1640s, in line with his conviction that ‘legislation [is] the supreme badge of the supreme power’ (in July 1643, the Commons had turned to Marten to provide an engraver for the new parliamentary seal).519Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 78, f. 1v; CJ ii. 759b; iii. 155b, 162a; iv. 699a, 703b, 714a; v. 117b, 376b; Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, 93-4; Williams, ‘Extremist tactics’, 143; ‘Anatomy of a radical gentleman’, 133. On 9 January, Marten reported the design that he and the committee had resolved upon – one side of the seal depicting a ‘map’ of England, Ireland and the Channel Islands and the legend ‘The Great Seal of England 1648’; the other side depicting the House of Commons in session, with the motto ‘In the first year of freedom by God’s blessing restored 1648’.520CJ vi. 115a; Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 492. That same day (9 Jan.), Marten was a minority teller with Ludlowe against admitting messengers sent from the Lords, and on 18 January he was a majority teller with Grey of Groby against seeking the Lords’ concurrence with the votes of 4 January.521CJ vi. 115a, 121a. Among those opposing the radical drift towards abolishing the Lords was Cromwell – an early manifestation of one of the major fault-lines in the Rump between worldly civilian republicans (notably, Marten, Chaloner and Henry Neville*) and godly army men such as Cromwell.522Bodl. Clarendon 34, f. 73v.

Marten’s other concerns during the first two months of the Rump, if his appointments in the House are any guide, included oversight of London’s municipal authorities, the funding and management of the navy, and diplomatic relations with the United Provinces. He was ordered to draft correspondence with Parliament’s agent at The Hague, Walter Strickland* and was named to committees to entertain the Dutch ambassadors and politely decline their request for a stay of proceedings against the king.523CJ vi. 103b, 105b, 112b, 113a, 116a, 117b, 123b, 124a, 125a.

As might be expected, Marten was one of the more active members of the high court of justice, attending 14 of the 18 meetings of the trial commission. He also attended all four sessions of the trial itself and was named to the committee the court set up on 15 and 25 January 1649 to draft the charge and sentence against Charles. At Marten’s own trial in 1660 for his complicity in the regicide, it was alleged that he and Cromwell had playfully marked each other’s faces with ink during the signing of Charles’s death warrant on 29 January.524Muddiman, Trial, 76, 89, 96, 102, 105, 133, 197, 202, 223, 227. There is no evidence that Marten shared the last-minute reservations as to the wisdom of executing the king that appear to have afflicted Chaloner and Scot.525Supra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’; infra, ‘Thomas Scot I’.

When he was not attending his duties as one of the king’s judges, Marten was preparing legislation for prohibiting any public officer from proclaiming the prince of Wales king ‘without the free consent of the people in Parliament’.526CJ vi. 124a, 125b; An Act Prohibiting the Proclaiming of Any Person to be King of England or Ireland (1649, E.1060.2). Consideration of the arrangements concerning the king’s corpse and his personal effects and papers was assigned on 31 January specifically to Marten’s care.527CJ vi. 127a. His loyalty to the Rump was acknowledged on 2 February, when the House ordered that the troops he had raised the previous summer be incorporated as a regiment in the regular army – although if the intention here was to tame Marten and his ‘mad boys’ by bringing them onto the army payroll it was not entirely successful.528CJ vi. 129a; Clarke Pprs. ii. 212-13; HMC Leyborne-Popham, 14; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 268; Worden, Rump Parl. 187. Marten retained his honorific title ‘colonel’ but would never again command, or attempt to command, soldiers in the field.

Defending and exporting the revolution, 1649-52

Marten was part of that relatively small group of Members which shaped and gave voice to the Rump’s political priorities in the first few months after the regicide.529Worden, God’s Instruments, 269 He was included, for example, on the committee set up on 1 February 1649 to take the dissent of Members seeking admission to the House – an important body in determining the Rump’s membership and therefore its political complexion – and on 6 February he was a majority teller with Grey of Groby against seeking the advice of the Lords ‘in the exercise of the legislative power’ in pursuance of the votes of 4 January.530[Prynne], Secluded Members, 25; CJ vi. 132b. Almost immediately after this division, the Rump voted the Lords ‘useless and dangerous’ and set up a ten-man committee – to which Marten was named – for preparing an act to abolish the Upper House. The following day (7 Feb.), this committee was also charged with bringing in an act for abolishing the office of king as ‘unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous’ (the claim that Marten drafted this bill cannot be substantiated).531CJ vi. 132b, 133a, 158a; Williams, ‘Anatomy of a radical gentleman’, 132.

At the time of the elections to the first council of state, in mid-February 1649, it was reported that ‘now there seems much to be expected from Mr Marten, for he begins to be in vogue, especially with the meaner officers [in the army] and the Levellers’.532Original Lttrs. and Pprs. ed. T. Carte (1739), i. 224. It was possibly with one eye on satisfying this constituency that Marten was a minority teller on 14 February against the nomination to the council of the earls of Pembroke and Salisbury. His opposition to these peers probably mingled an enduring hostility to lordly influence at Westminster and, in the case of Pembroke, a well-justified concern that it would enhance the earl’s prospects of replacing the recently deceased Sir Francis Pile as a knight of the shire for Berkshire. Marten would not have welcomed a figure as powerful as Pembroke in his political backyard – although he would be among the group of Commons-men that accompanied the earl when he first entered the House in April.533Perfect Occurrences, no. 120 (13-20 Apr. 1649), 944 (E.529.15); S. Kelsey, ‘Constructing the council of state’, PH xxii. 230.

Marten himself was elected to the first council of state and made no scruple about taking the ‘engagement’, requiring the councillors to approve ‘all that was done concerning the king [i.e. the king’s trial and execution] and kingship and for taking away the House of Lords and against the Scots’ invasion [in 1648]’.534SP25/1, unfol. (17 Feb. 1649); CJ vi. 146b; Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 537. In keeping with his hostility towards anything that smacked of courtly power or a revival of the old privy council, he was a majority teller with Livesay on 15 February 1649 against appointing a ‘lord president’ of the council of state. The opposing tellers were Valentine Wauton and the former courtier Sir John Danvers.535CJ vi. 143b; Kelsey, ‘Constructing the council of state’, 233-4. When, on 22 February, Cromwell presented the House with a revised version of the conciliar oath of office, from which all mention of the king’s trial and execution had been removed, Marten and Ireton were minority tellers in favour of retaining a retrospective clause.536S. Barber, ‘The engagement for the council of state’, HR lxiii. 47, 56; Sydney Pprs. ed. R.W. Blencowe (1825), 238-9.

Marten’s popularity with ‘the meaner officers and the Levellers’ aroused resentment and suspicion among the army grandees. Cromwell reportedly expressed ‘great anger’ in the House against ‘Marten and his Levelling crew’ late in February 1649 for opposing the establishment of a Cromwellian ‘superiority’ in the army. A petition was apparently on foot in London for replacing the army’s two senior officers, Fairfax and Cromwell, with Grey of Groby and Marten respectively. Rumours circulated that Marten was ‘issuing commissions in virtue of his own strength with the Levelling party, which courts him as their leader’.537Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 44 (27 Feb.-5 Mar. 1649), sig. Hhh4v (E.546.4); no. 46 (13-20 Mar. 1649), sig. Kkk2v (E.548.3); no. 47 (20-27 Mar. 1649), sig. Lll2 (E.548.22); Original Lttrs. and Pprs. ed. Carte, i. 225, 229; Worden, Rump Parl. 187. In July, the House received a petition from ‘several gentlemen ... and many thousands more’ from south Wales, requesting that Marten be appointed their commander-in-chief, ‘for the enemy [in the region] are many and the well-affected may probably be endangered thereby’. The petitioners may well have calculated that the Rump would look after one of its own and ensure that his troops were well supplied. The House referred the matter to Fairfax, who rejected the petitioners’ request on the grounds that Marten was first and foremost an MP and councillor rather than a soldier – although the lord general was doubtless also keen not to gift a Leveller-sympathiser like Marten a power base in the army.538The Moderate no. 53 (10-17 July 1649), sig. Ggg2v (E.565.11); The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer no. 321 (17-24 July 1649), 1434 (E.565.25); Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls) no. 15ii (24-31 July 1649), sig. P3v (E.566.15); D.P. Massarella, ‘The Politics of the Army 1647-60’ (York Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1977), 242.

Several political commentators, observing Marten’s falling away from the Levellers in the six months after Pride’s Purge, concluded that he had been bought off by the army and Rump grandees. It was reportedly Cromwell who was instrumental in securing a Commons order on 26 April 1649 for paying Marten £3,000 by way of reimbursement for the money he had lent Parliament since the early 1640s – of which he received at least £600 via his assignee Cornelius Holland.539CJ vi. 196a, 196b; Belvoir, QZ.5, f. 36; [Walker], Anarchia Anglicana, 164, 165, 213; Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls II) no. 3 (1-8 May 1649), sig. C2v (E.554.12); no. 7 (29 May-5 June 1649), sig. G2 (E.558.18); Worden, Rump. Parl. 198. A petition to the House from Marten in June was referred to a committee dominated by his friends, from which Grey of Groby reported the recommendation that an estate of £1,000 a year be settled upon Marten in respect of his pay arrears as a colonel, ‘his great losses ... his good affections and his constant and faithful service to the commonwealth’. Late in September, the House passed an act for settling the manors of Hartington, in Derbyshire, and Leominster, in Herefordshire – part of the forfeited estate of the duke of Buckingham – upon Marten.540CJ vi. 241b, 248a, 269a, 279a, 300a. This grant was allegedly resented by radical elements within the army, and to that extent it may have raised further barriers between Marten and his Leveller friends.541[Walker], Anarchia Anglicana, 213. But if Marten was indeed courting the ‘Levelling party’ at this time, nothing substantial came of it either militarily or politically. Moreover, his role in the Rump as a point of contact between the House and London’s commercial and governing elite reveals no principled hostility on his part towards the City mercantile companies and municipal establishment that the Levellers frequently reviled.542CJ vi. 127a, 127b, 137a, 171a, 181a, 227b, 284a, 384a, 397b, 486b, 527a; vii. 100a; CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 119, 150.

