BURGOYNE, Sir John, 1st bt. (1591-1657), of Sutton, Beds. and Wroxall, Warws.

The Burgoynes were settled at Sutton and Potton, Bedfordshire, from at least the fourteenth century. A Bedfordshire rhyme ran

I, John of Gaunt

Do give and do graunt

To Johnny Burgoyne

And the heirs of his loin

Sutton and Potton

Until the world’s rotten

but the status of the family was obscure until the sixteenth century.19Recs. of Wroxall Abbey, xxxiii. Modest local enhancements of the Sutton and Potton patrimony were made by Thomas and John Burgoyne in 1529 and 1544, but it was Sir John Burgoyne’s grandfather, Robert Burgoyne, an auditor of the exchequer, who took advantage of his appointment as a commissioner for taking the surrenders of monasteries. He acquired the buildings and estate of Wroxall abbey, Warwickshire, pulled down the monastery and built a substantial brick mansion around a quadrangle of nearly 5,000 square feet.20VCH Beds. ii. 248; Recs. of Wroxall Abbey, xxxii, xxxiv, xxxv. Even so, Robert Burgoyne never lived in Warwickshire, but in Hackney, Middlesex, and the Burgoynes continued to make marriage alliances with Cambridgeshire and Essex families rather than midlands ones.

Sir John Burgoyne was born in Haslingfield, the Cambridgeshire home of his maternal grandfather, and while his father lived at Wroxall, he himself spent more time at Sutton.21Recs. of Wroxall Abbey, xxxvii. Educated at Emmanuel, Cambridge, he proceeded after taking his BA in 1611 to the Middle Temple.22MTR ii. 541. After a period at the Inn, where he took no active formal role in its collegiate life, he returned to Sutton to live as a country gentleman, and came into his inheritance in 1636. He was an enclosing landlord at Sutton and Potton, where in 1639 he was able to secure agricultural changes with the consent of the 69 freeholders.23J. Godber, Hist. Beds. 1066-1888 (Bedford, 1969), 244. Sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1640-1, Burgoyne evinced nothing in his early career to suggest a stance of political opposition to the government, and he accepted the title of baronet in the year of his shrievalty. Nevertheless, there was much evidence of godly Protestantism in the family, which took on a greater significance as the project of Archbishop William Laud in the 1630s to foster the Arminian counter-culture developed.

Emmanuel College was a foundation favoured by puritans, and, at Sutton, Burgoyne’s father had attracted to the living the former fellow of Queens’ College, Oliver Bowles, who had taught John Preston, the renowned Calvinist preacher. Bowles remained at Sutton for nearly 40 years, thus providing a powerful puritan influence on John Burgoyne and, indeed, his son, Roger*.24S. Clark, Lives of Thirty-Two English Divines (1677), 76. When a Bedfordshire petition was presented to Parliament on 16 March 1642, Burgoyne was one of those who signed the plea to end ‘scandalous and superstitious innovations’ and to restore ‘true’ - Protestant - religion.25Beds. RO, X 48/1. He was the spokesman of the Bedfordshire gentlemen when they were admitted to the House of Commons. He called for the king to return to London and for the Militia Ordinance to be implemented speedily, further evidence that Burgoyne was firmly in sympathy with the parliamentary opposition to the king.26PJ ii. 46. When civil war broke out, he was named to committees for Bedfordshire, beginning with the committee to create a military association from the east midlands counties, under the military command of Lord Grey of Groby (Thomas Grey*), son of Henry Grey*, 1st earl of Stamford.27A. and O. In November, he contributed £200 towards the parliamentary cause from his Warwickshire estates.28CCAM 399. In October 1643, it was reported that during the plundering of the Dunstable and Bedford area by royalist soldiers under Sir Lewis Dyve, Burgoyne’s house was levelled, ‘even to the ground’. Passing on bad news from Bedfordshire, in coded correspondence at that time, Sir Roger Burgoyne* noted the escape of a ‘friend’, quite possibly his father, Sir John.29Life and Lttrs. of Sir Lewis Dyve, 39; HMC 7th Rep. 445.

