PRIDEAUX, Edmund I (1601-59), of Ottery St Mary and Forde Abbey, Thorncombe, Devon, and the Inner Temple, London.

There could scarcely have been an ancient gentry family with better documented roots in the south-west than that of Prideaux. They were settled in north-east Cornwall during the reign of William I, and by the thirteenth century, if not earlier, held lands in Devon. A Prideaux served as knight of the shire for Devon in 1298; another in 1331, and yet another was burgess for Dartmouth in 1368. Many bearing the name Prideaux served as sheriffs or escheators: Edmund Prideaux’s grandfather, Roger Prideaux†, burgess for Totnes in 1545 and 1547, escheator of both counties and sheriff of Devon, probably a lawyer, was typical of the family.54Vivian, Vis. Devon, 616, 618, 621; HP Commons, 1509-58, ‘Peter Edgecombe’. From the branch settled at Soldon, Holsworthy, came Edmund Prideaux II* and his kinsman, the subject of this biography. Edmund Prideaux’s maternal grandfather was Peter Edgecombe†, who sat in no fewer than eight Parliaments between 1555 and 1593. Prideaux’s father established himself in east Devon, and by marriage, Prideaux was related to Walter Yonge I* and William Fry*.55M. Wolffe, Gentry Leaders in Peace and War (Exeter, 1997), 181. As a second son, who could not expect to inherit, Prideaux was put to the law and admitted to the inn where it was acknowledged that his father had been a distinguished bencher and twice-serving reader.56CITR ii. 96. With such a background, it is not surprising that Edmund went on to make an impact both on Parliament and the legal profession.

Prideaux’s early marriage into the minor gentry family of Collins, of his home territory, Ottery St Mary, was terminated early by the death of his wife. In 1630, his second marriage, which lasted until his own death nearly 30 years later, was to a widow from a wealthier family, of Somerset, and brought to him, in right of his wife, at least three manors and many associated messuages in Dorset and Somerset.57Coventry Docquets, 611. Later that year he was appointed to the Devon bench of magistrates, and attended Devon quarter sessions meetings regularly through the 1630s.58Devon RO, Devon QS order bks. 1/6, 1/7, 1/8. By 1634, he was also practising law on the Western assize circuit, invariably acting as counsel for the Devon justices, of whom of course he was one, against recalcitrant or unresponsive individuals subject to court orders.59Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 77, 101, 118, 121, 131, 183, 193, 229. He combined this local activity with a legal career in London, and from 1634 he was appointed regularly to office at the Inner Temple. His friendship with Bustrode Whitelocke*, of the Inner Temple, probably dated from this period, Whitelocke later acknowledging Prideaux’s legal skills as ‘a good chancery-man’.60Whitelocke, Mems. iv. 358.

Yet despite this busy professional life in the two spheres of the capital and far-off Devon, Prideaux’s career was not without its hitches. In August 1633 he took the oaths of supremacy and allegiance in Westminster, which was evidently a matter of interest to the privy council.61CSP Dom. 1633-4, p. 190. By February 1635 Prideaux was summoned to appear before the court of high commission over an incident in his home district. He had apparently instructed the bailiffs of Ottery St. Mary to arrest Thomas Foster, the rector of nearby Farway.62CSP Dom. 1634-5, pp. 545, 554. Foster, a long-serving, Oxford-educated incumbent, found sympathy in the high commission where Archbishop William Laud’s support for the clergy against lay interference was policy. The case dragged on through 1635, and culminated in the exoneration of Prideaux, who made use of the canon law expertise of George Parry*, without his having been charged. A prosecution, for profanation of the church, fell instead on the bailiff of Ottery.63Al Ox. (Thomas Foster); SP16/261, f. 267; CSP Dom. 1635, pp. 180, 190, 197; 1635-6, pp. 86, 88. This episode seems not to have damaged Prideaux’s career, either in Devon or in London, but in February 1640, a fresh case was launched against him in high commission, this time with Charles Vaghan*, a neighbour in Ottery, as co-defendant. Vaghan was Devon clerk of the peace, and so like Prideaux, a regular prosecuting counsel for the court of quarter sessions, was central to the county legal establishment. As in 1635, the case involved endless delays and an inconclusive outcome.64CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 397, 404, 408, 413, 419, 424, 429; 1640-1, p. 384. There seems no doubt that Laud had Prideaux in his sights as an enemy of clerical pretensions, and that the chancery lawyer was imbued, in some significant measure, with the Erastian, Calvinist puritanism common among the Devon gentry before the civil war.

Even as the court of high commission endlessly procrastinated over Prideaux’s case, he was returned for Lyme Regis to the Short Parliament. Until Honiton recovered its franchise early in the life of the Long Parliament, Lyme was the nearest available parliamentary borough for a man from east Devon, the Exeter seats being controlled tightly by the citizens. Prideaux was doubtless elected on his own interest at Lyme, but played no discernible part in the proceedings of the assembly. Despite this, the corporation was evidently happy to return him again, to the second Parliament of 1640. His debut at Westminster was slow in coming and modest in scope. From 3 November 1640 until the end of the year, he had been named to 7 committees, whereas John Maynard, a Middle Templar and a comparable figure, was named in the same period to 23. His appointments included the west country specific case of William Coryton* and the abuses in the stannary courts (7, 23 Dec.), and the committee for the case of the ‘martyr’ to Laudianism, John Bastwick.65CJ ii. 47a, 52b, 57b. In the last-named case, it was Prideaux that moved that Bastwick’s petition be referred to the committee dealing with his fellow-sufferers, Henry Burton and William Prynne*.66Northcote Note Bk. 117.