Although Marten put membership of the Rump before any undertaking he may have given to promote the Agreement, he remained a Leveller sympathiser. His nomination to Commons and council of state committees in 1649 to examine and deliver a ‘sharp reprehension’ to the Leveller leaders and their supporters in London and the army did not alienate Lilburne or Walwyn, who continued to hold him in high regard and, in Lilburne’s case, to solicit and receive his favour at Westminster. Thus Marten and Ludlowe were minority tellers in May and October 1649 in favour of showing leniency to Walwyn, Overton and other Leveller prisoners in the Tower, and it was Marten who was instrumental in securing a Commons vote in July 1650 for paying Lilburne his arrears of army pay.543CJ vi. 189b, 208a, 313b, 433a, 441a, 445b; vii. 75b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 57, 302-3, 314; J. Lilburne, A Preparative to an Hue and Cry after Sir Arthur Haslerig (1649), 38, 40 (E.573.16); Lilburne, The Triall, of Lieut. Collonell John Lilburne (1649), 136, 153 (E.584.9); Lilburne, Picture of the Councel of State, 22; A True Narrative Concerning Sir Arthur Haslerigs Possessing of Lieutenant-Colonel John Lilburnes Estate (1653), 3-6; Writings of William Walwyn ed. McMichael, Taft, 436; HMC 13th Rep. IV, 390; Gardiner, Hist. Commonwealth and Protectorate, i. 161. Marten’s papers also reveal that he remained on close terms during the 1650s with Petty, Sexby, Wildman, William Wetton and several other of his Leveller friends of the late 1640s.544Infra, ‘John Wildman’; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 2 (letter from Wetton, Apr. 1650); box 72, item 519; box 78, items 51, 53, 54; vol. 88, f. 16; vol. 93, ff. 28, 30; HMC 13th Rep. IV, 391, 391-2, 393; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 30-1, 33; ‘Maximilian Petty’, Oxford DNB.

Marten’s importance as one of the Rump’s penmen and polemicists has probably been exaggerated. Little weight can be attached to Aubrey’s claim that Marten penned ‘the remonstrance of Parliament when ’twas formed as a commonwealth’ – by which Aubrey apparently meant the Rump’s declaration of 22 March, justifying its proceedings in settling the government.545Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 46-7; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 26, 171. The first draft of this declaration was largely Whitelocke’s handiwork – although Marten and Chaloner were probably involved in rendering it ‘much sharper’ by the inclusion of references to the late king’s ‘usurped tyranny’ and the burdensome nature of kingly government in general. Nevertheless, the phrase in the declaration that Aubrey specifically attributed to Marten and which Vane II supposedly contested – that is, ‘restored to its ancient government of a commonwealth’ – is not present.546CJ vi. 165b; Whitelocke, Diary, 235; Worden, Rump Parl. 188; God’s Instruments, 269. Marten penned (probably on the council’s orders) a defiant declaration to the Scottish Parliament at some point during the second half of 1649, defending the revolution at Westminster. However, there is no evidence that this document was sent or published.547CJ vi. 120a, 131b, 150b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 10, 19, 25, 217; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 78 (‘Fragments of political and religious writings’). Marten and Vane II certainly clashed over another of the Rump’s polemical pieces, when they were opposing tellers on 17 September 1650 concerning the wording of a parliamentary declaration against Charles II and the Scots. But although Marten had reported a draft of this declaration from the council of state it was clearly not his own work.548CJ vi. 468b-469a; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 308, 337; The Answer of the Parliament of England (1650, E.613.2).

Besides his role in securing the Lords’ abolition, his most important contribution to shaping the new regime’s political culture was not as one of its apologists but in helping to re-define the symbols and language of public authority and allegiance. He was at the forefront of several initiatives in 1649 to replace the king’s arms in all public places with those of the new republic, and he was involved as a committeeman and teller in promoting subscription to the Engagement.549CJ vi. 142a, 274a, 307b, 321b, 326b, 370b. Although introduced as a test of the Rump’s membership, the Engagement was quickly adopted as a means of rooting out opposition to the regime in the country generally and particularly in local office. To judge by his committee appointments, Marten was keen to purge delinquents from public office and replace them with men well-affected to the commonwealth.550CJ vi. 130a, 134a, 137a, 273b; vii. 187b. Similarly, he supported legislation for the trial and punishment of the regime’s most dangerous opponents; although when it came to individual cases before the House – those of royalist commanders George Goring†, 2nd earl of Norwich, and Sir John Owen, for example – he sided, more often than not, with those Members who favoured showing leniency.551CJ vi. 126b, 160a, 437b, 442a, 456a, 483b, 486b; vii. 62a, 163a; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 45.

One of Marten’s main areas of interest as a Rumper was foreign relations, and he received more committee appointments for drafting diplomatic correspendence and determining the protocols for receiving foreign diplomats than any other MP.552W.B. Bidwell, ‘The Committees and Legislation of the Rump Parliament, 1648-53: a Quantitative Study’ (Univ. of Rochester, NY, Ph.D. thesis, 1977), 410-11. His papers from the early 1650s contain correspondence from Spanish diplomats in London and from Spain’s enemies, the Venetian republic.553Brotherton Lib. ML mss, vol. 92, ff. 10, 56. Far more numerous, however, are letters from French agents and diplomats in London and from friends and intelligencers in France – a country with which Marten was familiar from his travels abroad in his youth.554Infra, ‘Thomas Scot I’; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 4, items 130, 135; box 8, item 107; box 67, items 120, 122; vol. 85, f. 38; vol. 92, ff. 58-69; vol. 93, ff. 1, 2, 8, 51; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 44; Ath. Ox. iii. 1238; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 318; HMC 13th Rep. IV, 387-9, 392; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 32-3. Much of this correspondence confirms that, like his friend Henry Neville, he was closely involved in the campaign orchestrated by Cromwell and the Rump’s de facto secretary of state Thomas Scot to establish links with the Frondeurs and to gather intelligence on royalist activity in France. One of Marten’s Leveller friends, Edward Sexby, was sent by the council of state as an agent to the Frondeurs in 1652 in an attempt to fan the flames of rebellion in south western France. In a letter immediately before embarking for Bordeaux, Sexby hailed Marten as ‘truth’s solicitor and liberty’s champion’, but he complained of the many opportunities to spread the revolution abroad that had been squandered through the timidity and covetousness of the Rump’s leaders.555Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 72, item 519; CJ vii. 134b; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 33, 183; C. H. Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct. of his actions as intelligencer during the Commonwealth’, EHR xii. 120; ‘Edward Sexby’, Oxford DNB. In the summer of 1652, Marten drafted, or began to draft, a tract in French outlining a radical programme of reform and government for use by the authorities in Bordeaux. But like several of Marten’s polemical set pieces it has survived only as a holograph title page.556Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 64, item 137; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 34.

Councillor of state

Given Marten’s affinity with the Levellers and his wariness of executive authority not exercised immediately by the Commons, it is perhaps not surprising that he did not cut a particularly impressive figure as a councillor of state.557Original Lttrs. and Pprs. ed. Carte, i. 273; Worden, Rump Parl. 250. He attended less than a third of the first council’s sessions during 1649-50 and delivered approximately ten reports to the House from Whitehall – mostly concerning relatively minor matters.558CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. lxxv, 52, 161, 199, 201, 275, 317, 359, 413, 447, 467, 471; CJ vi. 176a, 199a, 240a, 243b, 327b, 359b, 360b. He was named to numerous conciliar committees, particularly during the first six months after the council’s establishment and, on this basis, was probably involved in shaping, or at least implementing, policy on foreign and diplomatic affairs, relations with Scotland and the disposal of the Rump’s forces in England and Ireland.559CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 10, 14, 19, 22, 25, 26, 37, 52, 166, 172, 280, 297, 321, 346, 502. But few of these appointments were to important executive committees, and his workload on the council was clearly a good deal lighter than that shouldered by John Bradshawe, Scot I and Vane II. The petitions to the Rump or the council that survive among his papers were presumably sent not only to him but also to other leading Rumpers and were mostly from relatively unimportant groups and individuals.560Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 67, items 39, 46, 109; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 25. Similarly, his many suitors for office or some other favour from the Rump were generally the desperate – the royalists Sir William Davenant and John Bodvell*, for example – the politically friendless or the deluded. For such individuals, Marten, with his sensitivity to the plight of the underdog and the powerless, may well have represented their last hope of preferment or salvation.561Brotherton Lib. ML mss, vol. 92, ff. 55, 71, 72, 76, 78; vol. 93, ff. 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 17, 49, 72; HMC 13th Rep. IV, 395, 396; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 25-6.

Marten was elected to the second council of state in February 1650 and, in the process, helped to block the re-election of Danvers – after the latter had proposed that the council be given greater independence from the House – and the election of Vane I, who had been one of Charles I’s most trusted counsellors.562CJ vi. 361b, 362b, 369a; Bodl. Clarendon 39, f. 80; Gardiner, Hist. Commonwealth and Protectorate, i. 244. Although Marten’s attendance rate in the second council was better than it had been in the first, he is known to have delivered only one report from Whitehall during 1650-1.563CSP Dom. 1650, p. xli; CJ vi. 468b. Moreover, his tally of conciliar appointments, although reasonably large, again included very few major executive committees.564CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 2, 18, 165; 1651, p. 19. Most of his time on the council was apparently taken up with responding to complainants, assessing proposals from lobbyists, merchants and other interest groups, and in dealing with Berkshire matters and other local business.565CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 132, 133, 143, 150, 167, 290, 346, 353, 378, 391, 477; 1651, pp. 11, 13. Disliking any political practice that concentrated too much power in too few hands, he angered Lord President Bradshawe in February 1651 by temporarily ousting him as chairman of the council’s standing committee for examinations and informations. Rotation of the chairmanship was the norm, insisted Marten, and he ‘knew no reason [why] they should not observe the rules of other committees’.566Original Lttrs. and Pprs. ed. Carte, i. 443-4; Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, 129, 147.

This clash with Bradshawe may have contributed to Marten’s failure to secure election to the third council just a few days later (13 Feb. 1651). He suffered another setback in these elections when he and Grey of Groby were minority tellers against the election of Bradshawe’s close friend Sir William Brereton.567CJ vi. 533a. He was also on the losing side as a teller on 1 May in favour of a motion that the council’s executive orders be signed by at least five councillors (it was not unusual for Bradshawe to issue such orders under his signature alone).568CJ vi. 569a. Yet after scraping onto the fourth council in last place in November 1651, Marten emerged as one of its most active members. He was named to the conciliar standing committees for Scotland and Ireland, for examinations and for the admiralty. He also headed the committee for giving audience to diplomatic representatives from foreign states.569CJ vii. 42b; CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. xlvii, 43, 46, 421. The majority of his many appointments in the fourth council were to committees for receiving and treating with diplomats from the Dutch republic and the crowns of Denmark, Portugal and Spain.570CJ vii. 43a, 89a, 193a; CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 54, 80, 85, 94, 95, 141, 150, 185, 232, 233, 242, 245, 253, 259, 278, 284, 287, 290, 298, 321, 368, 376, 377, 406, 417, 421, 428, 436, 439, 440, 489, 497, 504. The height of Marten’s influence in the formulation and management of the Rump’s foreign policy seems to have coincided with his term of office on the fourth council between November 1651 and the appointment of a new council – to which he was not elected – a year later.

