ALURED, John (1607-50), of the Charterhouse, Sculcoates, Yorks.

The Alureds had migrated to Hull from Suffolk or Norfolk in the reign of Henry VIII – establishing their seat at the Hull Charterhouse, which lay just to the north of the town at Sculcoates – and within a generation they had become one of the area’s most prominent families.26Vis. Yorks. ed. Foster, 144; Vis. Suff. 1561, 1577, 1612, 50; HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘Thomas Aldred’. Alured’s great-grandfather and grandfather had represented Hull in several Parliaments between 1558 and 1586, and his uncle, Thomas Alured, was returned for Hedon – a small borough a few miles to the west of Hull – to the third Caroline Parliament of 1628-9.27HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘Thomas Aldred’; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘John Aldred’; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Thomas Alured’. By the 1580s, the Alureds were a puritan family, or, in the phrase favoured by John Alured’s grandfather, ‘labourer[s] in the building of the Temple’ – by which he meant a more thoroughly reformed church.28HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘John Aldred’.

Despite his godly ancestry, Alured himself was described by the puritan divine Thomas Shepard as ‘a most profane young gentleman’. It was apparently only after Alured’s marriage in November 1631 – to his pious second cousin, a daughter of the godly North Riding knight Sir Richard Darley of Buttercrambe (father of the future parliamentarians Henry* and Richard Darley*) – that he ‘fell to fasting and prayer and a great reformation’. According to Shepard (Sir Richard Darley’s chaplain), it was his marriage sermon which sowed the seeds of this transformation.29Cliffe, Yorks. 272; God’s Plot: the Autobiog. and Jnl. of Thomas Shepard ed. M. McGiffert, 55. The marriage also had its material benefits, for Sir Richard Darley settled a ‘valuable and considerable sum of money’ on his daughter as her marriage portion.30C10/14/3. Within a few years of his marriage, Alured, like his father-in-law, was acting as a patron to godly ministers. In 1633, he conveyed all the tithes of Sculcoates (worth £30 a year) to John Spofford, a local minister, for as long as he continued to preach in Sculcoates parish church (Spofford went on to become preacher to the parliamentarian garrison at Hull during the civil war).31C94/3, f. 52; Cal. of the Ancient Deeds, Letters etc. in the Archives of the Corporation ed. L.M. Stanewell, 126; Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains, 175. But for all his godly piety, Alured seems to have run with a rather insalubrious crowd in London during the later 1630s; his social companions included the wastrel heir of Sir Gervase Clifton*.32Infra, ‘Sir Gervase Clifton’; SP16/395/30, f. 58; Nott. Univ. Lib. CL C 7. Moreover, he apparently had no compunction about deserting and leaving destitute his second wife, the daughter of a London feltmaker.33C10/14/3. How he came to meet and marry this unfortunate woman is not known.

The Alureds’ commitment to the ‘building of the Temple’ brought several members of the family, Alured among them, into conflict with the crown over its religious policies and its perceived aversion to Parliament – regular Parliaments being regarded by the Alureds (as by other members of the godly) as the surest means of defending English liberties and the ‘true religion’. In 1620, Alured’s uncle, Thomas Alured, had caused a minor sensation as the purported author of a letter to James I’s favourite, George Villiers, the marquess (and future duke) of Buckingham, urging him to oppose the Spanish Match and to persuade the king to place his trust in Parliament rather than in foreigners. Although the letter had appeared under Alured’s name, it had very probably been drafted by the puritan divine John Preston – a client of Thomas Alured’s godly kinsman and patron Fulke Greville†, 1st Baron Brooke – at the behest of a high-powered puritan clique that included the future parliamentarian peers William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele and Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick.34I. Morgan, Prince Charles’s Puritan Chaplain (1957), 56-60. Thomas Alured’s conviction that the king should be guided by Parliament was apparently shared by his brother Henry (John Alured’s father), who joined Sir William Constable* and Sir John Hotham* in spearheading opposition to the 1626-7 Forced Loan in the East Riding.35SP16/68/51i, f. 82; R. Cust, Forced Loan, 227.

