MAULEVERER, Thomas (1599-1655), of Allerton Mauleverer, Yorks.

The Mauleverers were of Norman ancestry and had settled at Allerton Mauleverer in the West Riding by the early twelfth century.31Thoresby, Ducatus Leodiensis, 117-18, 191. They had supplied MPs for Yorkshire in the Parliaments of 1334 and 1419, and by the early seventeenth century they had built up an estate in and around Allerton Mauleverer that would be worth approximately £1,500 a year by the 1640s.32C142/294/80; SP23/215, p. 264; HP Commons 1386-1421, ‘Sir Halnath Mauleverer’. Mauleverer was still a child when his father died and his wardship was granted to his kinsman Sir John Bourchier – uncle of future parliamentarian and regicide of the same name – and (Sir) Richard Hutton, a prominent Yorkshire lawyer.33WARD9/348, unfol.; York Minster Lib. Hailstone mss, Box 4.5.

Mauleverer’s defiance of royal policies before 1640 was apparently confined to his failure to compound for distraint of knighthood, for which he and eleven other Yorkshire gentlemen, including Sir William Constable* and Henry Darley*, were summoned before the privy council in 1630.34APC 1630-1, p. 93; Cliffe, Yorks. 296. An active justice of the peace, he regularly attended the Knaresborough and Wetherby quarter sessions during the 1630s and was part of that circle of West Riding magistrates which included Sir Ferdinando (later 2nd Baron) Fairfax*, (Sir) Thomas Fairfax*, George Marwood* and Thomas Stockdale*.35W. Riding Sessions Recs. ed. J. Lister (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. liv), 21, 249; CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 433. Mauleverer was on particularly close terms with the Fairfaxes of Denton, serving as a captain in the trained bands regiment of the 1st Baron Thomas (Sir Thomas Fairfax†).36Add. 28082, f. 80.

Although Mauleverer had inherited a sizeable estate, one of his creditors would later claim that Mauleverer had been ‘much straitened’ for money in the mid-1630s (possibly in consequence of the great expense he had incurred repairing his corn mills at Boroughbridge). He would also accuse Mauleverer of being financially unreliable, finding him ‘then as now ... a very bad paymaster’. Mauleverer, for his part, excused his failure to pay the debt in question on the grounds that he had been duped into borrowing the money by his wife and household chaplain William Campleshon.37C6/4/134; E134/11CHAS1/EAST2. Campleshon appears to have left Mauleverer’s service shortly after this episode and in March 1637 was nominated to the vicarage of Carnaby by the godly East Riding gentleman Sir William Strickland*.38IND1/17000, f. 36.

Mauleverer signed several petitions from Yorkshire’s ‘disaffected’ gentry to the king in 1640 – in which they complained about the cost of military charges and pleaded poverty in the face of royal efforts to mobilise the county’s trained bands against the Scottish Covenanters – including that of mid-September, where they reiterated the demand made by a group of dissident English peers that Charles should summon a Parliament.39CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 523-4; Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland Ms vol. 1608-1700, N38 Car. I. On 5 October, Mauleverer was also among the signatories to the Yorkshire county indenture returning two of the summer’s leading petitioners, the 2nd Baron Fairfax and Henry Belasyse, to the Long Parliament.40C219/43/3/89. Although Mauleverer owned a burgage tenement and corn mills in Boroughbridge, he may owed his return for the borough that autumn largely to Lord Fairfax.41DL4/89/34; E134/11CHAS1/EAST2; York Minster Lib. Hailstone mss, Box 4.5. Fairfax had represented the borough in every Parliament since 1614, including the Short Parliament, and may have made way for Mauleverer only after his own election as a knight of the shire. Mauleverer certainly seems to have been part of Fairfax’s parliamentary circle during the early 1640s, for Stockdale used him to convey letters to his lordship at Westminster.42Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 99, 205, 207.

