HOTHAM, John (c.1610-45), of Scorborough, Yorks.

John Hotham junior and his father, Sir John Hotham*, were the most notorious of the 20 or so MPs who deserted Parliament during the first half of 1643. Their treachery, although motivated largely by fear and self-interest, also reflected the growing sense of alarm among the more pacific and conservative parliamentarians at the escalation and impact of the war. Hotham junior was certainly not unmoved by such considerations, as his wartime correspondence with the king’s northern commander, the earl of Newcastle, reveals. Yet his professed commitment to a negotiated settlement was undermined by his pride and ambition and belied by his evident taste for the excitement and spoils of war. Between the autumn of 1642 and the summer of 1643, he and his errant cavalry force ranged Yorkshire and Lincolnshire ‘without control’, earning an unsavoury reputation as ‘most exquisite plunderers’.19Harl. 164, f. 234v; Clarendon SP ii. 182; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 415; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 79. He doubtless acquired this taste for ruthless aggrandisement, not to mention what Sir Thomas Fairfax* (the future commander of the New Model army) described as his ‘peevish humour’, from his equally hot-tempered father.20Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 36. The Hothams’ self-conceit was consistent with their ancient lineage and local standing, for as Clarendon (Edward Hyde*) relates, they were masters of a ‘noble fortune in land and rich in money, of a very ancient family and well allied’.21Clarendon, Hist. ii. 47-9. Their support for Parliament in 1642, as much as their attempted defection to the king a year later, was closely connected with their efforts to preserve and extend their estates and ascendency in the East Riding.

The younger Hotham’s education after reaching adulthood was apparently perfunctory. He was not sent to university and probably attended Gray’s Inn merely as a formality; as his later career demonstrates, he was no great respecter of the law or its practitioners. His vocation was soldiering, and, like his father, he served his military apprenticeship fighting the Spanish in the Thirty Years War.22Infra, ‘Sir John Hotham’. In March 1629 (less than a year after being admitted to Gray’s Inn), he obtained a pass to travel into the Low Countries, where he and his travel companion – none other than (Sir) Thomas Fairfax – enlisted as volunteers under Horace, 1st Baron Vere of Tilbury in the army of the prince of Orange.23APC 1628-9, p. 371; Markham, Fighting Veres, 436. Their first experience of war – the siege of the Spanish stronghold of Bois-le-Duc (‘s-Hertogenbosch) – was a rather tedious affair as campaigns go, but at least it would have acquainted them with some of the latest military techniques, not to mention some of England’s leading swordsmen. Serving alongside Hotham and Fairfax were Sir John Suckling*, the future parliamentarian officers Lionel Copley* and Philip Skippon* and the future royalist commanders Sir Thomas Glemham and (Sir) Jacob Astley.24H. Hexam, A Historicall Relation of the Famous Siege of the Busse (1630), unpag.; Markham, Fighting Veres, 436-9.

Hotham had returned to England by early 1631, when he married a daughter of the godly Lincolnshire knight, and future parliamentarian, Sir John Wray*.25Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. iii. 262. By the mid-1630s, he had been commissioned as a captain in his father’s East Riding militia regiment.26Add. 28082, f. 80v. But in general he seems to have taken little interest in local government. He failed to secure appointment as a magistrate, for example, even though his father, as a close ally of Thomas Viscount Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†, the future earl of Strafford), the lord lieutenant of Yorkshire and president of the council of the north, was well placed to obtain him a seat on the East Riding bench. In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Hotham had to rely upon his father’s interest to secure him a place at Scarborough on the North Riding coast. Sir John recommended his son to Scarborough ‘that my affection to your town might prove hereditary’.27Supra, ‘Scarborough’; Scarborough Recs. 1600-40 ed. M.Y. Ashcroft (N. Yorks. RO publications xlvii), 340. Hotham junior received no appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate.

Hotham joined his father – the leader of the ‘disaffected’ gentry in the East Riding – in 1640 in registering opposition to the local impact of the king’s Scottish war.28Infra, ‘Sir John Hotham’. Hotham signed the three Yorkshire petitions to the king of July, August and September, in which the county’s gentry complained about enforced billeting, pleaded poverty in the face of royal commands to mobilize the militia and, in the case of the last petition, requested that Charles summon a Parliament.29Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland Ms vol. 1608-1700, N38 Car. I; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1215, 1231. On 5 October 1640, he signed the Yorkshire county indenture returning two of the leading petitioners, Sir Ferdinando Fairfax and Henry Belasyse, to the Long Parliament, while he himself was re-elected at Scarborough, once again on his father’s interest.30C219/43/3/89; Supra, ‘Scarborough’. Impatient of the niceties of parliamentary procedure, Hotham was not noted for his skills or subtlety as a Commons-man. On one occasion, in April 1642, he lost his temper in the House after being ordered to pay the mandatory shilling for arriving after prayers. According to the parliamentary diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes, ‘he took his shilling and threw it down upon the ground’, at which he was sharply reproved by the Speaker and was fortunate not to be called to the bar.31PJ ii. 194. D’Ewes would later refer to him as a ‘rash, young, heady, proud fellow’, much given to ‘virulency and passion’.32Harl. 164, f. 234v; J.L. Sanford, Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion, 556. Although Hotham appears to have attended the House on a fairly regular basis between March 1641 and the spring of 1642, he was not a particularly active Member. He was named to only 14 (mostly minor) committees and contributed little in debate.33CJ ii. 113b, 145b, 235a, 300a, 310a, 356b, 360b, 497a, 510a, 525b, 531a, 533b; LJ viii. 150b. His 13 appointments as a messenger to the Lords – mostly to request conferences – represented an acknowledgement of his standing as Sir John Hotham’s son rather than his aptitude for parliamentary business.34CJ ii. 140a, 175a, 257b, 262a, 299b, 306b, 338a, 341a, 353a, 354a, 364b, 509a, 546a; LJ iv. 274b, 364b, 370a, 411b, 426a, 471b, 485b, 695b; v. 25b.

