SCOT, Thomas I (1604-60), of Little Marlow, Bucks. and Lambeth, Surr.

Background and early career

The basic details of Scot’s parentage and background have been obscured by ill-informed speculation. There are no grounds for claims that he was born in Buckinghamshire ‘of no noted family’, that he was descended from a Yorkshireman who married into the influential Packington family of Buckinghamshire, or that he was a scion of the Scotts of Watton, in Norfolk.49Compleat Collection, 123; Lipscomb, Buckingham, ii. 11; C. Russell, Three Generations of Fascinating Women (1905), 260. In fact, he was the son and heir of Thomas Scott, a member of the London Brewers’ Company, who was descended from an Essex family – probably a branch of the Scotts of Stapleford Tawney.50Vis. Bucks. 111; Vis. Essex (Harl. Soc. xiii), 287; Russell, Three Generations of Fascinating Women, 261; Brewers’ Co. 1531-1685 ed. C. Webb (London Livery Co. Appr. Regs. xxxvi), 66, 77. In his will of 1617, Scot’s father referred to property he owned in Dublin and made bequests to the London Brewers’ Company and to the governors of Bridewell hospital. By the testamentary custom of London, he divided his estate into three parts and further divided one of those thirds equally between his children Thomas, Richard and Mary. Given that Scott senior divided his estate in this way and made only small bequests in his will, it is unlikely that Thomas Scot junior was heir to a considerable inheritance.51PROB11/130, f. 477v.

If Edmund Ludlowe II* and the antiquary Anthony Wood can be credited, Scot was educated at Westminster School and Cambridge University.52Ath. Ox. iii. 578; Ludlow, Voyce, 241. But although it is clear from Scot’s speeches in the second and third protectoral Parliaments, and at his trial in 1660, that he was well versed in the classics and the common law as well as in the bible, it is not certain where he acquired this gentlemanly learning. Ludlowe asserted that Scot had remained at Cambridge ‘till he attained the degree of master of arts’ – and certainly the Thomas Scott who was admitted at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1619 went on to graduate BA and MA in 1626. However, this man has tentatively been identified as the future clergyman Thomas Scott.53Al Cant.; Ludlow, Voyce, 241. Firmer evidence of Scot’s activities as a young man is the contemporary claim that he had been ‘a partner to a brewer in the precinct of Bridewell’ – this from a writer who was apparently unaware that Scot was the son of a brewer who had resided in Bridewell precinct.54Compleat Collection, 123.

The making of Scot’s prosperity and political career was his marriage in 1626 to the daughter and heir of the wealthy London citizen and member of the London Salters’ Company, William Allanson.55PROB11/164, ff. 40v-41. Scot’s first child, William, was baptised in maternal grandfather’s parish of All Hallows the Less on 5 November 1627.56All Hallows the Less, London par. reg. In his will of 1633, Allanson referred to his ‘brew house at Bridewell’ which he had leased to his son-in-law Richard Scott, Thomas’s younger brother. Allanson bequeathed this lease to Thomas, requesting that he treat his brother Richard ‘kindly and respectively’. More significantly, Allanson bequeathed to Thomas ‘a plentiful estate’ consisting of his messuages and lands in Little Marlow and Great Marlow, Buckinghamshire, in Storrington, Sussex, and in the manors of Kennington and Paris Garden, Surrey.57PROB11/164, f. 41v; Ludlow, Voyce, 241. Having taken up residence by 1634 on the property that Allanson had left him in Little Marlow, Scot was reported to the privy council by Buckinghamshire’s lord lieutenant in May 1637 for refusing to contribute to the county magazine.58Vis. Bucks. 111; SP16/356/26, f. 40v. Scot’s decision to side with Parliament in the civil war was almost certainly linked to his religious views, for his career during the 1640s and 1650s indicates that he was a man of strongly puritan convictions.

Political and parliamentary career, 1643-7

Scot was serving as a treasurer for parliamentary revenues in Buckinghamshire by the autumn of 1643 at the very latest.59SP28/1D, f. 463; SP28/220, pt. 1 (Eyre accts. 28 Sept. 1646). With Parliament’s establishment in June 1644 of the association of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, the Commons committee for the three associated counties appointed Scot its joint treasurer – an office he apparently retained until at least the autumn of 1646.60LJ vi. 604; vii. 676b; CJ iii. 551a; SP28/251, pt. 2 (order of Cttee. of Berks. Bucks. and Oxon. 1 Sept. 1646); A. and O. i. 455. He seems to have combined his role as joint treasurer for the three counties with that of treasurer for the Buckinghamshire county committee (established under the June 1644 association ordinance), of which he was an important member.61SP28/151, pt. 1 (Scot’s accts. 1644-6); SP28/252, pt. 1, f. 362; SP28/255, pt. 3 (Scot to Scobel, 9 Aug. 1644); A.M. Johnson, ‘Bucks. 1640 to 1660: a Study in County Politics’ (Swansea Univ. MA thesis, 1963), 102. During his tenure as treasurer for Buckinghamshire – that is, from June 1644 until February 1646 – he disbursed over £30,000 and drew a salary from this revenue of £254.62SP28/151, pt. 1. In September 1644, he signed a sharply worded letter from the Buckinghamshire county committee to Colonel Sir Samuel Luke* (a close military and political collaborator of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex), rebuking him for his ‘oppressions’ as governor of Newport Pagnell and urging him to ‘look into the ordinances of Parliament and there you will find your power circumscribed’.63Luke Lttr. Bks. 337-8. By the summer of 1645, Scot was a regular attender of the Commons committee for the three associated counties – which sat in the inner star chamber in the Palace of Westminster – where he rubbed shoulders with William Ball*, James Fiennes*, Henry Marten*, Simon Mayne*, Sir Thomas Wenman*, Bulstrode Whitelocke* and other serving and future MPs.64SP28/251, pt. 2.

Scot chose the ‘recruiter’ election at Aylesbury in the autumn of 1645 to make the leap from county to national politics. His decision to stand for the town was not to the liking of ‘some gentlemen of Bucks. in the House’, noted Whitelocke, which suggests that Scot’s political militancy was already in evidence and was not universally popular in his adoptive county.65Whitelocke, Diary, 180. Before the Commons had even ordered a new-election writ for Aylesbury, it received reports that Christopher Henn, a leading county committeeman, had used ‘divers printed papers’ (sent from London and addressed ‘to all freeborn subjects’) and a letter of recommendation from ‘a lord’ in order to assemble a ‘great party’ of townsmen in ‘a cellar at drinking’, where they informally elected Scot as one of the town’s MPs. Scot and another future regicide and county committeeman Simon Mayne were formally returned shortly afterwards – their election taking place just a few days after the appointment of yet another future regicide, Colonel Richard Ingoldsby*, as Aylesbury’s governor in place of the Scottish commander Major-general Crawford, who had been killed the previous month.66Infra, ‘Aylesbury’; ‘Simon Mayne’; ‘Thomas Scot I’; Add. 18780, f. 124v; Add. 37344, f. 15v; The Weekly Account no. 38 (17-23 Sept. 1645), sig. A3v (E.302.21). If a third challenger had entered the lists it was probably Thomas Tyrell*.67Infra, ‘Thomas Tyrell’; Johnson, ‘Bucks. 1640 to 1660’, 239-40.

Aylesbury lay about 16 miles north of Scot’s residence at Little Marlow, and it is therefore unlikely that he enjoyed any great proprietorial interest in the borough. Instead, he had apparently relied upon the support of the county committee (and possibly of local army units as well) and of an unnamed peer, who was almost certainly Buckinghamshire’s parliamentary lord lieutenant, the Independent grandee Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton. Scot’s estate at Little Marlow lay just a few miles and within easy walking distance from Wharton’s own, much grander, estate at Bishops Wooburn. Wharton enjoyed a powerful interest in Buckinghamshire and may well have inherited connections with both Christopher Henn and Richard Ingoldsby from his late father-in-law, Arthur Goodwin*.68Supra, ‘Arthur Goodwin’; PROB11/192, ff. 6v, 7. Wharton would be instrumental that autumn in securing the election of two more leading Independents, Henry Ireton and Richard Salwey, for the Westmorland borough of Appleby.69Supra, ‘Appleby’.

On 7 November 1645, the day after Scot and the MP for Wendover, Thomas Fountaine, had brought the county’s the newly-elected knight of the shire, Colonel George Fleetwood, into the Commons ‘in great triumph’, a petition was presented from a group of Buckinghamshire inhabitants ‘against their new elections’, alleging that they had not been free ‘by reason of the garrisons in that county’.70Supra, ‘Buckinghamshire’; Whitelocke, Diary, 182; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 533-4. Whitelocke appeared for the petitioners in this cause, which ‘made Mr Scot and his party to hate him’.71Whitelocke, Diary, 182. When Scot’s treating of the Aylesbury voters was examined at Westminster, presumably in the committee of privileges, his return for the borough was successfully defended by the leading Independent MPs Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Edmund Prideaux I.72Add. 37344, f. 15v. Although Scot resigned from his office as treasurer for Buckinghamshire in February 1646, his role as treasurer of the three associated counties and his several Commons appointments in 1645-6 for raising money to sustain the war effort against royalist Oxfordshire ensured that he remained an influential figure in the county’s affairs.73CJ iv. 335a, 337a, 445a, 625b, 627a, 682a; LJ vii. 676b; viii. 485a.

Acquiring something like an accurate picture of Scot’s appointments in the House during the first two years of his parliamentary career is complicated by the return, a few weeks after his own, of Thomas Scot II as a recruiter for the Yorkshire borough of Aldborough. Although Scot II – who may have been distantly related to Scot I – was an army major, the clerks of the House were not always careful to use his military rank to distinguish him from his civilian namesake.74Infra, ‘Thomas Scot II’; CJ iv. 562b; v. 195a. Consequently, it cannot automatically be assumed that references in the Journals to ‘Mr Scott’ relate wholly to Scot I. It is nonetheless significant that between the autumn of 1645 and Scot II’s death early in 1648, the two men were named to the same committee on only four occasions.75CJ v. 35a, 89a, 195a, 301b, 302a. Either their appointments did not overlap to any great extent – which seems unlikely in view of the large number of committee nominations for ‘Mr Scott’ – or one Member was much more active than the other. And as there was no noticeable drop in the frequency with which ‘Mr Scott’ was nominated to committees after Scot II’s death, that more active MP was almost certainly Scot I.

If it is assumed, therefore, that the references to ‘Mr Scott’ before early 1648 relate to Scot I, he was named to approximately 125 committees and to six conference-management or reporting teams between October 1645 and Pride’s Purge in December 1648.76CJ iv. 498b; v. 370a, 406a, 450a, 451a, 657a. To judge by these appointments, he took a particular interest at Westminster in strengthening church discipline and godly religious observance, particularly in London and the universities.77CJ iv. 312a, 413b, 545b, 562b, 595b, 641a; v. 35a, 51b, 84b, 121a, 143a, 331b. Ludlowe’s later reference to his ‘zeal and constancy ... for the promoting of a faithful and gospel ministry’ is more consistent with the facts of Scot’s parliamentary career than the allegation made in 1648 that he regarded all ‘forms’ in matters of worship and church discipline as ‘antichristian’.78Ludlow, Voyce, 241; Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 32 and 33 (31 Oct.-14 Nov. 1648), sig. Yy2v (E.470.33). The assertion by one authority that he was ‘irreligious’ is equally wide of the mark.79Mayers, 1659, 54. His appointment to committees for extending Presbyterian discipline throughout the province of London (21 Jan. 1646) and on an ordinance for reforming, but retaining, tithes (25 Oct. 1647) suggest at least some support on his part for a publicly-maintained ministry. More revealing still is his addition on 15 May 1646 to the Committee for Plundered Ministers* (CPM) – of which he was an active member.80CJ iv. 413b, 545b; v. 342a; SP22/1, f. 180v; SP22/2B, f. 283. The task of bringing in an ordinance for confirming godly ministers in the livings where they had been placed by the CPM was specifically referred by the House on 19 August 1647 to the care of Scot and the Presbyterian MP John Boys.81CJ v. 278b. The next day (20 Aug.), Scot was named first to a committee to address this same issue.82CJ v. 279b.

Although Scot was apparently not averse to the establishment of a national Presbyterian church, nothing in his parliamentary career indicates that he favoured the ‘rigid’, clericalist Presbyterianism of the Scots. He was named to a series of committees from the spring of 1646 for prosecuting the Commons’ various grievances against the Scots and their allies in London and for refuting assertions by the capital’s ‘Covenant-engaged’ ministers in favour of jure divino Presbyterianism.83CJ iv. 559a, 560b, 615b; v. 11a. Scot was very firmly among that majority of MPs which insisted that Parliament should remain the final arbiter on questions of church government. This was very probably the position of the only minister with whom he can be linked before the late 1640s – the godly lecturer of the London parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West, William Strong (who would emerge as an Independent under the Rump). On 25 March 1646, the Commons requested Scot to thank Strong for a recent sermon he had preached before the House.84CJ iv. 489a; ‘William Strong’, Oxford DNB. Scot’s London background probably accounts for the regularity with which he was named to committees concerning metropolitan affairs, particularly for tightening security in Westminster and the City.85CJ iv. 365a, 490b, 498b, 615b, 679b; v. 132b, 187a, 268b, 387b. His familiarity with the London scene may also explain his nomination to committees for suppressing ‘scandalous’ publications, which were printed almost exclusively in the capital.86CJ iv. 644b; v. 72b, 292b.

Scot and the Independent interest, 1647-8

Scot remained at Westminster during the Presbyterian ascendancy of early 1647 and was named to several of the committees that marked the New Model army’s growing defiance of Parliament and the Holles-Stapilton group’s efforts to raise money for disbanding the more truculent units and packing the rest off to Ireland.87CJ v. 127b, 147b, 153b. However, his only notable appointment that spring was to a committee set up on 18 March to place Parliament’s great seal into the hands of commissioners, reporting amendments to this ordinance on 9 April – the first clear evidence of his work as a parliamentary draftsman.88Supra, ‘Edmund Prideaux I’; CJ v. 117b, 138a, 139b. Little can be made of his addition on 10 June to the committee for receiving complaints against MPs – which was chaired by the Independents’ ally John Bulkeley and used by them to pressure their Presbyterian opponents – given that Commons-men of all political persuasions were added along with him.89Supra, ‘John Bulkeley’; CJ v. 205a. Considerably more revealing is his presence among those Parliament-men who fled to the protection of the army following the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster on 26 July. On 4 August, he signed their ‘engagement’, eulogising Sir Thomas Fairfax* and his men for their ‘Christian, noble and public affection to the good, peace and prosperity of this kingdom and ... faithfulness to the true interest of the English nation’.90LJ ix. 385b.

Scot’s activities at Westminster would assume a much more partisan hue in the aftermath of the Presbyterian counter-revolution of July-August 1647. Having resumed his seat on 6 August when the army entered London, he was named to a powerful bicameral committee, dominated by the Independents, to investigate the instigators of the 26 July riots. Appointment on 11 and 18 August would follow to committees for repealing the legislation passed between 26 July and 6 August.91CJ v. 269a, 272a, 278a; LJ ix. 415b. In debate on this issue, he was alleged to have joined Sir Henry Vane II, Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire and other noted Independents in threatening the Presbyterians with ‘the power of the sword’ unless they agreed to a repeal.92[C. Walker*], Hist. of Independency (1648), 49 (E.463.19). In the six months that followed the army’s triumph in August, Scot worked with Miles Corbett – the Commons-man leading the investigation into the forcing of the Houses – and other Independents in presenting the case against John Glynne* and the prominent London Presbyterians who had instigated the July ‘riots’.93CJ v. 315b, 316b, 380b, 450a, 451a; LJ x. 17a. The Presbyterian MP Clement Walker would refer to Scot, ‘the brewer’s clerk’, as Corbett’s ‘deputy-inquisitor or hangman’.94[Walker], Hist. of Independency, 98-9. Concurrent with Scot’s work in prosecuting Presbyterian offenders – and complementing it politically – was his involvement in preparing an ordinance that the Commons ordered to be drawn up in September for purging disaffected persons from the commissions of peace.95CJ v. 317b, 374a. Bearing down hard upon the Presbyterian interest was also consistent with his nomination that autumn to a number of committees for promoting the regular supply of the army and redressing the soldiers’ grievances over arrears of pay. It was to address these and related issues that he was added to the Committee for the Army* (on an ad hoc basis) in September and, in November, to the Star Chamber Committee of Irish Affairs*, of which he was an active member.96CJ v. 285a, 298b, 320a, 347b; LJ ix. 508a; CSP Ire. 1633-47, pp. 744, 750; 1647-60, pp. 1, 27.