Long Parliament draftsman, 1641-2

The last of these committee appointments in 1640, on the bill for keeping Parliaments in being, even if the king wanted rid of them, proved to be crucial in establishing Prideaux’s reputation (30 Dec.). The bill was put in his hands, and it was he who reported to the House on it a little over two weeks later (19 Jan. 1641).67CJ ii. 60a, 70a. Prideaux chaired the committee of the whole House which followed his report, and helped the clerk in reading the amendments to the bill on 13 Feb.68Procs. LP, ii. 443. He managed to satisfy the doubts of the Lords about the bill’s impact on existing legislation, and persuaded them to modify the amendments they themselves had tabled.69D’Ewes (N), 263, 331, 354, 359. Under his chairmanship, the bill had developed within the space of six weeks, from being a measure for annual assemblies into the triennial act, which was engrossed on 15 Feb. 1641. His chairing skills were capitalized upon again soon afterwards, when he steered a two day debate in a committee of the whole House on financing the navy (17, 18 Mar.), inseparably bound up with the grant of tonnage and poundage to the king.70CJ ii. 106a, 107a; D’Ewes (N), 498, 501, 503, 505. A minor distraction in this busy period was the abuse offered to him, John Wylde* and William Constantine* by Sir Henry Herbert*, at the heart of which was the disputed Worcestershire election.71D’Ewes (N), 415, 450; CJ ii. 94a, 97b

During 1641, Prideaux was named to 41 committees. The first of the year (6 Jan.) was one of those preparing for the trial of the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†). Prideaux helped manage a conference with the Lords on the trial arrangements (6 Mar.), and was appointed an official note-taker at the trial itself.72CJ ii. 98a, 108b. He contributed to two further conferences with the Lords on the trial (16, 22 Apr.), but in none of this was he a leading participant. Rather, Prideaux’s talent for drafting bills was becoming evident. The Strafford trial pushed down the parliamentary timetable the draft bill to exclude the clergy from secular employment.73Procs. LP, iv. 39. This bill had been read first on 8 March, and on 16 April Prideaux volunteered to report on it.74CJ ii. 99a, Procs. LP, ii. 581. On the 20th progress was disrupted by the trial, but three days later he resumed his report, and the bill was engrossed that day.75CJ ii. 124b, 127a; Procs. LP, iv. 39. At the end of February 1641, Prideaux had been a Member unknown to Sir Simonds D’Ewes*, but within a month the diarist was acknowledging Prideaux’s speeches, such as his expatiation on the ‘late wicked Canons’ (26 Mar.) as worthy of a note.76Procs. LP, iii. 155. Animus against the pretensions of the clergy and church hierarchy, probably fed by his own experiences with high commission in the previous decade, was clearly a significant driver. Prideaux was one of a small group which included two other west country lawyers, Maynard and Roger Hill II, that took Commons votes against the Canons of 1640 to the Lords (30 Apr.).77CJ ii. 130b. Later that year, D’Ewes noted Prideaux’s cool nomination of some peers to be trustees of church lands (9 July) during debates on the bill to extirpate episcopacy ‘root-and-branch’. He was doubtless legally correct to assert that without the episcopate, church lands would then by default be settled in the king.78Procs. LP, v. 579. He was sufficiently senior as a lawyer to be consulted around this time over the definition of mines-royal and the crown’s rights to the silver extracted from them.79T. Bushell, A Just and True Remonstrance of his Majestie’s Mines-Royall (1641), 9.

Prideaux took the Protestation on 3 May, and the following day was named to a committee to investigate the ‘enormous sentences’ of the court of star chamber, following a review of the sufferings of John Lilburne.80CJ ii. 133a, 134a. A little over a week later, he had assumed the initiative on a bill to abolish this important instrument of prerogative government, the committee scheduled to meet in the chamber of the court it was intent on destroying. On the last day of the month, he reported successfully on the bill, and it was engrossed that day before being sent to the upper House. The bill struck against the privy council as well as the hated court, presumably through the ingenuity of Prideaux, its principal architect.81CJ ii. 161b, 162a; Procs. LP, iv. 362, 487, 655, 658. It had a harder time in the Lords, with the peers seeking to safeguard their powers of committal after abolition. Once again, energetic management of the bill by Prideaux in the Commons, and adroit management by him of conferences between the Houses, ensured that the Lords’ amendments did not prove fatal, and the bill secured royal approval on 5 July.82CJ ii. 191a, 192b, 194a, 195a; Procs. LP, v. 387, 389, 412, 421, 447; Gardiner, Constitutional Docs. (Oxford, 1906), 176. He had played no part in the initial drafting of the Protestation, but it was he who took charge of refining it for a second round of distribution, and fielded ‘divers additions and amendments’ to the document (13 July), a crucial step in preparing it for national publication. Votes on 30 July were published, with a simple gloss that refusers were unfit for office.83Procs. LP, iv. 508; v. 615; CJ ii. 208b; Die Veneris 30 Julii. 1641. Resolved upon the Question (1641).

Another initiative of Prideaux’s in the reform programme of spring 1641 (12 May) was the publication of volumes by Sir Edward Coke, retrieved from the custody of the king, which included a highly apposite commentary on Magna Carta.84Procs. LP, iv. 337. They formed the second, third and fourth parts of Coke’s Institutes, and were published by order of the Commons on 28 July.85Lambert, Printing for Parliament, 1. Given leave to act as a counsel before the Lords (26 June), he was a manager of a conference with the peers on abolishing star chamber and high commission.86CJ ii. 189a,b. He also managed a number of bills for naturalizing English children born overseas, a project which he took over from William Strode I* (17 July).87Procs. LP, v. 635; CJ ii. 215b. He was named to four more committees in July, including the committee to prepare the impeachments of bishops (30 July), but then disappeared from the Commons until mid-November.88CJ ii. 222b, 228a, 230b. After a period of intense activity in which he had taken charge of at least six significant projects, including three major bills, his sudden absence, apparently without any official leave being given, is mysterious. Early in November, he attended Devon quarter sessions at Exeter, so at least some of his time away from London was spent in the south-west, where he doubtless supported calls for the disarming of recusants as news broke of the rebellion in Ireland.89Devon RO, Devon QS order bk. 1/8; Palfrey, ‘Devon and the Outbreak of the English Civil War’, Southern Hist. x. 29-30.