Politically, he appears to have followed his father’s line in the House (although the two men rarely worked together), which was strongly anti-Catholic and broadly pro-reform. Like a good many of his fellow MPs, he subscribed to the view that the kingdom was under threat from an Anglo-Irish Catholic conspiracy that reached as high as the royal court. He moved on 23 March 1641 that a concerted effort be made to hasten the disbanding of the ‘new’ Irish army (raised in 1640 by the earl of Strafford and consisting mostly of Catholics), the disarming of English Catholics, and the removal of papists at court.35Procs. LP iii. 85, 88. And his first appointment in the House was to a committee set up three days later (26 Mar.) on the bill for the suppression of recusants.36CJ ii. 113b. His fear of a threat to English liberties from Irish Catholicism may well have whetted his appetite for punishing his father’s erstwhile patron, Strafford – one of the principal charges against the earl being that he had intended to use the new Irish army against the king’s English opponents. In April and May, Hotham moved repeatedly that proceedings against Strafford – by trial and then by act of attainder – be expedited.37Procs. LP iii. 479, 512; iv. 274; CJ ii. 140a. He was also keen to bring one of Strafford’s defenders, and Charles’s most prominent Catholic counsellor, Francis Lord Cottington to book, presenting a petition to the Commons on 4 August, accusing Cottington of taking bribes. Hotham was subsequently named second to a committee for examining the truth of this charge.38Procs. LP vi. 194-5, 197, 199; CJ ii. 235a. Five days later (9 Aug.), he denounced Edward Lord Littleton, the lord keeper, declaring that ‘while we had such counsellors about the king we shall expect no good, and that there are pensions given to traitors, which drains the king’s treasury’. He urged the House to nominate the earl of Salisbury – a future parliamentarian peer – to the king for appointment as lord treasurer.39Procs. LP vi. 318, 320, 321-2.

This speech has been seen as part of an orchestrated attempt by Oliver Cromwell, Nathaniel Fiennes I, William Strode I and other godly Members to obstruct a settlement of tonnage and poundage until they had secured the abolition of bishops and the appointment of suitable councillors of state.40Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 358. In Hotham’s case, however, support for removing evil counsellors and the suppression of popery was not allied to any zeal for the cause of further reformation in religion. His lack of godly fervour emerged clearly on 23 April 1642, when he served as a majority teller with his fellow Yorkshire MP, the future royalist Henry Belasyse, in favour of appointing the Ripon divine, Matthew Levet, a member of the Westminster Assembly.41CJ ii. 539a. Levet was said to have been ‘a forward man for the late innovations [i.e. Laudian church ceremonies]’.42PJ ii. 209. Belasyse and Hotham won the division from the godly knight Sir Walter Erle and the radical Erastian Henry Marten.43CJ ii. 539a. However, the following month, the Commons rejected Levet in favour of the York Puritan minister Henry Aiscough.44CJ ii. 579a. Although Hotham probably associated the Laudians’ ‘new divinity’ with popery, he does seem to have shared some of their hostility to godly militancy, regarding it much as he did Catholicism, as subversive of the established social and political order.45Harl. 164, f. 234v.

Perhaps Hotham’s main priority at Westminster, certainly during the spring and summer of 1641, was the relief of the northern counties, where the king’s and the Scots’ armies had been quartered and causing great hardship since August 1640. Several of his appointments and interjections on the floor of the House in mid-1641 related to initiatives for hastening the disbandment of the armies in the north.46CJ ii. 175a, 257b, 262a; Procs. LP v. 131, 144; vi. 502. Alarmed by reports of the army plots, he joined his father on 7 August in urging the House to petition the king to delay his journey into Scotland, alleging that ‘the armies being not yet disbanded, it might endanger the safety of the whole kingdom if the king departed at the time appointed’.47Procs. LP v. 644; vi. 270, 271, 280. Hotham, Sir Henry Anderson (who was, or would soon be, Hotham’s father-in-law) and Arthur Goodwin were appointed on 19 August to attend the lord general (the earl of Holland) in Yorkshire with an order from Parliament to finish disbanding the horse – where the army plots had been hatched – before commencing on the foot. Although he managed to wriggle out of this irksome task – claiming, like Goodwin, that his health was too fragile to ride post – his appointment suggests that he enjoyed the trust of the parliamentary leadership (a group known as ‘the junto’).48CJ ii. 264a; Procs. LP vi. 490, 492. Moreover, his motions that summer in support of removing evil counsellors at court and for delaying the king’s journey to Scotland would certainly have been welcomed by John Pym* and his friends.

