WINDEBANKE, Sir Francis (1582-1646), of Drury Lane, London, and Haines Hill, Hurst, Berks.

Despite a record of service to the crown stretching back at least a century, Windebankes had not sat in Parliament before April 1640. As a privy councillor and secretary of state Sir Francis then made a dramatic début, playing a prominent role in the proceedings of the Short Parliament. He was credited with a parallel responsibility for its premature end. By the time the Long Parliament opened he had become a prime target for critics of the policies of the personal rule of Charles I, and within a month he fled abroad to escape retribution. Although the charges against him periodically occupied parliamentary time thereafter, his brief career as a Member had been terminated.

Origins and early career

Windebanke’s grandfather, Richard Windebanke of Hougham, Lincolnshire, knighted in 1545, had served in the Calais garrison.43Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 56; SP1/163, f. 84; SP3/5, f. 4; Add. 5753, ff. 182-5. Between 1560 and 1563 Richard’s son Thomas supervised the eldest son of their neighbour, Sir William Cecil†, later Lord Burghley, on an extended continental tour and, having discharged what proved a difficult task, later became a trusted aide and client of the Cecils. A clerk of the signet by 1577, he married into another Lincolnshire family, the Dymokes, who combined prominence in the county, a hereditary role as royal champions, and frequent parliamentary service with a tendency to recusancy.44SP12/17, ff. 30, 64, 95; SP12/18, ff. 29, 142, 144; SP12/19, ff. 14, 29, 48; SP12/25, f. 39, 11; SP12/114, f. 16; SP12/285, f. 124; F.M.G.E. Higham, The Principal Secretary of State (Manchester, 1923), 54, 56, 158; G.A.J. Hodgett, Tudor Lincs. (Lincoln, 1975), 6, 72, 94, 100, 113-14, 175, 181, 213; HP Commons 1509-1558; HP Commons 1558-1603; Lincs. Pedigrees, 1205. By 1593 Thomas had bought an estate at Haines Hill in the parish of Hurst, Berkshire (then a detached part of Wiltshire); complemented by a London residence in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, it was more convenient for duties at court, and the purchase may have represented a severing of regular links with Lincolnshire.45VCH Berks. iii. 248; Reg. of St Martin in the Fields. Knighted in 1603, Sir Thomas also acquired land in Kent and Northumberland, but, as Sir Francis later pointed out, hardly riches on the scale gained by others active at the centre of government (as Sir Thomas was to his death in 1607).46Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 115; VCH Berks. iii. 248, 253, 255; CSP Dom. 1603-10, pp. 136, 146, 208, 271. As an only son, Francis’s inheritance ‘in land and lease was not above £500 per annum, a poor and inconsiderable estate for a secretary’.47Nalson, Impartial Colln. i. 652.

None the less, Francis was moulded from the start to follow in his father’s footsteps. After graduating in 1602 from the Catholic-tinged St John’s College, Oxford, where he forged what was to be a vitally important friendship with William Laud, then a senior fellow, Francis was admitted to the Middle Temple.48Al. Ox.; M. Temple Admiss. i. 80; ‘William Laud’, Oxford DNB; CSP Dom.1603-10, p. 403. He secured a toehold in government office – a grant in reversion of a clerkship of the signet (Feb. 1605) – but then embarked on nearly three years of travel.49CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 198. During that time he polished skills in French and Italian and perhaps also learned some German and the Spanish in which he was later proficient. From Paris, Lucca, Padua, and Florence, he cultivated ambassadors, supplied books and pictures, and kept in touch with Robert Cecil†, 1st earl of Salisbury.50HMC 3rd Rep. 160, 166; CSP Dom. 1603-10, pp. 284, 285, 289, 366, 390. Shortly after his return to England early in 1608 he appears to have commenced some kind of employment: by the summer he could afford to marry a woman of obscure family and no fortune.51CSP Dom.1603-10, p. 403; ‘Sir Francis Windebank’, Oxford DNB. However, a clerkship at the signet office did not officially become vacant until September 1610 and it seems to have been the middle of 1611 before he took full possession: a letter of 31 August from James I to Salisbury is endorsed in his hand, ‘this was the first occasion that ever gave me access to his Majesty’.52BHO, Sainty, clerks of the signet; CSP Dom. 1611-18, pp. 39, 71.

Through the 1610s and 1620s, Windebanke cultivated his foreign contacts and nurtured his friendship with Laud as the latter ascended the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment.53CSP Dom.1611-18, pp. 54, 223-7, 389, 391, 396, 569, 596; W. Prynne*, A breviate of the life of William Laud (1644), 6. Yet while his family grew, his career progressed painfully slowly, perhaps because the death of Salisbury in 1612 deprived him of an effective patron. By the later 1620s he had become an active justice of the peace in Berkshire as well as in Westminster, but little public recognition appears to have come his way.54C181/2, f. 331v; C181/3, f. 16; CSP Dom. 1627-8, pp. 167, 480, 557; Addenda 1625-49, p. 277. When in August 1628 the secretary of state, Edward Conway†, 1st Viscount Conway, rebuked him for negligence, Windebanke expressed his frustration that one who had served for the space of well-nigh three ‘apprenticeships’ (i.e. nearly 21 years) in the signet office and comfortably survived Salisbury’s ‘active and strict’ regime should be the first to suffer criticism from Conway. Accepting his excuse of pressure of business, Conway then conceded that Windebanke had proved his diligence and abilities.55CSP Dom. 1628-9, pp. 244, 252, 257. For the time being, however, he added a handful of acres to his estates and was dependent on isolated grants and the good-will of friends like Laud, who in 1630 asked the head of Winchester College to choose one of Windebanke’s ‘many sons’ when scholars were next elected, ‘to ease his great charge of children’.56VCH Berks. iii. 248; CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 426-7; W. Laud, Works ed. W. Scott, J. Bliss (Oxford, 1847-60), vii. 36.