As an active committeeman in Bedfordshire, Burgoyne spent a great deal of time trying to resolve complaints about the free quarter of parliamentarian forces on the populace of Bedfordshire, and to overcome resistance to military taxation.30HMC Portland, i. 131. By 1645, Burgoyne and his colleagues were increasingly sympathetic to the plight of the civilian inhabitants. They noted the inequalities of the tax regime, by which Buckinghamshire was apparently contributing nothing towards the troops of either the New Model or the Scots army, in contrast to the heavy burden on Bedfordshire.31‘Civil War Papers of Sir William Boteler’, 9, 14-15. Pressure on the committee came not only from civilians, but also from the soldiers for whom they were raising levies. Sir Samuel Luke*, garrison commander at Newport Pagnell, complained of inequalities of rating as they affected him, and the ever-accommodating committeemen agreed to review their arrangements; shortly afterwards, they had to call on Luke to arbitrate in a confrontation between townspeople and soldiers at Elstow.32Lttr. Bks. of Sir Samuel Luke, 544, 594. Burgoyne was a senior member of the Bedfordshire committee, and his links with Parliament were further rooted in his Bedfordshire background when the rector of Sutton, Oliver Bowles, became a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, and with his son, Edward, began a career as a writer of Calvinist sermons and polemic. Burgoyne’s sympathies with the overburdened tax-payers of Bedfordshire may have allowed a suspicion to form at Westminster that his commitment to Parliament was not above questioning. In June 1644, the Committee for Advance of Money assessed his estate at £1,000, but noted his financial contributions in 1642 and concluded that he was well affected. That the committee could even have proceeded that far in considering Burgoyne’s loyalties is remarkable.33CCAM 399.

Burgoyne’s candidature in the Warwickshire recruiter election therefore came after no active career as a parliamentarian activist in that county. However, he maintained strong social links with Warwickshire political leaders. He presented gifts to Catherine, wife of Robert Greville†, 2nd Baron Brooke, at Warwick castle. They were possibly gifts of condolence on the death of her father, Francis Russell†, 4th earl of Bedford, in May 1641.34Warws. RO, CR 1886/CUP 4/21, accts. of John Halford. In the same period, just before the civil war, the schoolmaster diarist, Thomas Dugard, noted the Burgoynes among the circle of puritans associated with Lord Brooke.35A. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warws. 1620-60 (Cambridge, 1987), 74. Although it was Roger Burgoyne who was more closely associated with Warwickshire through residence – Sir John Burgoyne settled Wroxall on his son in October 1642 – Sir John was himself not a stranger to the county.36Warws. RO, CR 113/10. He was at Wroxall for long enough on occasions between 1646 and 1648 to lend money to an indigent tradesman, William Knight of Rowington.37BRL, ms 1098/115. It was probably for his profile as one of a group with impeccable puritan credentials and unimpeachable social standing recently associated with Brooke, who had been killed at Lichfield in March 1643, that Burgoyne was persuaded to stand in October 1645 with Thomas Boughton* in the Warwickshire recruiter election.

Brooke’s interest had passed to Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh, but in the circumstances of October 1645, the election was not a test of puritan commitment, but a contest between on the one hand the military- and radical-dominated county committee and on the other, the socially conservative gentry. The election spread over five days, as freeholders were repeatedly prevented from casting a vote by the angry soldiery, whose candidates were Richard Lucy* and Col. John Bridges.* After the poll was moved from Warwick first to Coleshill and then to Meriden, in the north of the county, where there was a danger of attack from royalist garrisons in neighbouring counties, eventually the soldiers conceded defeat.38The Scotish Dove no. 108 (7-12 Nov. 1645), 852-4 (E.309.5); Dugdale, Diary and Corresp. 82. Burgoyne and Boughton were declared successful on 5 November, but the election return was dated 27 October, the first day of the contest.39C219/43/3/58. Towards the end of November, Burgoyne and the defeated candidates Lucy and Bridges were among a group added to the Warwickshire county committee.40CJ iv. 345b.

In his early months in the House of Commons, Burgoyne was named to several committees investigating accounts and accounting. This had been a topic which had provided a battleground for the warring factions of the Warwickshire committee. The sub-committee of accounts for the county had become a vehicle for the socially conservative county gentry to attack the radicals of the main committee, and so Burgoyne’s interest in this topic may have owed something to the background against which his recent election to Parliament was fought. On 1 December 1645, he was named to a committee to investigate allegations that Members had taken money for matters depending in the House.41CJ iv. 362a. Twelve days later he was added to another committee charged with auditing the activities of the Committee of Accounts, and on 16 March 1646 was a member of the committee investigating the holding of civil or military offices by Members. Burgoyne’s membership of this last-named body, for which Sir Philip Stapylton’s name was first on the list, was confirmation that he was sympathetic to the political Presbyterians and their project of identifying what they considered the insidious self-advancement of the Independents.42CJ iv. 477a. Burgoyne was a religious Presbyterian, too: on 21 January 1646 he was named to a committee given the task of extending the system of elders and classes to parts of London until then beyond the domain of the nascent Presbyterian system in the City.43CJ iv. 413b.