Hotham sided even more conspicuously, and controversially, with the junto and its supporters on 24 November 1641, when he denounced the Lincolnshire MP and future royalist Geoffrey Palmer for having demanded the right to enter a protestation against the Grand Remonstrance.49Verney, Notes, 125-6. In typically forceful manner, he alleged that Palmer’s actions ‘did tend to draw on a mutiny, and that if this were permitted in the House, that any one might make himself the head of a faction here, [and] there would soon be an end of liberty and privileges of Parliament, and we might shut up the doors...’.50D’Ewes (C), 192. Not surprisingly, some MPs took exception to Hotham’s inflammatory and combative style of debating. Late in December, the House sent Hotham and another of the junto’s allies, Oliver Cromwell, to recommend William Jephson* and several other gentlemen to the earl of Leicester, lord lieutenant of Ireland, for military commands in Munster.51CJ ii. 360b, 361b, 364b.

By January 1642, Hotham had established himself as a staunch defender of the privileges and authority of Parliament. During the House’s brief residence in the Guildhall following the attempted arrest of the Five Members, he was named to a high-powered committee (or sub-committee, since the Commons had adjourned to the Guildhall as a committee of the whole House) to vindicate the privileges of Parliament, liaise with the City’s common council, and make provision for the safety of the kingdom (8 Jan.).52CJ iv. 458b. Four days later (12 Jan.), came his most important Commons assignment – securing Hull for Parliament. On 11 January, the Commons had appointed Sir John Hotham to draw some of the East Riding trained bands into the town in order to secure the magazine.53CJ ii. 371a. Sir John was unable to leave Westminster immediately, however, and the next day the House assigned this vital task to Hotham junior. On receiving this order, Hotham reportedly declared ‘Mr Speaker! Fall back [of the sword], fall edge, I will go down and perform your commands’.54Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 496; PJ i. 114-15.

A strong incentive for Hotham to accept this potentially hazardous assignment was that of strengthening his family’s power-base in the East Riding, especially in light of the king’s plan to deploy troops in Hull under the Hothams’ leading local rival, Sir Thomas Metham.55Infra, ‘Sir John Hotham’; LJ iv. 585a. But in addition to these local considerations, Hotham may also have gone to Hull at the special request of Pym. According to Clarendon, Pym and his supporters ‘well knew that he [the elder Hotham] was not possessed with their principles in any degree’ and thus sent Hotham junior, ‘in whom they most confided’, to implement their orders.56Clarendon, Hist. i. 523-4. For all his declared abhorrence of faction, Hotham was apparently far more at home with the partisan politics practised by the junto than was his father, who remained wedded to traditional notions of consensus and the rule of law. Hotham junior evidently had little respect for the latter, for when asking the Commons to help him overcome local opposition to billeting troops in Hull, he urged it not to stand ‘upon the nicety of the law nor lawyers...for salus rei publicae est suprema lex [the safety of the commonwealth is the supreme law]’.57PJ i. 318, 322.

With parliamentary backing – courtesy of Pym and his allies – and the ‘well management of threats and [en]treaties’, Hotham succeeded in drawing several hundred of the East Riding trained bands into Hull on 23-4 January 1642 and in consolidating his grip on the town in the weeks that followed.58CJ ii. 388a, 415b; PJ i. 114-5, 221, 318, 322; Add. 64807, f. 44v; Hotham Pprs. 11-12; ‘Two letters addressed to Cromwell’ ed. C.H. Firth, HER xxii. 312; I.E. Ryder, ‘The seizure of Hull and its magazine, January 1642’, YAJ xvi. 142-4; A.J. Hopper, ‘The Extent of Support for Parliament in Yorks. during the Early Stages of the First Civil War’ (York Univ. DPhil. thesis, 1999), 19-20. In making himself master of Hull and its magazine he had to contend with the earl of Newcastle – the commander of the king’s northern army during the civil war – who had been sent to the town by Charles on precisely the same mission that Parliament had despatched Hotham.59PJ i. 114-5, 221; Ryder, ‘The seizure of Hull’, 139-40. Unlike Hotham, however, Newcastle had no power of command over the East Riding trained bands and was therefore powerless to resist his parliamentary rival. Hotham’s seizure of Hull was to prove of vital importance during the civil war, for with the town in Parliament’s hands, Newcastle was reluctant to commit his forces outside of Yorkshire, thus preventing them from joining the king’s southern armies in a concerted assault upon London. While he was in Yorkshire early in 1642, Hotham signed two petitions from the county’s gentry: the first to the king, protesting at the attempted arrest of the Five Members and expressing support for a ‘perfect reformation in matters of religion’; the second to the Lords, asking the peers to work more closely with the Commons for the relief of Ireland’s Protestants.60Eg. 2546, ff. 23-4; PA, Main Pprs. 15 Feb. 1642, f. 55; LJ iv. 587a.