Social and legal reform

Marten made his greatest political impact in the Rump not as a councillor of state but in the debates and committees of the House itself. He was named to about 230 committees in the Rump, and although a handful of these appointments may have been those of the Devon MP Christopher Martyn, who was admitted to the House on 16 April 1649, the vast majority of the references in the Journals to ‘Mr Marten’ relate to Henry.571CJ vi. 187a. Similarly, given Marten’s huge appetite for political confrontation, there is little reason to suppose that many of the 119 tellerships amassed by ‘Mr’ and ‘Colonel’ Marten in the Rump belonged to the Devon Member.

The main focus of all this activity in the Rump, certainly in the period between the regicide and Cromwell’s victory at Worcester in September 1651, was the reform of the law and other ameliorative measures associated with, although not exclusive to, the Levellers. ‘Marten, Chaloner and others of their faction’ (as Marchamont Nedham styled them) were characterised not only by their republican convictions but also by their support for wide-ranging social and legal reform.572Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls II) no. 12 (3-10 July 1649), sig. M5 (Burney Colln.). Reports that Marten had sold out to the grandees notwithstanding, the political programme that he outlined to the House in June 1649 contained a number of reforms that the Levellers had championed – although it fell short of the sweeping constitutional changes that they regarded as essential to the foundation of a just society. On 15 June, he had been named to a council committee for preparing and presenting to the House ‘such things as are necessary and fit to be taken into consideration and passed in this House before an adjournment’ (an adjournment being favoured by the more reform-minded MPs, it seems, in order to give them ‘time and opportunity to prepare detailed social legislation’). This committee’s report, although almost certainly the work of several hands, was delivered to the council and the House by Marten (on 20 and 22 June) and included a number of his political priorities. Recommendations for the abolition of tithes and for ‘the settling of future Parliaments’ were perhaps the most controversial. But of more immediate concern to Marten was a proposal for legislation to relieve poor prisoners ‘not able to pay their debts’ and a stated commitment to reforming the law ‘for preventing the tediousness of suits, and abuses burdensome to the people’.573CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 185, 199; CJ vi. 229a, 240a; Worden, Rump. Parl. 200-1.

Marten had been associated with the cause of ‘poor prisoners for debt’ since the autumn of 1642 and had been berated in print in 1647 for failing to report an ordinance he had drafted on their behalf.574CJ ii. 853a; Times Present Mercy, and Englands Western Justice (1647), 14-17. He took up their plight again in the early months of 1649, securing appointment to a committee on 31 January – the day after the regicide – to draw up proposals for the release of poor debtors, reporting draft legislation from this body on 10 March. But the House evidently considered Marten’s proposals either too radical or impractical, or both, for his bill was given only one reading before being laid aside. However, order was given for reviving the 31 January committee, which was charged with drafting legislation for the release and relief of poor individuals imprisoned for minor debts.575CJ vi. 127a, 161b. On 5 June, he reported amendments to a bill for the release of poor prisoners, but again the House was not satisfied and had the legislation re-committed and assigned oversight of the re-drafting to the lawyer Robert Reynolds in addition to Marten.576CJ vi. 225a. In a petition to the two men of about this time, the poor debtors in Newgate Prison alleged that the legal profession, that ‘infernal brood of Simon Magus’, had offered £100,000 to prevent the bill passing the House – while the petitioners lived on dogs and rats.577HMC 13th Rep. IV, 396. On 17 July, Marten reported the bill, but he met with a familiar response – doubts and objections were evidently raised, and the draft legislation was referred to a new committee, to which he was named first.578CJ vi. 262a. Ten days later (27 July), he reported amendments to the bill, whereupon the House divided on whether these should be passed. Marten and Holland were the tellers in favour but were heavily defeated by Danvers and Armyne. The bill was then referred back to the committee, with orders that Marten and the lawyer Thomas Fell bring in a revised version as well as a bill for relief of creditors.579CJ vi. 270b. After further delays, Marten reported the bill for the release of poor prisoners, on 8 August, but once again it was re-committed.580CJ vi. 274b, 275b; Worden, Rump. Parl. 202.

The author of The Prisoners Remonstrance, which was published late in August 1649, laid the blame for the ‘profound diseased lethargy’ that had blighted the bill for poor prisoners squarely at the door of the lawyers in the House and specifically Nicholas Lechmere, Reynolds and Whitelocke.581The Prisoners Remonstrance (1649, E.572.8). When the bill was reported, possibly by Marten, on 30 August, the House watered down its provisions, and it did so again at the bill’s third reading on 4 September. On this occasion, Marten and Colonel Nathaniel Rich had been minority tellers against the addition of a proviso disqualifying former royalists from benefitting by the bill. Thus emasculated, the bill was enacted that same day (4 Sept.).582CJ vi. 288a, 289b; A. and O. ii. 240-1; Worden, Rump. Parl. 202-4. This somewhat pyrrhic victory seems to have marked the end of Marten’s involvement in the cause of improving the lot of poor debtors. Although present in the House on 28 November, he did not seek nomination to the committee set up that day to augment the 4 September Act.583CJ vi. 327a.

Marten was involved both as a teller and a committeeman in the Rump’s equally fitful efforts to reform and regulate the law.584CJ vi. 206b, 211b, 213a, 270a, 275a, 301a, 357b; vii. 215a, 253b, 268b, 274a; vii. 74a; Worden, Rump. Parl. 116, 206. On 25 October 1650, he and Walter Strickland were appointed joint chairmen of a high-powered committee to ‘consider of the delays and unnecessary charges in proceedings in the law and to present one or more bills to the House for redress thereof’.585CJ vi. 488a. Marten made three reports from this committee, one of which was a lengthy list of proposals to rationalise or remove a variety of legal proceedings and writs. But with the exception of Acts for abolishing the fee of damna clericorum (payable by the plaintiff before an award of damages) – which even most lawyers regarded as an abuse – and for replacing Latin and law-French with English on all legal documents, Marten’s committee made very little headway against the vested interests of the ‘gentlemen of the long robe’.586CJ vi. 498a, 509b, 525a; Worden, Rump. Parl. 107-8, 238. The earl of Portland anticipated that, as chairman of the committee for what he termed ‘letting loose the law into the country’, Marten would also revisit the issue of poor debtors and their creditors, although his lordship was either being sarcastic or indulging in wishful thinking.587Brotherton Lib. ML mss, vol. 92, f. 74.

Church policy

Marten’s contribution to religious reform under the Rump was more constructive than his contemporary reputation as an atheist and libertine might suggest. The legislative programme that he reported to the council and Commons in June 1649 included proposals not only for removing the laws against ‘pretended sectaries’ but also for replacing tithes with ‘an honourable and competent means for the preachers of the gospel’ and for enabling the presentation of ministers to incumbencies.588CJ vi. 240b. The first and last of these objectives may well have inspired his regular nomination to committees on religious and ecclesiastical issues and his participation in the Rump’s work of presenting ministers to church livings. Again, the evidence suggests that he did not seek a complete separation of church and state as did Lilburne or Vane II, but rather that he accepted the need for a national, parish-based church under parliamentary authority so long as it did not impose either materially or spiritually upon conscientious objectors.589CJ vi. 196a, 213a, 245b, 270a, 275b, 359a, 437a, 458b; Add. 36792, ff. 14v, 37v, 44, 49. Godly (and not so godly) ministers in livings to which he presented could generally rely on his patronage – as, it seems, could ministers seeking authorisation for their suits from John Lisle* and his fellow commissioners of the great seal. If Marten’s influence with Harbert Morley was as great as that with Lisle, joked one minister (who was angling for Morley’s support in the Committee for Plundered Ministers), ‘I shall be so happy as to have something to lose when tithes are taken away’.590Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 16 (Billingsley v. Poeton case ppr.); vol. 93, f. 55; vol. 95, ff. 11, 13; vol. 99, f. 25; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 81. Marten is known to have attended at least one meeting of the CPM.591SP22/2B, f. 140. Moreover, his nomination to the June 1650 committees for suppressing the Ranters and ‘divers atheistical, blasphemous and execrable opinions’, and to a conciliar committee of February 1652 to investigate the publication of the Racovian Catechism, suggests that his willingness to tolerate radical religious views was not without limits.592CJ vi. 423b, 430b; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 132.

The flashpoint in Marten’s relationship with the ‘orthodox’ godly interest in the Rump came on 29 April 1652 following the presentation of a Middlesex petition calling for the abolition of tithes – a proposal favoured by the sectaries and most of the army. In the debate that followed the reading of this petition, the House divided on the question of whether tithes should continue while the committee for the better propagation of the gospel devised proposals for an alternative form of church maintenance. Marten and Cromwell’s friend Sir Gilbert Pykeringe were tellers against but were defeated by the puritan pairing of Denis Bond and William Say.593CJ vii. 128b; Worden, Rump. Parl. 298; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 38.

Marten gave offence to godly Members on both sides of the tithes controversy by continuing to champion freedom of worship for ‘peaceable’ Catholics. On 1 June 1652, the unusual pairing of Marten and Vane II were majority tellers on two divisions in favour of retaining a clause in a parliamentary pronouncement on Ireland that it was not the House’s intention to compel Irish Catholics to attend Protestant services ‘contrary to their consciences’. The opposing tellers included the godly figures Sir William Masham and Philip Skippon. After winning these votes, Marten and Vane were probably dismayed when the House then resolved to add a proviso stipulating ‘that this doth not extend to the allowance of the exercise of the popish religion in Ireland in any kind; nor to give any colour or countenance thereunto, nor to the least toleration thereof’.594CJ vii. 138a. Marten and Grey of Groby won an even more unexpected victory a few weeks later as tellers in favour of giving a reading to a petition from a group of recusants – presumably pleading for toleration. But having read the petition, the House promptly rejected it.595CJ vii. 147a. Marten’s efforts a month later to secure a concession for Catholic compounders were defeated in a division in which the opposing tellers were the trenchantly godly Pykeringe and William Purefoy I.596CJ vii. 157b. Marten also clashed with godly opinion in the House by trying to lessen the severity of some of the Rump’s legislation against moral licence. Among his motives in this regard was, or so he claimed, a idesire to encourage a stronger sense of personal responsibility among transgressors.597CJ vi. 397a, 404b; Whitelocke, Mems. iii. 190.