Windebanke and the personal rule of Charles I

The advent of the 1630s marked a turning point. On top of nominations to local commissions, in June 1632, to the surprise of many, Windebanke was promoted to the place of secretary of state.57CSP Dom. 1631-3, pp. 7, 45, 62, 182, 263, 352. The general perception that it was Laud’s doing appears confirmed by both the bishop’s diary and his forwarding of the letter announcing the king’s pleasure, to which he added a welcome to the ‘parish of St Troubles’.58CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 353; P. Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (1719), 143. However, although there may have been an element of disingenuity or disillusion in Laud’s later comment to the favoured and disappointed candidate Sir Thomas Rowe* that he had simply ‘join[ed] in assistance to help my old acquaintance … forward’ and that if Windebanke ‘had not had more powerful friends than myself, he had never been where he is’, it may also have contained truth.59Laud, Works, vii. 74.

Once he had taken his seat on the council, his enhanced status recognised with a knighthood, Windebanke not only became an industrious official with his own supplicants, but also carved out particular areas of competence and forged alliances independently of Laud.60CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 354, 357, 368; Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 200. In the habit of detailed note-taking, he compiled papers on such subjects as the ‘abuses’ of English churches in the Low Countries and the lord keeper’s instructions to assize judges.61CSP Dom. 1631-3, pp. 432, 535, 540. His extensive copying from Sir Francis Kynaston’s unpublished tract ‘True presentation of forepast parliaments’ reveals his sympathy with the author’s attack on perceived institutional pretension. He recorded, for example, the injunction that the Commons should not resist the king, having a duty to give what was demanded for the public good whatever the private cost.62CSP Dom. 1631-3, pp. 565-6; ‘Sir Francis Kynaston’, Oxford DNB. Early in 1633, at the king’s command, he took delivery at his lodgings of parliamentary books and papers previously in the custody of the Houses’ deceased clerk. The acquisition, catalogued in March by Windebanke’s secretary and nephew Robert Reade*, was complemented in December 1634 by material taken in a search of the study of the recently-deceased Sir Edward Coke†, the king’s most prominent critic in 1628-9.63CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 567; 1634-5, p. 348. It is unknown what use Windebanke made of these documents, but it may be significant that it was his erstwhile rival Rowe, with a higher view of Parliament, who in November 1640 moved that its records be kept under lock and key, and liaised between king and Commons over the restitution of Coke’s confiscated papers.64Procs. LP i. 31, 489, 497; CJ ii. 80a.

In the meantime Windebanke was closely involved with key aspects of Charles’s extra-parliamentary rule. He minuted conciliar committees on the Merchant Adventurers and trade.65CSP Dom. 1634-5, pp. 9, 500, 520, 556, 598. He kept assiduous records as a commissioner for the admiralty (from Nov. 1632), the treasury (Mar. 1635) and survey of the ordnance (from Feb. 1635), and from proceedings in star chamber; his signature was attached to consequent orders.66CSP Dom. 1631-3, pp. 416, 440, 452, 454, 459, 463, 508, 515, 545, 560; 1633-4, p. 449; 1634-5, pp. 22, 72, 96, 233, 239, 245, 248, 256, 290, 299, 527, 583, 592, 594, 597, 607; 1635-6, pp. 212, 221, 435, 441. A commissioner from January 1635 to investigate escapes from and extortion and fraud at the Fleet prison, his office as secretary meant that in the mid-1630s he was also at the least inextricably associated with, and perhaps independently proactive in, the release from prison of a succession of recusants and suspected priests ostensibly granted royal mercy, as well as the leave given to their champion, Benedictine monk Leander Jones, once Laud’s room-mate at St John’s, to return to England on Catholic business.67CSP Dom. 1633-4, pp. 15, 338, 465, 581, 588, 597; CCSP i. 41, 53; Ceremonies of Charles I: the note-bks. of John Finet ed. A.J. Loomie (1987), 183-4; ‘William Laud’, Oxford DNB. While Windebanke’s request to the king (made 28 Oct. 1635) for written confirmation ‘for my safety’ of the verbal warrants he deployed on the latter’s behalf might betoken a well-founded anxiety that his actions would be challenged, the secretary was no passive agent.68Add. 4187, f. 49; CCSP i. 73. It went beyond the call of duty, when accounting for Leander’s movements, to discuss episcopal functions with the abbot of Douai and it signalled his engagement with religious dialogue when he abstracted motives for relinquishing Protestantism from The Bishop of London his Legacy (1622), the work of Clink prisoner George Fisher alias Musket, for whom Leander was negotiating.69CCSP i. 41, 59, 62; CSP Dom. 1634-5, p. 381; ‘George Fisher’, Oxford DNB.