Once Sir John Hotham was finally able to assume command at Hull, some time in mid-March 1642, Hotham junior returned to Westminster. His services at Hull were not forgotten by the House, which recommended him to the new lord lieutenant of Yorkshire, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, on 17 March for a commission as one of his deputy lieutenants.61CJ ii. 483b. Whether Essex acted upon this recommendation is not clear. In the weeks surrounding Sir John Hotham’s refusal to yield up Hull to the king (23 Apr.), Hotham junior was closely involved in Parliament’s efforts to consolidate its grip on the town, receiving appointments to committees and to several conference management teams concerning the removal of the magazine and the provision of the garrison.62CJ ii. 497a, 510a, 519a, 531a, 545b, 546a; PJ ii. 118, 229. On 30 April, on Denzil Holles’s motion, the House ordered that in the event of his father’s demise, Hotham junior should be appointed governor of Hull in his place.63CJ ii. 551b; PJ ii. 252, 255. A few days after this order, Hotham junior returned to Hull, where the garrison was preparing to resist a siege by the king’s forces. In his absence (18 May), he was appointed to a seven-man committee to assist his father in his duties as governor.64CJ ii. 577b; PJ ii. 341. The composition of this committee was apparently determined by Pym and his allies and reflected their desire to surround Sir John Hotham with men they trusted.65Infra, ‘Sir John Hotham’; CJ ii. 584b-585a; Clarendon, Hist. i. 523-4. Their decision to widen the base of parliamentary authority at Hull was vindicated in July, when George Lord Digby* almost succeeded in persuading Sir John Hotham to surrender the town to Charles. It was apparently only the vigilance of the Hull committee, and particularly of Hotham junior, which deterred the elder Hotham from going through with this design.66Clarendon, Hist. ii. 260, 263, 267.

Hotham junior, along with the godly Yorkshire MPs John Alured and Peregrine Pelham, played a leading role in organising Hull’s defences during the summer of 1642.67LJ v. 183a, 217b; CJ ii. 678b; PJ iii. 115, 170, 171, 196, 227, 228, 232. Indeed, he had almost certainly drawn his sword against the king by the time he was commissioned as a captain of horse in Essex’s army in late July or early August.68Jones, ‘War in north’, 386-7. Hotham's decision to side with Parliament at the general outbreak of civil war followed inevitably from his activities at Hull in January and July and his father’s initial refusal to render up the town to the king in April. Apart from any considerations of principle, he had reason to fear for his life should the king secure outright victory over Parliament.69PJ ii. 40.

With the lifting of the first royalist siege of Hull at the end of July, Hotham junior was able to go on to the offensive. Late in September, he led a force of about 500 horse and foot into the West Riding in order (as he claimed) to support the execution of the Militia Ordinance.70CJ ii. 785a; LJ v. 374a; Add. 18777, f. 13. In a rather ambiguously worded statement justifying this expedition, Hotham declared that he would ‘neither plunder nor burn in the country, nor offer violence to any, but according to the orders and declarations of the Parliament’.71CJ ii. 785a. His actions greatly alarmed the leading gentry of the West Riding, both royalist and parliamentarian, who were in the process of negotiating a treaty of pacification designed to prevent any escalation of violence in the county.72A. Woolrych, ‘Yorkshire’s treaty of neutrality', HT vi. 696-704. In fact, it is likely that Hotham marched into the West Riding with the deliberate intention of undermining this treaty, or at least of showing up one of its architects, Ferdinando 2nd Baron Fairfax*. On 19 September, Fairfax had been acclaimed ‘by one part of the county’ – namely, the West Riding – as commander-in-chief of Yorkshire’s parliamentarian forces, a choice which Parliament had promptly endorsed.73LJ v. 374a; CJ ii. 785a. This ‘unlucky, over-swelling commission’ (as Hotham junior later described it) was keenly resented by the Hothams, and particularly by Hotham junior, who had considerable pretensions as a military leader.74Certaine Letters Sent from Sir John Hotham (1643), 9; Clarendon SP ii. 182; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 527. Not only did it touch upon their pride, but having taken all the risks in their defiance of the king at Hull, the Hothams probably felt that they had a stronger claim to the command of Yorkshire’s parliamentarian forces than Lord Fairfax. Their rivalry with Fairfax over ‘superiority of commands’ would hamper the parliamentarian war effort in the north during 1642-3 and was an important factor in the Hothams’ decision to begin treating with the royalists.

Far from undermining the treaty of pacification, Hotham junior’s foray into the West Riding may well have hastened its signing, which occurred on 29 September 1643. One of the treaty’s articles was that Hotham’s forces withdraw to Hull and refrain from any further acts of aggression.75Woolrych, ‘Yorkshire’s treaty of neutrality’, 701. The treaty was immediately condemned by the Hothams, both of whom wrote to the Commons denouncing it as prejudicial to the safety of the kingdom, the privileges of Parliament and ‘the public liberty’.76Add. 18777, f. 19; A True and Perfect Relation (1642), sig. A4 (E.121.21); The Declaration of Captain Hotham (1642), 3 (E.121.32); A True and Exact Relation of...the Siege of Manchester (1642), 13-14 (E.121.45). When the treaty was debated at Westminster on 1 October it was likewise condemned by Pym, Marten, Sir Henry Vane II and others of the ‘violent party’, and there were numerous calls for Hotham junior to be supplied with money and additional men.77Add. 18777, ff. 19-20. On 3 October, the House invested Hotham and his cousin Sir Edward Rodes* with the power to raise money and horse in Yorkshire and to seize all delinquents. Hotham used these powers to wring at least £1,000 out of Thomas Viscount Savile on the spurious claim of being able to obtain ‘a protection and freedom’ for his lordship’s estate and person.78CJ ii. 792a, 792b; LJ v. 386a; Speciall Passages no. 15 (15-22 Nov. 1642), 130 (E.127.35); CSP Dom. 1645-7, pp. 401, 403, 424, 430. Hotham junior showed his disdain for the treaty in no uncertain fashion, storming and plundering Cawood Castle, the country seat of the archbishops of York, on 4 October.79CJ ii. 801b; Add. 18777, f. 24v; The Declaration of Captain Hotham, 1-4; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 414-20. Writing to the Committee of Safety* a few days later, he explained his reasons for opposing the treaty