Prideaux had returned to Westminster by 16 November, when he was added to a committee on mobilizing the militia against the perceived threat from papists.90CJ ii. 316b. Four further committee appointments followed until the end of the year, and he reported twice in December from conferences with the Lords on parliamentary privilege (3 Dec.) and impressment (10 Dec.).91CJ ii. 331b, 338b. To judge from his parliamentary activity in 1641, Prideaux was in support of the ‘junto’ of reformers, but there is no record of his involvement in defence of the Five Members, following the king’s botched attempt at their arrest, until 17 January 1642, when he was named to the committee to work with the Lords on a petition asserting parliamentary privilege. It was he who presented the draft petition, which called on the king either to proceed against the Five Members and Lord Mandeville immediately or abandon charges against them, to the Commons for approval (20 Jan. 1642).92CJ ii. 384a, 389a; PJ i. 118. He was included in a fresh committee on Members’ privileges (26 Jan.) and another on the crowds milling around Westminster (5 Feb.).93CJ ii. 398a, 415a. In a debate at Grocers’ Hall, considered a safer venue than the palace of Westminster against the threat of royal interference, Prideaux spoke in support of a Commons motion that no peers created henceforth should have voices in Parliament without the consent of both Houses – though he was careful to declare himself not against the law as it currently stood.94PJ i. 108.

On 14 February, Prideaux brought to the House a narrative of how a ship carrying armed Catholics and Irish, bound for Ireland from France, had been driven ashore at Salcombe, south Devon, by a storm. The House commended the actions of the local gentleman who had intervened to disarm the enemy, and Prideaux was asked to lobby the lord keeper to reward him with a place in the commission of the peace.95CJ ii. 430b, 431a; PJ i. 372, 374-5, 381. Ten days later (24 Feb), similar reports from Cornwall, on intercepted letters, priests and others seized as they plotted support for the Irish rebellion, were revealed in the House by John Pym. They were referred to John Bampfylde, Prideaux, Anthony Nicoll, Sir Robert Cooke and Roger Hill II, in the House the most vigorous west country opponents of popery and popish plotting.96CJ ii. 453b. The west country men were in a majority on a committee of 26 Feb. to peruse the laws against priests; on the 28th Prideaux informed the House of further sinister inferences that could be drawn from the episode at Salcombe, and with Richard Rose, his fellow burgess for Lyme, he was asked to thank the corporation for money they had raised for distressed Irish Protestants.97CJ ii. 456b, 460b, 467b. Further committees on measures against Catholics followed (5 Mar., 10 Mar., 16 Mar.), with Prideaux required first to review statutes and then with John Glynne, Bulstrode Whitelocke and Laurence Whitaker, to prepare an order banning the Irish from entering England.98CJ ii. 468a, 470b, 474a, 480b. A strong west country presence (Prideaux, Hill, Samuel Browne, George Peard) was evident among the managers of the trial of Attorney-general Sir Edward Herbert* (2 Mar.), who had framed the articles against the Five Members.99CJ ii. 464b.

A subsidiary interest of Prideaux’s since February 1641 had been the proceedings against bishops, both individually and corporately.100CJ ii. 91a, 157b, 168b, 230b, 333a, 385b. In February 1642, by dint of his legal expertise, he was one of a group of seven Members given charge of marshalling evidence against the episcopate, and helped work on the protracted project to alienate bishops’ lands from them.101CJ ii. 431a, 448b. He was probably sympathetic, or at least as sympathetic as an enemy of episcopacy could be, towards Joseph Hall (father of Joseph Hall*), the former bishop of Exeter translated to the see of Norwich in November 1641, who had once been regarded as hostile to the Laudians. Prideaux delivered to the House from the Tower a contrite petition from Bishop Hall (4 Mar. 1642), declaring his innocence of plotting.102PJ i. 500. Any sympathy Prideaux felt towards Hall would have stemmed from the bishop’s time in the see of Exeter. He did what he could to progress the bill against the clergy holding multiple livings, which had first been brought into the Commons in March 1641103CJ ii. 101a Nearly a year later, Prideaux was a manager of a conference with the Lords on the bill, and another on 3 May, with help from Sir Robert Harley and Sir Walter Erle.104CJ ii. 438a, 555a.

On 28 March, John Glynne* reported the case of the foreign posts, which re-established a Caroline monopolist, Thomas Witherings, in possession of the postmastership. The inland letter office was let separately, and Lucius Cary*, Viscount Falkland, brought in a petition on behalf of the existing lessees.105PJ ii. 96. The whole question of the inland postal service was referred to a committee chaired by Prideaux, which had first been formed as a sub-committee (30 Dec. 1640), and greatly expanded in size and scope a few months later (10 Feb. 1641).106CJ ii. 81b, 82a, 500b; K. Sharpe, ‘Thomas Witherings and the Reform of the Foreign Posts’, BIHR lvii. 159. Some of the reports from this committee were to be given by Richard Weston*, junior at the Inner Temple to Prideaux, and surely his subordinate in this business. The work of the committee was evidently held up by the rival claims to the office of postmaster. One of the claimants was the 2nd earl of Warwick (Robert Rich†), which complicated matters significantly. After numerous postponements of the committee’s report, it was eventually judged (16 Aug. 1642) that Witherings, the reinstated master of foreign posts, was a delinquent, but the question of how and in whom the office of inland postmaster should be vested, remained uncertain.107CJ ii. 666b, 681b, 685b, 695b, 700b, 703a, 722b. The record in the Commons Journal avoided mentioning any interest in the subject in another place, but D’Ewes candidly noted how Prideaux’s report condemned the letter office as ‘a mere project or monopoly which the earl of Warwick desired to have confirmed to him’.108PJ iii. 301. In this, the House was evidently determined not to oblige, but by early October, the matter was taken up in the Lords. The peers focused on the illegality of the claim to the office of the financier Philip Burlamachi, but it had become clear by late November that in fact Prideaux was running the inland letter office from the house of the disgraced Burlamachi.109LJ v. 387a, b, 388b, 469b, 470b, 471a.

Prideaux’s assumption of the postmastership in 1642 took place without the explicit approval of the Commons, which presumably shrank from an overt confrontation with the Lords over Warwick’s claim. Nevertheless, Prideaux was direct enough in his attempts to recruit or win over experienced postal personnel, asserting that he had ‘thought fit to vindicate and assume the liberty of carrying and re-carrying letters by way of post’.110HMC Portland, i. 74. One of these, Edward ‘Roden’ or ‘Rodden’, was surely Edward Raddon, a Devon-born servant of Prideaux in the post office and other spheres until the latter’s death.111LJ v. 473b, 474a, 508b; S.K. Roberts, ‘A Poet, a Plotter and a Postmaster’, BIHR liii. 258-65. The involvement of Raddon at such an early stage in Prideaux’s dominance of the post office show the continuing relevance of Prideaux’s provincial background to his developing new career as a national politician. More importantly, the willingness of the House to allow his colonization of the inland letter office sub rosa indicates how trusted Prideaux had become in the eyes of the junto by the autumn of 1642. Control of the posts was to be critical in intelligence and communications matters during the deepening political crisis.