Scot seems to have belonged to the majority of Commons-men who were still willing to pursue some kind of settlement with the king during the autumn of 1647. It was his namesake at Westminster, the Yorkshire recruiter, who joined Henry Marten and other radical Independents in September in denouncing the attempts of Oliver Cromwell* and the grandees to continue treating with Charles.97Infra, ‘Thomas Scot II’. Scot I, on the other hand, cannot confidently be placed among this radical grouping, and it was probably he who was named to five committees in October and November relating to Parliament’s re-drafted peace propositions.98CJ v. 336a, 346b, 351b, 367a, 370a. One of the two MPs – again, probably Scot I – was also included on a conference-management team on 25 December to justify a Commons’ vote for dispatching the pro-Leveller officer Colonel Thomas Rainborowe* to sea as vice-admiral of the fleet.99CJ v. 406a. Although Scot II was a Leveller sympathiser and a political associate of Rainborowe, it appears that he had ceased to attend the House over a month before this appointment.100Infra, ‘Thomas Scot II’.

Scot landed the chairmanship of two important Commons’ committees during the winter of 1647-8. The first, established on 13 December, was to investigate information of a security threat to Parliament and was allotted money from the exchequer to pay for informants and intelligence gathering.101CJ v. 380a, 380b, 404a. It was here and in his work as Corbett’s ‘deputy-inquisitor’ that Scot laid the foundations for his later career as the Rump’s spy-master and chief intelligencer. The second committee, which he chaired jointly with Alexander Rigby, was set up on 4 January 1648 – the day after the Commons had passed the vote of no addresses – and was charged with preparing ordinances for redressing the people’s grievances ‘in relation to their burdens, their freedoms and liberties, and of reforming of courts of justice and proceedings at law and in matters of trade and of all others things of public concernment’.102CJ v. 417a. The committee referred to in the Commons’ Journal on 13 January ‘for removing obstructions in trade, where Mr Scott has the chair’, may have been a sub-committee of that set up on 4 January.103CJ v. 430a.

In response to the vote of no addresses and initiatives like the 4 January 1648 committee to redress the people’s grievances, the well-affected of Buckinghamshire organised a loyal address to the Commons, which they presented to the House on 9 March. The contents of this petition tend to support the allegation made in one royalist newsbook that it had been ‘framed with the help of Mr Scot and Mr [Simon] Mayne and one other Parliament-man ... who supped with the petitioners after they came up to London’. The petitioners applauded the Commons’ proceedings – and specifically the vote of no addresses – and urged the House to ‘give due encouragement to all godly and able ministers and to cast out such as are scandalous and unfit for the work of the ministry [and yet] to be tender of the consciences of such whose conversations are as becometh the gospel of Christ’. Scot’s voice can be heard even more clearly in the petitioners’ request that the Commons ‘punish the authors, printers and publishers of all wicked and scandalous pamphlets, who privily instill into the breasts of many a sinister conceit and misinterpretation of all your noble actions and undertakings’.104CJ v. 488b-489a; Mercurius Elencticus no. 16 (8-15 Mar. 1648), sig. Q4 (E.432.11); The Humble Petition and Representation of...the County of Buckingham (1648), E.432.12.

If Scot was indeed involved in framing Buckinghamshire’s March 1648 petition, he apparently saw no contradiction between redressing the people’s grievances and his abiding concern to redress those of the soldiery. On 8 March, he was named first to a committee to consider petitions from army officers and other servants of the state for the speedy stating of their accounts and satisfaction of their arrears, and he would champion legislation during the summer for ‘stating and determining the accounts of all such officers and soldiers that have served the Parliament in the late wars’.105CJ v. 486a, 581b, 623a, 625b, 629b-630a, 662a. Raising revenue to honour the soldiers’ claims and keep the army in due obedience to Parliament almost certainly quickened his support for the efficient sale of bishops’ lands – a policy from which he would benefit personally, borrowing money to become joint purchaser in August 1648 of the manor and archiepiscopal palace of Lambeth.106CJ v. 344a, 460b; vi. 81b; LPL, COMM Add 1, ff. 55v, 57, 62, 63v; Coll. Top. et Gen. i. 123; C.H. Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct. of his actions as intelligencer during the commonwealth’, EHR xii. 124. It was apparently Scot’s fellow purchaser and not, as is sometimes stated, Scot himself who was responsible for having the corpse of Archbishop Matthew Parker disinterred and thrown onto a dunghill.107HMC 7th Rep. 149, 152, 153, 155; Ath. Ox. ii. 783-4; CJ vi. 72b.

Scot was regularly named to committees in the spring and summer of 1648 for securing London and the kingdom generally against royalist insurrection, and he was a minority teller with another Independent MP William Purefoy I on 27 May in favour of enlarging the Derby House Committee* (DHC) – Parliament’s principal wartime executive.108CJ v. 576a. But it was in his tireless pursuit of royalist conspirators and propagandists that Scot probably served Parliament most effectively during the second civil war.109CJ v. 529a, 551a, 558a, 574a, 630a, 657a, 671b, 678a; vi. 3a. In May and June, he was added to the committees for printing and for libels and was specifically entrusted by the House with investigating the ‘authors and contrivers’ of a pamphlet inciting the inhabitants of Essex to defy Parliament.110CJ v. 563a, 614b. He was probably also involved in uncovering the paper trail left by the royalist insurrection in Surrey of early July.111CJ v. 631b.

Scots’ most notable contribution to exposing and foiling Parliament’s enemies during the second civil war came as a result of a Commons’ order of 20 July 1648 for referring a packet of letters found on the Scottish emissary George Halyburton ‘to the committee where Mr Scott has the chair’. Halyburton had been carrying not only official correspondence to Parliament from the Scottish committee of estates but also secret letters to English royalists and Presbyterians asking for their support. That same day (20 July), the Commons put Scot in charge of discovering the identity of the English ‘traitors’ who had encouraged the Scots to invade. For the next six weeks or so, Scot and his committee – the origins and precise remit of which are a mystery – were integral to various Commons’ initiatives for exposing the Engagers as enemies of a godly church settlement. As part of this campaign to discredit and undermine the Engagers’ English backers, particularly in the Lords, Scot oversaw the deciphering of Halyburton’s secret correspondence and its publication in mid-August. 112CJ v. 640b, 643a, 646b, 664b, 676a; LJ x. 437a; [Walker], Hist. of Independency, 129; D. Stevenson, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, 1644-51 (1977), 111. The introduction to this pamphlet and the printed marginalia ‘by a private pen’ may well have been written by Scot himself or at least under his supervision. Never had God ‘more remarkably appeared and testified the continuance of his favour to this Parliament and people’, declared the author

then [sic] in discovering and disappointing the secret plots and machinations of such as, under the character of friends, lay in our bosoms ... and in unmasking and taking off those specious vizards wherewith those apostatized friends, and other more professed enemies that have risen up in arms against us, have clothed their undertakings.113The Designs and Correspondencies of the Present Committee of Estates (1648), 4 (E.459.5).

The author urged London’s Common Council to ‘put a test upon their members for discovery of those that have invited the Scots or correspond with them’ and was apparently serious in his insistence that ‘God is Independent and will not associate with such faithless pretenders to Presbytery’.114Designs and Correspondencies, 8, 14. To help highlight the contrast that the Commons was keen to draw between its own godly integrity and the supposedly feigned piety of the Engagers, Scot’s committee was ordered on 26 July to sit daily and ‘to put in execution the several ordinances for observation of the Lord’s day and fast days and for suppressing of stage plays and interludes, and to receive informations and to examine the neglects and the defaults therein and [to] redress the same’.115CJ v. 648a.

In the weeks after the defeat of the Engagers at Preston in mid-August 1648, Scot was put to work by the Commons in drafting ordinances for trying and punishing the Scots’ English collaborators, while his committee was again tasked with sifting and analysing the evidence ‘touching this late invasion by the Scots and the invitations thereunto’.116CJ v. 680a, 681b, 695b; vi. 6b. Added on 25 September to the committee for examining James Hamilton, 1st duke of Hamilton, and other leading Engagers taken after Preston, he went to Windsor Castle to confront some of the prisoners with their own intercepted correspondence ‘or copies thereof deciphered’. While at Windsor, he assisted Commissary-general Henry Ireton* in interrogating the captured royalist agent Thomas Holder, who, as Scot informed Speaker William Lenthall, was ‘the channel through which most of those streams of wickedness ran ... communicating the commands he had from France’ from the queen and Prince Charles ‘and the Isle of Wight’ from the king, ‘supplies of men, money and ammunition from the City and intelligence from your Houses to the north, west and where not’. Scot ascribed victory in the second civil war to the ‘good hand of [God’s] providence, which hath carried on your undertakings in His and His people’s cause with such marvellous workings as no story can parallel’. So eager was Scot to capitalise on God’s ‘workings’ by working over Holder, that he applied to the DHC to enlarge the powers he enjoyed as ‘assistant’ to the committee for examining Hamilton et al. He chose to approach the DHC rather than the Commons because he had found his proceedings in the House’s service ‘made diurnal news’.117CJ vi. 32b; CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 291, 293; Mems. of the Great Civil War ed. Cary, ii. 28-31. Scot by this stage evidently regarded the Presbyterian interest at Westminster and in the City as little better than a royalist fifth column.

Scot’s suspicion of and bitterness towards the king and his supporters, which were in evidence before the second civil war – in the March 1648 Buckinghamshire petition, for example – would intensify during it. In the Commons’ debate on 24 May 1648 over whether to resume negotiations with the king, Scot, John Blakiston and John Weaver ‘barbarously aspersed the king’, insisting that ‘it was fitter he should be brought to his trial and drawn, hanged and quartered then treated with, he being the only cause of all the bloodshed throughout the three kingdoms’.118NAS, GD 406/1/2467: ? to earl of Lanark, 27 May 1648; Mercurius Elencticus no. 27 (24-31 May 1648), 209 (E.445.23). Scot confirmed his alignment with the radical Independents – the faction that since the autumn of 1647 had opposed any attempt to negotiate with the king – on 29 June, when he declared that

there could be no time seasonable for a personal treaty or a peace with so perfidious and implacable a prince, but it would always be too soon or too late. He that draws his sword upon his king must throw his scabbard into the fire. All peace with him will prove the spoil of the godly.119[Walker], Hist. of Independency, 110.

In a debate on 27 July over whether to abandon preconditions to a treaty with the king, Scot supported Blakiston, Weaver, Sir Peter Wentworth and other ‘high boys of the faction’ by arguing that Charles ‘had so demeaned himself that he was in no case to be trusted’.120Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 18 (25 July-1 Aug. 1648), sig. S3v (E.456.7). Having backed calls by the ‘godly gang’ on 3 August that Prince Charles be declared a rebel and traitor, Scots denounced the king himself on 15 August as ‘still an enemy, because he had been a means to raise a new war by inviting the Scots in and had not yet made satisfaction for all the blood that had been spilt in the former war, nor had he yet acknowledged his faults nor submitted himself’. Two days later (17 Aug.), ‘that perpetual cur or hot-heated Beagle of the faction, Tom Scot’ vehemently opposed endorsing resolutions sent from the Lords for revoking the vote of no addresses.121[Walker], Hist. of Independency, 127; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 21 (15-22 Aug. 1648), sigs. Aa2, Aa4 (E.460.21). Scot was also among the radical Independents who agitated in July and August for the release of Major Edmund Rolfe, who had been imprisoned by the Commons on suspicion of planning to murder the king.122CJ v. 657a; [Walker], Hist. of Independency, 105, 122. When the Levellers petitioned the Commons on 11 September for Parliament to assume supreme authority, protesting that they ‘knew of no use of a king or Lords any longer’, they were supported in the Commons, according to one observer, by the familiar trio of Scot, Blakiston and Weaver.123Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 25 (12-19 Sept. 1648), sig. Ii2v (E.464.12).

Scot seems to have contributed little to the Commons’ proceedings during the autumn of 1648 in relation to the treaty with the king at Newport.124CJ vi. 18b, 29b; Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 32 and 33 (31 Oct.-14 Nov. 1648), sig. Yyv. Contrastingly, after the army’s Remonstrance, denouncing the Newport treaty and demanding justice against the king, was read in the House on 20 November, Scot, Wentworth and Cornelius Holland were quick on their feet to ‘applaud it highly’.125Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 35 (21-28 Nov. 1648), sig. Bbb2 (E.473.35). Later that same month, Scot, Marten, Rigby and Thomas Chaloner* were included on John Lilburne’s committee for redrafting the Leveller manifesto the Agreement of the People – although of these four ‘honest’ Commons-men all but Marten absented themselves.126J. Lilburne, The Picture of the Councel of State (1649), 22 (E.550.14); Lilburne, The Legal Fundamental Liberties of the People of England (1649), 33-4 (E.560.14). In the last great Commons’ debate before Pride’s Purge, on 5 December, on whether to accept the king’s answers at Newport as an acceptable basis for settlement, Scot spoke, and almost certainly voted, against the motion.127Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 36 and 37 (5-12 Dec. 1648), sig. Ccc3 (E.476.2).

Pride’s Purge and the regicide, 1648-9

Scot retained his seat at Pride’s Purge, but he may initially have harboured misgivings about the propriety of the army’s proceedings. In the second protectoral Parliament he justified the purge as an act of political necessity.

I am for trusting the people with their liberties as soon as any. But when they come to irregularities and the major part grow corrupt they must be regulated by miracle or otherwise perish. The soldiers see their cause betrayed ... and if the army had not then appeared, where had then our cause been?128Burton’s Diary, ii. 385-6.

But he was adamant that he had not been party ‘to what was done to the House in ʼ48’.129Burton’s Diary, iv. 453. In 1660, in self-exculpation in the face of trial and execution, he would

profess and protest that I knew nothing (ab ante [beforehand]) of the army’s counsels and resolutions of fetching the king from the Isle of Wight [in November] or of the secluding of the Members [at Pride’s Purge], both which I ever did, and still do, look upon as irregular and unjustifiable and sinful actions, contrary to the faith and duty they owed to the nation and to the privileges of Parliament, whose servants they were and whose protectors they should have been.130Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 125; Nicholas Pprs. iv. 245.

Reports that he was among the 30 or so MPs ‘down-right for the army’ who were present in the House on 11 and 14 December to debate the Remonstrance and vote against the re-admission of the secluded Members ‘against whom there was no charge’ must be treated with considerable caution (Vane II, who was also listed among this group, had almost certainly absented himself by this point).131Mercurius Elencticus no. 55 (5-12 Dec. 1648), 532 (E.476.4); no. 56 (12-19 Dec. 1648), 539 (E.476.36). Although Scot was apparently present in the House on 5-6 December, it is perhaps significant that his name does not appear in the Commons’ Journal between 25 November and 15 December.

Yet despite – or perhaps because of – any resentment that Scot may have felt towards the army, he quickly assumed a prominent role in efforts to strengthen the Rump’s political foundations. The unnamed Commons’ committee that Scot was chairing by 19 December 1648 was apparently the body charged with drawing up the dissent to the 5 December vote – that the king’s answers at Newport were a sufficient grounds for a settlement – to which he had been added only the day before (18 Dec.).132CJ vi. 100a; PA, Ms CJ xxxiii, p. 462; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 165-6. He was certainly among the 33 or so MPs who entered their dissent on the day it was introduced (20 Dec.), when he was also named to a committee for preparing a declaration justifying this test of the Rump’s membership.133[W. Prynne*], A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members Case (1660), 21 (E.1013.22); PA, Ms CJ xxxiii, p. 474.