The Alureds’ record of opposition to aspects of the crown’s policies was continued in no uncertain fashion by John Alured himself. In July 1638, as the kingdom began to mobilize for war against the Scottish Covenanters, Alured was reported to the privy council by Clifton’s wastrel son for having declared that the Scots were ‘brave boys and would make us all quake ... they would come to our faces and ... reform this land by a Parliament ... for the king would be forced to lay down his taxes [Ship Money] by their coming into England ...[and] would get nobody to fight against them, for they were our own nation and our own blood’.36SP16/395/29, f. 56; CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 558. Alured denied these remarks, but the council required him to enter bond for £2,000 for further appearance.37SP16/395/30, f. 58; CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 574.

The confidence with which Alured praised the Covenanters may have been more than mere bravado, for he was almost certainly on familiar terms with some of the most influential opponents of the Personal Rule, notably Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke and Viscount Saye and Sele. Alured was a distant relation of Lord Brooke, his brother-in-law Henry Darley was of one of Brooke’s closest friends, and Brooke’s step-father and Viscount Saye had both been closely involved in the ‘Alured letter’ episode in 1620. Another likely point of contact between Alured and Saye was Alured’s kinsman, the ardent East Riding puritan Sir Matthew Boynton*, whose son, Francis, had married Saye’s daughter.38Infra, ‘Henry Darley’; ‘Sir Matthew Boynton’; Morgan, Prince Charles’s Puritan Chaplain, 57, 60; D. Scott, ‘‘Hannibal at our gates’: loyalists and fifth-columnists during the bishops’ wars – the case of Yorkshire’, HR lxx. 279. Alured’s father and uncle were friends of the Boyntons, and Alured served as a captain in Sir Matthew’s militia regiment.39Add. 28082, f. 80v; HMC Cowper, i. 286; Cust, Forced Loan, 227. Moreover, both Alured and Boynton were investors in the Providence Island Company – a colonizing venture, established in 1629-30, that brought together many of the nation’s foremost godly figures, including the earls of Holland and Warwick, Viscount Saye, Lord Brooke, Sir Thomas Barrington*, Henry Darley, Sir Gilbert Gerard*, John Gurdon*, John Pym*, Benjamin Rudyerd* and Oliver St John*.40CO124/1, p. 2; CO124/2, ff. 1, 72; CSP Col. 1574-1660, p. 123. It is very likely that Alured was close to several other members of, or investors in, the company besides Darley and Boynton, particularly the godly Yorkshire gentlemen and future parliamentarians Godfrey Bossevile* (a half-brother of Lord Brooke), Sir John Bourchier* (a friend of Darley’s) and Sir William Constable. Alured’s political sympathies during the late 1630s and early 1640s appear to have been closely congruent with the thinking and stratagems of this powerful network of puritan peers and gentlemen.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Alured was returned for Hedon along with Sir Philip Stapilton, a gentleman closely associated with one of the leading ‘disaffected’ peers, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.41Infra, ‘Sir Philip Stapilton’. Alured’s interest at Hedon derived from his title to the manor of Burstwick, which he leased from the Catholic peer, Henry Constable, 1st Viscount Dunbar [S], lord of the seigniory of Holderness. Hedon was part of the manor of Burstwick, and as leaseholder of the manor, Alured was able to exercise considerable influence within the borough.42Supra, ‘Hedon’; C142/452/42. He received no committee appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate.

That summer, Alured may have been complicit in a design masterminded by Warwick, Saye, Brooke, Pym, St John and their circle to encourage the Scots to invade and thus force Charles to summon a new Parliament. Alured joined Yorkshire’s ‘disaffected’ gentry in July 1640 in their petition to the king in which they complained about the local impact of the bishops’ wars; and it is very likely that he also signed their petition of 24 August – pleading poverty in the face of royal efforts to mobilize the county’s trained bands for service against the Scots – although the principal source for both petitions, John Rushworth*, does not specifically list him among the signatories to either.43SP16/461/38, f. 58; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1215, 1231. Ostensibly, these petitions were expressions of localist concern at Charles’s mismanagement of the war. However, it was probably not accidental that they also served to advance the design of the Warwick-Pym group, for they had the effect of encouraging the Scots to invade whilst at the same time retarding the royal war effort. Both petitions were signed by Alured’s brother-in-law Henry Darley, who had acted as a courier for the Warwick-Pym group’s secret correspondence with the Covenanters.44Infra, ‘Henry Darley’. He was undoubtedly aware of petitions’ wider significance, and it is likely that both he and Alured promoted and signed the petitions primarily with the aim of bringing to an end the personal rule. The two men also signed the third Yorkshire petition, of mid-September, which reiterated the demand made by a group of dissident English peers, headed by Warwick, Saye and their co-conspirators, that Charles should summon a Parliament.45Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland Ms vol. 1608-1700, N38 Car. I. On 5 October, Alured signed the Yorkshire county indenture returning two of the summer’s leading petitioners, the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*) and Henry Belasyse, to the Long Parliament.46C219/43/3/89. Alured himself was re-elected at Hedon, on this occasion with the godly East Riding knight Sir William Strickland.47Infra, ‘Hedon’.