From 1633 Windebanke was a lynchpin of Charles I’s covert negotiations with Spain, being given with former diplomats and fellow Admiralty commissioners lord treasurer Richard Weston†, 1st earl of Portland, and Francis Cottington†, Lord Cottington, powers to treat with Don Juan de Nicolaldes. Their objectives were unexceptionable – securing assurances on the return of the Palatinate to the king’s nephew Elector Charles Louis and eliminating depredations by Dunkirk pirates at sea and on English and Irish coasts – but the proposed alliance, as the secrecy testified, was deeply controversial. Windebanke’s correspondence reveals that he was careful in negotiating and not uncritical of Nicolaldes, but also that he was persistent in pursuit of a scheme that was to the detriment of England’s existing ally, the United Provinces, and playing with fire in relying on Spain for the arming of an English fleet. Although in despatching two of his sons (including Thomas Windebanke*) to Madrid for their education and his better information he was anxious that they should not be converted to Catholicism, their prolonged presence there contributed to percolating suspicions of his apostasy.70Add. 32093, ff. 57-90; CCSP i. 38-83, esp. 48; Ceremonies of Charles I, 142; CSP Dom. 1635, pp. 336, 553-4, 610. At this date these were misplaced, but they were understandable: his demanding daily spiritual exercises were based heavily on the deeply controversial work by the Arminian John Cosin, dean of Durham, Collection of Private Devotions (1627).71Bodl. Rawl. B.224, ff. 40-44v.

Windebanke also engaged in discussions with the papal envoy Gregorio Panzani, who arrived late in 1634 to assess prospects for the conversion of the king and the reunion of the Church of England with Rome. According to Panzani, the secretary, ‘a Protestant by profession, yet no enemy to Catholics’, was the ‘first proposer’ of a reciprocal agency between Rome and the queen. If the former were to abandon communion in one kind, Latin liturgy, clerical celibacy and, by implication, the Jesuits, Windebanke appeared to think reunion of the churches would be ‘easily effected’.72G. Panzani, The Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani (1793), esp. 142, 160-1, 163-4, 168, 186-8. Whatever the unlikelihood of these eventualities and the overestimation of Windebanke’s commitment, he was heavily engaged in the implementation of Charles’s overtures to Rome and inevitably in close touch with the ambassador there, Portland’s son-in-law Basil Feilding, later 2nd earl of Denbigh.73Warws. RO, CR2017/C5 passim. As Panzani had noted, Windebanke knew the risks run by executives of this policy: the latter begged the king on this matter also

to vouchsafe me your warrant under your hand for any discharge, that if I shall be at any time questioned for it, my hand in which it is written being so well known and the business so full of peril, it may appear that I had but the ministerial hand in it and that I have done nothing without your Majesty’s royal and express direction.74Add. 4187, f. 48v.

In 1635 Windebanke’s long-standing association with a pro-Spanish and seemingly pro-Catholic grouping at court centring on Portland (until his death that year), Cottington and the earl marshal, Thomas Howard, 14th or 21st earl of Arundel, came fully to public attention in clashes between Cottington and Laud over the money-making government expedient that was the soap monopoly.75Rushworth, Hist. Collns. i. 287; CSP Dom. 1634-5, p. 65; 1635-6, p. 284. In partly cyphered letters to lord deputy Thomas Wentworth† in Ireland, Laud confided disappointment and perplexity over the position of his protégé. That October he noted that Cottington and (probably) Arundel were generally thought to be trying to ‘put [Windebanke] … into all the employment that can be’; this accomplished, Laud was ‘extreme sorry’ that Windebanke and others ‘should pass all the irregular things’. While he convinced himself that ‘Mr Secretary hath no part in this but his obedience’, he still worried that, although ‘certainly’ Windebanke and others had ‘not turned Roman Catholics, yet they have taken those beads into nearness’.76Laud, Works, vii. 178, 197, 200, 201, 210. By January 1636 the archbishop could report that the secretary ‘applies himself more to me than of late’ and ‘by fits will press himself as familiarly … as can be’, but he still lamented Windebanke’s ‘defection to Lord Cottington’ – they had ‘been at their beads together’ – and continued to fret at what they might be plotting.77Laud, Works, vii. 217, 231, 232, 251–2.

In the summer of 1636 Windebanke overstepped the mark with the king, who had only lately issued reassurance that the secretary need not be troubled by hostile rumours from Ireland.78CCSP i. 98. The unforeseen arrival, during Charles’s absence from London, of a Spanish ship laden with bullion seemed to some, as Sir Thomas Rowe reported, ‘an occasion sent from heaven’ to impound a large sum, but Windebanke licensed it to proceed to Flanders. Learning of the loss of the money, Charles called him ‘to a sharp account, with more passion and anger’ than Rowe had ever seen the king display, and both Cottington and Windebanke ‘looked dejected’.79CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 70.

Retiring to Haines Hill, Windebanke could only offer an apology.80CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 99; CCSP i. 109. In the longer term, however, he suffered little. He had just been appointed with fellow secretary Sir John Coke to the office of master of the post, which endowed him with potentially greater influence over foreign communications, and as time went on he evidently sought to undercut Coke, whose age and slowness would doubtless have rendered him a source of frustration even to an unambitious colleague.81HMC De Lisle and Dudley, vi. 134, 299; CSP Dom. 1637, p. 331. Probably in January 1637 Windebanke asked Robert Sidney, 2nd earl of Leicester, the ambassador in Paris whose despatches normally fell within Coke’s purview, if he could also be sent the intelligence gathered for Coke so that he might be informed of negotiations with France over the restoration of the Palatinate; he promised to reciprocate.82CSP Dom. Add. 1625-49, p. 551.