It has been argued, plausibly, that Scot was the ‘chief [civilian] ringleader’ among the early dissenters and the regicides and that he, Marten and Chaloner stand out ‘as the major parliamentary figures between the purge and the execution’.134Worden, Rump Parl. 35-6, 37. There is certainly no denying that Scot was very close to the centre of political events during the first months of the Rump. He was named to at least 31 committees between mid-December 1648 and the king’s execution, including the Committee for Compounding*, and was given charge of surveying the state’s treasuries, reporting on ‘the distressed commonalty’ of London weavers and of bringing in an ordinance to provide for Rainborowe’s widow.135CJ vi. 99a, 100b, 102a, 104a, 105a, 107a; LJ x. 633a. His first appointment in the Rump – to a committee set up on 15 December for investigating the publication of a pamphlet denouncing Pride’s Purge – would have allowed him to reprise his by now familiar role of parliamentary gamekeeper in the murky world of print journalism. But on about 18 December he seems to have turned poacher, for according to Thomason he was the author of a pamphlet published that day, appealing to the City to ‘stick close to those in the Parliament and army which stand most against the king’s prerogative’. Scot began by attacking the Covenanters for what he regarded as their inconstancy to Parliament and to a godly church settlement in their dealings with the king – although his own professions of support for the ‘honest party’ in Scotland and reverence for that ‘learned and godly divine’ Alexander Henderson (the most prominent of the Scottish Covenanting clergy before his death in 1646) are hard to take in good faith. Scot was probably being more sincere in denouncing Charles for his supposedly tyrannous designs stretching back to the 1620s, his complicity in the Irish rebellion and his refusal to desert ‘the bishops and papists’. Scot revealed his true political colours even more clearly in his keenness to identify those labelled ‘of late, Independents and sectaries’ with ‘honest, active men, ever in former times called puritans – if they had but public spirits to stand for the liberty of the subject – and then roundheads’. As an exercise in satisfying its author of the righteousness of the radical Independents’ cause, the pamphlet doubtless succeeded; as an attempt to conciliate the City Presbyterians and convince them of Charles’s and their Scottish friends’ duplicity, it almost certainly failed.136A Paire of Cristall Spectacles (1648, E.476.30).

In addition to his likely role in framing the dissent, Scot chaired the committee set up on 23 December 1648 ‘to consider how to proceed in a way of justice against the king’ – or, as Whitelocke termed it, the committee ‘to draw up a charge against the king and other delinquents’. This committee may have been conceived as part of another effort to wring concessions from Charles – particularly, it seems, to surrender his negative voice – for according to Nicholas Love*, the charge against Charles was ‘nothing but what he knew the king could clearly acquit himself of, and that it would be drawn up without bitter or invective language and in a grave, modest style’. Nevertheless, the fruits of this committee’s deliberations, which Scot reported to the House on 28 December, was an ordinance to try the king and other ‘capital offenders’.137CJ vi. 103a, 105b; Bodl. Clarendon 34, fr. 17r-v; Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 40 and 41 (26 Dec. 1648-9 Jan. 1649), sigs. Fff2, Fff2v (E.537.20); Whitelocke, Diary, 227. When this first ordinance was rejected by the Lords, Scot was named with Marten, Augustine Garland, John Lisle and Gilbert Millington on 3 January 1649 to bring in a new ordinance to the same effect. Reported by Garland that same day (3 Jan.), this draft ordinance for a high court of justice was then referred to a committee of which Scot was again made a member.138CJ vi. 106a, 110a, 110b.

Anticipating that the Lords would reject this second trial ordinance as they had the first, Scot, Wentworth and other Rumpers reportedly moved on 4 January 1649 that those peers who continued to obstruct the trial legislation should ‘be impeached of high treason as friends and well-wishers to the grand delinquent of the kingdom [i.e. the king], enemies to public justice and the liberty of the people’.139Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 40 and 41, sigs. Fff4. A committee was then set up, to which Scot was named, for framing the three resolutions adopted later that day – that ‘the people are, under God, the original of all just power’; that the Commons, being chosen by the people, ‘have the supreme power in this nation’; and that ‘whatsoever is enacted or declared for law by the Commons, in Parliament assembled, hath the force of law’.140CJ vi. 111a. But Scot’s apparent endorsement of these resolutions may not necessarily reflect a dogmatic assertion of Commons supremacy, as it did in the case of Marten, for example. His tellership with William Purefoy I on 9 January in favour of admitting messengers sent from the Lords – defeating the opposing tellers Marten and Ludlowe – does not point to a politician who was eager at this stage to remove the peers from the legislative process altogether.141CJ vi. 115a; S. Kelsey, ‘The trial of Charles I’, EHR cxviii. 590.

Scot was among the most active members of the high court of justice, attending all but two of the 18 meetings of the trial commission and securing appointment to sub-committees for considering the trial setting, taking evidence against the king and for drafting the charge and sentence against him. He was also present at all four sessions of the trial itself. Yet although he signed Charles’s death warrant on 29 January, the presence of his signature among a group of 13 commissioners who had not attended the trial commission that day suggests that he had departed the court without signing and that, like them, he had to be sought out in the Commons, or wherever, and prevailed upon to append his name and seal at the foot of the warrant.142Add. 35332, f. 119; Muddiman, Trial, 76, 89, 96, 102, 105, 197, 200, 202, 213, 223, 227, 228; S. Kelsey, ‘The death of Charles I’, HJ, xlv. 751. He would later claim that he ‘forbore to sign the warrant when all, or most present, did it, that so the Dutch ambassadors, who had an audience granted them, might be heard and the Parliament have time and opportunity to consider more advisedly of that business’.143SP29/18/58, f. 73; Nicholas Pprs. iv. 245. Regicide was ‘resorted unto as the last refuge’, he insisted, in that by continuing to encourage ‘daily revoltings ... and risings in all places’ Charles not only threatened Parliament’s existence but also affirmed, by his ‘obstinacy’, his guilt for all the blood that had been shed during the civil wars.144Burton’s Diary, ii. 382-3; iii. 109-10. The contrast between his evident support for the revolutionary events that winter and his delay and apparent hesitation in signing the death warrant certainly conveys the impression that he was keener on subjecting the king to the justice and authority of the new regime than he was on actual regicide.

Defining the commonwealth, 1649

Scot’s 180 or so committee appointments and 31 tellerships between Pride’s Purge and April 1653 mark him out as one of the most active and dedicated members of the Rump. His influence upon the regime’s counsels is harder to assess, although he was acknowledged by contemporaries as one of its leading statesmen.145‘Inedited lttrs. of Cromwell, Col. Jones, Bradshaw and other regicides’ ed. J. Mayer, Trans. Historic Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, xiii., 24; Worden, Rump Parl. 183-4, 211; W.B. Bidwell, ‘The Committees and Legislation of the Rump Parliament, 1648-53: a Quantitative Study’ (Univ. of Rochester, NY, Ph.D. thesis, 1977), 155. Indeed, in the weeks after the regicide he emerged at the very head of those in the Rump who sought to shape and guide its political future. He was included, for example, on the committee set up on 1 February 1649 to take the dissent of Members seeking admission to the House – an important body in determining the Rump’s membership and therefore its political complexion.146[Prynne], Secluded Members, 25. And on 6 February, he was named to a ten-man committee for drafting an act abolishing the House of Lords as ‘useless and dangerous’, to which the House also referred the task of bringing in an act for abolishing the office of king as ‘unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous’.147CJ vi. 132b, 133a, 158a.

But perhaps Scot’s most important assignment in the weeks following the regicide was his nomination on 7 February 1649 with Ludlowe, Cornelius Holland, John Lisle and Luke Robinson to draw up operational instructions for the Rump’s projected council of state and to nominate persons whom they conceived fit to serve as councillors.148CJ vi. 133a. Scot evidently chaired this committee, for on 13 February he reported its draft instructions to the House, along with a list of nominees for the council and an ‘obligation or engagement’ by way of a conciliar oath of office.149CJ vi. 138b, 139b, 140a. The House approved the committee’s instructions and, in the elections to the council the next day (14 Feb.), all of its 35 nominees. The House then elected Scot and his fellow nominating committeemen Lisle and Ludlowe to three of the remaining six places on the council.150CJ vi. 140b-141a, 143a; Ludlow, Mems. i. 223; S. Kelsey, ‘Constructing the council of state’, PH xxii. 223-4.

Despite the failure of Scot’s committee to nominate the influential Thomas Chaloner and another regicide – and Scot’s own ally – John Blakiston to the first council of state, there is reason to question the argument that it effectively betrayed its own ‘revolutionary’ constituency at Westminster by nominating ‘the most broadly based and the least radical body that could be persuaded to serve’. On the one hand, Scot and his colleagues were apparently not as devoted to the cause of fundamental constitutional and social reform as were several of those Rumpers they nominated – notably, Grey of Groby and Marten.151Mercurius Pragmaticus (For King Charls) no. 8 (5-12 June 1649), 69 (E.559.14); Worden, Rump Parl. 177-80; Kelsey, ‘Constructing the council of state’, 222-3. On the other hand, the conciliar oath of loyalty, or ‘engagement’, that the committee drew up was anything but conciliatory and inclusive in sentiment. Introduced, probably by Scot, at the council’s first meeting on 17 February, the engagement required the councillors to approve ‘all that was done concerning the king [i.e. the king’s trial and execution] and kingship and for taking away the House of Lords and against the Scots’ invasion [in 1648]’.152SP25/1 (17 Feb. 1649); Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 537; S. Barber, ‘The engagement for the council of state’, HR lxiii. 45. Only 19 of the 41 councillors subscribed this engagement, and Vane II later wrote that he ‘would not accept of sitting in the council of state upon those terms but occasioned a new oath to be drawn’, requiring that councillors declare only their willingness to ‘adhere to this present Parliament in the maintenance and defence of the public liberty and freedom of this nation as it is now declared by this Parliament’. Cromwell and Hesilrige were also involved in brokering this compromise.153Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Barber, ‘Engagement for the council of state’, 45-8. Scot would subsequently welcome the introduction of, and general subscription to, the Rump’s Engagement abjuring monarchy and the Lords.154CJ vi. 307b, 312b, 321b, 326b; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 205-6. The same five members who had comprised the committee for nominating the council of state were appointed on 5 March to supervise the taking of the dissent to the 5 December 1648 vote.155CJ vi. 157a. This committee – of which Scot was an active member – seems to have complemented the work of that set up on 1 February.156CJ vi. 187a, 190a, 224a, 287a, 287b; [C. Walker], Anarchia Anglicana (1649), 210 (E.570.4).

Military administration and foreign affairs, 1649-52

Elected to all five of the Rump’s councils of state, Scot was among the active core at Whitehall that shaped government policy – a group that Whitelocke and other contemporaries termed the ‘juncto’.157CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. lxxv; 1650, p. xli; 1651, p. xxxv; 1651-2, p. xlvii; 1652-3, p. xxxiii; [Walker], Anarchia Anglicana, 230; Worden, Rump Parl. 183; Bidwell, ‘Rump Parliament’, 164, 165. During the Rump’s first four years in power, Scot made at least 67 reports from the council to the House – a number that only Vane II came close to rivalling – a significant proportion of which were devoted to the military establishment in England and, more especially, Ireland. At both Westminster and Whitehall he was recognised as an assured hand in the administration of the Rump’s military affairs, and he was clearly at the centre of debates within the council concerning the size and supply of the forces not only in England but also in Ireland and on the conduct of the war there.158CJ vi. 157b, 163a, 183a, 184a, 184b, 188a, 234a, 239b, 248b, 262b, 277a, 300a, 328a, 337a, 412b, 438a, 458a, 458b, 483b, 488a, 498a, 550a, 552a, 620a; vii. 43b, 49a, 133a, 161b, 162a, 162b, 165a, 165b, 166a, 169a, 169b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 22, 26, 29, 33, 39, 42, 56, 62, 80, 93, 103, 126, 183, 198, 204, 221, 224, 238, 360, 397, 579; 1650, pp. 2, 18; 1651, pp. 50, 67, 254, 264, 423; 1651-2, pp. 22, 35, 43, 243, 244, 293, 355, 386; 1652-3, p. 100; Bidwell, ‘Rump Parliament’, 165. In terms of his tellerships, he backed efforts to maintain the revenue streams that flowed into the war effort in Ireland and to bring them more firmly under conciliar control.159CJ vi. 408b, 499a.

A diligent correspondent as well as councillor, Scot was one of the main points of contact between the Rump and its officers and officials in Ireland, and in this role he established friendly relations with Cromwell.160CJ vi. 277b, 321b, 328a, 371a, 397b, 451b; vii. 159b, 267a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 259, 396, 422, 452, 498, 511; 1650, pp. 90, 105, 251; 1651, p. 349; Ire. under the Commonwealth, i. 109n; ‘Inedited lttrs.’ ed. Meyer, 13-15, 20-5, 29-32; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 98, 99, 154, 166, 231, 253, 370. After the Restoration, he would admit to holding ‘a careful correspondence’ with Cromwell ‘for the supply of all the necessities and convenients’ of his army in Ireland ‘in a weekly intercourse of letters and every day’s care at the [council] committee of Scottish and Irish affairs’.161Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 118. The only surviving letter in Scot’s voluminous correspondence with Cromwell is dominated by a detailed account of military finances and progress on ‘what you were pleased to give me in charge relative to Ireland’.162Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 28. On Cromwell’s return from Ireland in the spring of 1650, the council sent Scot, Sir Henry Mildmay and Sir Gilbert Pykeringe as its official delegation to attend the lord general at Windsor, and in about December of that year, Scot and his ‘bosom and most endeared friend’ Hesilrige were dispatched to the army in Scotland, where they evidently conversed at length with Cromwell on matters of military supply.163CJ vi. 527b; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 178; 1651, p. 126; J. Lilburne, A Defensive Declaration of Lieut. Col. John Lilburn (1653), 5 (E.702.2); Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 261. Similarly, in the fortnight preceding the battle of Worcester in September 1651, Scot and another friend, Richard Salwey, were sent to army headquarters in the midlands to inform Cromwell and his staff ‘what course [the] council has taken in raising and ordering forces and what debates had upon intelligence received from them and others, and confer with them at the council of war or otherwise how the forces may be best employed against the enemy’.164CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 352-3, 355, 387, 403; CJ vii. 7a, 8a, 12a, 12b; Worcs. RO, 705:349/12946/502714.

Scot’s importance in the Rump’s military administration is also clear from his work on and with the Committee for the Army and on successive conciliar admiralty and ordnance committees.165SP28/59, f. 285; SP28/60-90; SP25/123, ff. 53v, 252; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. xxii, 13, 77, 183, 252, 302, 476, 508; 1650, pp. 3, 303, 358; 1651, pp. 223, 267, 312; 1651-2, pp. 234, 278, 306, 373, 377; 1652-3, pp. 77, 225, 264; Worden, Rump Parl. 49. A concern to supply the Rump’s armed forces may well explain his many employments by the House and the council on matters concerning the oversight and improvement of public revenue, the discovery and management of delinquents’ estates and the sale of church, crown and other sequestered property.166CJ vi. 138b, 147b, 150b, 160b, 161b, 178b, 196b, 202a, 205b, 244a, 251b, 290b, 298a, 325a, 330b, 343a, 368a, 369b, 400a; vii. 65a, 104a, 138b, 159a, 191b, 222b, 245a, 263a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 18, 188, 284, 307, 327, 332, 336, 430; 1650, pp. 73, 125, 165, 306; 1651, pp. 135, 310, 468; 1651-2, pp. 43, 81; 1652-3, pp. 48, 198; Bidwell, ‘Rump Parliament’, 404. His expertise in these areas also recommended him to the House on initiatives to improve the accounting system for receivers of public money.167CJ vi. 149b, 154a, 204b, 218b; CSP Dom. 1651, p. 50; SP28/258, f. 168. In a report from a committee set up in August 1650 to raise money ‘for the public service upon any visible securities’, he proposed that England’s counties be ‘required’ to advance a loan of £300,000, repayable from the sale of fee farm rents – although as he informed Cromwell a few months later, he was mindful that ‘England is not as France: a meadow to be mowed as often as the government please’.168CJ vi. 459b, 468a; Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 28.