the endeavours of the adverse party here is [sic] for this pacification, which both Houses have declared against. I confess, myself and some few have stood in the gap against it, [the treaty] being much desired by many which have no ill will to the Parliament, only erred in judgement. I wrote plainly to them, I neither could nor would consent to it before the Parliament were acquainted with it and had consented, although they all forsook me, and that I would not disband nor march away but when I liked ... in the mean[time] I made bold to take the castle of Cawood from my lord archbishop of York ... If I had not ventured abroad, this pacification and worse had been, I doubt, concluded, but now I hope the neck of it is broke. Yet am I glad every day to be protesting that I will not agree to sever Yorkshire from the Parliament and kingdom.80Sotheby’s sale 14 Dec. 1993, Fairfax collection, lot 399: Hotham to the Cttee. of Safety, 7 Oct. 1642.

With Lord Fairfax’s swift repudiation of the treaty, the Commons’ inclination to look to Hotham junior for military leadership in Yorkshire soon faded, and late in October 1642 the Committee of Safety felt it necessary to remind him that he must obey Fairfax’s commands.81CJ ii. 800a; Add. 18777, f. 24v; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 23. For the space of a few months, Hotham was apparently content to do so – he and Fairfax combining effectively to threaten York and slow the earl of Newcastle’s advance into Yorkshire.82Add. 18777, f. 200; A True and Perfect Relation of a Victorious Battell (1642), 4-5 (E.126.5); A Most True Relation of the Great and Bloody Battell (1642), sigs. A2-4v (E.129.9); Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 414-20; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 26-8; A. Hopper, ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the Eng. Revolution (Manchester, 2007), 35-7. Fairfax, for his part, seems to have reposed at least some measure of trust in Hotham, nominating him lieutenant-general of the northern army early in December and commissioning him as such, at Essex’s request, in mid-February 1643.83Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 27, 39; Mercurius Civicus no. 81 (5-12 Dec. 1644), 744. Fairfax’s hesitation in this matter would prove well-founded, for, by mid-December, under cover of treating for the exchange of prisoners, Hotham was engaged in secret correspondence with his father’s ‘old friend’ the earl of Newcastle. Writing to the earl on 27 December, Hotham left it in no doubt that he and his father were seriously contemplating surrendering Hull to the king in return for a full pardon and other ‘good offices’.84HMC Portland, i. 80, 81-2. At the same time, serious cracks began to appear in his obedience to Fairfax. On 6 January, Fairfax informed the Commons that Hotham junior and several of his officers had refused to submit to his commands; and Sir Thomas Fairfax also complained that ‘no order will be observed by him [Hotham] but what he pleases’.85CJ ii. 923b; Add. 18777, f. 123; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 36.

Hotham’s insubordination and his overtures to Newcastle can both be traced, at least in part, to his dissatisfaction with the progress of the war at national as well as local level. As he explained in his letter to Newcastle of 9 January 1643, he desired to see neither king nor Parliament ‘absolute conquerors’, for that would only result in tyranny of one form or another. His hope was for speedy endeavours towards securing a ‘happy peace’, for otherwise, he feared, the ‘necessitous people of the whole kingdom will presently rise in mighty numbers and ... set up for themselves to the utter ruin of all nobility and gentry’.86HMC Portland, i. 87. If his professed desire for a negotiated settlement was genuine, it suggests that his motives in deserting the parliamentary cause were not dictated entirely by self-interest, as Sir Hugh Cholmeley*, for one, claimed.87Clarendon SP ii. 186. Admittedly, there was a strongly mercenary element to his treachery – he apparently sought to profit materially from his defection to the king in a way that Cholmeley never did. Equally, it is clear that his disenchantment with the parliamentary cause arose partly from wounded pride and jealousy. He could never reconcile himself to the fact that command of the northern army had been given to Lord Fairfax rather than to himself or his father.88Clarendon, Hist. iii. 527. He was also resentful of the influence in Fairfax’s counsels of those he regarded as his social and military inferiors, in particular the West Riding squire Thomas Stockdale*.89HMC Portland, i. 84; Certaine Letters, 9. It was probably Hotham junior who was instrumental in securing the Essex’s appointment, late in January 1643, of a council of war to supplement Fairfax’s command.90Add. 18979, f. 131; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 37-8, 39.