If Marten posed any threat to a well-endowed public ministry it was not as an advocate of religious reform or wide-ranging toleration but as a willing hand in the exploitation of church property to maintain the army and satisfy the state’s creditors. With the Rump desperate for money by January 1653, Marten was ordered to bring in a bill for ‘satisfaction of the public faith by sale of such cathedrals as are fit to be taken down’.598CJ vi. 147b, 241a, 409b; vii. 245b, 249a; Harl. 6942, f. 104; Worden, Rump. Parl. 318.

Managing the Rump’s assets and offices

Marten was a prominent and probably influential figure in the Rump’s prolonged drive to manage and sell off former crown lands – although he never rivalled Hesilrige or Scot in this regard.599Supra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; infra, ‘Thomas Scot I’. A significant proportion of his committee appointments and tellerships in the Rump concerned the sale of these assets – most of the proceeds of which went towards payment of the army – and the upkeep of the financial and administrative machinery for maintaining the military establishment. As a teller in divisions over questions of military or public finance, he generally represented those Members who put the state’s and the army’s interests before those of the taxpayer or private claimants upon the public purse.600CJ vi. 150b, 160b, 170b, 178b, 205b, 243b, 244a, 246a, 254a, 258b, 259b, 264b, 273a, 294a, 302b, 325b, 358b, 402b, 499a, 500a, 522a, 533b, 556a, 584b, 593a, 606b; vii. 58a, 112a, 128a, 150b, 151b, 222b, 237a, 246b, 263a, 268a. Where he deviated from this line it was usually in an effort to exempt minor royalists from punishment or to succour the poor by keeping coal and basic foodstuffs free of duties.601CJ vi. 179b, 187b, 547a. Sustaining the commonwealth’s armed forces he doubtless considered essential to the regime’s survival, and it was this calculation that probably underlay his many appointments relating to the improvement of state revenues, regulating the accounting system for receivers of public money, and the management and sale of delinquents’ estates.602CJ vi. 127b, 159a, 161b, 167b, 177a, 182b, 204b, 218b, 300a, 368a, 400a, 528a, 538a, 544b, 561a; vii. 46b, 154b, 158b, 159a, 250b, 267b.

Marten’s generally supportive stance towards the army extended into the realm of Irish affairs and the encouragement of English soldiers and settlers in Ireland.603CJ vi. 200b, 368a, 512b, 552a; vii. 129a, 162a, 278b. He seems to have contributed little to advancing the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, at least directly, although Whitelocke records a motion Marten made in August 1649 ‘that the regalia of the crown be delivered up to the trustees for sale of the king’s goods, to raise money for the service of Ireland’.604Whitelocke, Mems. iii. 83. Marten’s hostility towards anything that smacked of regal authority informed his collaboration with Hesilrige in May 1652 to prevent the renewal of Cromwell’s commission as lord lieutenant of Ireland, leaving his designated successor, John Lambert*, with the inferior rank of commander-in-chief and a good deal of resentment.605Supra, ‘John Lambert’; CJ vii. 134a, 134b.

Marten preferred to reward deserving army officers and public servants – or their widows, in the case of Thomas Rainborowe and Henry Ireton – with grants of land and money, and he was regularly named to committees for this purpose.606CJ vi. 225b, 299b, 417b, 428b, 441a, 516b, 595a; vii. 49a; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 60 (fragment of bill for settling lands upon Rainborowe’s widow and heir). While Aubrey’s claim that Marten himself ‘never got a farthing by the Parliament’ is incorrect, he certainly showed a determination to prevent others profiting unduly at the public’s expense and for punishing them when they did. As a teller and committeeman, he was active in the Rump’s efforts to stamp out pluralism and the receipt of perquisites and bribes among Parliament-men and other public servants and in measures for replacing MPs in various branches of the executive with civilian administrators.607CJ vi. 400a, 438b, 448b, 598b; vii. 61a, 79b, 124a, 127a, 144b, 257b; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 44; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, vol. 88, f. 9 (Marten’s notes from cttee. to investigate Howard of Escrick*); Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 503.

Friends and enemies in the Rump

Marten’s allies and his opponents in the Rump varied considerably according to the issue in question. He had 51 different partners on the 119 divisions on which he served as teller, and of these Rumpers, only Ludlowe (7), Sir William Monson (6), Grey of Groby, Hesilrige, Livesay, Mildmay and Rich (5) were paired with him on more than four occasions. His leading adversary in the House, if his tellerships are any guide, was the godly Warwickshire MP Sir William Purefoy I, who opposed him in 19 divisions in the Rump. By 1652, their clashes had become emblematic of the acrimonious relations between radical reformists and those with greater regard for the established order.608Infra, ‘William Purefoy I’. After Purefoy, Marten’s leading opponents in divisions were Danvers, Mildmay (15), Hesilrige (13), Vane II (c.11), Bond, John Fielder (10), Masham and Francis Allein (9). Cromwell and Marten squared up as opposing tellers just once.

None of MPs who regularly served as opposing tellers to Marten could be described as social radicals, and it is likely that they each invested more political capital in trying to shape Parliament’s religious policies than did Marten. Marten tended to evaluate issues of church government and toleration largely in terms of ‘the principles of civil liberty’.609Burnet’s History of My Own Times ed. O. Airy (Oxford, 1897), i. 120; Worden, Rump Parl. 260. This was generally not the case with most of his leading parliamentary opponents. There is very probably substance to the claim that Marten, Chaloner and the Berkshire MP Henry Neville ‘formed the centre of the most closely knit political grouping in the Rump’. As convinced ‘commonwealthsmen’ and proponents of wide-ranging social reform and freedom of worship they shared the same political vision. They also socialised together while in London.610Supra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’; Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 2532 (accts. for ‘secret expenses’ distributed by Alonso de Cárdenas, 1638-55), unfol.; Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls II) no. 12 (3-10 July 1649), sig. M5 (Burney Colln.); CSP Dom. 1650, p. 432; Ath. Ox. iii. 532; Worden, Rump Parl. 218-19, 221-2, 256, 260-1. Yet aside from Marten’s and Chaloner’s overlapping efforts during the winter of 1648-9 to define the Rump’s constitutional structure and in shaping its foreign policy priorities in 1651-2, there is little evidence of their political collaboration beyond their frequent appointment to the same committees. Marten’s tellerships and his Leveller associations place him more firmly, or at least consistently, in the political company of the ‘scripturally-inspired republicans’ Grey of Groby and Ludlowe.611Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 34.

It is easier to identify Marten’s political enemies than his friends – and the most formidable of these were Hesilrige and Vane II, who were themselves frequently at odds by 1651. Tension between Marten and Hesilrige was perhaps inevitable given their contrasting personalities and divergent political views, particularly on questions of social and religious reform. Hesilrige, for example, was a leading spokesman in the Rump for ‘all the priests, both Presbyterian and Independent’ – which could never be said of Marten.612Supra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’. But discord between the two men was heightened by Marten’s support for John Lilburne and his uncle George Lilburne* in their bitter feud with Hesilrige in County Durham during the late 1640s and early 1650s. Marten was a teller in two divisions in January 1652 in support of the Lilburnes’ London business partner Joseph Primatt, who had dared to criticise Hesilrige in print. But any cause that had the notorious John Lilburne and Marten in its camp was unlikely to prevail against the respectably godly and well-connected Hesilrige. Primatt was fined £3,000 and imprisoned; John Lilburne was fined the same amount and ordered into exile. The victorious tellers in the two divisions were Marten’s familiar adversaries Bond, Fielder and Purefoy.613Supra, ‘George Lilburne’; CJ vii. 55b, 64a, 71b; Worden, Rump Parl. 282-3.

The rivalry between Marten and Vane II was again a case of clashing personalities, but it was rooted in Marten’s aversion to the grandee, not to say courtly, pretensions of the Vanes and their circle, which included another of Northumberland’s nephews (and Marten’s enemies), Algernon Sydney. Marten would not easily forget Vane I’s intimacy with Charles I. It is also hard to imagine that he had much time for Vane II’s esoteric puritan mysticism.614Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 45; V.A. Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger (1970), 152-4, 156; J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic 1623-77 (Cambridge, 1988), 29, 89, 94, 96, 99-100. For their part, the uxorious Vanes would have disapproved of Marten’s living openly with his mistress Mary Ward, with whom he had at least three children.615Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 487; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 145-7. The Vanes, too, had suffered at the pen of John Lilburne. Moreover, following his purchase in 1650 of a large estate 20 miles north of Boston, Vane II may have felt distinctly uncomfortable at the support that Marten, Lilburne and Wildman afforded the Lincolnshire fen-men in their disputes with the drainage projectors.616Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’; ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; ‘John Wildman’; CJ vi. 204v, 413b; vii. 118b; Rowe, Vane, 153-4.

Foreign alliances and commercial policy, 1649-51

Marten’s conspicuous role in the overlapping fields of naval administration and foreign affairs provide perhaps the clearest picture of his political alignments and priorities in the Rump. Naval policy-making and strategic and operational oversight of the fleet passed in the spring of 1649 to a new council of state admiralty committee, which was dominated by Vane II.617Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; SP25/123, p. 11 and passim; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. xxi, 34, and passim. Marten’s power base in naval affairs, if he had one at this time, was the so-called ‘merchants committee’ that was established on 1 February 1649 – and to which he was named in first place – to purge the navy and the customs service of royalists.618CJ vi. 127b; Rowe, Vane, 152-3. Appointment in 1649-51 to various ad hoc committees on maritime, mercantile and naval matters could not compensate for his repeated omission from conciliar admiralty committees.619CJ vi. 185a, 186b, 216a, 270a, 274a, 290a, 335a, 420a, 527a; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, vol. 92, f. 80. But he secured the next best thing to membership of this executive elite when he was added to the Committee of Navy and Customs* on 29 May 1649.620CJ vi. 219b.

Like other leading Rumpers, Marten doubtless regarded the extension of naval power under the commonwealth and the strengthening of the nation’s domestic and international trade as interlinked and mutually reinforcing. But despite his nomination to committees for improving infrastructure and promoting manufacturing – one of which, on a new process for smelting iron ore, he chaired – he cannot be placed with Chaloner and Richard Salwey among the Rump’s leading strategists on commercial policy.621Supra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’; CJ vi. 358b, 486a, 527a, 542a, 543a; Worden, Rump Parl. 254-5, 256, 259. Similarly, his support for keeping interest rates low, for removing prohibitions on the cultivation of tobacco in England, and his likely hostility to the fenland drainage projectors and other would-be monopolists, probably owed more to a concern for the welfare of the lower orders than to macro-economic considerations.622CJ vi. 403b; vii. 112b, 130a; SP25/2, unfol. (20 June 1649); Worden, Rump Parl. 258. It is revealing that he received nomination neither to the Rump’s leading think-tank on commercial matters, the council of trade, nor to the Commons’ committee responsible for drafting the necessary legislation.623Supra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’.