Like other leading Rumpers, Scot saw the extension of naval power under the commonwealth and the improvement of the nation’s domestic and international trade as interlinked and mutually reinforcing. But in identifying him alongside Thomas Chaloner ‘at the core of the emerging imperialist republican leadership’ in the Rump, too much has been made of his connection with the leading City merchant Owen Rowe and of a letter that Chaloner wrote to Scot in December 1650, urging him to persuade Cromwell to put England’s maritime interests at the top of his agenda.169Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 42-3; R. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), 582; Worden, Rump Parl. 254, 256; J.E. Farnell, ‘The Navigation Act of 1651’, EcHR n.s. xvi. 442. In fact, Scot was linked with Owen Rowe primarily through the latter’s godly brother William – Scot’s son-in-law – who was Cromwell’s scoutmaster and a critic of the worldly Chaloner, Henry Neville* ‘and that gang’.170‘Owen Roe’, Oxford DNB; Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 43; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 238. Although Scot was an active member of the council committee for trade and foreign affairs, it is revealing that he was not named, with Chaloner, to the Rump’s leading think-tank on commercial matters, the council of trade.171SP25/131-3. That the several bills in Scot’s hands in March 1649 ‘touching trade and manufacture’ did not result in reports to the House – at least not by him – or numerous committee appointments relating to commercial affairs, suggests that he was not a leading player in this area of policy.172CJ vi. 161b, 247b, 273a, 275a, 403b; SP25/2, unfol. (20 June 1649); CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 14, 44, 368; 1651-2, p. 192; 1652-3, p. 18.

Scot was much closer to Chaloner, Marten and their circle in his eagerness to forge good relations with Spain, ‘whose king’, as he would later recall, ‘was then so avowedly our friend’.173Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 120. But whereas Chaloner and Marten were motivated largely, it seems, by the possible commercial benefits of Anglo-Iberian friendship, Scot’s main reason for looking favourably on Spain may have been its hostility to France, which was the continental mainstay of Charles II and the Scottish Covenanters.174Supra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’, ‘Henry Marten’. By 1651, at the latest, Scot (along with Chaloner, Marten and Neville) was on the payroll of the Spanish ambassador Alonso de Cárdenas and was intervening in debates at Westminster and Whitehall to prevent policies prejudicial to Spanish interests. Indeed, such was Scot’s value to Spain that Cárdenas paid him an annual pension of £500 from April 1651 until the Rump’s dissolution two years later. The only other MP so richly rewarded in Spanish gold was Marten.175Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 2532 (accts. for ‘secret expenses’ distributed Cárdenas, 1638-55), unfol. Scot probably worked most effectively in Spain’s interest as a councillor of state at Whitehall. But he occasionally exerted himself on Cárdenas’s behalf in the House. On March 1652, for example, Scot and Marten were minority tellers against referring a paper from Cárdenas concerning the death of Anthony Ascham – the English resident in Spain who had been murdered in Madrid by a party of royalists – back to the council of state. The majority of Rumpers apparently wanted the council to demand reparations from Madrid; Scot and Marten were content to accept Spanish apologies for the incident and leave it at that.176CJ vii. 100b. Scot was the ‘principal instrument’ that September in securing an order from the council of state for Admiral Robert Blake* to attack a French flotilla attempting to relieve Dunkirk, which was then under siege by the Spanish. Blake captured the French flotilla on 4 September, and the next day Dunkirk surrendered. Cárdenas paid Scot’s pro-Spanish collaborators on this occasion – namely, Chaloner, Neville, Alexander Popham and Denis Bond – £200 each in gold; Scot himself was rewarded with a tapestry in eight panels worth £253.177Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 2532; Gardiner, Hist. Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii. 130. There is no reason to doubt Scot’s professions in 1660 that he had always

had a clear conviction and satisfaction that the crown of Spain was the fittest to make a friend for England of any nation under heaven, and therefore from the time of my first concernment in the councils of state I sincerely endeavoured to effectuate and expedite a good treaty, amity and alliance with them.178Bodl. Carte 31, f. 70; I. White, Mr Ignatius White His Vindication (1660), 1, 2, 17; Nicholas Pprs. iv. 232.

To lump him, as one authority has, with Vane II and Cromwell among the Rump’s foremost Hispanophobes is clearly a mistake, therefore – a consequence, in large part, of attributing to him the publications and opinions of his Jacobean puritan namesake.179S. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism (Cambridge, 1996), 52, 186, 190.

Scot’s work on the council’s committee for foreign affairs, his regular appointment to conciliar and House delegations to treat and communicate with ambassadors and envoys, and his many reports to the House on such matters, demonstrate beyond doubt that he was among that group of leading Rumpers responsible for formulating foreign policy. In addition to his efforts to improve relations with Spain, he figured prominently in the Rump’s dealings with the Dutch and their ambassadors, and he evidently favoured sending Oliver St John and Walter Strickland* as ambassadors to The Hague early in 1651 to negotiate a union with the Dutch republic.180CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 147, 482, 506; 1650, pp. 165, 344; 1651, pp. 19, 24, 40, 53, 65, 69, 129, 165, 173, 194, 201; 1651-2, pp. 43, 67, 85, 102, 106, 122, 242, 244, 249, 252, 259, 278, 284, 290, 298, 321, 417, 436; 1652-3, pp. 2, 9, 22, 62, 117, 198, 240, 242, 254; CJ vi. 130a, 337a, 353b, 528b, 530a, 567b, 568a, 570a, 573a, 575a; vii. 137a, 246b, 252a, 255a, 262a, 270a, 273b; Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 121; Burton’s Diary, iii. 111-12; Worden, Rump Parl. 330; Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 52, 53. Following the republic’s perceived betrayal of what Scot termed ‘the poor perishing Protestant interest’ in rejecting the Rump’s overtures, he seems to have supported the vigorous prosecution of the war against the Dutch.181CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 42, 278, 290, 298, 318, 321, 324-5; 1652-3, p. 144; Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 126; Gardiner, Hist. Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii. 180; Worden, Rump Parl. 301-2; Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 51. In 1659, he would refer to the ‘irreconcilable quarrel’ between England and the Dutch republic: ‘We are rivals for the fairest mistress in all Christendom: trade’.182Burton’s Diary, iii. 394. Nevertheless, he was part of the five-man committee that the council appointed in January 1652 to manage the peace negotiations with the republic’s envoys, and he would express regret in 1659 at what he saw as a lost opportunity in the early 1650s to bring the Dutch ‘to oneness with us’.183CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 102, 106; Burton’s Diary, iii. 111. Assuming that advancing English trade and colonies was less of a priority for him than securing the Rump against the Stuart interest and its foreign backers, he probably looked upon the Dutch – England’s greatest maritime rivals – more charitably than did the Chaloner, Marten and their circle.

The Rump’s secretary of state

Scot’s principal portfolio as one of the Rump’s ‘juncto’ grandees was that of supervising its intelligence system. In his ‘confession and discovery of his transactions’ after the Restoration, he deliberately downplayed his appointment by the council of state in July 1649 to ‘manage the business of intelligence both at home and abroad for the service of the state and for the better discharging of the great trust reposed in this council’.184SP25/62, f. 484; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 221, 227. This highly important office, with its annual appropriation of £800, was conferred on him, he claimed, more to help him supplement his ‘small estate’ – which he had supposedly exhausted by ‘diligent and daily [attendance] on the service of the public’ – than from ‘any great expectation they [his fellow councillors] had of any considerable service they thought me capable to do them, who had so little experience in language, travails or matters of that nature’.185Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 118. In fact, as already noted, Scot had several years of experience in ‘matters of that nature’ and had been employed by the council regularly since February 1649 in interrogating royalist suspects and investigating the activities of the Rump’s opponents.186CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 11, 18, 49, 66, 81, 137.

Even before the Rump put Scot in charge of its intelligence system in July 1649, he had been a leading participant in its crackdown against the Levellers. Once he had state funds to work with, he successfully infiltrated Leveller meetings by paying ‘some [ap]prentices and young men ... at a weekly salary for their expenses in keeping them [the Leveller leaders] company’.187CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 57, 80, 154; Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 118. Whatever sympathy he had harboured towards the Levellers before Pride’s Purge had apparently evaporated by the autumn of 1649, when it was reported that he had he ‘pressed very earnestly’ that John Lilburne and his confederates ‘might be tried for their lives as being ... the most seditious incendiaries living and such as will cut our throats unless some speedy course be taken with them’.188Mercurius Pragmaticus (For King Charls) no. 22 (11-18 Sept. 1649), sig. Y2 (E.574.1); no. 27 (23-30 Oct. 1649), sig. Ddv (E.575.40); Worden, Rump Parl. 58. Scot was very probably the author of a declaration that the council and House authorised in September for vindicating its proceedings and ‘discovering the dangerous practices of several interests’ but principally the Levellers.189CJ vi. 299b, 300a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 302-3, 305, 319; Worden, Rump Parl. 214. The result was a wholly conventional defence of the Rump with reference to necessity and the judgement of ‘God’s over-ruling providence’. Much of the first half of this publication was taken up with denouncing the Presbyterians as apostates from the cause of godly reformation, and praising the Congregationalists and those ‘reputed sectaries’; much of the second half was devoted to smearing the Levellers as royalist stooges and men of ‘atheistical and licentious principles’.190A Declaration of the Parliament of England (1649, E.575.9).

Scot gathered intelligence against the commonwealth’s enemies from a wide variety of sources – the Rump’s diplomats and various correspondents and intelligencers across Europe; the army’s commanders and scoutmasters (including George Downing*, Arthur Hill* and William Rowe); agents among the English and Scottish Presbyterians and at the courts of Charles II, the Duke of York and Henrietta Maria; spies upon Lilburne and, presumably, other leading Levellers; the intelligence network established in France by the Committee of Both Kingdoms*, to which Scot added the exiled former MP Edmund Waller* and the Leveller Edward Sexby; intercepted letters (which he sent, where necessary, to the noted cryptographer John Wallis for deciphering); and information received privately from other Rumpers (notably, Sir Henry Mildmay).191Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 118-21; Belvoir, QZ.5, f. 66; Brotherton Lib. Marten Loder mss, box 72, item 519; Lilburne, Defensive Declaration, 5-7, 10-11, 16-17; ‘Inedited lttrs.’ ed. Meyer, 8; Hutton, Royalist Conspiracy, 62-3; ‘Henry Mildmay’, Oxford DNB. One of his agents was the Cistercian abbot Father Patrick Crelly, who was also employed by Cárdenas to treat Chaloner, Marten and other Rumpers on the Spanish payroll.192Supra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’; Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 119. Scot’s authority as head of the Rump’s intelligence service extended to ordering the navy to intercept Dutch ships carrying perceived enemies of the commonwealth.193HMC Leyborne-Popham, 54-5.

Besides his role in gathering and collating intelligence, Scot sent agents into France, Denmark and the Dutch republic and worked with Cromwell, and possibly with Marten and Vane II, to make contact with the leading Frondeurs the Cardinal de Retz, the Prince de Condé and other enemies of the pro-Stuart French court.194Infra, ‘Henry Marten’, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 401; 1650, pp. 11, 83; 1651-2, p. 147; 1654, p. 160; Gardiner, Hist. Commonwealth and Protectorate, iii. 140; Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 119-20, 121-2. ‘The affairs of Holland’ during the Anglo-Dutch war were well known to him, he would later boast, ‘by my gaining the minutes or heads of every nights debate in their closet counsels and the whole resolutions in terminis [concluding determinations] as often as was possible [and] at least every post’.195Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 121. The council of state order books attest to Scot’s diligence as a spy-master and counter-insurgency expert and – given the increasing amount of money put at his disposal – to the perceived effectiveness of the intelligence system and networks that he helped to create. His annual budget of £800 grew to about £2,500 – a sum that he claimed ‘could not purchase any great matter or dive very deep’. Yet Levellers, Presbyterians and royalists all lived in fear of his ‘large-pensioned agents’ and his ‘spies and intelligencers ... swarming over all England as lice and frogs did in Egypt’. They also resented what they saw as the illegal methods of entrapment, blackmail, subornment and the other covert practices that Scot and his men employed in the ‘service of the state’.196CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 248, 263, 283, 301, 401, 541; 1650, p. 11, 15, 83; 1651, pp. 48, 63, 113, 254, 264, 458; 1651-2, pp. 56, 147, 514, 587, 594, 601, 611, 616; 1652-3, pp. 2, 482; Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 124; [C. Walker], The High Court of Justice. Or Cromwells New Slaughter House (1651), 34-5 (E.802.3); Lilburne, Defensive Declaration, 5, 13-14; Hutton, Royalist Conspiracy, 20-1; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 226-7. Armed with these powers and ably assisted by the future Quaker polemicist George Bishop, Scot played a vital role in discovering the 1651 Presbyterian plot for which the Rump executed Christopher Love.197Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 121; Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 39; Worden, Rump Parl. 243, 244; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 272-3; ‘George Bishop’, Oxford DNB. He was also a leading member of the council’s standing committee ‘for taking examinations and informations’, which was responsible for hearing secret evidence against suspects and interrogating detainees.198CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 316; 1650, pp. 18, 371; 1651, pp. 67, 119; 1651-2, p. 43; F. Buckley, A True Relation of the...Horrid Murder of Col. Eusebius Andrewe (1660), 1, 4; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 21.

Scot’s position at the head of the council of state’s intelligence system earned him widespread recognition as the Rump’s de facto secretary of state – Cárdenas, for example, referred to him as ‘principal secretary of state’ – and in January 1660, the restored Rump would officially nominate him to that position. As the careers of Scot’s royally-appointed predecessors Sir Francis Windebanke* and Sir Edward Nicholas† had demonstrated, the office of secretary combined the fields of intelligence gathering with control of the press and responsibility for government propaganda – and that connection would become even more pronounced under Scot and extend to oversight of the nation’s pulpit.199Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 2532; Hull Hist. Centre, C BRL/537; CJ vii. 806b, 813b; Lilburne, Defensive Declaration, 10; White, White His Vindication, 1; Compleat Collection, 125; ‘Inedited lttrs.’ ed. Meyer, 8; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 226-7. From the earliest days of the Rump, his services were regularly called upon by the House and council in their unceasing attempts to silence criticism of the government – whether it be in sermons or ‘scandalous’ and ‘seditious’ pamphlets – and to discover and punish its perpetrators. Named on 29 September and again on 13 October to council committees ‘for suppressing scandalous and unlicensed pamphlets’, he was also specially selected by the House to investigate particular publications, including Clement Walker’s Anarchia Anglicana and Abiezer Coppe’s A Fiery Flying Roll.200CJ vi. 97b, 189b, 256a, 257, 312b, 354b, 571a; vii. 236b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 18, 307, 340, 385, 400, 401, 402, 455; 1650, p. 76; 1651-2, p. 132; 1652-3, p. 78; SP25/3 (29 Sept. 1649); Resolves of the Commons Assembled in Parliament (1649, 669 f.14.55). ‘I had much to do’, he would later recall, ‘suppressing the swarming number of pamphleteers, which sooner or later I always got into my power’. He probably kept several newsbook editors on retainers and used their publications to peddle pro-government propaganda or to draw a veil over potentially damaging news items.201Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 121; Worden, Rump Parl. 402; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 159, 228. A royalist publication of 1661 would allege that he had been ‘a continual perplexer of printers and booksellers, not suffering them to vent the least light of transactions for information of the people but by his substitutes ... All honest and true intelligences were not only seized and suppressed but the divulgers thereof were both punished and imprisoned’.202Compleat Collection, 125. Scot’s high-profile role in the commonwealth also drew criticism of a more personal nature. It was reported in June 1652 that he had brought and won a court case against the ‘first authors’ of allegations that he had committed adultery ‘with several women’ – although jibes to this effect were still circulating in 1659 and beyond.203Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XXII, f. 99; Clarke Pprs. v. 304.