The inroads he made into post office management did not inhibit Prideaux’s work in the House. During 1642 he was named to 116 committees in all, and contributed to managing 21 conferences with the Lords. His legal skills were sought in a series of trials and impeachments planned by the Commons. These included preparations for the trials of the Kentish petitioners Sir William Boteler and Richard Lovelace (4 May), a conference on the impeachment of Sir George Strode (10 May), management of the trial of the Ship Money judge Sir Robert Berkeley† (13 May) which never actually took place, the impeachment of 9 peers who had withdrawn from the House of Lords (11 June) and that of the lord mayor of London, Sir Richard Gurney (7, 8 July).112CJ ii. 556b, 565b, 571a, 620b, 658b, 660a, 664a; T.P.S. Woods, Prelude to Civil War (Salisbury, 1980), 82-3. He took the lead in liaising between the Commons and the judges examining the Irish rebels Macquire and MacMahon (22 June, 11 July), moving that the Lords send down the examinations taken in the Tower. This phase of prosecuting zeal seems to have ended for Prideaux after the trial of Gurney (19 July).113CJ ii. 636b, 665a, 681a,b; PJ iii. 208. He was unquestionably in support of taking a robust line against the king, and promised £100 to the cause (10 June).114PJ iii. 471. Doubtless in the same spirit of defending liberties, he moved on 3 June that the executors of Sir Edward Coke† might be allowed to bring out another edition of his commentary on Magna Carta.115PJ iii. 9.

Civil war regionalist and postmaster-general, 1642-3

While in 1642 Prideaux took on no further work of constructing a fresh major piece of legislation, he was nevertheless occupied in drafting various orders and declarations on the Commons’ behalf. With Robert Reynolds and William Pierrepont he drafted an order to prevent the movement of arms to the king’s headquarters at York (26 May), and to prevent the slipping away by Members to join him, with Sir John Evelyn of Surrey* and Sir Arthur Hesilrige* he penned another to command MPs to return to Westminster (1 June).116CJ ii. 587a, 598a; PJ ii. 377. With John Glynne he drafted an order to indemnify soldiers volunteering on behalf of the parliamentary cause (6 July), and with William Wheler* a declaration that confirmed that Bristol was not an adjunct of Somerset for rating purposes, but a county of itself, perhaps the first courtesy he performed for a city which later made him its recorder.117CJ ii. 656a, 681b. With Roger Hill II he drafted a declaration for the better observance of fast days (27 July), which grew into a bill on the same subject (4 Aug.).118CJ ii. 702b, More importantly, he shared with Whitelocke the task of drafting the ordinance to make Sir Gilbert Gerard* treasurer-at-war for the military force that Parliament was on the point of putting into the field against the king (30 July), and was named to the committee to make Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, governor of the Isle of Wight.119CJ ii. 697b, 706b. A piece of unfinished business was the bill against religious innovations, on which Prideaux reported after it had returned from the Lords with the peers’ amendments (26 July), but this legislation was never completed.120CJ ii. 691b.

During August 1642, as the king raised his standard at Nottingham to signal the outbreak of civil war, Prideaux was occupied in half a dozen committees, the most significant of which was that on the postmasters.121CJ ii. 715b, 725b, 732b, 734a. The breakdown in relations with the king probably accounts for the decision by the Commons to reverse its stance on the patentee of the 1630s, Thomas Witherings, and to declare him a delinquent.122CJ ii. 722b. Prideaux’s other committees were noticeably local in scope – on affairs in Coventry, Colchester and Yorkshire – and seemed to signal a retreat on his part from the major initiatives he had been used to taking in 1641.123CJ ii. 731a, 732b, 734a. On 27 August, he was given leave to go into the country, and it was mid-October before he had returned to Westminster.124CJ ii. 740a, 806b. His destination in August was probably east Devon, although no proof of his presence there has been found. His elder brother, Sir Peter Prideaux, was in the opening stages of the war a deputy lieutenant attempting to raise a regiment for Parliament, and it seems likely that Edmund would have done what he could to help, especially since the elder Prideaux was encountering local resistance to his recruiting drive.125Certain Information from Devon (1642), 4 (E.114.24); J. Were, The Apologie of Colonell John Were (1642), 1 (E.21.34). Only months after this excursion from London he was appointed retained counsel to Exeter corporation, suggesting that he may also have used his time away to improve his interest with the most important civic entity in his native county.

Prideaux’s commitment to the parliamentary cause was by no means weakened by his leave of absence from the House. On his return he was quickly included in a committee to draft a declaration on the illegality of the king’s demands for horses, money or plate (12 Oct.), and after Miles Corbett had reported from the grand committee on the bill to summon an assembly of divines (13 Oct.), the legislation was committed to Prideaux, Corbett and William Wheler to bring to fruition.126Add. 18777, f. 27v; CJ ii. 806b. The moves noted by the Journal clerk against the estates of delinquents (14 Oct.) were understood by Walter Yonge I to include the sequestration of bishops’ and dean and chapter estates, and thus the addition of Prideaux to the committee would have been for him a return to unfinished business.127CJ ii. 808b; Add. 18777, f. 29. Even so, the declaration Prideaux helped draft on 17 Oct. was to enforce the continued payment of tithes, indicating the limits of his radicalism.128Add. 18777, f. 30; CJ ii. 811a. Within a month of his return, Prideaux contributed to the drafting of six declarations in all, indicating that he was becoming central to Parliament’s strategy of enforcing its will on those parts of the country where its writ ran.129CJ ii. Add. 18777, ff. 27v, 30, 31v, 48; CJ ii. 826b, 829a. He was appointed to the committee for despatches (28 Oct.), which co-ordinated reports from MPs on intelligence in the country and which reported to the Committee of Safety or the House itself.130Add. 18777, f. 45; CJ ii. 825a.