While he may have been more careful to double check certain policies with the king, Windebanke’s position, buttressed by his loyal assistant Reade and by the presence in the privy chamber of his eldest son, appeared to strengthen towards the end of the 1630s.83CCSP i. 122; CSP Dom. 1637, p. 529; 1637-8, p. 123; 1638-9, p. 517. His influence seems to have been critical in a temporary cooling in 1637 of rapprochement with Spain and he replaced Coke as attendant when Charles had an audience with the French ambassador.84HMC De Lisle and Dudley, vi. 98, 136; Ceremonies of Charles I, 224; CCSP i. 131-3. By 1639, with the king absent in the north, he was a lynchpin of the executive, holding his own among peers at the council in London, proffering advice to his sovereign and, inevitably, appending his signature to controversial orders.85Add. 4187, ff. 52, 58; Nottingham Univ Lib. Pw 1/277; CCSP i. 180-1; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 895, 902, 904, 923-4, 967, 977; Clarendon, Hist. i. 195-6; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 150. He observed to Charles on 24 April in a letter from his house in Drury Lane that he lacked the briefing on the course of the campaign against the Scottish rebels needed to counter subversive reports, and hastened both to deny any intent to complain and to ‘humbly [crave] pardon if I have erred, and that you will please ... that my lord of Canterbury may have his share in the blame, if any thing be amiss’. But the general tenor of his correspondence belied this apparent insecurity. Recounting how he and Cottington had passed on to Lord Keeper Thomas Coventry†, Lord Coventry (a man with whom they had little in common), royal orders for instructing local élites to expedite the collection of impositions, he noted that ‘his lordship was much surprised and struck with this intimation, and it was very good sport to observe how he wriggled at first’.86Add. 4187, ff. 50-51v. A similar tone underlay his report a month later on discussions over the response to the refusal of William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, and Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke, to join the king at York.87Add. 4187, f. 51v.

Windebanke’s nomination on 30 December to the council formed to prosecute the war in the north must have seemed inevitable, while on 15 January 1640 he received a further sign of royal favour in the form of a warrant to repay £3,000 lent to the king.88CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 188, 295, 337. Notwithstanding Reade’s advance misgivings, the redistribution of responsibilities following Coke’s replacement by the much more energetic Sir Henry Vane I* confirmed Windebanke as principal secretary and did nothing to curb his propensity to operate outside his particular province; despite his brief for Spain, Italy and Flanders he continued to be a major conduit to envoys like Sir Thomas Rowe whose concerns lay elsewhere.89CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 332, 364-5, 371, 433-5; HMC De Lisle and Dudley, vi. 230.

The Short Parliament

With a parliamentary election in prospect, Windebanke and his allies made preparations in good time. Cottington’s attempt to recruit Sir Edward Sawyer to canvas for Windebanke as a knight of the shire for Berkshire met an ostensibly willing response, but as Sawyer explained to Reade on 13 December 1639, while he owed the secretary many favours, he could not promise more than some potential voices from the Vale of the White Horse.90CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 162. It may have been Cottington who secured the return of Thomas Windebanke for Wootton Bassett, over the border in Wiltshire, but his backing failed to gain Sir Francis the advantage in Berkshire and the secretary’s own attempt to procure Reade’s election as burgess for Rye in Sussex was equally unsuccessful.91s.v. 'Thomas Windebanke'; East Sussex RO, RYE/47/131/14. It was Windebanke’s erstwhile patron Archbishop Laud who finally found him a seat for Oxford University. On 9 March 1640 the secretary’s youngest son John reported that the vice-chancellor, who customarily had the nomination, had ordered MAs to elect his father to the senior seat.92CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 531. The register of convocation for 11 March indicates that they obeyed unanimously, but the context of university politics makes this open to question.93Bodl. Oxford Univ. Archives, NEP/supra/Reg. R pp. 169-70; Wood, Fasti, 191.

Before Parliament met the king confided important business to Windebanke. Having accepted verbatim the secretary’s instructions to Leicester to affirm an alliance with Louis XIII against the Scots, Charles diverted Windebanke from his Easter devotions (as the latter informed the earl) to the all-absorbing task of drafting a declaration justifying royal actions since the pacification of Berwick.94CSP Dom. 1640, p. 21; Add. 1625-40, p. 621. His Majesty’s Declaration, which was in the press by 11 April, asserted that ‘our intention in taking up arms’ against the Scots ‘was no way for invading of our native kingdom or to innovate religion and laws, but merely for the maintaining and vindicating of our royal authority’. The campaign ‘aimed to take care that the gangrene’ of rebellion ‘be cut off before it spread too far’. However, if resistance persisted, it would be dealt with summarily, by the authority of ‘God whose vicegerent we are’; there would be no allowances for those who claimed to act ‘by gross hypocrisy, under the counterfeit habit of religion’. Charles was confident that the English would ‘not suffer themselves to be debauched and betrayed into anarchy’, while the grant of supply by the Irish Parliament to reduce disaffected Scots to obedience, announced in a declaration read by Windebanke at the king’s behest to the privy council on 1 April, was adduced as the way forward. There was ‘no cause to doubt but our subjects of England, who are nearer to the danger, will show the like tenderness of our and their own honour and safety’.95[F. Windebanke], His Majesties Declaration, concerning his Proceedings with his Subjects of Scotland (1640), 9, 60-3; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1097.