Scot’s familiarity with the government’s propaganda machine may well account for his many appointments in the Rump to draft declarations vindicating its proceedings and explaining its reasons in setting aside days of public humiliation. It is clear that a number of these official publications were largely or wholly his own work. One such was the declaration he reported on 30 August 1650, ‘setting forth the grounds and reasons ... for [a] public thanksgiving to almighty God for his great mercies in giving many victories to our forces in Ireland’. Another was the declaration that he and Richard Salwey drafted in September 1651, announcing a day of public thanksgiving for the victory at Worcester, ‘with a narrative, declaring the grounds and reasons thereof’.204CJ vi. 131b, 143b, 152a, 278a, 299b, 301a, 352b, 440a, 459a, 459b, 460a, 471a, 544b; vii. 13a, 20a, 21b, 22a, 137b, 162b, 173b, 266b, 271a; An Order of Parliament for a Thanks-giving Together with a Declaration of the Grounds and Reasons of it (1650, 669 f.15.52).

Alignments in the Rump, 1649-53

Identifying Scot’s priorities and activities beyond the realm of Irish and foreign affairs, military finances and his duties as the Rump’s secretary of state is difficult. He was active on the committee for Scottish and Irish affairs that the council set up in March 1651 – and which became the Rump’s ‘maid of all work’ – and on the committee appointed in October 1652 to negotiate with deputies sent from the shires and burghs of Scotland about finalising the terms of the new Anglo-Scottish commonwealth.205Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; CJ vii. 189a, 189b; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 66-7; SP25/138; Add. 63788B, f. 86; Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 118. But his haul of Commons and conciliar appointments on Anglo-Scottish affairs was relatively modest when compared with his tally relating to Anglo-Irish business.206CJ vi. 120a; vii. 118b, 189a, 189b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 10, 25, 139, 224; 1650, pp. 256, 273, 308; 1651-2, p. 185; 1652-3, p. 160. Similarly, although his appointments in the Rump point to his continuing involvement in London-related issues and to an interest in reforming and streamlining the legal system, there is no evidence that he made a telling contribution in either area.207CJ vi. 98a, 103b, 107a, 118a, 129b, 151a, 167b, 171a, 213a, 245b, 256a, 257b, 301a, 327b, 330b, 382b, 488a; vii. 215a, 253b.

Scot had a rather more marked impact upon the Rump’s religious policies, for he was clearly a prominent member of that large group of Rumpers that was committed to the promotion of godly reform and a preaching ministry and to the closely related issues of relieving the poor (especially those in prison for debt) and the suppression of vice and vagrancy.208CJ vi. 127a, 171a, 180b, 190b, 196a, 199b, 209b, 262a, 270a, 284a, 365b, 374b. In 1660, he would lament the ‘sad effect’ of his work as the Rump’s intelligencer-in-chief in exposing the Presbyterian divine and conspirator Christopher Love to the fury of ‘some less friends to the ministry’ and of his inability to mitigate Love’s punishment. His claim that he had tried to prevent Love’s execution is supported by his majority tellership on 9 July 1651 with the Presbyterian Rumper Philip Skippon in favour of adjourning debate on petitions submitted by Love and his wife – presumably in order to buy time for the beleaguered minister. The opposing tellers were Mildmay and the radical anti-formalist Vane II.209CJ vi. 599b; Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 121.

Perhaps the clearest indication of Scot’s doctrinal and devotional preferences is his appointment to the two committees set up on 10 February 1652 in response to a petition from the Independent divine John Owen* (one of Cromwell’s chaplains) and his clerical friends, urging tougher action against radical sectarian and heterodox beliefs and the more effective propagation of the gospel.210CJ vii. 86b. Scot remained on close terms with one member of Owen’s ministerial group in particular – William Strong.211CJ vii. 251b; ‘William Strong’, Oxford DNB. In consultation with the second of these committees – the committee for the propagation of the gospel, which Scot chaired – Owen’s group produced a report in March, The Humble Proposals, calling for a university trained ministry, the introduction of county commissioners to remove unfit ministers and for the suppression of one of Scot’s particular bugbears, ‘that abominable cheat of judicial astrology, whereby the minds of multitudes are corrupted and turned aside from depending upon the providence of God to put their trust in the lies of men and delusions of Satan’.212CJ vii. 258a-259a; R. Norwood, Proposals for Propagation of the Gospel (1652), 1 (E.656.21); The Humble Proposals of Mr Owen, Mr Tho. Goodwin, Mr Nye, Mr Sympson, and Other Ministers (1652, E.658.12); The Lives of those Eminent Antiquaries Elias Ashmole...and Mr William Lilly (1774), 93; ‘John Owen’, Oxford DNB. In December, Owen’s group added to The Humble Proposals what amounted to a confession of faith that would provide the doctrinal basis for a national, state-supported church. This set of 13 ‘principles of Christian religion’ was intended to proscribe Catholics, anti-Trinitarians and the extreme opinions associated with the Ranters.213Proposals for the Furtherance and Propagation of the Gospel in this Nation (1652, E.683.12); S. Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2010), 198-9. On 11 February 1653, Scot reported the proposals as agreed on a year earlier but omitted several of them, including those for prohibiting all who held beliefs contrary to the ministers’ 13 principles from preaching or otherwise publishing their views and for requiring those wishing to worship outside of a parish church to do so in ‘places publicly known’ and certified by a magistrate. By withholding these particular proposals the committee was apparently trying to avoid giving offence to the champions of liberty of conscience in the army. But the Rump overrode the committee and decided to consider all the proposals.214CJ vii. 285a-259a; Worden, Rump Parl. 326-7; Woolrych, Commonwealth and Protectorate, 53-4. Scot also chaired and reported from a committee set up on 11 January 1653 to bring in a bill for ‘a new translation of the bible out of the original languages’.215CJ vii. 245b, 264a.

Scot is difficult to place in any political grouping in the Rump on a consistent basis. His 31 tellerships were mostly in divisions of no obvious partisan significance and consequently reveal no clearly defined patterns in terms of his political views.216CJ vi. 115a, 188a, 264b, 269a, 408b, 483b, 499a, 552a, 555a, 573b, 585b(bis), 596a, 599a, 599b, 604b, 618a; vii. 20b, 25a, 84b, 85b, 95b, 100b, 144b, 150b, 151a, 157b, 183b, 186b, 209a, 239b. For example, he partnered Hesilrige, his alleged bosom companion in the Rump, in three divisions but opposed him on three as well.217CJ vi. 552a, 555a, 585b; vii. 25a, 151a. Again, he opposed Marten on five occasions and partnered him on four.218CJ vi. 115a, 188a, 264b, 483b, 499a; vii. 100b, 150b, 151a, 183b. Besides Marten, his most frequent adversaries were Mildmay and Vane II, who were the opposing tellers on six and five occasions respectively, although it is difficult to distinguish Vane II’s tellerships from those of Vane I.219CJ vi. 188a, 483b, 555a, 573b, 596a, 599b; vii. 20b, 25a, 144b, 209a. In divisions concerning the treatment of royalists or betrayers of the public trust (such as Edward Howard*, Lord Howard of Escrick), Scot – in marked contrast to Cromwell – almost invariably sided with those demanding a tough line against delinquents and backsliders.220CJ vi. 483b, 555a, 596a, 604b, 618a; vii. 150b.

Scot’s relationship with Cromwell and engagement with the army’s programme after the victory at Worcester for settlement and reconciliation provide important clues as to his political alignment in the Rump, particularly from the autumn of 1651. Although he was named to the nine-man committee established on 15 May 1649 to consider ‘the settling of the succession of future Parliaments and regulating their elections’, he does not appear to have agreed with one of its main conclusions – that the Rump should be recruited rather than dissolved and a new Parliament called.221Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; CJ vi. 210a. On 25 September 1651, Scot and Cromwell were majority tellers in favour of bringing in a bill ‘for setting a time certain for the sitting of this Parliament and for calling a new Parliament’ – in other words, for jettisoning the recruiter scheme.222CJ vii. 20b; Worden, Rump Parl. 266. Somewhat surprisingly, he failed to secure nomination to the committee established immediately after this division to draft the necessary legislation, although he would be named to that of 13 August 1652 that would debate the bill during the Rump’s final months.223CJ vii. 164b, 178b; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 26-7, 43.

The 25 September 1651 vote probably represented the high point in the close relationship that Scot had established with Cromwell during the latter’s campaigns in Ireland and Scotland. For the first three years or so of the Rump, it is likely that Scot was indeed, as both he and Lilburne would later claim, the lord general’s ‘great bosom friend’.224Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 126; Lilburne, Defensive Declaration, 16; Nicholas Pprs. iv. 231, 245. But the limits of Scot’s sympathy with the aims of Cromwell and the army for settlement and healing were exposed in the debates early in 1652 on the Act of general pardon and oblivion. On 5 and 6 February, Scot lined up against Cromwell as a minority teller in favour of adding provisos to the Act that would have reduced the scope of its amnesty to former royalists. As it was, the Act emerged in a much more pusillanimous form that Cromwell would have liked.225CJ vii. 84b, 85b; ‘Oliver Cromwell’, Oxford DNB. Nor would Scot have endeared himself to the lord general by siding with Marten a month later in trying to prevent the Rump taking a tough line with Spain over Ascham’s murder (see above). The two men would clash again in September, as opposing tellers in a debate over an Act for the relief of royalists who had been sued or otherwise molested contrary to the articles of surrender granted them in wartime. Once again, Scot favoured placing limitation on the Act’s provisions, and on this occasion he and Mildmay defeated Cromwell and Colonel Nathaniel Rich.226CJ vii. 186b.

Scot was almost certainly present at the meeting on 19 April 1653 between senior army officers and 20 or so leading Rumpers at which Cromwell received what he thought were assurances from ‘two or three of the chief [Rumpers]’ that they would persuade the House to suspend debate on the bill for a new representative pending further talks on the idea of a swift dissolution of the Rump and the setting up of an interim army-civilian government until new elections could safely be held. But there is no firm evidence as to whether Scot approved of this proposal or supported Hesilrige the next day (20 Apr.) in trying to rush through the bill, amended (or so it has been conjectured) in order to continue the Rump until at least November and to recruit the House in the interim.227Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 64-5, 68-102. His only recorded reference to these events was made in the protectoral Parliament of 1659, when he claimed that ‘if it had pleased God and his Highness [Cromwell] to have let that little power of a Parliament sit a little longer ... we intended to have gone off with a good savour and provided for a succession of Parliaments. But we stayed to end the Dutch war’.228Burton’s Diary, iii. 111. All that can be said for certain is that he bitterly resented Cromwell’s dissolution of the Rump and the council of state in April 1653 and emerged thereafter as an implacable opponent of the lord general and all his works.229Ludlow, Mems. i. 357; Worden, Rump Parl. 337

The protectoral Parliaments, 1654-8

In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Scot was returned for the Buckinghamshire borough of Chipping Wycombe, where he had acted for the Rump in securing the appointment of a ‘well-affected’ mayor in 1650 and had been rewarded by the corporation with the office of high steward.230Supra, ‘Chipping Wycombe’; Weekly Post no. 185 (20-27 June 1654), irreg. pag. (E.229.43). He was named to only one committee in this Parliament, but he was active in the early debates on the protectoral settlement, joining Hesilrige, John Bradshawe and other ‘commonwealthsmen’ in denouncing Cromwell’s office as supreme magistrate and in pressing strongly for the proposition that ‘the government should be in Parliament of the people of England’ and that alone.231CJ vii. 366b, 381a; Burton’s Diary, i. p. xxv; Ludlow, Mems. i. 391; Burton’s Diary, ii. 395. In a preparatory skirmish to this assault on the protectoral constitution, Scot and Hesilrige were tellers on 6 September in favour of a motion to the effect that words uttered in Parliament should not be actionable under the terms of any Act or ordinance for treason. However, they lost this division to the ‘court party’.232CJ vii. 367a; Burton’s Diary, i. p. xxiii. It is very likely that Scot was among those ‘eminent assertors of the liberty of their country’ who withdrew from the House in mid-September in conscientious refusal to sign the Recognition pledging to be true and faithful to Cromwell and the protectoral government. The ‘Thomas Scott’ added to a committee set up on 3 November 1654 was probably either his son Thomas Scott IV or the Canterbury MP Thomas Scot III.233CJ vii. 381a; Ludlow, Mems. i. 392; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 86.

Secretary John Thurloe* received intelligence early in 1655 that Scot and Hesilrige were complicit in a republican plot against the protectorate, but no action was taken against either man.234TSP iii. 147. Scot reckoned himself in good enough odour with the government in the spring of 1655 to write to Thurloe on behalf of one of the Rump’s intelligencers, the royalist officer Robert Werden.235TSP iii. 337, 350. Scot exerted himself even more strenuously that spring in overcoming the opposition of Whitelocke and his friends to the installation of the ‘rigid’ Presbyterian minister Daniel Sutton (probably a kinsman of Scot) as vicar of Great Marlow.236Whitelocke, Diary, 403, 407; Calamy Revised, 470. Although Scot seems to have steered clear of republican plotting against the protectorate, his regular attendance at meetings of the governors of Westminster school during the mid-1650s ensured that he kept in touch with many of his closest colleagues in the Rump, among them Bradshawe, Chaloner, Ludlowe, Purefoy, Thomas Lister, Gilbert Millington, William Say and John Weaver.237SP28/292, unfol.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Scot was returned again for Aylesbury, where he had purchased an estate, including former church lands, in the early 1650s.238Supra, ‘Aylesbury’; LR2/266, f. 5; Worcs. RO, 705:349/12946/502714. According to Thurloe, however, Scot was not content with his return for Aylesbury and therefore contested the seat at Chipping Wycombe as well, only to lose to the Cromwellian Major-general Tobias Bridge.239TSP v. 316-17. Like most of the leading commonwealthsmen returned to this Parliament, Scot was excluded from sitting by the protectoral council as an enemy of the government.240CJ vii. 425b; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 18; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 90. However, at the beginning of the second session, in January 1658, he was allowed to take his seat, along with the rest of the excluded Members, and again joined the republican interest in attacking the protectoral settlement – particularly with reference to ‘the force that was upon that assembly [the 1656 exclusions], whereby a great number of those who had as good a right to sit there as any others were peremptorily refused to sit’.241Ludlow, Mems. ii. 33; Burton’s Diary, ii. 378.

Once admitted to the Commons, Scot reserved particular scorn for the Cromwellian Other House, supporting a motion on 22 January 1658 not to receive any messages from this body as a House of Lords: ‘They are at last but a swarm from you’, he and other newly-admitted Members declared, ‘you have resolved that they shall be another House but not Lords’.242Burton’s Diary, ii. 339, 341, 343. He made a lengthy and impassioned speech on 29 January, contrasting the public-spiritedness of the Commons, as evidenced by the vote of no addresses and the regicide, with what he saw as the faithlessness of the Lords.243Burton’s Diary, ii. 382-92. ‘The providence of God has so ordered it that England is turned a commonwealth’, he insisted

and do what you can, you cannot make it otherwise, and if you join any with them [the Commons] in the legislature it will not do your work ... The administrations of God’s dealings are against you. Is not God staining the glory and pride of the world? Is there anything but a commonwealth that flourishes? ... [The people] were, by the providence of God, set free from any negative [voice]. Will they thank you if you bring such a negative upon them? The people that have bled for you ... have not gained by you but you by them. What was fought for but to arrive at that capacity to make your own laws?244Burton’s Diary, ii. 389, 390.