Marten’s involvement in formulating the Rump’s commercial policy, although more episodic than that of Chaloner, could occasionally be significant. In August 1650, he was named with Chaloner, Vane II and three other Rumpers to a council committee to consider the royalist take-over of Barbados and the other plantation colonies of Virginia, Antigua and Bermuda – which given that the rebels sustained their opposition to the commonwealth with the help of Dutch merchant interlopers was as much a commercial as a military problem for the Rump.624CSP Dom. 1650, p. 290. Marten had a strong vested interest in seeking a profitable resolution to this colonial crisis, for his brother George had been among those planters evicted from Barbados by the royalists. Marten’s later dabbling (apparently not very successfully) in the tobacco import trade may well have been in partnership with his brother.625Brotherton Lib. ML mss, vol. 93, f. 57; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 123, 124-5, 129. In October 1650 – a little before George Marten’s return to London to lobby on behalf of well-affected Barbadians – Chaloner reported the committee’s proposals for a fleet to be sent to blockade and retake Barbados, and the same day a bill was passed prohibiting trade with Barbados and the other royalist colonies.626CJ vi. 478; CSP Col. W. I. 1574-1660, pp. 345, 346. On 27 November, Marten and Chaloner were named to a council committee ‘to consider of the most speedy means to reduce Barbados’.627CSP Col. W. I. 1574-1660, p. 347.

Diplomatic affairs and foreign policy do not appear to have claimed a great deal of Marten’s attention in 1649; his involvement in such matters was largely confined, it seems, to several conciliar committees for assessing the Rump’s options in terms of continental allies.628CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 37, 166; CJ vi. 130a, 149b, 176a; R.T. Fallon, Milton in Government (University Park, PA, 1993), 21. In May 1650, however, he was re-appointed to the council’s foreign alliances committee – together with Chaloner, Scot and Mildmay – and he was prominent in the Rump’s reception of and response to several diplomatic delegations from the United Provinces during the first half of that year.629CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 502; 1650, pp. 165, 202-3; CJ vi. 424a, 424b. The Hollanders feared that the Dutch stadholder, William II, intended to lead the other provinces against them and in support of a French invasion of the Spanish Netherlands – in which case, it was anticipated that Spain would intervene on Holland’s behalf. It was probably no coincidence that the Rumpers chosen to handle negotiations with the agent from Holland included Spain’s leading friends at Westminster – Marten, Chaloner, Neville and Bond.630Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 2532; CJ vi. 424a, 424b; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 169, 206, 229; H.R. Rowen, The Princes of Orange: the Stadholders in the Dutch Republic (Cambridge, 1988), 84-5.

In February 1650, Marten, Chaloner and Neville had each been paid £100 by the Spanish ambassador Alonso de Cárdenas for having headed off attempts by MPs to order his removal from England, ‘as suggested many times in Parliament and the council of state’.631Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 2532. Building on this success, Marten, Chaloner and Ludlowe managed to secure an initially favourable reception by the Rump to overtures from the crowns of Spain and Portugal during the winter of 1650-1. The emergence of English naval power in the Mediterranean had obliged the Spanish and Portuguese to adopt a more friendly posture towards the commonwealth, and in December 1650, Spain became the first foreign state to recognise the new regime. The most trenchant opposition to this rapprochement with the Iberian kingdoms seems to have come from Vane II and those Members who favoured an Anglo-Dutch alliance to advance the Protestant cause in Europe. Marten and his friends, on the other hand, were motivated largely, it seems, by the possible commercial benefits of Anglo-Iberian friendship and the need to stiffen the Rump’s defences against Spain’s great enemy – and the continental mainstay of Charles II and the Scottish Covenanters – France.632Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; CJ vi. 511b, 516b, 517a, 520a, 522b, 524b, 526a, 558a, 560a, 560b; Worden, Rump Parl. 252-3, 254.

But before trying to capitalise on its diplomatic coup in securing Spanish recognition, the Rump was determined to seek redress from Spain for the death of Anthony Ascham, the English resident in Spain, who had been murdered in Madrid by a party of royalists. Marten chaired a committee – to which Chaloner was named in second place – set up late in December 1650 for preparing a letter to the king of Spain, Philip IV, concerning Ascham.633CJ vi. 517a. Aside from the demand that justice be done on Ascham’s murderers, this letter was a moderate, even cordially worded, document. Its authors thanked the king for the ‘courteous usage’ that had been shown to Admiral Robert Blake* and the English fleet, ‘as also your Majesty’s good affection towards us which your ambassador [Alonso de Cárdenas] hath of late with much expression made known to us’. However, until Ascham’s murderers were punished, the letter stated, there could be no hope of a ‘sincere or lasting friendship ... which, notwithstanding to preserve and to further all free commerce, no befitting means or opportunity shall be by us omitted’.634HMC Portland, i. 554-5. Three weeks later, on 21 January 1651, the House resolved that this letter be amended and referred the matter specifically to the care of Marten and Chaloner.635CJ vi. 526a.

Angered by Philip’s failure to punish Ascham’s murderers, many MPs wanted to break off relations with Spain. But with the help of their pensionary interest in the Rump – or ‘our faction’ as Cárdenas put it – the Spanish weathered the storm, and in January 1652, Cárdenas sent Marten, Chaloner, Neville and Alexander Popham* a £35 barrel of Canary wine each for having defended Spanish interests in Parliament and on the council. Unable to reward the MPs in person, having been banned from seeing any public official, Cárdenas sent the Cistercian abbot Father Patrick Crelly to entertain Marten, Chaloner and their friends ‘in gardens and taverns, as is the custom here’. Such was Marten’s value to Spain that Cárdenas paid him an annual pension of £500 from April 1651 until the Rump’s dissolution two years later. The only other MP so richly rewarded in Spanish gold was Thomas Scot.636Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 2532.

Between the army and the Dutch, 1651-3

Marten’s energetic support for a rapprochement with Spain may well have been a factor in his omission from the third council of state in February 1651. Ousted from the council, he ceased to have a major influence on foreign policy decisions and was only peripherally involved, if at all, in the Rump’s ambitious project of early 1651 for an Anglo-Dutch union.637CSP Dom. 1651, p. 19. His route back onto the council – to which he was narrowly re-elected in November – would carry him into the contested political territory that opened up as a result of Cromwell’s victory at the battle of Worcester early in September 1651. Marten was highly visible in the Rump’s initiatives preceding and after the battle to thank and reward the soldiery and senior officers, including Cromwell, Lambert, Matthew Alured* and Robert Lilburne* (John’s elder brother).638CJ vii. 8b, 13a, 13b, 14a, 14b, 20a, 35b. After Cromwell and Scot secured a vote on 25 September in favour of ‘setting a time certain for the sitting of this Parliament and for calling a new Parliament’, a committee to bring in the necessary bill was appointed, to which Marten, Cromwell, Vane II and Salwey were added the next day (26 Sept.).639CJ vii. 20b.

Marten had not been named (as both Vanes, Scot and Sydney had been) to the committee set up on 15 May 1649 to consider ‘the settling of the succession of future Parliaments and regulating their elections’.640CJ vi. 210a. And although the reform programme he had reported in June of that year had included a proposal for ‘settling of future Parliaments’, he had delivered a speech in the House in February 1650 in which he had likened the commonwealth to the infant Moses: ‘that it was but young, fluctuating and in danger, as he [had been] in his ark of bullrushes’, and ‘that nobody would be so fit to nurse it as the mother who brought it forth, and that they should not think of putting it under any other hands [i.e. holding elections for a new Parliament] until it had obtained more years and vigour’.641Bodl. Clarendon 39, f. 80; Clarendon, Hist. v. 276; Worden, Rump Parl. 221. By the autumn of 1651, however, with the royalist and Scottish threats neutralised, Marten seems to have endorsed the idea of a ‘new representative’, as well as the aims of Cromwell and the army for settlement and healing with a view to the Rump’s dissolution and holding fresh elections.

Marten had shown an interest since 1649 in satisfying the army’s call for an act of oblivion and measures to honour the articles of war it had given to surrendering royalists during the civil wars.642CJ vi. 202a, 250b. With a bill for oblivion and general pardon back on the legislative agenda by early 1652, he supported its passage through the House, and in four out of five divisions concerning the bill he was a teller in favour of making its terms more generous to the royalists. Among the opposing tellers on these divisions were Purefoy and Mildmay but also his friends Chaloner and Holland.643CJ vii. 75a, 76b, 78a, 86a, 88b, 92a. On 8 June, he was a teller with Cromwell’s close ally Colonel Nathaniel Rich in two divisions concerning amendments to a bill that Rich had reported for reviving legislation to ensure that articles of war were honoured. The opposing tellers this time were Purefoy and Allein.644CJ vii. 140b. Marten approached the 1652 bill for the sale of forfeited estates in a similar spirit of reconciliation (and appeasing the army), consistently serving as a teller in favour of mitigating its provisions and for excluding various delinquents from the list of sufferers. On 3 August, he was a minority teller with Cromwell himself in favour of excluding William Craven, 1st Baron Craven. The victorious tellers were Bond and Mildmay.645CJ vii. 148b, 149b, 150b, 151a, 151b, 154b, 160b, 166b, 183b, 208a, 212b.

Marten addressed the army’s political grievances more directly as chairman of ‘the committee for the public faith’, which was an off-shoot of a committee set up in November 1651 to prioritise business pending before the House. His committee was charged with finding money to pay the state’s debts, especially to its poorer creditors and the soldiery.646CJ vii. 37b, 68b, 79b; Worden, Rump Parl. 318. In July and November 1652 and again in January 1653, he reported proposals and draft legislation for satisfying the state’s creditors from the sale of church property and lands in Ireland.647CJ vii. 152b, 170a, 223b, 249a. But the committee’s work proceeded too slowly for the army’s liking, and in a petition from the council of officers in August 1652 the Rump was urged to make the satisfaction of poor creditors a higher priority (Marten was named to the committee that was set up in response to this petition).648CJ vii. 164b; To the Supreame Authoritie the Parliament of the Common-wealth of England (1652, 669 f.16.62); Gentles, ‘London Levellers in the English revolution’, JEH xxix. 303-4. Marten was also badgered by the radical campaigner Samuel Chidley with proposals for paying ‘the public faith money and the soldiers’ arrears’. One of Chidley’s admirers berated Marten ‘as the only man that obstructs this honest business [Chidley’s proposals]... if it must be obstructed, let it be by others and not by you, in regard there is yet some hope that you will still stand for the public’.649A Letter Written by Samuel Chidley, Soliciter for the Publique Faith of the Common-wealth of England (c.1652); Brotherton Lib. ML mss, vol. 93, ff. 13, 70.