Having framed the royal agenda for Parliament and been conspicuous in its opening formalities on 13 April, Windebanke attempted to steer proceedings.96CJ ii. 3a. An assumption that he would be at the centre of business, as at court, probably underlay the generous subvention given to a kinsman – almost certainly Edward Fulham, chaplain to the bishop of Oxford – by a Spanish government keen to have insider information about the workings of Parliament.97Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 2532 ‘Negociaciones Secretas’; Al. Ox. When the grand committees were settled on the 16th, Windebanke was nominated to the committee for privileges but, significantly, not initially to those relating to grievances.98CJ ii. 4a. He then ‘acquainted the House with the king’s desire of their sudden handling of the Scottish business’. With the Commons’ permission he read in French and English the letter from the Covenanters to Louis XIII requesting his assistance which Charles had brandished in the House to dramatic effect on the 13th.. Windebanke went on to vouch for its authenticity: that much had been established when he and Cottington had examined a slippery Lord Loudon in the Tower of London.99Procs. 1640, 54, 97, 121-2, 134; Aston’s Diary, 3; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1127. The intention was clearly to produce compelling evidence of Scottish treason demanding prompt action, but, after Harbottle Grimston* observed that this was a relatively distant problem, a succession of speeches deflected Members’ attention to English grievances.100Aston’s Diary, 3-4. Windebanke had to be content with being nominated to the conference with the Lords to fix a fast day to mark the solemnity of the situation.101CJ ii. 4a. He reported from the Commons committee on this two days later and four times (20, 21, 23, 24 Apr.) delivered messages on the matter to the Upper House, although his nomination for one of the preachers was rejected on the ground that the man concerned had shown himself too sympathetic to papists and too unsympathetic to puritans.102CJ ii. 6a, 7a, 8a, 9a, 9b, 11a; Aston’s Diary, 16, 24; Procs. 1640, 64, 237.

Windebanke had at least some chance for damage limitation, being placed belatedly with lord treasurer William Juxon on the committee to consider grievances (20 Apr.) as well as the seemingly less contentious one to refine a bill regulating apparel (21 Apr.).103CJ ii. 7b, 8a. Nominated (22 Apr.) to the committee to peruse the petition of Peter Smart, the canon of Durham imprisoned after a dispute with his dean, John Cosin, and asked by John Hampden* by what authority Smart had been restrained, Windebanke replied robustly that it had been by the king’s authority, thinking perhaps to silence the clergyman’s supporters. He did not succeed, for his answer prompted Sir John Hotham* to question whether the Petition of Right had thereby been breached.104CJ ii. 8b; Aston’s Diary, 26. Windebanke’s attempt the next day to squash calls from Hampden and John Pym* to petition the king about grievances, by once again impressing on Members the urgency of deciding supply first, was similarly fruitless.105Aston’s Diary, 41, 44. Notes of a council meeting probably from that day (23 Apr.) and probably in his hand outlined a plan to put pressure on the Commons via the Lords, appealing to the latter’s sense of honour to expedite supply.106Procs. 1640, 290.

On 24 April Windebanke still had proposers to nominate him to the privileges committee (his last such appointment), but active as he was, he regarded its very business as a distraction.107CJ ii. 12a; Aston’s Diary, 49, 60. It must have been with heavy irony that four days later he thanked Pym for an impromptu speech explaining why discussion of privileges must precede the voting of supply.108Procs. 1640, 239. He had already written to Sir Arthur Hopton in Spain (24 Apr.) expressing his fears that this Parliament would be no more productive than its predecessor.109CCSP i. 197. He did not give up, arguing the king’s corner in the debate on Ship Money and Hampden’s case (30 Apr.), but he had plenty of distractions.110Aston’s Diary, 104, 105. Like some other councillors, he was busy trying to prevent and address May day disorders.111Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1169 seq. He was in the House again on 2 May to support Treasurer Juxon in emphasising that delay in answering the king’s request for supply was as destructive as denial: observers abroad (as he had heard from Sir Thomas Rowe) were of the same opinion, the Lords (he assured MPs) considered a grant reasonable and, if an alternative means could be found to fund the navy, the king would relinquish Ship Money. But his words failed to persuade, and he was asked with Juxon and Vane to acquaint his master with the resolution that the House would need more time for debate.112CJ ii. 19a; Aston’s Diary, 125; s.v. ‘Sir Thomas Rowe ’. Two days later the same delegation was obliged to deliver a similar message.113CJ ii. 19b; Aston’s Diary, 136. Early the following morning (5 May) Windebanke arrived at the house of Speaker Sir John Glanville* with an order to take him straight to the Lords at Whitehall. This proved to be the signal that Parliament would be dissolved that day.114Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1154; CSP Dom. 1640, p. 40.

Windebanke was among signatories to warrants of 8 and 10 May for the committal of at least three troublesome Members – Henry Belasyse*, Sir John Hotham* and John Crew* – and among commissioners to investigate the leaking of royal and privy council business during the parliamentary session (27 May).115Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1167-8; CSP Dom. 1640, p. 222. It was Lord Keeper John Finch†, 1st Baron Finch, who prepared the royal declaration explaining the premature end of the Parliament, although Windebanke might plausibly have aspired to the task, given his previous form.116His Majesties declaration … of the causes which moved him to dissolve the last Parliament (1640, E.203.1); 'John Finch', Oxford DNB. However he certainly held tenaciously to his position in the king’s counsels, telling Edward Conway, 2nd Viscount Conway, on 26 May that he had no intention of giving up any responsibility to Vane.117CSP Dom. 1640, p. 219.

Over the summer he gave every impression of wide influence as he laboured to raise money for campaigning in the north, signed orders for supplying Strafford in Ireland, issued warrants for the release of prisoners, and relayed to and from the king information on the suspect activities of peers like Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, and Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford.118Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1234; CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 244, 652; Add. 4187, f. 53v. In early September he was among the quorum of a commission named to manage affairs during Charles’s absence in the north.119Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1256; CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 3. But although he adopted a light tone in his communications with the king, evincing at the end of the month some optimism that Anglo-Scottish affairs were taking a turn for the better, Windebanke did not feel entirely secure.120Add. 4187, ff. 56, 58v. Instructed by Charles from York on 6 October to ‘get as many burgess places for the Parliament for my servants as ye may from the chamberlain, or any that has power that way’, the secretary felt his personal chances for election at Oxford University were threatened by that very chamberlain, Philip Herbert, 4th earl of Pembroke, who deployed patronage there rivalling Laud’s.121Add. 4187, f. 58v; CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 151 Moreover, rumours were circulating about his connection to papist plotters and blatant Catholic worship.122Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1320, 1322.