On 28 January 1646 Burgoyne took the Covenant, and continued to be named to committees on a variety of subjects, with financial and accounting matters dominant among them. He was included in the committee which considered evidence on abuses in the north of England (20 Mar.), care of which was given to Thomas Stockdale and Sir William Constable.44CJ iv. 481b. In May he sat on the committee which enquired into the losses sustained by trustees as a result of the abolition of the court of wards, and in November was thus a natural choice for another committee examining the specific complaints of a number of MPs arising through this problem.45CJ iv. 538b, 727b. His Bedfordshire interests are sufficient to account for his appearance on a committee considering the extension of the Great Level into a number of adjacent counties.46CJ iv. 525a. His presence on the committee to bestow £200 in lands from the family of the marquess of Worcester (Henry Somerset) on the Independent preacher, Hugh Peter, may have been a counter-balance to members who were more obviously Peter’s supporters; his membership of two committees in June 1646, to judge scandalous offences and to regulate the proliferating sprawl of parliamentary committees, were more typical of his interests.47CJ iv. 525a, 562b, 583a. He sat on the committee (3 July) to consider the case of the radical, John Lilburne, whose petition for arrears of pay had been considered with some sympathy by the Lords. Less favour was shown Lilburne by the Commons, whose committees kept the ordinance for Lilburne’s relief from reaching fruition. Burgoyne would have had as little time for Lilburne as for the sequestered episcopal ministers who somehow managed to cling to their livings despite parliamentary orders to the contrary. They and all those who had borne arms against Parliament were the targets of another of the committees on which Burgoyne sat in July 1646.48CJ iv. 601b, 608b, 625b. That summer he was named for the first time as a magistrate in Warwickshire, but never seems to have acted there : his presence in the county was probably always temporary, even if it was to Wroxall and not to Sutton he journeyed when given leave by the House on 30 July.49C231/6, p. 51; CJ iv. 629b.

Burgoyne was back in the Commons by 5 September, when he was named to the committee which was to raise £200,000 from the City in order to pay off the Scots army with what was generous compensation.50CJ iv. 663a. This delegation to the City came three days after the Scots commissioners had demanded the £200,000 as a down payment on the sum of £400,000 which the House had agreed to bestow on them in order to rid themselves of their unwelcome presence in England.51Harington’s Diary, 34-5. The sale of bishops’ lands and the excise were offered up as security for the loan.52Juxon Jnl. 134. The antipathy towards the English armies - let alone the Scots - of the peace party was probably shared by Burgoyne, a member of the committee despatched to cut the allowances of officers and review their conditions of service, in an attempt to reduce military expenditure.53CJ iv. 689b. He continued to be active in promoting the Erastian church settlement devised as an alternative to full-blown Scots Presbyterianism: working on an ordinance for publishing the Bible and an approved Greek Old Testament, and reviewing the list of Visitors to the University of Oxford.54CJ iv. 695a; v. 51b. Towards the end of 1646, he was named to two committees of strategic political importance: one to review the commissions of the peace and nominate sheriffs (30 Oct.); the other the committee for privileges, which had before it a number of disputed recruiter elections, in which political factions in the localities were being transferred to Westminster.55CJ iv. 709b; v. 14b. There can be little doubt that Burgoyne’s sympathies in these activities lay with the conservatives, but he was sufficiently his own man to be regarded by Sir Ralph Verney* as having useful influence on the Independent politician (and Bedfordshire resident), Samuel Browne*.56Claydon House, Verney mss: Sir Ralph Verney to Mary Verney, 31 Jan. 1647 (BL Film M636/8).