Mauleverer cut an insignificant figure in the Commons. He received less than ten committee appointments during his entire parliamentary career and made no recorded contribution to debate. Granted leave of absence on 6 March 1641, he joined Lord Fairfax and several other Yorkshire MPs later that month in a petition to Parliament for a statute establishing a court of justice in the north, in place of the proscribed council of the north.43CJ ii. 97a; HMC Lords, n.s. xi. 255-6. He had returned to Westminster by 3 May, when he took the Protestation.44CJ ii. 133a. On 2 July, he was named to the committee on the bill for securing the billet money due to the northern counties – which would be his only such appointment in the Commons before 1647.45CJ ii. 196a. Early in August, the king created Mauleverer a baronet, waiving the thousand pound creation fee, as part of a royal initiative to curry favour with the Yorkshire gentry.46SO3/12, f. 161. He was granted further leave of absence on 18 March 1642, and in June he was included on a list of Members who were to be fined £100 if they did not resume their seats before 16 June.47CJ ii. 486a, 598a; PJ iii. 1. He left it until the last moment (16 June) to come to the door of the House and request permission to satisfy the committee set up to fine absent Members. John Pym and other Commons-men then withdrew to speak with Mauleverer, and soon afterwards the committee’s chairman announced that he was satisfied with Mauleverer’s excuse, ‘which was that his wife was not well and the notice he had of the order was late’.48PJ iii. 89, 90. The House then ordered that his fine be lifted.49CJ ii. 628b.

Mauleverer took the side of Parliament at the outbreak of the civil war, joining Lord Fairfax, Sir Thomas Fairfax and other Yorkshire parliamentarians in a ‘protestation and declaration’ to the Commons late in August 1642 against the issuing of the commission of array at the York assizes.50Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 648-9. As a loyal ally of the Fairfaxes, he supported their attempt that autumn to reach an accommodation with the West Riding royalists and was one of the signatories on the parliamentarian side to the short-lived ‘treaty of pacification’ at Rothwell, near Leeds, on 29 September. This initiative to keep Yorkshire neutral in anticipation of a decisive battle in the south was immediately condemned by Parliament and quickly collapsed.51CJ ii. 794a; A. Woolrych, ‘Yorkshire’s treaty of neutrality’, HT vi. 701.

Besieged at Allerton Mauleverer by the royalists late in October 1642, Mauleverer was relieved by Sir Christopher Wray* and probably busied himself thereafter recruiting for Lord Fairfax’s northern parliamentary army – he later claimed to have raised a troop of horse and two regiments of foot for the parliamentarian cause.52Speciall Passages no. 12 (25 Oct.-1 Nov. 1642), 103 (E.126.1); CJ v. 330b; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 838. He should not be confused with his kinsmen and fellow parliamentarian officers Colonel James Mauleverer – whose ‘brutal and vindictive’ conduct during the war is sometimes mis-attributed to Sir Thomas – and Colonel John Mauleverer, who was appointed deputy governor of Hull by Lord Fairfax.53CJ iii. 125a; LJ vi. 40b; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 529-30; DNB, ‘Sir Thomas Mauleverer’. According to a history of Ripon published in the 1730s, Mauleverer and a detachment of parliamentarian troops entered the town at some point late in 1642 or early 1643 and defaced the memorials in the collegiate church and smashed the stained glass and ‘offered many indignities to the inhabitants’, before being driven out by Sir John Mallory* and royalist forces from Skipton Castle.54T. Gent, Hist. of Rippon [sic] (1733), 118; Ripon Millenary ed. W. Harrison (Ripon, 1892), ii. 58, app. p. xiv. He commanded a troop of horse in the northern army at the battle of Adwalton Moor late in June 1643; and in January 1644 was part of the force that Sir Thomas Fairfax took into Cheshire to relieve Nantwich. Having garrisoned Ripon for Parliament in the spring of 1644, he was driven out of the town again in October.55Mercurius Civicus no. 72 (3-10 Oct. 1644), 678; Yorks. Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. Clay, 3; Newcastle Mems. ed. C.H. Firth (1886), 217; Civil War in Cheshire, 117; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Thomas Mauleverer’; Jones, ‘War in north’, 392-3; Hopper, ‘Army of the Fairfaxes’, 16. His military career came to an end with the passing of the Self-Denying Ordinance in the spring of 1645.