By re-establishing the Lords with a coordinate legislative power, he insisted, the Commons would become accountable for all the blood that had been shed during the civil war – including that of the king – to secure the sovereignty of the Commons, by thus causing it to have been shed in vain.245Burton’s Diary, ii. 390. His proposal that the issue of how to transact proceedings with the other House be referred to the more open arena of a committee of the whole House – which he repeated on 3 February – was supported by Hesilrige, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, Thomas St Nicholas and John Weaver.246Burton’s Diary, ii. 392, 428-9. To the Presbyterian MP Thomas Gewen, on other hand, Scot’s ‘long oration’ on 29 January represented an affront by a ‘thorough-paced republican’ to the ‘peaceably spirited’ Members who had defied the army at Pride’s Purge.247Burton’s Diary, ii. 392-3. When the Speaker made the mistake on 3 February of asking the House’s permission to admit two messengers sent down from the ‘Lords’, Scot, Hesilrige and their allies launched another lengthy attack upon the Other House as an instrument of ‘slavery’. ‘All power being originally in the people’, argued Scot, the Cromwellian peers are, ‘at best, but originally from you’.248Burton’s Diary, ii. 437, 440-1.

In addition to his contributions on the floor of the House, Scot was named to ten committees between his re-admission in January 1658 and the dissolution of Parliament early in February, and he chaired several meetings of a committee established back in November 1656 to bring in a bill for the maintenance of the ministry.249CJ vii. 579a, 580b, 581a, 588a, 589a, 591a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 372, 404, 441. On 28 January, he warmly seconded a speech by Hesilrige – with whom he sat in the gallery of the House – that expressed regret at the failure of the ministers who had preached to the House the day before (27 Jan.) to mention ‘what that victorious Parliament [the Long Parliament] did for the ministers by that large allowance given them and other great things done by that Parliament’.250Burton’s Diary, ii. 347, 376; An Exact and Most Impartial Accompt of the...Trial [of the Regicides] (1660), 87 (E.1047.3).

Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, 1659

In the weeks before the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, ‘divers’ commonwealthsmen met privately to consult about ‘what would be most proper for them to do in case any of them should be elected to serve in the approaching assembly’. After ‘mature deliberation’ they resolved that ‘if they should be fairly chosen and that no unjust or dishonourable thing were required of them they should accept the employment’. This republican caucus apparently included Scot, Hesilrige, Ludlowe and Henry Neville.251Ludlow, Mems. ii. 50; TSP vii. 550. In the event, Scot was returned for Chipping Wycombe again, although it was reported by several hands that he had secured this seat only after being rejected at Aylesbury.252TSP vii. 590; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 438.

Scot was named to eight committees in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, including that set up on 17 February 1659 to consider the size and deployment of the protectorate’s armed forces and how to manage the revenues of England, Ireland and Scotland so as to defray and reduce the cost of maintaining the government and military establishment.253CJ vii. 594b, 605a, 610a, 622b, 627a, 634b, 639a. His experience in the field of financial administration recommended him to his fellow Parliament-men as chairman of a body known variously as the ‘committee of excise’, the ‘committee for excisemen’ and the ‘committee for brewers’. He also chaired meetings of the committee of privileges, reporting on 4 April the case of the disputed election at Taunton.254CJ vii. 624b; Burton’s Diary, iv. 273, 276, 317, 333, 383, 403, 439. On the floor of the House, he supported the returns of the republican Henry Neville – whom he defended against accusations of atheism – and Robert Danvers alias Villiers.255Burton’s Diary, iii. 251-2, 298.

Scot spoke frequently in debate and occasionally at great length – to the annoyance of the parliamentary diarist Thomas Burton and doubtless other Members as well.256Burton’s Diary, iv. 342. One of his speeches lasted a full hour, which must have been especially taxing for his audience in that it came shortly after Hesilrige had spoken for two hours. Both men had plenty to say, but both were also employing the commonwealthsmen’s tactics of stringing out the House’s proceedings so that the court party ‘might not be able to drive so furiously’ and in order to gain time ‘to infuse good principles’ into those many Members who were new to Parliament.257Henry Cromwell Corresp. 447-8; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 55-6. Scot’s first major speech was on 1 February 1659 in response to Thurloe’s presentation to the House of the bill of recognition (the bill confirming Richard Cromwell as protector). Taking his cue from Hesilrige and St Nicholas, he argued that the House should settle many preliminary issues before proceeding to the bill, and he referred to one such issue in particular – the right to sit of the Scottish and Irish Members.258Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, pp. 89-90; Burton’s Diary, iii. 28-9. The commonwealthsmen contested the presence of these MPs partly because they regarded them as Cromwellian placemen, but also as a filibustering tactic to impede the passage of the bill of recognition. When the debate turned on 5 February to whether MPs should be required to take the protectoral oath of allegiance before taking their seats, Scot again sought to divert the House’s attention to the question of the Scottish and Irish Members. Ludlowe and others who cavilled over taking the oath were merely ‘tender conscienced’ in Scot’s opinion. Before questioning their right to sit the House should ‘validate the members for Scotland and Ireland’.259Burton’s Diary, iii. 73-6. Scot would return repeatedly to the ‘inconveniency’ of these Members ‘intruding into our legislature’, and on one occasion he likened them to ‘a wooden leg, tied to a natural body’.260Burton’s Diary, iv. 22, 136, 217, 228; iv. 92-5, 136, 217, 228.

In his hour-long speech, delivered in a debate on the bill of recognition on 7 February 1659, Scot ranged more widely in support of his contention that the House must ‘first digest a government and [only] then fit the person’. Starting from the proposition that ‘we may have liberty to propound any government to the people, salus populi [the safety of the people] will warrant it’, he filibustered on the machinations during the 1640s of the king and his royalist and Presbyterian abettors. He justified the regicide both as an act of political necessity and as ‘vindictive [i.e. vindicatory] justice’ for all the bloodshed that Charles had caused, and he defended the establishment of the commonwealth in equally unrevolutionary terms: ‘The representative, in their aggregate body, have power to alter or change any government, being thus conducted by providence’. Having exalted the Rump’s achievements, particularly in foreign affairs – ‘we never bid fairer for being masters of the whole world’ – he lamented its dissolution by Cromwell. He concluded by urging the House to follow the advice he had proffered a year earlier – that is, appoint a committee of the whole House to debate the ‘body’ of the constitution ‘and then fit your head, if you please one head ... In the meantime, lay this bill [of recognition] aside’.261Burton’s Diary, iii. 107-13. On 11 and 12 February, he renewed his calls for the bill’s committal – this time on the grounds that the 1656 exclusions had invalidated the Humble Petition and Advice.262Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, p. 118; Burton’s Diary, iii. 192, 195, 219-221. More controversially, he insisted that the hereditary principle was not an argument for confirming Protector Richard’s title.

The kingdom of England was not always hereditary. Of 25 or 26 kings, 15 or 16 of them came in by the choice of the Parliament and not by descent ... The Parliament has always power to make or empower the chief magistrate, and they changed the government as often as they thought it good for the people ... Make the provision for the safety of the people’s liberties and your magistrate’s power and prerogative contemporary. Let them be twins. Let them justify one another. Let not one precede the other ... Name a committee to form a question that may take in both.263Burton’s Diary, iii. 219, 221.

In his zeal against rule by a single person, Scot declared on 14 February that he was so far from repenting of his part in the regicide that he ‘would be content it should be set upon my monument ... I was one of the king’s judges’.264Burton’s Diary, iii. 275.

Having lost the vote on whether the bill of recognition should extend to acknowledging Richard Cromwell ‘to be the undoubted lord protector and chief magistrate of the commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland’, the commonwealthsmen switched their attention to the question of how the protector’s powers should be bounded.265Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, p. 126; Burton’s Diary, iii. 336. On 17 February 1659, Scot shrewdly seized upon a report of the commissioners of the army and navy to re-open debate on the extent of the protector’s authority. It was surely not the House’s intention, he asked rhetorically, ‘[at] a time of year when kings go out to war ... to leave the making of peace or war in the single person’s hands’.266Burton’s Diary, iii. 313; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 262. When, on 21 February, Thurloe made a long report on foreign affairs, requesting money to send a fleet to the Sound, Scot followed other commonwealthsmen in questioning not only the government’s foreign policy objectives (in supporting Sweden against Denmark and its Dutch allies) but also in exposing what they saw as a design to inveigle one million pounds for a ‘pretended war’ that would increase the power of the protector.267Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Burton’s Diary, iii. 401. ‘There is a game ... a playing and stakes to be kept abroad’, he conceded, ‘but we have a game, and of greater concernment to us, that is now playing at home. The militia at home is first to be settled’. It was the Commons’ proper role, he argued, to be ‘the great disposer of peace and war. This will otherwise determine the dispute of the militia’.268Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, p. 135; Burton’s Diary, iii. 393-5. He made these same points, but at greater length, on 24 February. Before sending a fleet anywhere the House should assert its ‘directive power’ over the nation’s armed forces. To counter objections that a Parliament was not suited to handling such matters of state, he again lauded the Rump’s military achievements, which he contrasted with the ‘dishonourable peace’ that Protector Oliver had made with the Dutch in 1654, and with his ‘unprofitable and dangerous war’ against the Spanish. ‘It is known abroad’, he claimed, ‘that a Parliament of England can fight and conquer ... But they do not know so much of anybody else’ [i.e. the House of Cromwell]. He urged his fellow MPs to

declare the right of the militia ... to be in yourselves, that you will dispose of this expedition [to the Sound] yourselves, to be in such hands as you think fit, [and] that you will examine the grounds of the war and be shown how you may make a lawful war or upon what terms we ought to undertake it.269Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, pp. 147-8; Burton’s Diary, iii. 473-6.

In a vain attempt to delay a vote on whether to commit the care of ‘this expedition’ to the protector, Scot and Hesilrige were minority tellers against bringing in candles to prolong the debate.270CJ vii. 607a. After several more hours of discussion, a majority of MPs voted to leave the management of the fleet – and, by implication, foreign policy generally – to Richard. However, it was reportedly the commonwealthsmen’s efforts that secured the addition to this resolution of the words ‘saving the interest of this House in the militia and in making of peace and war’.271CJ vii. 607b; S. Bethel, A True and Impartial Narrative of the Most Material Debates and Passages in the Late Parliament (1659), 8.

The focus of contention at Westminster had shifted by early March 1659 to the vexed question of the Cromwellian Other House and whether it was first necessary to decide the status of this body before determining who had the negative voice. In common with other republican Members, Scot was less interested in determining whether the Other House was properly constituted according to the Humble Petition than in proclaiming the supposed power of the Commons to bind both the chief magistrate and the Other House as it saw fit. ‘They are your servants’, he insisted on 5 March, ‘and it is improper to make them your masters’. To do so, he argued, was ‘a design to bring in Charles Stuart’ or, at the very least, to return England to the rule of the major-generals: ‘Are those fit to have a parliamentary authority that will undertake to abet the single person to levy taxes without you? ... Though some [of the Other House] be men of estates there, yet the bulk are not such persons’.272Burton’s Diary, iv. 34-7. He recommended that the whole business of determining the membership and powers of the Other House be referred to a committee – a classic republican spoiling tactic.273Burton’s Diary, iv. 36-7. He employed two more such stratagems on 9 March – reviving the issue of the Scottish and Irish Members and questioning the Humble Petition’s utility as a blueprint for settlement. The Scottish and Irish Members sat in the House, he contended, merely by an ‘intimation in the Petition and Advice’, and the Other House had been called on that same uncertain basis.274Burton’s Diary, iv. 92-5. ‘I would have the Parliament of England speak plain English’, he declared, disingenuously, ‘and not go by implication that the chief magistrate may know what he has to do’.275Burton’s Diary, iv. 228. The Other House rested on dubious constitutional foundations, he repeated on 28 March, and therefore should not be transacted with: ‘It may, without straining, be said they neither sit upon [the] Petition and Advice, nor by laws, nor by law of prudence or policy’. Yet again, he called for a committee ‘to consider of the necessity of another House, and, that done, acquaint your chief magistrate with the reasons why you cannot transact with this constitution’.276Burton’s Diary, iv. 280. With the majority of Members clearly unmoved by this attack upon the protectoral settlement, Scot lowered his sights and secured the addition of the words ‘during this present Parliament’ to a question that the House framed on 28 March on whether to transact with the Other House. Although the commonwealthsmen lost the subsequent vote, Scot’s proviso allowed them to believe that the Cromwellian peers were ‘probationers’, sitting for this Parliament only and not a permanent feature of the constitution.277CJ vii. 621; Burton’s Diary, iv. 285-6. After disagreement over the wording of a protectoral declaration had re-ignited the debate on the Other House, Scot and his republican allies secured another minor victory on 6 April with the appointment of a committee, to which he was named, to consider the manner of transacting with the Cromwellian peers.278CJ vii. 627a; Burton’s Diary, iv. 342, 351-2, 357. Inevitably, the commonwealthsmen seized on a report from this committee on 8 April to launch yet more attacks upon the Other House as a mere stalking horse for the return of the ‘old lords’.279Burton’s Diary, iv. 377.

Scot’s attitude towards the army by early 1659 was ambivalent, for he was doubtless aware of resentment towards the protectorate among some of the officers (notably John Lambert*) and their men. One of his main objections to the Other House was the strong military presence among the Cromwellian peers. Indeed, on one occasion he referred to that House as a ‘council of officers’ and commented darkly on the fact that its membership included all 19 regimental commanders and that they, unlike their soldiers, had received their pay in full.280Burton’s Diary, iv. 35-6, 317. Predictably, he was among the chorus of Members on 12 April calling for harsh measures against the Cromwellian Major-general William Boteler*, following a report from the committee of grievances that Boteler had abused his authority.281Burton’s Diary, iv. 405, 410. Yet at the same time, Scot was solicitous of the common soldiers’ grievances over arrears of pay, and he had evidently not abandoned faith in the army as a servant of the ‘good old cause’.282Burton’s Diary, iii. 61, 192, 307. For all that he condemned the ‘horrid barbarities’ used in collecting the excise, he defended the tax as a necessary evil for maintaining the army. It was not keeping up the army per se that had plunged the nation into debt, he insisted, but rather Protector Oliver’s foolhardy war against Spain.283Burton’s Diary, iv. 316-17, 399, 419.

It is hard to believe that Scot was oblivious of the overtures made to Hesilrige and Vane II by Charles Fleetwood*, John Disbrowe* and other disgruntled Cromwellian officers from late March 1659, although he protested in April that ‘he knew nothing beforehand of the debates or transactions of the army [and] that neither immediately or mediately he had the least communication with any of them [the senior officers]. If any else had, they did not trust him with it’.284Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; TSP vii. 659. On 18 April, with London full of angry soldiers, Scot defended the proceedings of the general council of officers in remonstrating with the government. He even went so far as to call for the appointment of a committee to confer with the Other House. As the Commons debated how to bring the army to heel, Scot warned against a government trick to

expose your army to assassination ... Disperse [the soldiers] and you will keep the cavaliers together. It can never be policy to distrust those you are obliged to trust ... There is a ‘good old cause’. If [the officers’] meetings be to manage that, I shall not be against them while their counsels are in subordination to you.285Burton’s Diary, iv. 453-4.

Rather than support the idea mooted on 21 April for a declaration asserting the protector’s authority over the armed forces, Scot again urged that the House to assert its authority over the protector by binding his powers.286Burton’s Diary, iv. 478-9.

Behind the scenes, however, Scot was in contact with Secretary Thurloe through an associate from his days as the Rump’s spymaster, Colonel Joseph Bampfield. If Bampfield can be credited, Scot was anxious by mid-April that as the army should not ‘impose laws upon my lord protector and the Parliament, so he is very sorry to see such rough expedients resorted to as may endanger the dividing of that power [the army] which he considers as the sole bulwark and defence of his Highness and his friends and of the commonwealth’. Prominent among these ‘rough expedients’ were the Commons’ votes of 18 April prohibiting the sitting of the council of officers without the consent of the protector and Parliament and for removing from command any officer who refused to pledge not to interrupt the free meetings of Parliament. Scot feared that these votes, which he had opposed, would exasperate the army and encourage ‘the Presbyterians ... to impose their own laws upon all, [and] if [the votes] are disobeyed, ’twill endanger the dividing of the army ... and the ruin of the nation’. Through Bampfield, Scot implored Thurloe to ‘think of a speedy way of bringing in such moderate expedients for the settlement of the government as may be satisfactory to honest and moderate men on both sides’.287CJ vii. 641b; TSP vii. 659-60. But though anxious to reach a compromise that would forestall army intervention, Scot was (Bampfield informed Thurloe)

resolute not to recede from what he delivered touching the Other House: first, because it is his sense, to which you know he is something pertinacious; next by reason that he has declared himself. But if that were carried once in the affirmative against his judgement, I persuade myself he might in other things be taken off from the triumvirate, though the other two [?Hesilrige and Vane II] have still great influence upon him.288TSP vii. 661.