Another major initiative with which the Rump was keen to proceed before any dissolution was that of the proposed union of England and Scotland. Marten was named to the committee appointed in April 1652 to draft the necessary legislation, and during October and November he was a leading member of the committee that the Rump convened to negotiate with deputies sent from the shires and burghs of Scotland about finalising the terms of the new Anglo-Scottish commonwealth.650CJ vii. 118b, 189a, 189b; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 185; SP25/138, pp. 3-64 (calendared in CSP Dom. 1651-2, 1652-3). Overall, his evident support for the army’s programme of healing and settling in 1652 throws doubt on (unsubstantiated) assertions that Marten ‘always opposed Cromwell’ or remained firmly wedded to the idea of recruiting the House rather than a dissolution and fresh elections.651Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 573, 594, 617, 633.

Following his re-election to the council of state in November 1651, Marten re-established himself as a major player in the Rump’s foreign policy deliberations and was named to numerous committees at Westminster and Whitehall in 1652-3 for receiving and negotiating with the representatives from Spain, Portugal, Denmark and other foreign dignitaries.652CJ vii. 130a, 224a, 233b, 246b, 262a, 270a; CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 43, 55, 85, 94, 95, 232, 233-4, 242, 253, 259, 278, 284, 287, 290, 298, 318, 321, 368, 406, 417, 421, 428, 436, 439, 489, 497, 504. Indeed, Marten and Neville chaired the council committee for ‘giving audience to public ministers of foreign princes’.653CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 43. It has been argued that Marten, Chaloner, Neville, Harbert Morley ‘and their assorted allies’ gained control of the council’s standing committees for the admiralty and foreign affairs during the first half of 1652, and that from this power base they accelerated the commonwealth’s slide towards war with the Dutch.654Worden, Rump Parl. 281, 301; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 630; W.B. Cogar, ‘The Politics of Naval Administration, 1649-60’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1983), 101-3. Members of the Marten-Chaloner group certainly attended these two committees on a regular basis and may have formed a majority on the admiralty committee – to which Marten, Neville and Morley had been added in December 1651. But whereas Morley and Neville attended the admiralty committee regularly during the spring and summer of 1652, Marten and Chaloner were present at less than a third of its 70 or so meetings and certainly put in fewer appearances than did Vane II, who was undoubtedly opposed to the war. In fact, of the ten men who effectively ran the committee, only the absent-on-duty Robert Blake had a worse attendance record than Marten.655CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 46; SP18/27-8; SP25/131; Bodl. Rawl. A.226, ff. 53, 62v and passim; Rowe, Vane, 273.

Yet if Marten and his allies did indeed exercise a controlling influence over foreign policy, it can only have been from Whitehall, for their grip on the House itself was far from secure. On 2 March 1652, Marten and Scot were minority tellers against referring a paper from Cárdenas concerning the murder of Ascham back to the council of state. Whereas the majority of Rumpers apparently wanted the council to demand reparations from Madrid, Marten and Scot were content to accept Spanish apologies for the incident and leave it at that.656CJ vii. 100b. The halting progress of the Rump’s talks with Cárdenas during the spring and summer of 1652 also sits uneasily with the idea that Marten and his Hispanophile friends were the dominant force in foreign affairs during this period.657Fallon, Milton in Government, 93-6.

The Marten-Chaloner group seems to have played only a relatively minor role in negotiations with the Dutch during the first half of 1652.658S. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism (Cambridge, 1996), 52. Furthermore, its attempt to steer policy in this area suffered a major rebuff in June, when Vane II and Purefoy (both members of the admiralty committee) won a vote to reject the council’s bellicose response – drafted by Marten, Scot and Bradshawe – to Dutch peace overtures. Marten was one of the losing tellers.659CJ vii. 145a; CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 278, 284, 298; Worden, Rump Parl. 301-2; Rowe, Vane, pp. 154-5. That same month (June), Marten chaired a committee to draft ‘an Act for the observation of a day of public fasting and humiliation’ – the first, and only, time that he was involved in promoting such measures for ‘seeking after the Lord’. After the usual admission of the nation’s sins and unworthiness, and an oblique reference to the onset of war with the Dutch, the Act asked for God’s blessing ‘upon the counsels and forces of this commonwealth both by sea and land’.660CJ vii. 137b, 139b; An Act for the Observation of a Day of Publique Fasting and Humiliation (1652, 669 f.16.52). On 6 July, the House ordered Marten to prepare a letter of thanks to Blake’s second-in-command, Sir George Ayscue. 661CJ vii. 150a. But the falling attendance records of Marten and most of his friends at the foreign affairs and admiralty committees from late summer suggests that they were losing interest in the war or the confidence to manage it.662SP25/131; Rowe, Vane, 273; Worden, Rump Parl. 314.

In the elections to the fifth council of state in mid-November 1652, the advocates of the war generally fared badly, with Marten, Neville, Popham and their likely allies Anthony Stapley I and William Hay all losing their places.663CJ vii. 220a-221a After the defeat of the English fleet off Dungeness, late in November, the Rump acceded to pressure from Vane II and his circle for a radical overhaul of naval administration, passing a bill on 10 December for putting the powers of the admiralty committee into commission. This initiative ensured that the management of the navy was entrusted to a small but competent group of commissioners, which was dominated by Vane and his allies.664Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Rowe, Vane, 173-4; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 109-112, 116-19. Marten continued to feature in the Rump’s handling of the war but only in a minor capacity.665CJ vii. 256b; Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 105.

The fall of the Rump, 1653

Marten’s enthusiasm for war against the Dutch may have eroded whatever goodwill his support for the army’s reform programme had earned him with Cromwell. The lord general, like Vane II, was solidly pro-Dutch and hostile to Spain and favoured a foreign policy that prioritised the Protestant cause over the advancement of English commerce and maritime power.666Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’. For his part, Marten would have recoiled at Cromwell’s willingness to consider a settlement ‘with somewhat of monarchical power in it’.667Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 46. It would be no surprise, therefore, if Marten were not among the group of 20 or so leading Rumpers that held talks with Cromwell and his officers on 19 April 1653 about establishing an interim government ‘till another representative shall be chosen’.668Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 62-3. Marten’s report that day (19 Apr.), recommending a substantial grant to Colonel Owen Rowe – brother of Cromwell’s scoutmaster – was possibly intended as one more olive branch to the army, but if so it came to nothing.669CJ vii. 280b. When Cromwell dissolved the Rump on 20 April, he did not single out Marten by name – or so Whitelocke reported – but rather denounced some of the Members as ‘whoremasters, looking then towards Henry Marten and Sir Peter Wentworth’.670Whitelocke, Diary, 286; Abbott, Writings and Speeches ii. 642. However, according to an account by the Genoese envoy Francesco Bernardi of Cromwell’s proceedings that day, the lord general denounced Marten as an ‘atheist and adulterer’ and Chaloner as a ‘drunkard’. The fall of the Rump was lamented by Cárdenas, recounted Bernardi, because it deprived him of his ‘pensioners’ Marten and Chaloner.671Corrispondenza dei Rappresentanti Genovesi a Londra ed. C. Prayer (Atti Della Società Ligure di Storia Patria xvi), 86, 88.

Among Marten’s papers is the manuscript draft of what seems to be an open letter to Cromwell, written in about June 1653, vindicating the Rump and denouncing its dissolution. Neither the body of the text – apparently a scribe’s clean copy – nor the corrections made to it by a second pen, are in Marten’s hand, and if the author did indeed receive a writ of summons to the Nominated Parliament, as he claimed to have done, he was almost certainly not Marten, who was about the last person the council of officers would have selected. But it is possible, as has been argued, that Marten was assuming the character of a ‘generalised Rumper’ in order to hide his identity and broaden the appeal of his message, and it would have been entirely typical of him to have drafted such a piece and then have failed to see it through to publication.672Brotherton Lib. ML mss, vol. 93, ff. 39-40, and ff. 1-4 (appended sheets); Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 528-58; Worden, Rump Parl. 364-5; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 82; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 38-9. Not all of the political views expressed in the letter are consistent with those he would have subscribed to openly, under his own name, but many were – in particular, the assertion that

the government of this nation (as to the essential parts of it) hath not been changed since the end of the barons’ wars [i.e. the mid-thirteenth century] till the 20th of April last … Whereby it will appear that the same thing which the last king and his father did for so long design and attempt, your Excellency [Cromwell] hath brought about in a morning: viz. to take from the people of this nation the power of making their own laws and contributing their own money. These I take to be the essential parts of our government.673Brotherton Lib. ML mss, vol. 93, ff. 40r-v.

The author contended that the Rump was on the point of voting to dissolve itself and for the holding of fresh elections when Cromwell so rudely interrupted it.674Brotherton Lib. ML mss, vol. 93, f. 2v (appended sheet). He also accused Cromwell and his party of having deliberately clogged the House with private business and petitions so as to make the Rump appear unresponsive to the army’s and the people’s grievances and fixed instead upon its own perpetuation.675Brotherton Lib. ML mss, vol. 93, f. 1v (appended sheet). The Rump itself did not escape the author’s censure, however. ‘Nothing did render the Parliament more unfit and indeed more uncapable to settle this government’, he asserted, than

their putting all the power in the three nations into one hand [i.e. Cromwell’s], for … it was by this manifested to the world that they understood nothing of a commonwealth but the name and were so far from hoping to bring the people out of Egypt that they knew not how to get out of it themselves.676Brotherton Lib. ML mss, vol. 93, f. 1v (appended sheet); Worden, Rump Parl. 365.

Marten under the protectorate, 1653-9

The dissolution of the Rump brought an end to Marten’s privileged status as a Commons-man, leaving him fully exposed once again to the demands of his many creditors. In 1651, plans had been drawn up for selling off his estate in and around Berkshire in order to meet debts of approximately £35,000 that he had accumulated while pursuing his public duties and private pleasures or in subsidising his brother George’s various ventures. But at least one party to this scheme had refused to accept the terms for repayment and had begun legal proceedings against him, whereupon he had been obliged to borrow £8,000 from his former brother-in-law Lord Lovelace in order to pay off his principal creditors.677Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 22 (June 1651 estate valuation; statutes and judgements against Marten); box 32 (1654 bill in chancery, Marten v. Hampson); box 72, item 184; vol. 87, ff. 3-4; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 206, 436-7.