Long Parliament and retribution

It must have come as a relief when, by 13 October, Henry Jermyn* resigned to Windebanke his seat at Corfe Castle in Dorset, the home of the attorney general (John Bankes†).123CCSP i. 209. Once Parliament assembled, however, any hopes of managing proceedings rapidly faded. As in the spring, on 3 November Windebanke and the treasurer led the newly-elected Speaker to the chair.124CJ ii. 20a. The secretary was again placed on a committee to discuss a fast day (9 Nov.).125CJ ii. 23b. But this was to be his sole nomination: from the 10th accusations against him surfaced almost daily. First, Sir Gilbert Pykeringe* introduced a petition from a scholar from the Palatinate who claimed that his books had been confiscated by Reade on Windebanke’s orders, whereupon the secretary was heard to explain that he had understood that the man had ‘kept a school against his licence, teaching strange doctrines’ and to desire ‘more time to prove the particulars’. Potentially more damaging was the assertion which also emerged on the 10th that a breach of Lords’ privileges had occurred in the seizing and searching of Brooke and Warwick, traced to a warrant under the hands of Vane and Windebanke.126Procs. LP i. 80-7. The next day Thomas Coke* complained that Windebanke had intervened when he tried to prosecute a Catholic priest who had once been involved in the Gunpowder Plot, while a Mistress Hussey had told another Member how the secretary had shrugged off information against another priest.127Procs. LP i. 93, 97, 98, 105. Windebanke’s widely-reported reply, that ‘he had done nothing in the business of recusants but ministerially and if he has done anything in his own particular, he will submit to this House’, was insufficient to stem the tide.128Procs. LP i. 98, 107. Sir John Packington* and others cited informants as saying that Windebanke had claimed that both Ship Money refusers and Members of the Short Parliament who had denied the king subsidies were traitors. Some testimonies proved insubstantial, but it was ordered that Windebanke, who for the time being pleaded both innocence and forgetfulness, should answer formally at a date to be fixed. In the meantime the keepers of the Gatehouse and Newgate and prisons were summoned to appear and produce their warrants for the release of prisoners.129Bodl. Rawl. C.956, f. 24v; Procs. LP i. 96, 100, 106; CJ ii. 27a.

In a context where the Commons had already established a committee to investigate recusancy in and around London (9 Nov.), Aquila Weekes and Richard Johnson, the respective keepers, promptly presented themselves on the 12th with seemingly damning evidence.130CJ ii. 24b. The failure of the king to supply Windebanke with the written authorisations requested in 1635 returned to haunt him as the keepers testified that Leander’s client George Fisher and fellow priests John Goodman and Thomas Reynolds had been freed on instructions under the secretary’s hand. Sir John Culpeper*, a member of the recusancy committee, argued that anyone who bailed or released a prisoner accused of treason was himself guilty of the offence, while John Pym*, apparently Windebanke’s chief pursuer, affirmed that Sir Thomas Jermyn’s assurance that Charles was the source of the order did not meet the case: ‘a verbal warrant is insufficient in the king’.131CJ ii. 27b; Procs. LP i. 118-23. According to Edward Hyde*, petitions against Windebanke were ‘very acceptable’ to the House; one was ‘read with great delight’. The secretary could not disavow his signature and ‘gave so ill an account of himself (as he was a bashful speaker) that he was called upon to withdraw’, and, following normal procedure, retired to the committee room.132Clarendon, Hist. i. 234; CJ ii. 27b. This was probably the last time he set foot in the Commons chamber; at the end of the day’s session he left for home. As Hyde suggested, he almost certainly realised not only that ‘the House meant not to give him over’ but also that his position was hardly defensible, ‘it being neither of his office nor in his power to grant such warrants’.133Clarendon, Hist. i. 235.

For a couple of weeks, as the case was discussed in committee and the Commons itself concentrated on other matters, the onslaught slowed. On 14 November Windebanke’s name surfaced in the chamber as the king’s agent for issuing instructions for Ireland.134CJ ii. 29b; Procs. LP 150. On the 20th Richard Whithed I*, Member for Hampshire, produced the county’s under sheriff, Robert Horwood, who on questioning by the Speaker alleged that he had obeyed an order from Windebanke to forbear the statutory seizure of recusants’ property only to be taken into custody and there pressured by Reade into entering a bond of £100 never to prosecute any recusant. The matter was referred to the committee for recusants, and in the meantime Reade and others implicated were summoned to account for their actions.135Procs. LP i. 208-11, 215; Nalson, Impartial Colln. i. '537' [563]. On 1 December, as John Glynne* reported from the committee, other incriminating documents were read in the House, including material from the sheriff of Sussex relating to the committal to and discharge from the Clink of another Catholic priest, Edward Moore.136CJ ii. 42a; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 69-70; CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 291, 294.