Of more immediate consequence was Prideaux’s involvement in appointing Parliament’s generals in the field. He was one of a committee of six that reviewed the commission to the 3rd earl of Essex (Robert Devereux) as lord general, and met to frame a fresh commission to the 4th earl of Pembroke (Philip Herbert*) as commander in the south-west (19 Oct.).131CJ ii. 814a. He was one of the four, with Francis Rous, Henry Marten and Samuel Browne, charged with managing a conference with the Lords (24 Oct.) on propositions by the earl of Warwick, now the major-general for London.132CJ ii. 822a. Within a couple of weeks it had become evident, if it were not already so, that Prideaux had made himself a major obstacle to Warwick’s claim on the inland letter office.133LJ v. 470b. The appointment of Pembroke failed, but on 29 October Prideaux reported on over £1,000 sent up from Devon in plate. If indeed he had stayed there in September, he is likely to have played a major part in collecting this sum, and after his report a vote was passed in support of a supply of arms to the county.134Add. 18777, f. 47v. On 1 November he and John Pym managed a conference with the Lords on the security of the west, and the same day Prideaux contributed to a declaration which guaranteed accommodation to soldiers joining the colours in London.135CJ ii. 829a, 830a; Add. 18777, f. 48. He made less headway in securing a strategy for safeguarding the peninsula of the south-west than in working on parliamentary orders to support the wider war effort. In this connection, with John Wylde and Alexander Rigby I he drafted an ordinance to indemnify those in the City contributing men or horses to the cause (2, 9 Nov.) and joined a committee on hospitals for maimed soldiers (2 Nov.), which he soon chaired.136Add. 18777, ff. 53; CJ ii. 831b, 832a, 841a, 848a.

Prideaux was a tenacious legislator. Early in November, on an initiative of his, another bill on church government was launched, a phoenix from the ashes of the failed bill on ‘innovations’. The brief notes of Walter Yonge I suggest that the paying of church rates was at its heart, and Prideaux was left to amend the draft legislation.137Add. 18777, f. 48v; CJ ii. 831b. It was also he who reported on the order to clear monks and friars out of royal property in London, and to remove their relics and statues.138Add. 18777, f. 55v. On the 16th, again with Wylde, and joined by John Maynard and John Glynne, he was required to produce an ordinance for sequestering the rents of profits of church lands, returning once again to another earlier interest of his.139CJ ii. 852b. This had evolved by the 22nd into an order to draft a bill to remove the hierarchy of the church, with Prideaux in familiar company, including Wylde, Hill, Whitelocke and Samuel Browne, all able lawyers.140CJ ii. 858b. It was Prideaux who moved on 14 November for a declaration permitting each county to make its own rate, following pre-civil war practice at quarter sessions, for defence and protection against plundering: in other words, for the notion of the continuing county-by-county militia. This despite his involvement in conferences to thank Lord General Essex (7 Nov.) and indeed, his appointment to draft a letter to him (21 Nov.).141CJ ii. 838b, 857b; Add. 18777, f. 57v. By mid-November he was chairing the committee for despatches, and so he was the obvious person to make representations to the House about particular regions from which intelligence had been received: for instance, Derbyshire (15 Nov.), north-east England (17 Nov.) and, of course, the City of London (12 Nov.).142CJ ii. 845b, 851b, 853b. Towards the end of November, a further indicator of his importance came with his nomination to the Committee for Advance of Money.143CCAM 1.

Prideaux’s interest in local associations ran deeper than the mere accident that he chaired the clearing-house committee of despatches: it was based on a political principle. His interest in the affairs of Coventry, Colchester and Yorkshire have already been noted; he was named to the committee working on a military association for Northamptonshire (9 Dec.) and helped manage a conference on the association in the west midlands (28 Feb. 1643).144CJ ii. 882a, 983a. More immediately, however, the security of the south-west, in which Devon, the largest county as well as his home shire, was central, occupied much more of his time. While acknowledging the need for necessary courtesies to the earl of Essex, he consistently worked for a separate commander for the south-west, and for regional solutions to regional problems. It was he who presented an order for Exeter on 15 Nov. 1642, followed by a motion on 25 Nov. that the city should appoint its own trained bands to watch and ward, under the supervision of a major-general selected by the city authorities and recommended to Essex.145CJ ii. 851a; Add. 18777, f. 70v. Walter Yonge I, his kinsman, who evidently deferred to Prideaux’s superior political skills, asked him to intervene with an aggressive policy towards Exeter cathedral, which included turning out the ‘singing men’, casting the bells into cannon, making a powder magazine in the building, and minting coin from the dean and chapter plate. Prideaux duly got the order through the House (8 Dec. 1642).146Add. 18777, f. 85v; CJ ii. 881a.

The wider problem of finding a general for the south-west as a whole proved harder to solve. On 26 November, in response to alarming letters from the peninsula, Prideaux moved that the earl of Pembroke, as general of the west, should be asked to go down to repel the Cornish royalists from west Devon. Acting in concert with Sir John Bampfylde*, he and other leading Devon MPs, John Maynard and William Strode I, managed a conference and lobbied the Committee of Safety to this end.147Add. 18777, f. 70v; CJ ii. 865b. Pembroke refused to go, however. Prideaux and his colleagues quickly recovered from this setback. Within a little over two weeks (13 Dec.), a larger committee of Members from Devon, Somerset, Dorset and Cornwall went with a delegation from the Lords to the City, this time to recommend Denzil Holles*, a Dorset MP, as an alternative commander-in-chief.148CJ ii. 886b. On 21 Dec. Prideaux reported that a colonel had been ready for the last three days to march to Devon, but was stayed by lack of arms, and Strode, an associate of Essex, revealed that the lord general was working on an order of his own for another regiment to be despatched.149Add. 18777, f. 99v. Prideaux and the other ‘western gentlemen’ seem to have had nothing to do with the despatch of the 1st earl of Stamford (Thomas Grey*), to the region, but he and Strode wrote to thank the peer (9 Jan. 1643) soon after his arrival in Exeter. Prideaux’s contribution seems to have been confined to making preparations for a mint to be established in the city (3 Jan. 1643), and an order that rates levied in Exeter should be used there for defences and repairs.150CJ ii. 919b; Add. 18777, ff. 111v, 127.