The estates in Derbyshire and Herefordshire that the Rump had awarded Marten in 1650 had done little to relieve his financial distress. Indeed, they were so debt-ridden themselves, so mired in title disputes, and so full of tenants unwilling or unable to pay their rents, that they would prove more trouble to Marten than they were worth.678Supra, ‘Leominster’; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, vol. 97, ff. 31, 32, 35; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 30, 31, 99-115; ‘Henry Marten’, Oxford DNB. Marten’s free and easy style as a landlord did not help matters, serving either to confuse those he employed to manage his scattered estate (who included Wildman and Wetton) or to compromise their authority.679Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 2 (letter from Wetton, Apr. 1650); box 6 (instructions for Edmonds and Wetton c.1650); vol. 85, f. 29v; vol. 95, f. 54v; vol. 97, f. 28; vol. 99, ff. 30, 31, 51; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 104-5. Despite his parlous financial situation, he had purchased Derby House in 1652 and had made it his principal London residence.680Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 78, items, 15, 51; vol. 95, f. 8v; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 24; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 37. The ambassadorial reception party early in 1653 at which Mary Ward had reportedly ‘much displeased’ the wives of leading Rumpers ‘for being finer and more bejewelled than any’, may have been held in or adjacent to the couple’s rooms in Derby House.681HMC 5th Rep. 192.

Marten was allegedly involved in the plots that the commonwealthsmen, and Wildman in particular, were said to be hatching against the protectorate early in 1654.682TSP iii. 147. But by this time, Marten was embroiled in lawsuits brought against him by his creditors – with Lord Lovelace now at the head of the baying pack – and at some point early in 1654 he was committed to the king’s bench prison in Southwark. His confinement was short-lived, however, for by June he was apparently residing in an area known as the Rules of Southwark, which was an area adjacent to the prison where fee-paying inmates could live on parole. The Rules would be his legally-appointed residence until at least May 1659. 683Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 23 (sheriff of Berks. inquisition 20 Oct. 1653); box 78, item 65; vol. 12 (writ 17 June 1657); vol. 88, f. 29; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 415-16; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 39-40, 116; ‘Henry Marten’, Oxford DNB.

If Marten stood for Berkshire in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654 – as a letter he wrote from Abingdon in July suggests he did – his motives would have been mixed: to join the fight at Westminster against the Cromwellian settlement, but also to regain some measure of parliamentary immunity from prosecution. Whatever his reasons for standing, the Berkshire voters were not impressed, and he was not elected.684Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 78, item 65; vol. 89, f. 1; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 40. Early in 1655, he was outlawed on a suit brought by one of his creditors, and a warrant was issued to the sheriff of Berkshire (another of his creditors) for his apprehension, ‘forasmuch as the said Henry, so outlawed, doth hide and run from place to place in your county’.685Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 31, item 1284. In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, he ordered his steward in Herefordshire to canvass on his behalf for one of the county seats, and he may also have tested the waters in Berkshire. But the electoral appeal of an absentee landlord and ‘a man in durance’ was limited, and he was not returned for either shire.686Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 78, items 97, 98; vol. 99, f. 7; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 418-19; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 40-1.

Marten’s only known publication during the mid-1650s is a Latin poem in honour of the Elizabethan Protestant hero Sir Philip Sidney†, which was included in a dedicatory verse preface to the 1655 edition of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. 687Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 171-2. Although given that Marten was a strong Hispanophile and Sidney had died fighting the Spanish, it is possible that the author was an unknown namesake. The most substantial of Marten’s surviving draft pamphlets from this period is a lively, point for point, rebuttal of The Quacking Mountebanck or The Jesuite turn’d Quaker, by the clerical polemicist Donald Lupton.688D. Lupton, The Quacking Mountebanck or the Jesuite Turn’d Quaker (1655, E.840.4). Although Marten spent more time picking holes in Lupton’s arguments than he did in defending the Quakers, he clearly thought them honest by their own lights, even praiseworthy in some respects: ‘Their doctrine is never the worst if they teach the value of light and liberty … liberty indeed may be abused; so may grace. But it will be hard for you to prove that there can be too much of either’. If their ‘presumption’ – borrowing Lupton’s term – ‘be no more then thinking themselves in the right and all other opinions in the wrong, it is common to … the professors of every religion in the world’.689Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 78, ff. 6-9; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 82-3.

Marten’s own religious affiliations are a mystery. If he belonged to any church congregation – which seems very doubtful – it may have been that of the radical Independent divine John Goodwin at Coleman Street, London. Marten certainly had social and family dealings with Goodwin during the mid-1650s.690Brotherton Lib. ML mss, vol. 89, f. 11; ‘John Goodwin’, Oxford DNB. The Henry Marten who served as a churchwarden of St Margaret, Westminster, in the 1650s was not the MP – as one has authority has claimed – but a namesake.691Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 38.

Marten contemplated standing for Leominster in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, but his steward there advised him that the borough was so divided and the local intrigues so complicated there was little he could do but assure the townsmen of Marten’s willingness to serve them if elected – which, it hardly needs saying, he was not.692Brotherton Lib. ML mss, vol. 97, f. 58. Marten’s legal battles with his creditors – principally Lord Lovelace – had greatly eroded his proprietorial interest and political credit, as had the sale or assignment to his creditors since 1652 of many of his properties in and around Berkshire, as well as in the manors granted him in Derbyshire and Herefordshire.693Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 11 (indentures 30 Apr. 1653, 25 June 1659, 30 June 1661); box 23, items 1053, 1058; box 39 (Wildman’s encumbrances; encumbrances on the estate of Mr Henry Marten); box 67, item 45; vol. 12 (writ 17 June 1657); vol. 86, ff. 1-2, 33-4, 42, 49; vol. 87, ff. 3-4; vol. 89, ff. 13-15; vol. 96, ff. 35v, 43; vol. 97, ff. 3, 60; vol. 98, f. 92; Berks. RO, D/EZ7/59; HMC 13th Rep. IV, 399; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 439. By the early 1660s, large parcels of Marten’s estate were owned or otherwise in the possession of Wildman and the Berkshire squire John Loder.694Infra, ‘John Wildman’; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 2 (indenture 30 May 1663); box 9 (indenture 22 Dec. 1652); box 10 (indenture 20 Jan. 1659); box 16 (Billingsley v. Poeton case ppr.); box 39 (Wildman’s encumbrances; encumbrances on the estate of Mr Henry Marten); box 42 (1664 ‘agreement’); box 75, item 1033; Iron box (‘Articles of agreement’ 20 Sept. 1651); vol. 35 (indenture 25 May 1664); vol. 36 (indenture Feb. 1658); vol. 38 (indenture 1658); vol. 111 (indenture 13 July 1658); Berks. RO, D/EZ7/59; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 493.

Marten in the restored Rump, 1659-60

Marten, Hesilrige, John Okey*, Francis Hacker* and other prominent republicans were allegedly members of Wildman’s ‘Commonwealth Club’, which met during the late 1650s at The Nonsuch tavern in Bow Street.695SP29/41/32, f. 98; CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 86. But although Marten may well have fraternised with leading commonwealthsmen in 1658-9, there are no firm grounds for asserting his co-authorship – supposedly with Ludlowe, Neville, Wildman and two others – of a pamphlet published early in May 1659 that proposed (among other things) a James Harrington-style commonwealth of ‘continual successive assemblies of the people’ – as opposed to a return ‘back to that imperfect form of Parliaments that’s now become unsuitable for us as a free people’. Indeed, Marten would have resented its claim that the Rump had been ‘strongly tempted to have made themselves perpetually legislators, and what else they please, and to have governed according to their private interests’.696The Armies Dutie, or Faithfull Advice to the Souldiers (1659), 24-5 (E.980.12); Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 42-3; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 315-16.

As Marten doubtless realised by this point, the restoration of the Rump represented his only realistic opportunity of reviving his parliamentary career. And sure enough, one of the Rump’s first acts upon re-convening on 7 May 1659 was to summon those ‘two chaste cock-sparrows’ Marten and his fellow debtor Sir William Monson from the king’s bench prison – or, in Marten’s case, the Rules.697[A. Annesley*], England’s Confusion, or a True and Impartial Relation of the Late Traverses of State in England (1659), 10 (E.985.1); Nicholas Pprs. iv. 135. Released from his legal shackles, Marten may have taken up residence in the house he leased in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, although he would retain Derby House until the 1660 Convention returned it to the earl of Derby.698Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 4, item 156; vol. 88, f. 32v; CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 24, 601; LJ xi. 35b.

On returning to the Rump, Marten immediately threw himself back into the fray, receiving appointment to three committees on 7 May 1659 alone and reporting the form of a letter requesting the attendance of absent Rumpers. The prose of this letter is pure Marten, with its reference to ‘the Parliament of this commonwealth, being by God’s blessing now again restored to the freedom and right of sitting … for the carrying on the great work expected from them in the settling and securing the peace and freedom of this commonwealth’.699CJ vii. 645a, 646a. His diminished political standing – the inevitable consequence of his insignificant role in the commonwealthsmen’s resistance to Cromwell and the protectorate – was reflected in his failure to secure appointment to the Rump’s interim executive, the committee of safety, or to the new council of state. Moreover, like Chaloner and Neville, he would figure very little in diplomatic and foreign policy affairs under the restored Rump.700CJ vii. 793b, Mayes, 1659, 118. Nevertheless, he was named to about 68 committees between 7 May and the army’s second dissolution of the Rump in mid-October – or roughly twice as many as one of the restored Rump’s true statesmen, Thomas Scot – although the precise figure is again obscured by the presence in the House of Christopher Martyn.701Infra, ‘Thomas Scot I’.

Marten’s committee appointments in the restored Rump are largely consistent with the pattern his parliamentary career and priorities had assumed a decade earlier. He was named to committees for re-establishing the Rump’s political and legal authority, managing and maintaining the armed forces (the navy in particular) and militia, improving state revenues (principally the excise) and for keeping a firm grip on London.702CJ vii. 646a, 648a, 654b, 656a, 656b, 662a, 664a, 673b, 676b, 684b, 689a, 690a, 691a, 691b, 694b, 702a, 705a, 710b, 726a, 727a, 729a, 757b, 772a, 780b, 781b, 786b He chaired at least two committees – for preparing a declaration justifying the Rump’s proceedings (20 May); and on legislation to introduce an oath of allegiance for judges and other ‘ministerial [i.e. legal] officers’ (20 June) – and he played a leading role as a committeeman on a bill to establish a free market in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (12 Aug.).703CJ vii. 661a, 689b, 757a; Mayers, 1659, 88, 89. It was not until 5 August that he reported the declaration he had been tasked on 20 May with preparing, and it would disappear after its first reading.704CJ vii. 736b, 738b, 748a. In July, he was named to two committees to consider the claims upon the public purse of Robert Reynolds, who had spoken approvingly in the third protectoral Parliament of the sentiments that Marten had expressed in August 1643: ‘no family to be balanced with an interest of the people’.705CJ vii. 705b, 714a; Burton’s Diary, iii. 212. Of Marten’s seven tellerships in 1659, two are particularly revealing of his political alignments. The first, on 7 June, saw him partner Ludlowe in favour of appointing the radical Miles Corbett to the commission for governing Ireland. The opposing tellers were Hesilrige and Sydney. Then, on 4 July, Marten and Luke Robinson were minority tellers against the state picking up the tab for Cromwell’s funeral. The opposing tellers this time were Hesilrige and Sir William Strickland.706CJ vii. 674b, 704b, 714a, 734a, 770b, 787a, 788a; Mayers, 1659, 90.