Flight into exile

This was probably a decisive day. Although Reade drafted for delivery in the Commons a response to the charge against Windebanke and himself, it does not seem to have been penned with any expectation of achieving vindication.137CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 297-8. There were almost certainly already plans in hand for flight. Early on Thursday 3 December the Commons requested Windebanke’s present attendance, unless prevented by urgent royal business, only to receive the answer that ‘upon his Majesty’s occasions, he sat up all last night, and was newly gone to bed’. Allowing him leeway, MPs resolved that a fresh summons be issued at 8am the next morning.138CJ ii. 44a. But by Thursday night, as Reade soon informed his cousin, he and Windebanke were aboard ship at Queenborough.139CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 299-300. When the second summons was issued on the 4th, seeking Windebanke, or failing that Reade and an explanation of his uncle’s whereabouts, there was thus no response.140CJ ii. 45a. However, it was only on the 8th that Sir Simonds D’Ewes* noted (perhaps prematurely) the reading of the letter ‘supposed to have been sent’ from Reade to Thomas Windebanke in Drury Lane announcing their departure for France, and not until the 10th that sightings surfaced of Windebanke embarking from Queenborough with Reade and the queen’s surgeon, Maurice Aubert.141Procs. LP i. 515, 554; HMC De Lisle and Dudley, vi. 348. That day the Commons ordered that Windebanke be given immediate notice at his house requiring him to appear on the 11th; if he failed to comply they would ask the Lords to move the king for a proclamation to bring him in.142CJ ii 48b.

While the details of what became a steady stream of letters from Reade in France began to leak (evidently intercepted despite the writer’s conviction otherwise), MPs periodically returned to proceedings against Windebanke.143CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 427. On 17 December additions were made to the committee hearing the case and a writ was authorised for a by-election for the secretary’s vacated Corfe Castle seat.144CJ ii. 53a. The next day, during a debate on Laud, Harbottle Grimston* produced as his trump card against the archbishop the rhetorical question, ‘who is it but he only that hath brought in Secretary Windebanke to this place of service of trust, the very broker and pander to the Whore of Babylon’.145Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 122. For their part, the fugitives appealed to all who might help including Juxon, Cottington and, doubtless as a courtier perceived to have a foot in both camps, Lord Chamberlain Pembroke.146CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 312-5. In January 1641 Windebanke addressed from Calais a long and self-pitying justification to Pembroke, protesting that he had served the king ‘faithfully, diligently, painfully and with as true and loyal an heart, according to my poor abilities, as any other whatsoever’. He denied corruption, profiteering, infidelity and popery. On the contrary, unlike other officials, he had not ‘added one foot of land to the inheritance left me by my father’, and nearly 80 years of their combined royal service had gained them no peerage, while the Catholics he had encountered ‘were poor distressed creatures, and far from being able to enrich me’. Invoking God’s judgement, he vehemently dismissed the charge of favouring popery. Knowing ‘nothing in the Church of Rome that can win me from that Church wherein I was made a Christian’, he considered the Church of England the purest, most orthodox and closest to the apostolic tradition. His actions had been ‘merely ministerial’ and ‘his Majesty hath not been deceived by it’. Obliged by their office to ‘hold intelligence with the party’, secretaries must necessarily have, as they had always done, ‘latitude according to time and occasion’; they could not ‘be so tied according to strictness of law as others are without peril to the government’. Where there had been compromise it was ‘but in obedience to my master’s commandment, which I hope shall not be censured as a crime’.147Nalson, Impartial Colln. i. 652-3.

Once they reached Paris the exiles surprised observers and fed rumours by their propensity to light-hearted socialising, but the confidence expressed by both Windebanke and Reade in the queen’s protection and the king’s vindication proved misplaced, just as the former’s argument for executive freedom appeared dangerously arbitrary.148CCSP i. 216; CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 426-7, 435-8; Procs. LP ii. 260; HMC De Lisle and Dudley, vi. 371, 403. The defence, apparently delivered to Pembroke by Thomas Windebanke as envisaged, for the time being sank without trace. The Commons committee to whom the case had been assigned, having acquired further members and additional business, was finally called to prepare articles against Windebanke at the end of January.149CJ ii. 72a, 73a. Still under the chairmanship of Glynne, it met at irregular intervals until at least spring 1642, receiving petitions from the aggrieved and collecting information which emerged in the general context of complaints against privy councillors.150CJ ii. 79a, 95a, 134a, 158b, 197b, 205b, 212a, 329a. News reached Paris that at his trial Strafford cast ‘the crime of breaking the last Parliament ... wholly’ on Juxon and Windebanke, ‘who assured the king the lower House would give no supply’, and that there were allegations the latter had assisted Catholics in transporting their children to monasteries on the continent.151HMC De Lisle and Dudley, vi. 387; CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 475-7. Hearing in April that Charles wished him to declare if he had heard Strafford say in council that the king was absolved from the rules of government and might thus deploy the Irish army to reduce England to obedience, Windebanke assured his master that he had not.152CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 547-8. The sentencing of Strafford increased the exiles’ pessimism and as their financial plight grew desperate the Commons, who had already burdened him and others with reparations for the suffering of those who had suffered at the hands of the privy council, moved in July 1641 to block the secretary’s allowances.153CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 584; Procs. LP ii.723; CJ ii. 201a, 232a. Apprehensive that his case would not be settled before an adjournment, Windebanke prepared a petition to the House, to be presented by his son after first consulting with discreet friends and the king, but it temporarily stalled on royal advice not to ‘stir’ the business unnecessarily.154CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 25-7, 39-40, 58, 59, 66, 77, 86, 87. When in mid-August Thomas Windebanke, apparently reluctant to attend Parliament himself, finally passed the petition to ‘Mr Baseley’ (?Belasyse), it proved to be largely a reiteration of the apologia to Pembroke, but included a plea that Members would view his service to the king favourably in the light of his good intentions, and thus that they would be merciful to him and his family.155CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 87-8. The petition reached the state papers, but it is unclear who knew of it.