Mauleverer was active on both the York and Westminster committees of the Northern Association* during the mid-1640s, both of which bodies were dominated by allies of the Fairfaxes and supporters of the New Model army.56CJ vi. 421b; Add. 15858, f. 216; Add. 21427, f. 1; Bodl. Nalson IV, ff. 43, 204, 240, 246, 288, 317; W. Yorks. Archives (Leeds), WYL230/2973. He signed at least five of the Yorkshire committee’s letters to Parliament in the summer and autumn of 1645, complaining about the abuses committed by the Scottish army in the northern counties and requesting that it be removed from the region.57Bodl. Nalson IV, ff. 60, 282, 309; Nalson V, f. 16; Tanner 59, f. 428; HMC Portland, i. 303. He used his authority as a committeeman to have some of the unruly Scottish soldiers stationed at Tickhill, near Rotherham, imprisoned, for which their officer threatened to kill him.58SP16/513/52, f. 114. Significantly, Mauleverer did not take the Covenant until February 1647, which was extremely late, even for one who had spent long periods away from Westminster.59CJ v. 97a.

Mauleverer’s attendance record in Parliament appears to have improved little, if at all, after the civil war. He was granted leave by the Commons on 26 March and 1 October 1646 and again on 8 March 1647, and he received just one appointment in the House before late 1648, when he was added on 10 June 1647 to the committee for receiving information against Members with royalist pasts.60CJ iv. 489b, 680a; v. 107b, 205a. He was not among those Members who fled to the army following the ‘Presbyterian’ riots at Westminster on 26 July – probably because he was absent from the Commons at the time. With the Independents back in the ascendant by the autumn, he petitioned Parliament concerning his arrears of pay. His petition was presented to the House in October by his son-in-law Major Thomas Scot II*, who had been returned as a ‘recruiter’ for Boroughbridge’s neighbouring constituency of Aldborough – almost certainly on Mauleverer’s interest – and was strongly pro-Leveller.61Infra, ‘Thomas Scot II’; CJ v. 323a, 330b. Mauleverer claimed that as well as raising troops for Parliament and serving as an officer under Lord Fairfax he had incurred personal losses and expenses amounting to £15,000. The House resolved to allow him £1,000 for his immediate relief and left it to the Northern Association Committee to decide how to settle the rest of the account.62CJ v. 330b. Declared absent at the call of the House on 9 October, he was fined £20, although this sum was subsequently returned to him on the recommendation of the committee for absent Members.63CJ v. 330a, 337a. On 17 November, the Northern Association Committee proposed that Mauleverer’s £1,000 be charged upon the excise and an ordinance was duly passed to this effect, but no further recompense was forthcoming.64CJ v. 362b; vi. 191a; LJ ix. 552b. Granted further leave of absence on 24 February 1648, he spent that summer in Yorkshire, where he helped to mobilize the county’s parliamentarian forces during the second civil war.65CJ v. 471a; Add. 36996, f. 113; Bodl. Nalson VII, f. 22; HMC Portland, i. 454. The ‘Colonel Mauleverer’ who attended Lord Fairfax’s funeral in March 1648 and who served at the siege of Pontefract and in the force that occupied London that winter was not Sir Thomas, as is sometimes assumed, but John Mauleverer.66A Perfect Narrative of the Late Proceedings of the Parliament of Scotland (1648), 2-4 (E.433.13); Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 530; I. Gentles, New Model Army (Oxford, 1992), 281; J. Binns, Yorks. in the Civil War (Pickering, 2004), 141. Sir Thomas was still in Yorkshire on 26 September, when he was again declared absent at the call of the House, but had returned to Westminster by 25 November to receive his first and only appointment in the Commons since mid-1647 – to a committee for determining which garrisons and strongholds to maintain and which to dismantle.67CJ vi. 34b, 87a; W. Yorks. Archives (Wakefield), QS 10/2, p. 185.