War Party activist and strategist, 1643

Away from regional affairs, Prideaux continued to contribute towards building the wider parliamentarian war machine. He and Roger Hill II were required to draft an ordinance to tax various emoluments of royalists (6 Dec. 1642), helped draft orders securing life tenancies for the dependents of those killed in action and assuring Parliament’s enemies that its prisoners of war would be treated in like kind as the king’s armies dealt with captured parliamentarians.151CJ ii. 888a, 891a With John Wylde, he drafted an order empowering local committees to seize the rents of royalists (21 Dec.), and the next day served on the committee for the ordinance to sequester delinquents’ estates.152CJ ii. 898b, 899a. By this time, his involvement in managing the inland post office was common knowledge at Westminster. There was nothing apologetic about Prideaux’s claim. He treated the arrest by the Lords of one of his servants on post office business as a breach of privilege, and ensured that it was his own committee of despatches that investigated, extending the enquiry to include abusive words directed at him by Thomas Witherings.153CJ ii. 899a; Add. 18777, f. 100. The Lords were in no mood to back down, and the conference on the matter on 23 December must have taxed even Prideaux’s diplomatic skills.154LJ v. 508b, 512; Add. 18777, f. 101v.

At the turn of the year, Prideaux’s main activity was a fresh bill he brought in on abolishing the hierarchy of the church, with the confiscated lands invested in trustees, the idea he had pursued energetically in July 1641. The day after he introduced the bill to the Commons, he chaired a committee of the whole House on it. By 4 January 1643, with peace proposals to the king in the offing, debate in the House during further committees of the whole House, that he chaired, had become divided on whether in the event of a settlement the lands should simply be handed back to the king, or should be vested in trustees to fund a national preaching ministry.155Add. 31116, pp. 35, 40; Add. 18777, f. 107, 109; Harl. 164, f. 267v; CJ ii. 909a, 914b. By the 20th, after another committee of the whole House managed by Prideaux, some speakers, wishing to facilitate the Oxford peace treaty, began to argue that before any abolition, plans should be in hand for a reconstructed church. At this, Prideaux moved pre-emptively to put the question (20 Jan.), provoking a speech by Sir Simonds D’Ewes.156CJ ii. 931a, 935b, 936b; Harl. 164, f. 279. It is clear that Prideaux was in favour of church trustees (the principle which over a decade later governed the protectorate’s church settlement), and by 21 January seven feoffees had been named. By contrast, he spoke sceptically (8 Feb.) about the treaty, and in a debate opened by Pym urged that the king should be pressed to give speedy and precise answers to Parliament’s propositions.157Add. 18777, ff. 131, 146. Yonge’s note of Prideaux’s speech includes a sentence that the armies of both sides should be disbanded. This was the official parliamentary proposal, but Yonge later struck through the sentence, which rather implies that Prideaux disavowed it.158Add. 18777, f. 146v. He was certainly a hardliner on Catholicism; his speech of 3 January recommended that any refusal on their part to take the oath of abjuration then under discussion should be taken as a summary conviction for recusancy.159CJ ii. 913a; Add. 18777, f. 113v.

Prideaux and other leading war party lawyers were in favour of moving assizes from regions where the king’s military strength threatened to determine the proceedings against the interests of Parliament. That this policy of postponement was pursued despite the peace negotiations was further evidence of the distrust harboured against the king among the hawks of the House. Beginning with an order to move the Buckingham assizes (13 Feb.), Prideaux, Hill and Yonge had within four days pushed through the Commons a motion for an ordinance for postponing all assizes.160Add. 18777, ff. 154, 157; CJ ii. 964a, 968b. It met resistance in the Lords, and a conference with the peers was set up on 25 Feb.161CJ ii. 979b. More significantly for Prideaux, he was successful in steering through both Houses an order for Exeter to raise and fund its own horse troop, under the city’s deputy lieutenants (13 Feb.). This success must have encouraged him to move on 23 Feb., seconded by Sir Henry Mildmay, that the Committee of Safety should have no power to allocate funds raised by the Commons without the explicit consent of the House. In an open attack on the committee, Prideaux went further, moving for a reduction in the committee’s numbers to its original size. He won the division, in which Henry Marten and Edmund Waller supported his motion, by 50 votes to 39.162Add. 18777, f. 161v; CJ ii. 976a.

The following day (24 Feb.) came an assertion of authority over western affairs by the Committee of Safety. Prideaux had written to the mayor of Exeter asking for ‘continual information’ on the situation in the south-west. His reply was sent to the Committee of Safety, which then took an initiative of its own.163Harl. 164, f. 305v. A group of Scots officers formerly in the employ of the earl of Warwick (since the unresolved contest over the post office very unlikely to have been well disposed towards Prideaux) was promised pay by the committee and allocated to Devon. Later that day (24 Feb.) came a message from the Lords proposing that in the light of the ‘cessation’ they sought between the armies of king and Parliament, the siege of Plymouth by the royalists should be lifted and Parliament’s local regiments stood down. Contrary to the spirit of this proposal, Prideaux moved that Sir Ralph Hopton*, Sir Nicholas Slanning* and John Trevanion* should be driven out of the south Devon town of Modbury, a campaign which had already begun.164Add. 18777, ff. 163, 163v; Hopton, Bellum Civile, 34.