For all his talk of ‘reform[ing] this land by a Parliament’, Alured seems to have been one of the least active Members of the Long Parliament. This was in marked contrast to Henry Darley and most of the other Members with links to the Providence Island Company, who provided much of the leadership for the reform movement in the Commons. Alured was present in the House to take the Protestation on 3 May 1641.48CJ ii. 133b. But his only parliamentary appointment before the spring of 1642 was on 30 August, when he was named as a commissioner for disarming recusants in the East Riding.49LJ iv. 385a. He invested a mere £100 as an Irish Adventurer in March 1642.50Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 175. In May, he was appointed to a seven-man committee to assist Sir John Hotham in his duties as parliamentary governor of Hull.51CJ ii. 577b; PJ ii. 341. The membership of this committee was determined by John Pym and his allies, who were suspicious of Hotham’s commitment to the parliamentarian cause and anxious to monitor his proceedings.52Infra, ‘Sir John Hotham’; Clarendon, Hist. i. 523-4. On 24 May, Parliament ordered Alured, John Broxholme (a godly Lincolnshire MP) and Henry Darley to go to Hull immediately.53CJ ii. 584b-585a; LJ v. 82b. All three men were trusted by the Commons’ leadership and no particular friends of Hotham. In the event, Darley appears to have remained at Westminster, and most of the work in ‘assisting’ Sir John at Hull devolved upon Alured, Captain John Hotham (Hotham’s son) and the Hull MP Peregrine Pelham.54CJ ii. 678b; LJ v. 183a, 217b; PJ iii. 115, 170, 196, 227, 232; HMC Portland, i. 41. Alured was reportedly eager that spring to bring some of his militia troops into Hull in order to strengthen the town’s resistance to the king.55Bodl, Clarendon 21, ff. 81, 83.

Commissioned as a captain of horse in the earl of Essex’s army in July 1642, Alured was also one of the first Yorkshire gentlemen to raise troops for Parliament.56SP28/1A, f. 19; SP28/2A, f. 136; SP28/34, f. 399; SP28/143, pt. 6, f. 6v. He should not be confused with his younger brother Christopher, who was a captain of foot in the Hull garrison during the early months of the war.57Hotham Pprs. 249, 263; Jones, ‘War in north’, 367. On 23 September, the Commons summoned Alured and Peregrine Pelham back to Westminster – Hotham having begun to complain loudly about interference in his governorship.58CJ ii. 779b. Alured was almost certainly the ‘Captain Alured’ in whom Sir Hugh Cholmeley* (Hotham’s close friend) expressed little confidence in November, claiming that he ‘much magnified the king’s party in London and his forces’.59Beinecke, MS Osborn 94, folder 12: Sir Hugh Cholmeley to John Pym, 3 Nov. 1642; A.J. Hopper, ‘The Extent of Support for Parliament in Yorks. during the Early Stages of the First Civil War’ (York Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1999), 40. That Alured did not get on well with Hotham can perhaps be inferred from his decision to remain with Lord Fairfax after the Commons had requested Essex to send Alured’s troop and other northern parliamentarian units to Fairfax’s assistance in the West Riding in December.60CJ ii. 891a; Newes From Yorke (1643), sig. A4 (E.85.17); Jones, ‘War in north’, 367. Alured’s resolve to take service under Lord Fairfax may also reflect his commitment to the vigorous prosecution of the war – Hotham, in the autumn of 1642, having urged Parliament to seek a negotiated settlement with the king.61Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 275. During the first half of 1643, Alured played a leading role in gathering evidence of Hotham’s treasonous dealings with the royalists, and was apparently unperturbed by the fact that his uncle, Lieutenant-colonel Lancelot Alured, defected to the king with Sir Hugh Cholmeley in March. At his trial in 1645, Hotham was to claim that Alured ‘being before sufficiently disaffected to me...was the first man that durst speak ill of me publicly’, and blamed his downfall partly on the machinations of Alured and Lord Fairfax’s military secretary Thomas Stockdale*.62Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 275; Hotham Pprs. 122, 126.