Mauleverer continued to sit after Pride’s Purge and was among those Commons-men who entered their dissent to the 5 December vote – that the king’s answer to the Newport propositions were an acceptable basis for settlement – on 20 December: the day on which this test of the Rump’s membership was introduced.68[W. Prynne*], A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members Case (1660), 21 (E.1013.22). On 23 December, he was added to the committee to investigate cases of public servants taking bribes.69CJ vi. 103a. Appointed early in January 1649 to the high court of justice to try the king, he attended 17 of the 18 meetings of the trial commission, all four sessions of the trial itself and signed the death warrant – as did his cousin Sir John Bourchier.70Muddiman, Trial, 195, 228.

Mauleverer’s motives in seeking the king’s death are obscure. To claim that his actions were merely those of an ‘unprincipled, choleric malcontent’ is perhaps a little harsh.71C.V. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I (1964), 100. The assumption that he was entirely indifferent to the cause of godly reformation, for example, is hard to reconcile with evidence of his friendship with the Fairfaxes, his occasional attendance at the Committee for Plundered Ministers (to which he was never formally appointed) and his participation in the Rump’s work of presenting ministers to church livings.72SP22/2B, ff. 22, 24; Add. 36792, ff. 36v, 59. But certainly his tally of appointments after Pride’s Purge was hardly that of a zealous commonwealthsman. He was named to only five committees in the Rump, including those on a bill for discharging poor debtors from prison and (his last appointment) on a bill for the better execution of Parliament’s judgement against the Leveller leader John Lilburne (21 January 1652).73CJ vi. 103a, 132a, 327a, 515b; vii. 75b.

Money rather than politics appears to have been Mauleverer’s main preoccupation by the late 1640s. He was apparently not above fabricating charges of delinquency against his creditors in order to avoid repayment.74SP24/62, pt. 3, unfol.; CCAM 851, 1190. And he was a ‘bad paymaster’ even to his own son and heir Sir Richard Mauleverer†, who, in contrast to Sir Thomas, sided with the king in both civil wars. During compounding proceedings in 1649, Sir Richard claimed that £1,700 of a £500 annuity had been withheld from him by his father.75SP23/215, p. 264. Mauleverer also had designs on his son’s estate, which he had settled on him at his marriage in 1642.76Nottingham Univ. Lib. Ga 9337. When the Yorkshire commissioners for sequestration moved to sequester Sir Richard’s lands in June 1650, Mauleverer flatly denied that he had ever settled an estate on him. Having then given his word not to harass his son’s tenants while the commissioners looked into the matter, he promptly collected the rent of those tenants who were willing to pay and distrained the goods and livestock of those who were not. He subsequently ignored repeated requests from the commissioners to return the goods, threatened their agents and compelled the tenants he had distrained to compound for their belongings. Acknowledging defeat, the commissioners decided to ‘forbear further contending with him in regard he is a Member of Parliament’ and referred the whole matter to the Committee for Compounding*.77SP23/236, ff. 31, 32. Still in need of money (largely, it seems, to pay off debts incurred before the civil war), Mauleverer and his son mortgaged the manor of Allerton Mauleverer and several of their West Riding properties in November 1651.78LC4/202, f. 234v; Nottingham Univ. Lib. Ga 9341-2; York Minster Lib. Hailstone mss, Box 4.5.

Mauleverer died intestate at some point between February 1655 – when he was appointed to the commission of oyer and terminer for the northern counties – and 9 June of that year, when the administration of his estate was granted to Sir Richard Mauleverer.79C181/7, p. 93; PROB6/31, f. 126. His place of burial is not known. In his petition to compound in 1649, Sir Richard had claimed that his father’s estate in Yorkshire was worth £1,500 a year.80SP23/215, p. 264. However, in 1668 Mauleverer’s lands were valued at exactly twice that sum.81LR2/266, f. 1v. At the Restoration, Mauleverer’s name was exempted from the act of oblivion, but Sir Richard, who was appointed a gentleman of the privy chamber in 1660, was allowed to inherit the baronetcy and at least part of his father’s estate.82LJ xi. 102a; CSP Dom. 1661-2, pp. 267, 357, 498; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Richard Mauleverer’. Sir Richard represented Boroughbridge in the Cavalier Parliament.83HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Sir Richard Mauleverer’.