On the 27th, Prideaux delivered into the House a letter from John Waddon, burgess for Plymouth, on events at Modbury, and used the opportunity to speak more generally against the cessation, warning that if Parliament ‘will treat generally with the king he will direct the manner of the treaty’, extracting the concessions that suited him; and if the treaty collapsed Parliament would suffer the most from the consequences.165Harl. 164, f. 307v; Add. 18777, f. 166. News soon came from the south-west which undermined everything which Prideaux had worked towards. On 11 March, the House heard from Thomas Gewen* and Charles Vaghan* (Prideaux’s neighbour and former fellow-suspect of high commission) of a treaty between the Devon parliamentarians, including John Northcote*, and the Cornish royalists, a local rapprochement which had evidently been forged to demonstrate the potential for a national cessation of arms, and which had been sealed with a celebration of Holy Communion, to underscore the solemnity of the event.166Bodl. Nalson II, f. 332; CJ ii. 998b; Hopton, Bellum Civile, 34. Prideaux seems not to have had to work hard to persuade the Commons of the dangers, and letters were sent post-haste to Exeter forbidding the city authorities from allowing in the royalists. Prideaux and Anthony Nicoll were despatched to Exeter with all speed, leaving Pym (Nicoll’s uncle), William Strode I, Sir Walter Erle, John Glynne and Oliver St John to prepare instructions for the Exeter city fathers.167CJ ii. 998b, 999b. Also vocally critical of the Devon treaty was Sir William Waller*, who in January 1643 had been identified as a possible governor of Plymouth.168Hopton, Bellum Civile, 35; CJ ii. 929a. D’Ewes, hardly an unbiased observer, saw the disruption of the debate on the Oxford treaty by the Devon emergency as a ruse by the ‘fiery spirits’.169Harl. 164, f. 323v. The instructions given Prideaux and Nicoll expressed the dislike of both Houses towards individually negotiated local treaties, but cited Essex’s approval of national articles of cessation, towards which Prideaux, for one, was evidently out of sympathy.170LJ v. 657b.

Prideaux’s mission to Devon demanded persuasive skills of a high order. As one who had from the outset of the war been in favour of local associations, he was now confronted in his own county with an ‘association for neutrality’ as the Okehampton MP, Laurence Whitaker, put it. Similar movements in Yorkshire and Cheshire had been stamped out, and the prospects for quashing this one must have looked more promising to the radicals when letters from Prideaux and Nicoll arrived at Westminster, detailing the ‘very ridiculous’ peace articles that Northcote and the others had signed.171Add. 31116, pp. 63, 67; CJ iii. 7a. The Dorset men Sir Thomas Trenchard*, John Browne I* and John Fitzjames* came to Exeter with the intention of signing the peace articles, but Prideaux and Nicoll were relieved that no delegation came from Somerset.172Bodl. Nalson II, f. 342. From a south-western royalist perspective, the arrival of Prideaux and Nicoll in the region wrecked the chance the gentry had of actualizing their probably genuinely desired peace.173Hopton, Bellum Civile, 35. Their presence transformed the conduct of the war in Devon, which in turn affected the neighbouring south-western shires. By 24 March, Prideaux and Nicoll were able to report to Speaker Lenthall that three regiments for Parliament were being raised in Devon, Walter Yonge I and Roger Hill II, two reliable allies of Prideaux, were authorized by the Commons to set up a new Devon association (27 Mar.), and while he was in Devon Prideaux took the war to the enemy in Cornwall by asking for an order from Parliament to sequester Cornish church livings.174Bodl. Nalson II, f. 362; CJ iii. 20a, 22a.

Perhaps as a direct consequence of Prideaux’s indefatigable powers of persuasion and attention to administrative detail, the parliamentarian forces in Devon were strengthened during his stay there sufficiently for the young Serjeant-major James Chudleigh to secure some impressive victories over the royalists, the most heartening of which was at Sourton Down (25 Apr.), on which the MP was the following day able to report to the Speaker.175CJ iii. 29a, 63b; Bodl. Nalson XI, f. 169; Hopton, Bellum Civile, 35-40. Prideaux based himself at Exeter while he combatted the peace yearnings of the Devon gentry, and improved his credit with the city fathers to the extent that in May he was chosen their recorder, for him personally surely the crowning achievement of his mission.176Harl. 164, f. 332v, 337; Devon RO, Exeter City Archive, act bk. viii, f. 146v. A further task successfully accomplished was the strengthening of the Devon county assessment committee, which now included not only Prideaux and Nicoll themselves, but also the uncompromising George Peard* and Thomas Gewen*.177CJ iii. 57b. Prideaux and Nicoll had their expenses paid by the Plymouth committee; money payments between Prideaux and the committee continued throughout 1643.178SP28/128, pts. 24, 27.

By 15 May, Prideaux had returned to Westminster, and as a way of applying the lessons of his sojourn in the south-west to the general situation, took on the drafting of an ordinance that authorized the removal of burgesses from corporations and the tuning of county benches of magistrates.179CJ iii. 86a. On 19 May, the committee charged with finding a solution to the problem caused by the king’s possession of the great seal was put under his chairmanship.180CJ iii. 92b. Without the great seal, there was no means of authorising the higher fiats of government or demolishing ‘obstructions to justice’. Prideaux’s committee recommended a rival great seal of Parliament, but the Lords rejected this. On 14 June a fresh committee, which included Prideaux, was named, and by 5 July an order for the making of a new seal was put under the direction of Sir Robert Harley*.181CJ iii. 113b, 130a, 145a, 155b. This in turn ran into obstacles, and the matter was put into the hands of John Wylde three months later. By the end of October, conferences managed by Wylde and Prideaux were addressing the related question of invalidating documents sealed by the king at Oxford; and finally, on 10 November, the Commons nominated its commissioners of the great seal, Prideaux and Wylde finding places at least partly because of their work in seeing the process through to completion.182CJ iii. 269a, 283a, 283b, 296a, 307b.

Other legal work in the House which fell to Prideaux during the early summer of 1643 included a return to the attempt to prosecute Judge Robert Berkeley (22 May), drafting articles of impeachment against the queen (24 May) and a planned interrogation of Henry Wilmot*, all of which proposals seem with hindsight to have been unrealistic.183CJ iii. 96b, 100b, 105a. More profitable was his legal work with William Strode I and Roger Hill II on an ordinance withdrawing parliamentary recognition from any law officer of the king, an implication of the moves afoot to establish a rival great seal and legal system.184CJ iii. 152b. More profitable still, probably, was his time spent on an additional ordinance for sequestration (2 June) and his appearance on a committee of accounts which was given plenary powers over all obstacles to bringing in funds for the war effort.185CJ iii. 112a, 115b. Although he had been named to the Committee for Advance of Money, a major initiative in army supply, in November 1642, only from June 1643 did he attend its meetings.186SP19/1. Prideaux was named as a member of the Westminster Assembly (7 June), joining a cadre of sympathetic lawyers which included Maynard, Whitelocke, Wylde, Glynne and St John. He took charge of an ordinance to make the Presbyterian minister George Newton lecturer at the Temple (28 June) and was named to a Commons committee in response to an early Assembly initiative on sabbath observance (19 July), a further indication of his conservative religious sympathies.187CJ iii. 119b, 148b, 173b. He had no reservations about the new ‘vow and covenant’ tendered to Members in the wake of the plot associated with Edmund Waller*, and with John Glynne went to apprise the Lords of the implications for their House of the discoveries (12 June).188CJ iii. 118b, 126a.