The response of the Rump’s leaders to the rebellion of Sir George Boothe* in August 1659 served to widen the division in their ranks between ‘oligarchical republicans’ (Vane II, Lambert, Richard Salwey and their friends) and ‘true republicans’, led by Hesilrige and Scot. Which group Marten belonged to, if any, is hard to say. On the one hand, he would have been deeply hostile to Vane’s big constitutional idea – the appointment of a ‘select senate’. On the other, he would have had little sympathy with the insistence of Hesilrige and his allies that ‘the civil magistrate shall have a corrective power in matters of religion’.707Infra, ‘Thomas Scot I’; ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 485-6, 490. Little can be inferred from his appointment to committees on 6 September to consider a new oath of loyalty, or ‘engagement’, that Hesilrige wanted imposed on the army, and on 8 September ‘in order to the settlement of the government of this commonwealth’.708CJ vii. 774b, 775b; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 474. As chairman of one of several committees set up on 10 October to respond to a petition from the army rehearsing their grievances, Marten reported a ‘carefully crafted reply’ the next day (11 Oct.), acknowledging the soldiers’ right to petition Parliament as ‘freemen of England’, provided that

the way of promoting and presenting the same may be peaceable and the things petitioned for not tending to the disturbance of the commonwealth nor to the dishonour of the Parliament. And that it is the duty of petitioners to submit their desires to the Parliament and acquiesce in the judgement thereof.709CJ vii. 794b, 795a; Mayers, 1659, 244-5, 247.

His appointment to committees on 11 and 12 October that asserted or implied parliamentary authority over the army in more aggressive terms, suggests that he subscribed to the fears of Hesilrige and his allies that Lambert’s military faction was intent on a coup.710CJ vii. 795a, 796b; Mayers, 1659, 248-9. Their reaction to this perceived threat became a self-fulfilling prophecy, however, for on 12-13 October the army dissolved the Rump. Although Marten almost certainly opposed the authority of the army’s new executive, the committee of safety, he made no notable effort to help Hesilrige, Scot and their confederates pull it down.

Having resumed his seat when the Rump re-assembled late in December 1659, Marten was ordered with Scot and John Weaver to prepare letters of thanks to General George Monck* and Vice-admiral John Lawson for their fidelity to the commonwealth.711CJ vii. 797b, 799a. On 31 December, he and Chaloner scraped onto the list of nominees in the elections to a new council of state, where they joined their old colleagues Neville and Morley. Marten attended ten of the council’s 26 sessions, before losing his place in fresh elections in February 1660.712CJ vii. 800b; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. xxv; TSP vii. 809.

Between the Rump’s re-assembly late in December 1659 and the Long Parliament’s final dissolution in mid-March 1660, Marten was named to a further 18 committees, including those to prepare qualifications for voters and candidates in any future recruiter elections, to appoint commissioners of the great seal and for the admiralty, and to bring in an ‘oath of engagement’ to be taken by councillors and Commons-men.713CJ vii. 803a, 806a, 806b, 807a, 808b. In debate, he questioned whether Monck’s choice of officers was consistent with his stated preference for a republican constitutional settlement, and (at Ludlowe’s prompting) he was instrumental in securing a vote on 11 February 1660 for placing Ireland under the jurisdiction of the newly-appointed commission for governing the army in England and Scotland – a body that included the commonweathsmen Hesilrige, Wauton and Alured.714CJ vii. 841b; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 207-8, 224. This victory for the republican interest followed two divisions that day (11 Feb.) on which Marten partnered first Hesilrige and then Neville as majority tellers in favour of proceeding to the election of army commissioners and against the appointment of Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, who was the choice of ‘Monck’s party in the House’.715CJ vii. 841a; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 223. On 20 January, Marten had been a majority teller, with Neville, in favour of commissioning the radical officer Nathaniel Rich as colonel of a regiment of horse.716CJ vii. 817b. But this unusual sequence of tellership victories for Marten was brought to an end as a result of the re-admission on 21 February of the Members secluded at Pride’s Purge. On 13 March, he and Scot were heavily defeated as tellers in favour of excluding all royalists from voting in the elections to the Convention.717CJ vii. 874a. This was Marten’s final tellership in the Long Parliament; his final committee appointment was the next day (14 Mar.).718CJ vii. 875a.

Trial, imprisonment and death, 1660-80

Although Marten was reported to have ‘fled’ upon the king’s return in May 1660, on 20 June he complied with the royal proclamation for the surrender of the regicides on pain of exemption from pardon or indemnity.719LJ xi. 35b, 52b, 70a. When his case was discussed in the Commons, Henry Cary*, 4th Viscount Falkland reportedly pleaded for his life using the jest with which Marten had supposedly pleaded for Davenant’s life in the Rump – that according to ancient rite all sacrifices must be ‘without spot or blemish, and now you are going to make an old rotten rascal a sacrifice’.720Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 45; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 445.

Exempted from the Act of Indemnity, Marten was among the group of regicides tried at the Old Bailey on 16 October 1660 for high treason. His defence in court combined quibbling over the wording of the indictment and the legal definition of murder with more substantive, constitutional arguments. The House of Commons in January 1649, he contended, although ‘but a third estate, and a small parcel of that’, was ‘the supreme authority of England … though it be but an authority de facto’. Charles I, on the other hand, had not been a king in the true sense (to Marten, anyway) of that term – that is, ‘in execution of his offices’ – merely a prisoner. Charles II he considered king ‘upon the best title under Heaven, for he was called by the representative body of England [the 1660 Convention]. I shall during my life, long or short, pay obedience to him’.721CJ viii. 61a, 139b; State Trials, v. 1199-1202; Ludlow, Voyce, 267-8. The jury duly convicted Marten as charged, but sentence was suspended pending a legislative verdict by Parliament. An open letter purportedly written by Marten at about the time of his trial, in which he justified the regicide and the part he had played in it, has been adjudged genuine. But its frank denial of the legal and constitutional propriety of the high court of justice does not sound convincingly Marten-like.722Gayton, Marten’s Familiar Letters, 1-4; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 31, 241-2.

In 1661-2, the Commons in the Cavalier Parliament passed a bill for executing Marten and 18 other regicides, but the Lords rejected the legislation and thus spared their lives. Brought before the Lords to plead his cause, Marten had thrown himself on the mercy of the peers: ‘the honourable House of Commons that he did heretofore idolise had given him up to death, and now this honourable House of Peers, which he had so much opposed, especially in their power of judicature, is now made the sanctuary for to fly to for his life’.723CJ viii. 319a; LJ xi. 380a; Ludlow, Voyce, 295. In July 1662, he was transferred from the Tower to Berwick, then to Holy Island and from there, in May 1665, to Windsor Castle.724CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 446; 1663-4, p. 303; 1664-5, p. 374. Loosely confined in Windsor Castle, he proved an ‘eyesore’ to the king and was transferred in July 1669 to Chepstow Castle.

Marten remained at Chepstow Castle – largely, again, in loose confinement and accompanied by Mary Ward – until his death in the autumn of 1680.725Royal Archives, Windsor, GEO/ADD/52/1, p. 63; CJ viii. 667a; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 45; Coxe, Monmouthshire, ii. 389; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 44-6; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 445-6. He was buried in the chancel of Chepstow church on 9 September, but a later incumbent of the parish had his body moved into the nave.726Coxe, Monmouthshire, ii. 389-90. His forfeited estate, encumbered with debts of over £50,000, had been granted to the duke of York at the Restoration; the duke had then assigned it to Lord Lovelace, who, in turn, had sold it to the Loder for £2,000. The bulk of Marten’s former estate had been sold by 1674 to satisfy his creditors.727C5/56/41; Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 7, item 185; box 39 (‘encumbrances on the estate late Mr Henry Marten’s’); vol. 18 (indentures dated 21 June 1662; Jan. 1674); Berks. RO, D/ELS/T2/5; CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 63; Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 199; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 46. Marten was the last of his line to sit in Parliament.

Assessment

Marten’s extremism consisted largely in his willingness to voice publicly what more circumspect politicians were content to utter in private. His political thought was radical to the extent that it was not fettered, as was that of many of his contemporaries, by respect for legal precedent or time-honoured usage. ‘The bare question’, when it came to issues such as retaining the Lords or the monarchy, was ‘not how long we have been ridden but how justly’. ‘Your bible proofs for [justifying the] peerage’, he told Prynne, ‘are such as Democritus must be a Christian not to kill himself with laughing at’.728Add. 71534, f. 10v. Nevertheless, Marten’s own frequent appeal to Magna Carta and the Petition of Right as sources of political authority should caution against regarding him as a notable constitutional innovator.729Williams, ‘Anatomy of a radical gentleman’, 132, 136.

Similarly, attempts to portray Marten as a sceptic and neo-stoic do not look entirely convincing – at least, not in regard to his public career.730R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government (Cambridge, 1993), 250; Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 88-9; His conviction that ‘reason ... is the surest ground of all humane [sic] law’ and his belief in active citizenship as a force for political and social good are difficult to reconcile with the scepticism of Michel de Montaigne and his admirers.731Add. 71532, f. 19; Williams, ‘Anatomy of a radical gentleman’, 132. In contrast to such thinkers, Marten believed in the capacity of reason to apprehend ‘those points ... wherein our salvation is concerned’. At the same time, he recognised no authority, either spiritual or political, to prevent Parliament ‘from taking the best course ... to prevent offences’ committed in the name of religious freedom.732Brotherton Lib. ML mss, box 78, f. 2v. Not even the plea of conscience should be allowed to restrain the magistrate in this regard.733Williams, ‘Political Career of Henry Marten’, 263.

Just as Marten’s Erastianism circumscribed his commitment to freedom of worship, so his Commons supremacism limited his engagement with Leveller ideas. The concept of a law paramount seems to have held no lasting appeal for him. What he shared with the Levellers, above all, was a profound suspicion of power concentrated in a few hands.734Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 251. And it was this distrust of monarchical and conciliar government that explains his fitful contribution to the Long Parliament’s most noteworthy achievement – the creation of a large, centralised and oligarchical state.