But his jealousies and ambitions aside, Hotham’s disenchantment with Parliament seems to have derived from a conviction that there were those at Westminster who desired peace only on their own, extreme terms, with no thought for ‘the king’s honour and the public security’ and that the longer an honourable settlement was deferred, the greater the chance of popular insurrection.91HMC Portland, i. 87, 89-90, 699; Hotham Pprs. 88. Back in January 1642, when he had accepted the assignment to secure Hull for Parliament, he had doubtless regarded Charles as the greatest obstacle to settlement and had probably anticipated a swift capitulation by the king (who, at that stage, lacked sufficient support to raise a party) and a suitable reward for his own services. By the spring of 1643 it was a very different story. To men such as Hotham junior, fearful of the social consequences of continued war, it was puritan firebrands at Westminster, eager to bring the Scots into the war, who seemed to stand most obstinately in the way of an accommodation. Furthermore, there was real cause to fear the king’s displeasure by early 1643, for his forces seemed to be gaining the upper hand, especially in Yorkshire where Newcastle’s soldiers were ‘masters of the field’.92Add. 18777, f. 95v.

Hotham junior’s correspondence with Newcastle continued throughout the first half of 1643 – the Hothams seeking to ‘linger out the treaty ... for the better accomplishing their own ends’ and to make certain that they were not deserting the stronger party.93Clarendon SP ii. 183. Although Hotham junior assured Newcastle that he and his father were not in the least swayed by the shifting balance of military fortunes, Sir Hugh Cholmeley was probably accurate when he claimed that the they were ‘cautious of being engaged too far, having an eye at the inclination of the Scots, who if they appeared for the Parliament, they [the Hothams] conceived would balance the business on that side’.94HMC Portland, i. 699, 707; Clarendon SP ii. 182. Hotham junior took a big step towards switching sides in February 1643, when he joined Newcastle in attendance upon the queen at Bridlington.95Add. 18778, f. 16; Clarendon SP ii. 182-3; Slingsby Diary ed. D. Parsons, 91; Hotham Pprs. 19. According to Hotham’s account of this meeting, the queen, through Newcastle, offered him a title, senior military command and the governorship of Hull if he would deliver up the town to the king.96Mercurius Britanicus no. 3 (5-12 Sept. 1643), 22 (E.67.8); The Weekly Account no. 69 (18-24 Dec. 1644), sig. Yyy2v (E.22.8). However, Sir Hugh Cholmeley claimed that it was Hotham who had demanded these terms, along with a viscountcy for his father and £20,000.97Clarendon SP ii. 182-3. Hotham’s subsequent failure to intercept the queen’s convoy on its journey to York, and Newcastle’s forbearance from attacking the Hothams’ quarters in the East Riding, suggests that some kind of deal was struck at Bridlington.98Clarendon SP ii. 183; Speciall Passages no. 30 (28 Feb.-7 Mar. 1643), 243 (E.92.8); HMC Portland, i. 99; Hotham Pprs. 87. Moreover, Newcastle and the queen clearly expected Hotham to have deserted Parliament by late March. Hotham, for his part, pleaded that the time was still not yet ripe for him to defect: ‘I shall and do intend to serve his Majesty, but I cannot do it so unseasonably as to make my so doing of no advantage to him and a dishonour to myself’. He was also, he claimed, looking to the outcome of the peace talks at Oxford: ‘we shall now soon see whether the king will be refused just things, which if he be, I shall take no long time to resolve; [but] if the Parliament offer all fairness and it be obstinately refused, truly I will not forsake them, come the worst that can come’.99Hotham Pprs. 88-9. Nevertheless, Newcastle continued to press him to defect, and Hotham continued to protest his loyalty to the earl and to the king, but to ask for patience while he chose the right circumstances in which to act ‘as befitted a gentleman, otherwise I would not serve the greatest emperor’.100Hotham Pprs. 87-9, 96, 98-9; HMC Portland, i. 109, 701-2, 704. Although Hotham senior clearly blamed the failure of the Oxford negotiations on the unreasonableness of the king’s terms, Hotham junior assured Newcastle that he was ‘as much your servant as ever’ and would soon be able to bring round his father.101HMC Portland, i. 707.

Early in April 1643, in defiance of Lord Fairfax’s orders, Hotham junior led the bulk of the Yorkshire horse into Lincolnshire, where he had obtained, through the influence of his in-laws, the Wrays, the post of general of that county’s forces.102Add. 18778, f. 16; Special Passages no. 36 (11-18 Apr. 1643), 296 (E.97.8); The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer no. 16 (11-18 Apr. 1643), 124-5 (E.97.9); A Continuation of Certain Speciall and Remarkable Passages no. 50 (29 June-6 July 1643), 3 (E.59.13); Clarendon SP ii. 183. Once in Lincolnshire, he endeavoured to subvert the local parliamentarian leaders – notably, Sir Christopher Wray*, Sir Edward Ayscough* and Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham – and assured Newcastle that given a little time he could bring over a large part of the county to the king’s service.103HMC Portland, i. 702-3, 704. At the end of May, having rendezvoused with Colonel Oliver Cromwell* and Lord Grey of Groby* at Nottingham, he embarked upon a ‘private treaty’ with the queen at Newark and allowed his men to plunder indiscriminately.104Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 45-6; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 81.