Alured demonstrated more zeal as an army officer than he did as a Commons-man. He and his troops fought at the battle of Adwalton Moor in June 1643 and probably also at Marston Moor in July 1644, by which point he had attained the rank of colonel.63J. Binns, Yorks. in the Civil Wars, 67; Jones, ‘War in north’, 367. He was also active as an East Riding committeeman during the mid-1640s.64CJ iii. 586a, 606a; Hull Hist. Centre, C BRL/381. He seems to have attended Parliament briefly during the summer of 1643, when he took the vow and covenant (6 June) and was named to several committees concerned with supplying Lord Fairfax’s army.65CJ iii. 118b, 166b, 174b. By early 1645, he had apparently become a close friend of his fellow cavalry officer Sir Thomas Fairfax*, and was part of the small entourage of officers that accompanied Sir Thomas to London in February 1645 following his appointment as commander of the New Model army.66Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 13; Perfect Passages no. 17 (12-19 Feb. 1645), 126 (E.270.5). On the day that Alured arrived in London (18 February), he was added to the committee set up the previous day (17 February) for recruiting troops for Fairfax’s new command – his only committee appointment between 1643 and 1649.67CJ iv. 52a. On 28 May 1645, he took the Covenant.68CJ iv. 156a.

Although Alured undoubtedly supported the establishment of the New Model, his main reason for travelling to London in 1645 was probably to obtain some form of maintenance for himself and his family. The fighting around Hull during 1642 and 1643 had severely damaged his estate, and his army pay was doubtless in arrears (because he had held a militia commission before 1642 he was not required to resign his colonelcy in accordance with the self-denying ordinance).69W.L.F. Nuttall, ‘The Yorks. commrs. appointed for the trial of King Charles the First’, YAJ xliii. 152. He was probably in urgent need of the £4 weekly allowance for MPs which the Commons granted him on 3 June 1645.70CJ iv. 161a.

Like the majority of Yorkshire Members by the mid-1640s, and especially those close to the Fairfaxes, Alured aligned with the Independent interest at Westminster in opposition to the Scots and their English Presbyterian allies. His change of attitude towards the Scots, whom he had lauded in 1638 as ‘brave boys’, was probably linked to his religious convictions, for he was almost certainly hostile to the establishment of a clericalist, Scottish-style Presbyterian church. Indeed, he may have been a member of the Independent congregation established at Hull by the prominent Independent divine Philip Nye. The minister of Alured’s own parish of Sculcoates, Robert Luddington, was certainly a member of this congregation, as was, it seems, Sir Matthew Boynton.71Supra, ‘Sir Matthew Boynton’; A.E. Trout, ‘Nonconformity in Hull’, Trans. of the Congregational Hist. Soc., ix. 31-2. Alured was possibly among the MPs with whom Nye allegedly held ‘discourses’ at Hull, ‘pleading ... for a necessity of a toleration’.72T. Edwards, Antapologia (1644), 217, 222-3 (E.1.1). During the summer and autumn of 1645, Alured signed numerous letters to Parliament from the Yorkshire parliamentary committees, complaining about the ‘infinite oppressions and extortions’ of the Scottish army in the north, and asking that it be removed from the region.73Bodl. Nalson IV, ff. 60, 108, 187, 282, 309; Nalson V, f. 21. For their part, the Scots accused Alured and other Yorkshire committeemen of trying to stir up ill-feeling against them by colluding with their principal opponent in Cumberland, Richard Barwis*.74Bodl. Nalson IV, f. 60.