These furtive negotiations with Thurloe reveal Scot’s difficulty in trying to resolve the tension in his political thinking between, on the one hand, adherence to the good old cause and ‘salus populi ... above all rules’ – which left a door open to army intervention in civil affairs – and, on the other, reverence for the sovereignty of the Commons.289Burton’s Diary, iv. 94. Despite his antipathy towards the protectorate, it seems unlikely that he approved of the army’s dissolution of Parliament on 22 April, and he may well have joined Hesilrige and other Members in declaring it ‘treason for any persons whatsoever to put force upon any Members of the House’.290Supra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; [A. Annesley*], England’s Confusion, or a True and Impartial Relation of the Late Traverses of State in England (1659), 9 (E.985.1).

The restored Rump, 1659

There are conflicting reports as to whether Scot participated with Vane II, Hesilrige, Salwey and Ludlowe in talks with senior army officers late in April and early in May 1659 about restoring the Rump.291Clarke Pprs. iv. 6-7; Baker, Chronicle, 643. But he was evidently one of the 20 or so Rumpers who solicited Lenthall on 6 May to resume his old post as Speaker, and of the civilian politicians in the restored commonwealth, perhaps only Hesilrige and Vane II would enjoy greater influence and eminence than Scot.292[Annesley], England’s Confusion, 9.

Scot’s standing in the restored Rump was confirmed with his appointment to its interim executive, the committee of safety, which had authority ‘to seize and secure such as might justly be suspected of any design to disturb the public peace and also to remove such officers of the army as they should think fit and to fill their places with others, till the Parliament should take farther order therein’.293Ludlow, Mems. ii. 79-80. Unlike Hesilrige and Vane, however, he failed to secure nomination to this committee at its establishment on 7 May but was added with Lambert, Disbrowe and Colonel James Berry on 9 May.294CJ vii. 646b. Scot acted as the spokesman for the Parliament-men on the committee of safety when he reported to the House on 13 May their proposal for entrusting the selection and promotion of officers not to the commander-in-chief, as the army desired, but to a committee that included leading commonswealthmen (Vane and Hesilrige) as well as officers (Fleetwood, Lambert).295CJ vii. 650b-651a; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 99. Scot also reported the committee’s nominees as admiralty commissioners and army committeemen. In all, he made six reports from the committee of safety between 13 and 18 May.296CJ vii. 650b, 652b, 656a, 656b, 658a.

Scot was also a major figure on the restored Rump’s council of state, to which he was elected on 14 May 1659. One of his first acts on returning to Whitehall was to challenge the appointment of his fellow councillors Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper and Bulstrode Whitelocke. Scot informed the council that he had received information from ‘one of his spies beyond sea’ – Father Patrick Crelly – that the two men held secret correspondence with Charles Stuart and Sir Edward Hyde*.297CJ vii. 654a; Whitelocke, Diary, 515. But while there was reason to doubt Cooper’s fidelity, Scot’s pointing the finger of suspicion at Whitelocke looks more like a settling of old scores.298Ludlow, Mems. ii. 85. In the event, both Cooper and Whitelocke retained their places. True to form, Scot attended the council with notable regularity, rarely missing a meeting, and served as its president for the first two weeks of October.299SP25/79, p. 668; Bodl. Rawl. C.179, passim; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. xxiii-xxiv, 230; Mayers, 1659, 169. The majority of his 13 recorded reports from the council concerned military and security matters, of which perhaps the most significant was the draft bill for appointing commissioners to nominate and commission army officers – a policy that Fleetwood and his colleagues greatly resented.300CJ vii. 662b, 670b, 672b, 699a, 704b, 706a, 715a, 751b, 764b, 768b, 791b.

Scot’s appointments to conciliar and Commons committees to receive and treat with diplomats from the Dutch republic and the crowns of Denmark, France and Portugal point to his close involvement, once again, in managing the Rump’s foreign relations.301Bodl. Rawl. C.179, pp. 2, 39, 60, 62, 125, 137, 184, 284; CJ vii. 710b, 718a; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 155, 173, 208, 213. The French ambassador, Antoine de Bordeaux, reported to Cardinal Mazarin early in June that he had conversed with Scot, ‘who discharges the duties of secretary of state. And your Eminence may take your measures on this basis that the present government is altogether disposed to peace with Spain and that peace with France has lately been spoken of as very uncertain’.302M. Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell and the Restoration of Charles I (1856), i. 401. Scot’s desire for a ‘perfect understanding betwixt Spain and this commonwealth’ had not diminished.303Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 122; White, White His Vindication, 3. But although convinced that the protectorate’s war against Spain had been entered into ‘improvidently’, he would not have the Rump conclude a dishonourable peace.304Bodl. Clarendon 61, ff. 286-7.

Scot also resumed his duties in the Rump’s campaign to silence or otherwise thwart its enemies. On 15 June 1659, the council referred it to Scot ‘to use all legal means for discovery and suppressing of seditious and libellous books and pamphlets ... and for punishment of the offenders therein’.305Bodl. Rawl. C.179, p. 75; Mayers, 1659, 188-9. Similarly, he was a prominent member of the council’s various committees for intelligence and for securing and examining suspects.306Bodl. Rawl. C.179, pp. 6, 11, 12-13, 159, 165, 175, 199, 252, 268; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 130, 140; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 85; CCSP iv. 360, 361; Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 122; Mayers, 1659, 172. Although probably not quite as pre-eminent in the Rump’s intelligence service as he had been in 1649-53, his network of agents and informers was apparently vital in foiling several of the royalist uprisings planned for 1659 and in persuading the council of state to take a ‘more than usual care in modelling the army and settling the whole militia of the kingdom’.307Bodl. Rawl. C.179, pp. 90, 109, 138, 210, 227; Clarendon 63, f. 129; Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 122-3; Baker, Chronicle, 650; CCSP iv. 311, 351, 367, 406; Mayers, 1659, 38, 188-9. Not content with spying on the regime’s enemies, Scot and Vane II commissioned an agent to monitor the proceedings of William Lockhart*, the Rump’s ambassador in Paris.308CCSP iv. 396; Mayers, 1659, 118-19.

Scot’s 34 committee appointments in the restored Rump are largely consistent with the pattern his parliamentary career and priorities had assumed a decade earlier and suggest that much of his activity in the House was related to defining its membership and establishing a council of state, re-structuring and financing the armed forces, settling the government of Ireland, strengthening security arrangements in London and framing various declarations justifying the Rump’s proceedings.309CJ vii. 645a, 656a, 656b, 661a, 664a, 672b, 678a, 690a, 691a, 705b, 710b, 735b, 754a, 764b, 780b. His appointment on 4 June 1659 with Richard Salwey and Nicholas Lechmere to draft the oaths to be taken by the commissioners of the great seal and other ‘ministerial [i.e. legal] officers’ again highlights his importance in defining the bounds of political participation in the commonwealth.310CJ vii. 672a, 672b. On 28 June, Scot and Chaloner were ordered to prepare a parliamentary seal for use by the Speaker.311CJ vii. 695b. As in 1649-53, he favoured a tough line against delinquents, whether they be former royalists or those complicit in the Presbyterian-royalist rising in the north west in August under Sir George Boothe*.312CJ vii. 714b, 754a, 764b.

The response of the Rump’s leaders to Boothe’s rebellion served to widen the division in their ranks between ‘oligarchical republicans’ (Vane II, Lambert, Richard Salwey) and ‘true republicans’, led by Hesilrige and Scot, who were less sympathetic than were Vane and his friends to the claims of the army and the idea of complete religious toleration.313Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 485-6, 490; Mayers, 1659, 53. The ‘true republicans’, it was reported, favoured a settlement in which ‘the civil magistrate shall have a corrective power in matters of religion’.314Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 490. Reacting to evidence of disaffection within the army’s ranks that the rebellion had exposed, Hesilrige demanded the imposition of a new engagement ‘to be true, faithful and constant to this commonwealth, against any king, single person and House of Peers and every of them’.315CJ vii. 774a; Mayers, 1659, 231. When this oath was presented for subscription to MPs early in September, it was reported that ‘the greatest heats that could be in words’ had passed between Hesilrige and Vane.316Wariston Diary, 134, 135; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 207. Vane apparently suspected that the oath would be used by Hesilrige and his friends as the basis for purging their opponents from the army and public office.317Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 478; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 110; Mayers, 1659, 231-2. In the event, the engagement was referred on 6 September to a committee, to which Scot was named, and there it was allowed to drop.318CJ vii. 774b; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 474.

Against this background of rising political tensions at Westminster, the Rump returned to the vexed question of the constitution, setting up a committee on 8 September 1659 – to which Scot was also named – ‘in order to the settlement of the government of this commonwealth’.319CJ vii. 775b. Scot was almost certainly among the majority of this committee that voted to reject a ‘fundamental of toleration’ in religion.320Wariston Diary, 138; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 111. Hostility between the two factions flared into the open again in response to a petition from Lambert’s army, expressing frustration at the Rump’s failure to redress the army’s grievances since its restoration in May. The petitioners demanded, among other things, the establishment of a select senate (Vane’s particular hobby horse) and Lambert’s promotion to major-general.321Baker, Chronicle, 655-6; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 118; Wariston Diary, 137; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 112-13; Mayers, 1659, 237. When the petition was debated in the House on 22 September, Hesilrige (and doubtless Scot as well) clamoured for Lambert’s imprisonment on charges of high treason in endeavouring to raise a party against Parliament. But on 23 September, the calmer counsels of Vane and Fleetwood prevailed – even with Hesilrige – and in a division that day on whether some of the proposals in the army petition were ‘unseasonable and of dangerous consequence’, Fleetwood and Hesilrige were tellers for the noes, defeating Scot and Henry Neville.322CJ vii. 785b; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 124, 134-5; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 483; Whitelocke, Diary, 532; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 113. Scot was named to one of several committees that the House set up on 10 October to prepare answers to a petition presented by the council of officers on 5 October that re-iterated many of the army’s demands but was not without conciliatory gestures.323CJ vii. 794b; Mayers, 1659, 244-8. But then on 11 October came the revelation that Lambert, Disbrowe and other officers had been canvassing signatures to the petition from army units throughout the three commonwealths – ‘an exercise in blatant military pressure’.324Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 115. The next day (12 Oct.), Hesilrige, Scot and other militant republicans – emboldened by a secret offer of support from General George Monck* in Scotland – led the Commons in voting to cashier the nine officers and vest supreme command in seven commissioners, among them Hesilrige, Ludlowe and Monck.325CJ vii. 796a; Baker, Chronicle, 660; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 116; Mayers, 1659, 248-50. That night, Lambert and Fleetwood mobilised their troops, and the next day (13 Oct.) they took possession of the Parliament House.326Supra, ‘John Lambert’; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 116-17; Mayers, 1659, 250-1.

The collapse of the commonwealth, 1659-60

In the immediate aftermath of the restored Rump’s dissolution, Lambert, Vane and their confederates sought a compromise with Hesilrige’s faction that would allow the House to resume sitting on condition that it annul the anti-army votes of 11 and 12 October and redress the officers’ grievances. But in a meeting of the council of state on 14 October – the last day of Scot’s two-week term as president – Hesilrige and his allies strenuously asserted Parliament’s ‘absolute authority’ against suggestions that it should be limited for the good of ‘the cause’. In addition, the council ordered the army to withdraw from the Palace of Westminster and allow the Speaker and other Members to return to the House. Scot would continue to attend the council assiduously until it was replaced by a new executive on 26 October, the committee of safety.327CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. xxiv, 252; SP25/79, pp. 667-9; Wariston Diary ed. Ogilvie, 145; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 118; Mayers, 1659, 255.

When solicited by Ludlowe late in October 1659 about the possibility of a reconciliation with Lambert’s party, Scot urged his friend to ‘declare against the proceedings of the army and to join with Monck in opposition to them’.328Ludlow, Mems. ii. 144-5. A group of the councillors of state, Scot among them, began to meet privately after 26 October, writing to Monck on 19 November, pledging their solidarity with his stand against the committee of safety. Scot headed the list of signatories as the group’s designated council president – effectively usurping the office of Whitelocke, who had served as president during the council’s last two weeks in formal session.329Clarke Pprs. v. 343; Baker, Chronicle, 673; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 143. In his capacity as president of this clandestine council, Scot signed a commission to Monck as commander-in-chief and to Colonel John Fagge* – and presumably other well-disposed gentlemen – to raise troops against and the committee of safety. Scot, Cooper and the Hesilrige faction’s army allies Matthew Alured*, Francis Hacker* and John Okey* also tried to enlist the support of the common council in the cause of restoring the Rump.330Clarke Pprs. iv. 137-9; Wariston Diary ed. Ogilvie, 152; Whitelocke, Diary, 546 A pamphlet published in November or December, denouncing Lambert’s army faction as neo-Cromwellians and urging his soldiers to ‘deliver up their most obstinate officers to him who knows how to obey the Parliament, fight rebels and maintain a good cause with an honest sincerity and suitable courage’ [i.e. Monck], has been attributed to Scot.331The Copy of a Letter to a Countrey Collonel (1659); Mayers, 1659, 256. Whether this was Scot’s work or not, he very probably helped to mastermind the council’s propaganda campaign against the committee of safety during the final months of 1659.332Ludlow, Voyce, 241; R. Hutton, The Restoration (Oxford, 1985), 77-8.

Scot and his republican allies moved early in December 1659 from protest and agitation against the committee of safety to direct military action. While Hesilrige and several other commonwealthsmen took control of Portsmouth, Scot, Cooper, Okey, Weaver and Colonel Thomas Fitch* attempted to seize the Tower, but Fleetwood got wind of the design, whereupon Scot fled to the safety of the fleet under Vice-admiral John Lawson.333Clarke Pprs. iv. 187-8; Ludlow, Mems. 169, 176; CCSP iv. 481, 487-8; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 146. In an open letter to Fleetwood on 16 December, Scot and his fellow conspirators warned the commander-in-chief and the rest of the Wallingford House ‘junto’ that nemesis was approaching in the shape of General Monck, and they insisted that the Rump was ‘the sole lawful authority ... which can only be hoped to make the sword subservient to the civil interest and settle the government in the hands of the people by successive and free Parliaments’.334TSP vii. 797-8; A Letter from Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, Thomas Scot, Jo. Berners, and John Weaver Esquires, Delivered to the Lord Fleetwood (1659). When Vane and Salwey went down to the fleet in mid-December in an attempt to mediate between the committee of safety and Lawson, Scot demanded nothing less than ‘the absolute submission of the army to the authority of the Parliament’, and he repudiated Vane and Salwey ‘as persons that had too far espoused the interest of the army’.335Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 180-1; G. Penn, Memorials of Sir William Penn (1833), ii. 186-91; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 150-1. With the committee of safety’s power crumbling by late December, Scot and his allies successfully mobilised army units in and around London to help recall the Rump. One of the Rump’s first acts on re-assembling on 26 December was to place interim control of the armed forces in the hands of seven parliamentary commissioners, among them Scot, Okey and Alured. That same day (26 Dec.), the Rump assigned the government of the Tower to Scot, Cooper, Weaver and Josias Berners*.336CJ vii. 797a; Clarke Pprs. iv. 220; Hutton, Restoration, 82.