Alarmed by Hotham's actions, and suspecting his loyalty, Cromwell – towards whom Hotham junior reportedly ‘carried himself wondrous scornful’ – and another religious Independent, Colonel John Hutchinson*, obtained a parliamentary order for his arrest.105CJ iii. 138b, 140a; Continuation of Certain Speciall and Remarkable passages no. 50, 2; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 81. On 22 June 1643, Hotham was seized by Cromwell and imprisoned in Nottingham Castle on charges of plundering Parliament’s supporters, turning his ordnance on Cromwell and maintaining a correspondency with the cavaliers at Newark.106Certaine Informations no. 23 (19-26 June 1643), 128 (E.56.2); J. Tickell, Hist. of Hull (1798), 459. Hotham immediately wrote to the queen for help, promising, should he be rescued, to deliver up Hull, Lincoln and Beverley to the king.107Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 274, 746 [recte 794]. Soon afterwards he managed to escape and fled to Lincoln, where he tried to subvert Colonel Edward Rosseter* and possibly Lord Willoughby.108Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 746 [recte 794]; Tickell, Hist. of Hull, 458. From Lincoln, he wrote to Parliament attempting to justify his conduct and reminding the Houses that ‘he was the first man whom this Parliament had entrusted with the matter of the raising of arms and that he had preserved the town of Hull for them when the earl of Newcastle and Captain [William] Legge were sent thither to surprise it’. He denounced his apprehenders at Nottingham, claiming that Cromwell ‘had employed an Anabaptist to accuse him, and that one Captain White* had been employed against him who was lately but a yeoman’.109CJ iii. 146a; Harl. 164, f. 234; Sanford, Great Rebellion, 555-6. This view of Cromwell and his men as ‘a company of Brownists, Anabaptists, [and] factious, inferior persons’ was evidently shared by Hotham senior and his supporters in Yorkshire.110Continuation of Certain Speciall and Remarkable passages no. 50, 3; Clarendon SP ii. 184; Hotham Pprs. 144; Tickell, Hist. of Hull, 458-60. Hotham junior then returned to Hull, resolving to have nothing more to do with ‘the popularity’ (as he scornfully termed Parliament’s supporters), and resumed negotiations with Newcastle about betraying the town.111Tickell, Hist. of Hull, 468-9. But time had finally run out for him, and, on the morning of 29 June, the townsmen – who had been apprised of his treachery – seized him in his chambers.112A True Relation of the Discoverie of a...Plot for the Delivering up...of Hull (1643), 4-5 (E.59.2). His father was taken the same day, and both men were subsequently conveyed by sea to London, where they endured ‘a most close and hard imprisonment’ and were subjected to ‘an 100 several sorts of interrogatories’.113Add. 31116, p. 118; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 275-6; Hotham Pprs. 108-9.

Whether Hotham junior had ever possessed a coherent plan to defect to the king, or had simply been hedging his bets and letting events dictate his ultimate allegiance, is difficult to judge. Lord Digby, according to one report, was convinced that Hotham had simply been waiting for the right moment and had delayed his defection for the king’s ‘better service’. On the other hand, the queen, and probably Newcastle also, appear to have thought that Hotham junior was largely the victim of his own prevarication.114Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 746 [recte 794]. All that can be said with any certainty is that, in his arrogance, he under-estimated the intelligence and resolve of his parliamentarian colleagues, particularly Cromwell, and over-estimated his ability to continue deceiving them with impunity.

Hotham was brought to the bar of the House on 8 September 1643 to explain why, ‘upon the evidence against him’, he should not be disabled from sitting as an MP; ‘some violent spirits’ in the Commons were for expelling him peremptorily, without a hearing.115CJ iii. 218a; Harl. 165, f. 179v. Hotham made a ‘long narration of the whole carriage of affairs...acknowledging he had committed many errors and offences, but nothing to betray the trust reposed in him by the Parliament’. He denied holding any correspondency with Newcastle or that he had attended the queen at Bridlington – although the former was patently untrue, and there is evidence for the latter from both royalist and parliamentarian sources. The House certainly found his denials unconvincing and, ‘after a little debate’, voted that he be disabled (Sir John had been disabled from sitting the day before).116Harl. 165, ff. 175-6; Add. 31116, p. 154; CJ iii. 234a.

The Hothams would be held close prisoners in London for almost a year and a half before they were brought to trial. The main reason for this delay, according to Clarendon, was that they had ‘so many friends in both Houses of Parliament, and some of that interest in the army, that they were preserved from further prosecution’.117Clarendon, Hist. iii. 527. Support for the Hothams among the more peace-minded Parliament-men may indeed have been a factor in postponing their trial. Yet equally important was the apprehension on the part of many MPs that if the two men were tried by court martial, as their crimes and military rank dictated, they would escape punishment. Jurisdiction in the Hothams’ case was claimed by the earl of Essex, who, besides being a patron and close friend of Sir John Hotham’s son-in-law, Sir Philip Stapilton*, had emerged by early 1644 at the head of the peace interest at Westminster.118CJ iii. 286b; Harl. 165, f. 176; Add. 31116, p. 165; [William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele], Vindiciae Veritatis (1654), 46-7 (E.811.2). The Commons suspected, and with good reason, that if ever the Hothams were tried by court martial, the lord general and his friends would arrange for their acquittal. Consequently, the Hothams’ enemies in the Commons, who were apparently in the majority, were obliged to delay proceedings against them until they could be sure of obtaining a conviction.119CJ iii. 320b; Add. 31116, pp. 165, 185-6, 190.