Almost nothing is known about Alured’s activities between 1646 and 1649, either at Westminster or in Yorkshire. Never very active in Parliament, he appears to have abandoned his seat entirely during the late 1640s, being declared absent at the call of the House on 9 October 1647 and again on 26 September 1648.75CJ v. 330a; vi. 34b. Presumably he was living in Yorkshire during this period, although there is no evidence that he was active in the county’s affairs. Nor does he appear to have fought for Parliament in the north during the second civil war. Nevertheless, he seems to have been regarded by the army and its friends at Westminster as a firm opponent of a negotiated settlement with the king; and on 6 January 1649, he was appointed to the high court of justice for trying the king. He attended six of the 18 sessions of the trial commission and all day four days of the trial itself.76Muddiman, Trial, 76, 89, 96, 105. However, he was among a group of 13 trial commissioners who did not attend the court on 29 January when the death warrant was signed and who therefore had to be sought out in the Commons or wherever and prevailed upon to append their signatures.77Muddiman, Trial, 226-8; S. Kelsey, ‘The death of Charles I’, HJ xlv. 750-1.

It is not clear what moved Alured to condemn Charles. According to a Restoration pamphleteer, he was a man of ‘turbulent spirit...apt to take fire like gunpowder’, and ‘a cruel and close pursuer of whatsoever he intended to put in execution’ – although these traits are not evident in his parliamentary career.78Oliver Cromwell The Late Great Tirant His Life-Guard (1660), 5 (E.1040.10). Like other northern regicides, Alured may have come to the view that Charles’s obduracy signalled not only that God had marked him for destruction, but also the political necessity of killing him before he could invite the Scots to heap yet more misery on their region.79D. Scott, ‘Motives for king-killing’ in The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I ed. J. Peacey (Basingstoke, 2001), 148-53. Whatever Alured’s motives for supporting the regicide, they were not shared by his old friend Henry Darley, who refused to have anything to do with the king’s trial and execution.80Infra, ‘Henry Darley’.

Alured entered his dissent to the 5 December vote – that the king’s answer to the Newport propositions were an acceptable basis for settlement – on 29 January – in the company, among others, of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, and his fellow Yorkshiremen John Anlaby, Sir William Constable and Luke Robinson.81CJ vi. 124b. The timing of his dissent (the days before the king’s execution) and his signing of the death warrant would seem to place him firmly among the more radical element in the Rump. Yet this was virtually the sum of his involvement in its proceedings. He received only one appointment in the House after 1648 – to a committee set up on the day of the king’s execution (30 January) to repeal several former Acts concerning the law of treason and the authority of the monarch, thereby clearing the ground for the establishment of a republic.82CJ vi. 126a. Besides signing the death warrant, Alured’s only claim to fame is his likely patronage of the godly poet Andrew Marvell*. The Marvell family had been neighbours and friends of the Alureds since the 1620s, when Marvell’s father had become master of the Hull Charterhouse, which adjoined the Alureds’ house of the same name.83Infra, ‘Andrew Marvell’; Borthwick, Prob. Reg. 40, f. 247; Marchant, Puritans, 262. It was perhaps Alured who introduced the young Andrew Marvell to Sir Thomas Fairfax, in whose service Marvell wrote some of the finest poetry of the seventeenth century.

Alured petitioned the Rump in the summer of 1649, requesting compensation for losses in Parliament’s service – which he put at £5,275 – and arrears of army pay amounting to £5,494.84CJ vi. 279b. The House ordered that he be paid £2,000, but it is not clear how much of this he had received before his death on 4 July 1650.85C7/402/5; CJ vi. 279b; vii. 7b. He was buried two days later, on 6 July, at St Clement Danes, Westminster.86St Clement Danes par reg. In his will – which does not appear to have survived nor been entered in probate – he charged his estate with £60 a year in annuities and bequests totalling over £900. According to his widow, he died in possession of a real and personal estate of ‘great yearly and other value’, which suggests that, in spite of his losses during the civil war, he had managed to improve the rental of his estate since 1638, when his income had been put at between £400 and £500 a year.87C10/465/3; CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 574. At the Restoration, his estate, like those of other regicides, was forfeited to the crown. His younger brother, the republican army officer Matthew Alured, represented Hedon in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, but he was the last of Alured’s immediate family to serve as an MP.