Scot, as might be expected, figured prominently in the final days of the commonwealth. Elected on 31 December 1659 to a new council of state, he served as its president until mid-January 1660, when he was replaced by Nicholas Love.337CJ vii. 800b; SP25/99, pp. 1, 9, 11. It is likely that he was involved in the council’s nomination of Ludlowe and four others as commissioners for governing Ireland, which Scot reported to the House on 13 January.338CJ vii. 811b. In further acknowledgement of Scot’s standing at Westminster, the House appointed him on 10 January to ‘receive informations of private and public intelligence as the secretary of state heretofore had and used and [to] present them to the council’. His appointment as ‘secretary of state to this commonwealth’ was made more explicit by a resolution of the House on 17 January.339CJ vii. 806b, 813b. By this time, Scot had extended peace feelers to the Spanish via Cárdenas and would shortly resume his secretarial duties in suppressing ‘abusive books .. .in disgrace of the Parliament’, which to his mind included all publications that contained the abusive label ‘the Rump’.340CCSP iv. 519, 529; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 348; Rugg Diurnal, 28. He was keen to use the intelligence to which he was privy as secretary, such as intercepted and deciphered correspondence, to help secure the punishment of Lambert and his old enemy Whitelocke.341CCSP iv. 511, 512. So angry were Scot and Neville at Whitelocke’s collaboration with the committee of safety that they ‘threatened to take away his life. Scot said that [Whitelocke] should be hanged with the great seal about his neck’.342Whitelocke, Diary, 554.

Scot was closely involved in parliamentary initiatives by Hesilrige’s faction to acknowledge and promote its friend and to flush out and proscribe its opponents. Appointed with Marten, Weaver and Robert Reynolds to prepare letters of thanks to Monck, Lawson and several other figures involved in the Rump’s restoration, he was also named to committees set up early in January to present nominees as judges, commissioners of the great seal and other legal officers and to bring in an ‘oath of engagement’ to be taken by members of the council and MPs.343CJ vii. 797b, 799a, 799b, 806a, 806b. Promoted by Hesilrige and, almost certainly, Scot – who were named first and second to the committee for giving it legislative force – this ‘oath of abjuration’ required the swearer to renounce the ‘pretended title of Charles Stewart and the whole line of the late King James and of every other person, as a single person, pretending .. .to the crown of these nations’. In fact, it was said to have been the strictest such oath that had ever been imposed and was ‘disliked by many’.344CJ vii. 806b; Baker, Chronicle, 678; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 163.

Anxious to shore up his and Hesilrige’s fragile ascendancy, Scot almost certainly arranged for his appointment with Luke Robinson on 16 January 1659 to attend Monck – ostensibly to offer him the thanks and congratulations of Parliament but with ‘private directions’ to ‘draw the general to their party’ and engage him to take the oath.345CJ vii. 813a; Baker, Chronicle, 678. Scot ‘had kept a long correspondence’ with Monck and also with his chaplain Thomas Gumble, who had been vicar of Chipping Wycombe and a client of Scot’s.346Ludlow, Mems. ii. 209; Ludlow, Voyce, 241; J. Price, The Mystery and Method of His Majesty’s Happy Restauration (1680), 35; HMC Leyborne-Popham, 209. Scot and Robinson joined Monck on his journey southwards, near Leicester, and were shown the ‘height of respect’ by the general, who pretended to be wholly directed by their counsel, while at the same doing his best to ‘dissemble his inclinations’. For their part, the two Rumpers effectively acted as ‘strict spies’ upon their charge and tried to obstruct his discussions with county gentry calling for an end to the Rump.347CCSP iv. 537, 538, 548; T. Gumble, Life of General Monck (1671), 224, 225-6; Baker, Chronicle, 680-1; Price, Mystery and Method, 83-6; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 209; Whitelocke, Diary, 564; HMC Leyborne-Popham, 210; G. Davies, The Restoration of Charles II (Oxford, 1955), 271. Scot made it clear to Monck that once in London he was expected to make ‘public professions of his affections to their interest and authority and his dislike of the addresses to him for the secluded Members and a free Parliament’. But although Scot and Robinson accompanied Monck to the House on 6 February, the general then gave a speech that troubled and offended his republican minders and their friends. The general, they complained, ‘gave the cavaliers a possibility of being received into the exercise of trust, with a total exclusion of the more strict Parliament party under the notion of fanatics’.348CJ vii. 834b, 835a; Gumble, Monck, 228-9, 234; Baker, Chronicle, 682, 684; Price, Mystery and Method, 91; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 216; Whitelocke, Diary, 566-7; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 166-7. On 9 February, the House sent Scot and Thomas Pury II to Monck with draconian orders that Scot had reported from the council of state for securing the City against the commonwealth’s opponents. Two days later (11 Feb.), in response to the general’s call for fresh elections to fill up the House, Scot and Robinson were dispatched to fob him off with assurances that the matter was in hand.349CJ vii. 837b, 838a, 841a; Gumble, Monck, 248; Baker, Chronicle, 684-5, 686-7; Price, Mystery and Method, 106; Whitelocke, Diary, 566; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 167-9. But having boasted of their ‘intimacy and favour’ with Monck, Scot and his allies now began to come under criticism by the general and his officers for favouring ‘fanatics’ – notably, Praise-God Barbon* – and Ludlowe’s republican interest in Ireland.350Whitelocke, Diary, 569; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 222; Davies, Restoration, 282; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 170-1. These signs that Monck’s patience with the republican grandees was wearing thin did not deter Scot and Hesilrige serving as tellers on 16 February in favour of strengthening the qualifications against royalists and other enemies of the commonwealth in a future general election.351CJ vii. 845b. Hesilrige and other leading commonwealthsmen – there are conflicting reports as to whether Scot was among them – met with Monck on 18 February and tried to persuade him not to allow the secluded Members back into the House, but to no avail.352Clarke Pprs. iv. 264; Baker, Chronicle, 687; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 228; Whitelocke, Diary, 570.

Predictably, ‘Hesilrige, Scot and their party’ reacted with ‘great heat and discontent’ to Monck’s resolve on 21 February 1660 to re-admit the Members turned out at Pride’s Purge and informed him ‘that they would not join with the secluded Members or act any more’ in the Commons.353HMC Leyborne-Popham, 222; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 237; Davies, Restoration, 288. One of the House’s first orders after the re-admission of the secluded Members was to dissolve the commission appointed on 11 February for governing the army.354CJ vii. 847a. Scot seems to have withdrawn from Parliament for about two weeks after the re-admission of the secluded Members, and during his absence the House stripped him of his office as secretary and he and other noted commonwealthsmen were dropped in elections to a new council of state on 23 February.355CJ vii. 849, 855a, 868b; CCSP iv. 593; Whitelocke, Diary, 572; HMC Leyborne-Popham, 222; Hutton, Restoration, 101. With their power at Westminster visibly on the wane, Scot, Hesilrige ‘and the firebrands of that party’ were said to have instigated the army agitation in London on 7-8 March in which Monck was confronted with calls from Okey and other officers to declare ‘against all single persons, particularly the king and his family, and for the settling of a free state’. But Monck was unmoved and ordered all officers to repair to their commands.356Nicholas Pprs. iv. 200-1; CCSP iv. 594; Baker, Chronicle, 694-5; Davies, Restoration, 298-300. Scot’s fall from office and influence was revealed all too clearly on 10 March, when the House voted to reject a proviso in the militia bill for adding his name to the Surrey commission.357CJ vii. 869b. He and Marten were tellers on 13 March in favour of excluding all royalists from voting in the April parliamentary elections, but they were heavily defeated. This would be Scot’s last parliamentary appointment.358CJ vii. 874a.

In response to Parliament’s repeal on 13 March 1660 of the Engagement introduced in 1649, Hesilrige, Scot and ‘some other well-wishers to the commonwealth’ tried to persuade Monck to ‘take the dominion of the three kingdoms upon himself, than to have the king restored’. A republic, they told him, was evidently ‘not agreeable with the disposition of the people, who are always bad judges of what is best for themselves, and therefore, since a single person was necessary, there could not be one fitter than he for that office’. To sweeten these offers, ‘Scot’s party’ in the House promoted a bill for settling Hampton Court upon Monck and his heirs. But once again, Monck ‘would by no means hear more of these temptations’.359CJ vii. 852b; Baker, Chronicle, 693; Ludlow, Voyce, 89; HMC Leyborne-Popham, 225-6. Scot’s subsequent consultations with Ludlowe and William Say* ‘about some expedient [to save himself and the good old cause], finding himself wholly deserted by Monck’, likewise came to nothing.360Ludlow, Voyce, 90, 101. On the final day of the Long Parliament (16 Mar.), after John Crewe I had moved that MPs ‘bear their witness against the horrid murder of the late king’, Scot did not flinch from declaring that ‘though as things stood he knew not where to hide his hated head, yet he durst not but own that he had both a hand in it [the regicide] and a heart to it’. The king had been a ‘man of blood’, he insisted, and had deserved death, ‘and that it was not good to have respect of persons in judgement’. He concluded by boldly repeating the sentiments he had expressed in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament: ‘that he should desire no greater honour in this world, after the Lord should call him out of it, then to have this epitaph written on his tomb – “Here lies one who had a hand and a heart in the execution of Charles Steward [sic], late king of England”’.361Ludlow, Voyce, 99-100.

The day after the Long Parliament’s dissolution, on 17 March 1660, Hesilrige, Scot and other former MPs reportedly attended the parliamentarian grandee the earl of Manchester in an unsuccessful effort to persuade him and Lord Fairfax (Sir Thomas Fairfax*) to resume their military commands in defence of the commonwealth. One of Hyde’s informers also claimed that Scot and other Rumpers had been responsible for printing a recent pamphlet concerning the king’s judges in order to ‘increase jealousy’. This publication’s title was not mentioned, but it was probably the Catalogue of the Names of Such Persons as did Actually Sit as Judges upon the Tryall of Charles the First, which listed not only those, such as Scot, who had signed the king’s death warrant but also leading Rumpers who had either not attended the trial commission or had dissociated themselves from its proceedings, including Godfrey Bossevile, Sir William Brereton, James Chaloner, John Disbrowe, John Gurdon, Sir James Harington, Philip Viscount Lisle, Philip Skippon and Sir Peter Wentworth. Also listed were the names of the mayor and aldermen of London who had ‘personally proclaimed the Act for abolishing kingly government’. Publicly naming these men as complicit in the regicide and the establishment of the Rump may well have been intended to anger and frighten them into standing firm with the likes of Scot against a Stuart restoration.362CCSP iv. 616; Catalogue of the Names of Such Persons as did Actually Sit as Judges upon the Tryall of Charles the First (1660).

Flight, trial, and execution, 1660

Late in March 1660, Scot engaged to the council of state for his good behaviour and then withdrew to Buckinghamshire ‘to endeavour his election at one of his neighbour towns to serve in the next Convention ... hoping thereby rather to have an opportunity to make better terms for himself, then to put a stop to the great torrent of malignancy that was falling upon the honest interest’.363Whitelocke, Diary, 578; Ludlow, Voyce, 101; Hutton, Restoration, 110. Defeated at Aylesbury, he met with more success at Chipping Wycombe, where the borough’s ‘anabaptistical’ mayor secured his election on a double return. Scot’s opponents in the borough had gone to the lengths of producing what they alleged was his mistress and bastard child on election day in an effort to ruin his reputation. The Convention upheld the return of Scot’s rival, threw out his own and had the mayor taken into custody.364‘Aylesbury’, ‘Chipping Wycombe’, HP Commons, 1660-90; CCSP iv. 625, 626, 643-4.

Although Scot believed that Monck, his ‘great friend’ and had ‘promised faithfully ... to solicit his pardon’, realistically, he could expect little in the way of leniency from the Restoration regime.365Bodl. Carte 30, f. 699v; Ludlow, Voyce, 120, 150; A Private Conference Between Mr L. Robinson and Mr T. Scott (1660, E.1025.1); Price, Mystery and Method, 106. Late in May 1660, therefore, having been informed by ‘persons of quality ... that I was in danger of my life by the rage and violence of some uncharitable men, who designed no less then a bloody assassination upon me’, he fled abroad on a ship taking Spanish prisoners-of-war to Ostend.366Bodl. Carte 31, f. 69; White, White His Vindication, 3, 16; CCSP v. 37. On 6 June, the Commons voted to exclude Scot and six other Rumpers from pardon as to life and estate for their part in the regicide.367CJ viii. 57a. Once in Flanders, Scot was protected from the hostile attentions of various of his royalist countrymen by Cárdenas and the ambassador’s agent Ignatius White, who persuaded Scot to turn himself in to Sir Henry de Vic, the king’s resident in Brussels, in the hope of obtaining mercy by obeying the royal proclamation for the surrender of the regicides.368Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 117, 126; Bodl. Carte 30, f. 699; Clarendon 73, f. 10; Nicholas Pprs. iv. 212-25, 229-37, 243-5, 247, 261-2; CSP Dom. 1660-70, p. 649; A True Narrative...of the Apprehension of the Grand Traytor, Thomas Scot (1660, E.1046.1); White, White His Vindication, 2-17. Scot justified his political career to De Vic by insisting that

all he hath done hath been upon principles which he believed to be good and true, namely that the supreme authority resided in the people, and upon that score, when Cromwell attempted to make himself king, he opposed him as vigorously as he did the king’s re-establishment, though till then he was his [Cromwell’s] great bosom friend.369Nicholas Pprs. iv. 231, 244-5.

White assured Hyde that by pardoning Scot the king would ‘gain the ablest man of the commonwealth party’.370CCSP v. 37.

Returned to England under guard, Scot was put in the Tower, where he was induced to make a full confession of his actings as the Rump’s spy-master on the understanding, it seems, that by doing so his life would be spared. He concluded this highly informative account of his intelligence work by pleading that the ‘erroneous petulancy of an intemperate tongue and a misguided conscience [his defence of the regicide on 16 March 1660], which I heartily repent of, may not be charged upon me but, according to the undoubted privilege of Parliament, put in perpetual oblivion’. But either his revelations were not considered sufficiently valuable, or he had trusted to the kind of false promises of mercy that he himself had doubtless made while interrogating prisoners.371SP29/445/59, ff. 82-88; Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 116-26. It was probably while in the Tower that he wrote to his Buckinghamshire neighbour Arthur Annesley* in a desperate attempt to obtain mercy.

[I] nakedly beseech you as a gentleman and a Christian to do me what fair offices you may with his Majesty and the Parliament ... without remembering any the intemperances of a petulant tongue, drawn forth from my too much zeal for this unprofitable and, as I now find, unpracticable interest of a commonwealth government ... Sir, methinks you, that were so generous and gallant as to own the interest of the royal family and old government when the stream went against them and it might have been dangerous, should not be offended that I was so for a commonwealth so long as I could, nor yet because I was not so wise as you in judging which was likelier to be best for England.372C108/188, pt. 1, ‘Correspondence 2’, unfol.

Scot was tried on 12 October 1660, along with several other regicides. He pleaded not guilty, arguing that his actions and words, and particularly his speech in the Commons on 16 March 1660, were covered by the authority and privilege of Parliament. The prosecution witnesses included Lionel Copley* and William Lenthall.373State Trials, v. 1058-70; Ludlow, Voyce, 220-3. Unrepentant, he was found guilty and condemned to death, and he was hanged, drawn and quartered at Charing Cross on 17 October. Defiant to the last, he died protesting that ‘God ... hath engaged me in a cause not to be repented of. I say, in a cause not to be repented of’. His head was fixed atop London Bridge, and his quarters, boiled to preserve them longer, were displayed on the City gates.374Compleat Collection, 128, 138; Hutton, Restoration, 134.

Scot’s property, like that of other regicides, was forfeit to the crown, although to little advantage, for his estate, as he had repeatedly protested, had been wasted through the profligacy of one of his sons and his own honest toil in public service.375TSP v. 711-12; Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s acct.’, 124; CCSP iv. 249. His eldest son, Thomas Scott IV, had represented the Irish constituency of Westmeath, Longford and King’s Counties in the first protectoral Parliament.