Two developments took place during the second half of 1644 which encouraged the Hothams’ enemies to bring them to trial. Firstly, the discovery of some of the Hothams’ correspondence with Newcastle, seized in the earl’s coach after the parliamentarian victory at Marston Moor in July.120CJ iii. 562a. Secondly, a considerable weakening in Essex’s influence as a result of his defeat in Cornwall in September. By November, the lord general’s opponents at Westminster felt strong enough to proceed against the Hothams on the basis of an ordinance passed in August for establishing a court martial.121CJ iii. 592b, 610a; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 528. Under the presidency of Essex’s military rival Sir William Waller*, the court (held at the Guildhall) found Hotham senior guilty of treason and, on 7 December, sentenced him to death.122Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 744-5 [recte 792-3]. Two days later (9 Dec.), Hotham junior’s trial opened. Like his father, he was charged with a whole string of offences, including the betrayal of his trust as a parliamentarian officer, insubordination, misappropriation of public funds, correspondency with Newcastle and the queen and repeated failure to engage the enemy.123Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 745-7 [recte 793-5]. Hotham constructed a clever defence, producing ‘a great number of witnesses’, deporting himself with ‘submissiveness and respect’ towards the court, pleading guilty to the lesser charges, attempting to place an entirely innocent or honourable construction on the greater, and implying that the fault lay mostly with his father. The court was not convinced, however, and on 24 December he too was sentenced to death.124The Weekly Account no. 69 (18-24 Dec. 1644), sig. Yyy2v (E.22.8); Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 747 [recte 795]; Clarendon SP ii. 184; Hotham Pprs. 27, 199.

In the event, the court martial verdicts settled little, for the Hothams’ fate by this stage was contingent upon the struggle for supremacy at Westminster between the Essexian peace interest and the war party – or the Presbyterians and Independents as they would become known. A majority in the Lords, which was dominated by Essex’s supporters, were sympathetic to Hotham senior and endeavoured to pressure the Commons into sparing his life. On 30 December 1644, however, the Commons voted by 94 votes to 46 to uphold the sentence against him.125CJ iv. 4b. Hotham junior was even more unpopular than his father – less than six MPs spoke for him according to Cholmeley – and he was forced to the desperate expedient of trying to hasten his father’s execution, ‘conceiving he might then save his own life’.126Clarendon SP ii. 185; Hist. iii. 528. Late in December, he presented petitions to both Houses asking that his sentence might be commuted to a fine or banishment, but to no avail.127Add. 31116, p. 365; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 748-9 [recte 796-7]; CJ iv. 6b. On 1 January 1645, he was brought to the scaffold and, after a short speech clearing himself of treason and reproaching Parliament for its ‘continuing of the war’, was beheaded.128Rushworth, v. 749 [recte 797]; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 529. He was buried that same day at All Hallows, Barking.129J. Maskell, Parochial Hist. and Antiquities of Allhallows Barking, 81. No will is recorded in the case of Hotham junior, and the extent and value of his estate are not known. His widow later claimed that she and her husband’s personal estate had been plundered by the parliamentarians in 1643 to the tune of £7,000.130Hotham Pprs. 175; Abstracts of Yorks. Wills ed. Clay, 43. The value of the goods and money found in his rooms at Hull was put at £4,708.131Hull Hist. Centre, C BRL/309. Hotham’s eldest son, Sir John Hotham, 2nd bt., represented Beverley in the Cavalier Parliament and again in 1688.132HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Sir John Hotham’.

Hotham junior made a very unfavourable impression upon his contemporaries. Clarendon thought him full of ‘pride and stubbornness’, and Sir Hugh Cholmeley described him as ‘a very politic and cunning man, [who] looked chiefly at that which stood most with his own particular interest’.133Clarendon, Hist. iii. 527; Clarendon SP ii. 186. Lucy Hutchinson (the wife of Colonel John Hutchinson*) regarded him as a cavalier in all but name, a man ‘full of wicked wit’, who ‘fought for liberty and expected it in all things’.134Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 81. Both Clarendon and Cholmeley believed that Sir John Hotham would have declared for Charles in July 1642, or soon thereafter, if his affection to the king’s cause and the peace of the kingdom had not been blunted by his son’s self-interest.135Clarendon SP ii. 185-6.

This perception of Hotham junior as the villain of the piece has some credibility. He may well have deterred his father from obliging Digby and the king in July 1642; he appears to have been the prime mover behind covert negotiations with Newcastle; and, pace Clarendon and Cholmeley, may actually have persuaded his father against breaking off contact with the royalists after the failure of the Oxford peace talks. He was certainly the more duplicitous of the two men, professing in private to desire peace yet, unlike his father, making no effort to urge MPs to an accommodation with the king. In fact, in April 1643 he wrote to the godly Yorkshire MP Henry Darley, attacking the Oxford negotiations.136Certaine Letters, 9. Nevertheless, his repeated assertions to Newcastle that he desired peace, his very real fears that continued war would lead to social upheaval, and his reported denunciation of Parliament from the scaffold for its failure to seek a negotiated settlement, cannot be entirely discounted. He undoubtedly shared some of the fears and scruples that led his father-in-law Sir Henry Anderson and the Hothams’ East Riding ally Thomas Heblethwayte* to defect to the king in 1643.