Earlier in the month Charles, who had little choice but to replace Windebanke, had delivered his signet to Edward Nicholas†.156Nicholas Pprs. i. 1-2. As time went on the former secretary’s position weakened further, his reputation corroded by rumour and publication. Although he sometimes escaped primary blame for unpopular secular policies of the personal rule, the suspicions of religious treachery stuck.157J. Taylor, Old Newes newly revived (1641), [sig. A3] (E.160.22); Four fugitives meeting (1641), 2, 4; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 287. At the turn of the year Windebanke vehemently denied to his son that he had held secret meetings of the disaffected at his lodging in France with the object of framing a declaration of defiance against Parliament; a couple of months later he was also among those exiles accused of applying themselves to Henrietta Maria when she visited the Netherlands ‘in all obsequious duty to repair their lost credit in England’; at about this time William Aylesbury reported from Rome that he had met a Franciscan who threatened to accuse Windebanke of greater matters than had been aired in Parliament.158CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 213, 220; An Ordinance or Proclamation by the Prince of Orange (1641), 3 (E.138.24); CCSP i. 227. By March 1642, despite courtesies from Cardinal Richelieu and the earl of Leicester, Paris was becoming uncomfortable: ‘I seldom go abroad and have of late forborne my lord ambassador’s house to avoid offence and take away occasion of suffering from him’.159Bodl. Rawl. D.390, f. 20.

On 22 March the Commons committee was still discussing the detail of the sequestration of Windebanke’s share in the letter office and it was not until after the impeachment of Laud had been presented on the 26th that Glynne was ordered finally to bring in the articles against Sir Francis.160CJ ii. 493a, 499b. What proved a definitive version of them appears to have been circulated beforehand, however. On 1 March Windebanke wrote to Thomas lamenting that the letter to Pembroke from Calais ‘is become public’, although ‘nothing was more contrary to my intention when I when I [wrote] it’.161Longleat House, PO/vol. xi, ff. 66-7 (IHR microfilm). Leaving aside the possible disingenuity of the protestation, it seems that Windebanke was referring to the appendage of the letter to The articles or charge exhibited in Parliament, printed before 25 March.162The articles or charge exhibited in Parliament against Sir Francis Windebanck (1641, E.156.17). These related exclusively to his ‘letters of grace’ to recusants and his signature to the warrants for the discharge of imprisoned priests. No evidence has come to light that further charges were formalised and there is every indication that the prosecution stalled. While it may have been overtaken by more pressing concerns, it may also be that, as Hyde argued, from the outset those driving judicial proceedings against representatives of unpopular policies had concluded that this was not the best way to deal with Windebanke. The Commons, Hyde suggested, ‘had it in their power to have proceeded against him and to have prevented his escape’, but rose before doing so and thus gave the king reasonable cause to assent to his departure. ‘They by whom the House was then guided were best pleased by his absence’ which left his place open for them to supply a sympathetic candidate and obviated the need for a trial ‘which for many reasons they would not have thought fit to hasten’. The chief stumbling block, Hyde’s comments later implied, was that in attacking Windebanke’s signature it was impossible to avoid casting outrageous aspersions on the legality of the king’s own actions.163E. Hyde, A Full Answer to an Infamous and Trayterous Pamphlet (1648), 30, 37 (E.455.5). The secretary’s defence that he had acted ‘merely ministerially’ had greater force than his enemies anticipated.

As previously indicated, once abroad Windebanke might commit new and more independent offences. In June and July 1642 Parliament ordered the printing of accusations that, disappointed in hopes of assistance, he had conspired with Finch to turn against Richelieu and Louis XIII, and that, thwarted in this, he was preparing with other exiles to bring over a fleet from Dunkirk to assist the king.164New Treason Plotted in France (1642, E.153.19); The King of Denmarks resolution concerning Charles King of Great Brittain (1642), [sig. A3] (E.154.3). By 16 August Windebanke could be pronounced a delinquent with Coke and John Witherings when grievances concerning the postmastership were aired.165CJ ii. 722b. Once civil war broke out accusations of treason and connivance at popery could be propounded and acted upon without need for official proceedings. They duly surfaced in the negotiations of Parliament with the king.166Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 45; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 414; 1644, pp. 532, 541; E. Bowles, The Mysterie of Iniquity yet working in the kingdomes of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1643), 40; CJ v. 461a; G. Bate, The Regall apology, or the Declaration of the Commons, Feb. 11, 1647 (1648), 32. Windebanke’s goods were self-evidently subject to seizure and sale, and his house open to sequestration and use by parliamentary committees.167CJ iii. 149a, 389a.

Perhaps still in Paris in July 1643, when he translated into English a French edict giving the rights of belligerents to ships of Charles and of Parliament which put into French ports, Windebanke was in England by the early summer of 1644.168CCSP i. 243. In May he wrote from the royalist camp at Exeter to Reade in the royalist capital at Oxford.169CSP Dom. 1644, p. 171. There on 5 June he received a pardon for all treasons, felonies and other offences.170Docquets Letters Patent ed. Brown, i. 222. But he probably did not stay long. Excepted from pardons offered by Parliament on 26 September 1644 and 27 November 1645, at some point he returned to France.171CJ iii. 639a; iv. 356b. He died on 1 September 1646, reportedly ‘a professed papist’.172Whitelocke, Mems. (1732), 39; Juxon Jnl. 140. Thomas, who obtained administration of his will four years later, also converted before the Restoration and none of Sir Francis’s other sons sat in Parliament.173s.v. 'Thomas Windebanke'.