Burgoyne’s own constituency background intruded on his parliamentary work in January and March 1647. He had from his first appearance in the Commons been involved in matters connected with accounts and accounting; this had been an issue in Warwickshire around the time of the recruiter election which had won him his seat. On 25 January 1647, with his fellow-knight, Thomas Boughton, Burgoyne was named to a committee to investigate complaints against sub-committees of accounts. In 1645 Boughton, a sub-committeeman, had himself been the subject of such a complaint from the Warwickshire county committee, but in the climate of early 1647, when hostility towards the county committees was growing, the new Commons committees were more likely to prove critical of radicals, wherever they sat, than of conservative members of county families.57SP28/247/540; CJ v. 63a. On 24 March, a letter from the Warwickshire committee, with petitions and depositions against its members, were read in the House, and were referred to a committee which included Burgoyne, but also the more radical figures, William Purefoy I and Godfrey Bossevile. A year later, Burgoyne was still pursuing members of the Warwickshire committee, demanding on more than one occasion that Peter Burgoyne, his more radical close relative, should submit his accounts for auditing.58SP28/248, Burgoyne to cttee. for accts., Warwick; CJ v. 122b. Some doubt must attach to his level of activity early in 1647, however: his son reported in February that Sir John had not been out of doors for two months because of illness.59Claydon House, Verney mss, Sir Roger Burgoyne to Sir Ralph Verney, 11 Feb. 1647 (BL M636/8).

Burgoyne was active in a number of high profile committees of the House during the turbulent months of the spring and summer of 1647. He was one of the body charged with briefing the commissioners to the king, now held at Newcastle on behalf of Parliament, on their approach to eliciting a response from him on the Propositions of July 1646, and on 2 June he was named to the committee to investigate allegations against Sir Philip Percival*.60CJ v. 142b, 195a. This turned out to be the start of a recovery by the Independents after months of concessions to the Presbyterians in the Commons, but before the parliamentary process for concessions to the king or for a hard line against him could develop further, the violence of the London crowds forced the Houses, and produced the flight of 58 MPs to the New Model army. When the Commons reassembled on 30 July, Burgoyne was one of four Members who went to the king’s children to assure them of their safety.61CJ v. 260b. The trauma of the invasions had paralysed many MPs, but he was evidently confident enough to take an active part in supporting the official line, cobbled together by the remaining MPs and the common council of the City, that normal business would be resumed despite the ‘undue liberty’ taken by the London apprentices.62OPH xvi. 192.

No more is heard of Burgoyne for nearly six months, and it is likely that with the army’s march on London and, on 6 August, its escorting the MPs and Lords who had fled the Houses back to Parliament, he quietly departed from Westminster. He was back in the House by 10 January 1648, being named to a committee which included two other Warwickshire and Worcestershire MPs, William Purefoy I and John Wylde, to consider the reconstruction of churches and houses destroyed in the civil war. He was then living at Clerkenwell Green.63SP28/248, letter of Sir John Burgoyne to Warwick cttee. for accts. 24 Jan. 1648; CJ v. 425a, 614a. His son commented in March that Sir John was unable to care for himself or his estate; he seems to have sunk into a depression brought on by the death of his wife.64Claydon House, Verney mss, Sir Roger Burgoyne to Sir Ralph Verney, 16 Mar. 1648. (BL M636/8). He seems to have been at Sir Roger Burgoyne’s house at Chiswick when George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, and other promoters of the July 1648 revolt in Surrey approached.65Claydon House, Verney mss, same to same, 6 July 1648 (BL M636/9). He is last mentioned in the Journal on 27 June; at a call of the House on 26 September, Burgoyne was not recorded as absent, but if he continued to attend his profile must have been low.66CJ vi. 34a,b.

When on 6 December 1648, the final reckoning came between the Presbyterians and the army-backed Independents, it was inevitable that Burgoyne should have been on the losing side. His history of criticizing county committees in Warwickshire, his voting for attempts to reduce the size of the army and above all, perhaps, his remaining in the House when the London apprentices forced the hasty exit of the Independents, exposed him as an enemy of the radicals. He was secluded, was removed from the commission of the peace and made no later attempt to re-enter public life.67A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669 f.13.64); OPH xviii. 468. He retired to Sutton, and the only further role he may have played beyond that of the private country gentleman was in connexion with the draining of the fens, a committee to which he was appointed in May 1649. He died in October 1657, and was buried at Sutton.68A. and O.; Genealogia Bedfordienses, 282. Letters of administration were granted to his son, Sir Roger Burgoyne*, on 25 May 1663.69PROB6/38, f. 38.