Architect of regional association, 1643-5

It was Prideaux’s misfortune that as soon as he was back at Westminster in May, the successes he had worked for in Devon were emphatically reversed by the royalists. The battle of Stratton (16 May) broke up Stamford’s army, the largest parliamentarian fighting unit in the south-west, sending some of his force to defend Exeter and other elements north to join Waller. Prideaux could do little other than attend committees to ensure that an important garrison like Bristol was maintained (17 June), that soldiers in the west were regularly paid (22 June), and that fresh mounted forces were raised (19 July).189CJ iii. 174a. Despite these measures, which came too late to have a bearing on events in the field, Stratton was soon followed by the greater disasters of Roundway Down (13 July) and the consequent loss of Bristol to the king (26 July). Prideaux, Wylde and Hill were asked to draft an ordinance empowering conscription of men to the armies (1 Aug). Prideaux’s opposition to publishing an order of the previous week which imposed punishments on deserters from Essex’s army may probably be taken as an unwillingness on his part to concede that the setbacks in the west inevitably implied a strengthening of the lord general’s authority.190CJ iii. 190b. In this he may have taken a minority view. A committee was formed on 3 August for the relief of Exeter and the west, a subject given even more urgency by the disintegration of Sir Walter Erle’s* Dorset regiment, discussed in the House a few days later.191CJ iii. 192b, 196b. The preservation of Plymouth, beset as it was by the king’s army, took on a greater significance as a parliamentarian outpost and seaport. Prideaux, John Waddon (burgess for Plymouth) and Francis Buller* were asked to negotiate an advance from the City of London for Plymouth’s resistance to the siege (14 Aug.), and on the 18th Prideaux was involved in more general moves to deploy Essex’s army.192CJ iii. 204b, 210a.

The proposals by the Lords to continue the negotiations with the king at Oxford found no favour with Prideaux, who with Pym, St John, Glynne and others told the peers on 7 August that their plans were rejected by the Commons. With Pym and Whitelocke, Prideaux managed the subsequent conference between the Houses on this source of tension, and he was closely involved in drafting legislation to compel prisoners-of-war to compound for their estates, a hardening of attitude which must have signalled a determination to continue the war. By 17 August he was chairing the committee on this initiative.193CJ iii. 197b, 200b, 202a, 203b, 209a As a gesture towards Parliament’s friends, he and Robert Nicholas worked on an ordinance to relieve tenants obliged to pay the monthly assessment for their landlords (22 Aug.).194CJ iii. 214b. News of the military setbacks, conflict between the Houses over peace and the turbulence in the Westminster streets combined to produce an atmosphere in the summer of 1643 which made talk of an adjournment credible, and Prideaux was one of a group of 23 Members who met to outline the powers that a committee of safety might be given in that eventuality.195CJ iii. 206b; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, i. 186-7. Prideaux was in favour of greater powers for the London militia committee, resented by D’Ewes, who recognized this for what it was: a further repudiation of the peace moves.196Harl. 165, f. 151. Strengthening the London militia was also in line with Prideaux’s support for local associations, and played well with Sir William Waller, who was in London himself, the object of debate about a new army to be raised in the capital under his generalship.

Prideaux reported to the House on 3 September that Prince Maurice had been repulsed at Exeter.197Add. 31116, p. 150. This turned out to be misplaced optimism, and only two days later the city surrendered to the royalists, as did the MPs in residence there: Sir John Northcote, Sir Samuel Rolle and Sir John Bampfylde. With this, the last element of Prideaux’s earlier building up in Devon of support for Parliament was destroyed. His own constituency, Lyme, had a garrison that could still be supported by various financial expedients, but only by means of a fresh external military intervention was their any hope of re-taking the south-west.198Harl. 165, f. 153v. From the fall of Exeter, Prideaux did all he could to promote Waller – once considered a possible governor of Plymouth, and the Exeter city leaders’ choice of rescuer when they called on Parliament in August to avert the impending disaster – as the potential deliverer of the whole region.199Add. 18778, f. 18v. Walter Yonge I recorded a view, which he himself may have shared, that Waller, even with money and soldiers, would in fact do little.200Add. 18778, f. 19v. Perhaps as an attempt to counter that, on 14 September, in a symbolic demonstration of confidence in Waller, Prideaux and 13 other Members pledged sums of their own money for his army to march from London.201CJ iii. 241a. The Dorset man, John Trenchard*, was named as their treasurer, but the quarrel between Essex and Waller had scotched any prospect of a decisive march for the west country. ‘The devil sows dissension among us’ was Sir Arthur Hesilrige’s comment late in September, but the western gentlemen met at Waller’s own house (18 Oct.) and then at Sir Robert Harley’s* (27 Oct.).202Add. 18778, ff. 56v, 72v; CJ iii. 291a. These meetings were the origins of the Committee of the West, a standing joint committee with the Lords which managed affairs in the counties of Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire, and which had the goal from the outset of putting Waller in the field.203Add. 18778, f. 77. Prideaux’s personal sufferings when the royalists overran Devon were recognized (17 Oct.) with a recommendation to the Committee for Sequestrations that he be recompensed for having been plundered.204CJ iii. 279a.

The Committee of the West began to meet regularly from late October 1643. Direct evidence that Prideaux chaired it has been found from February 1644, but it seems likely that Sir Robert Harley acted merely as an enabler, and that Prideaux quickly assumed a role of leadership. Much of the work of the committee at this early stage of its existence necessarily focused on resourcing the garrisons of the western counties. This included Gloucester, which had a parliamentary committee devoted to ensuring its survival and to which Prideaux and other ‘western gentlemen’ were added (29 Sept.).205CJ iii. 258b. Similarly, Plymouth, regarded as the most highly prized garrison in the south-western peninsula, had a parliamentary committee of which Prideaux was a vigorous member, moving that impressment be introduced to protect the town (30 Nov.). In October, he was one of four MPs who went to the City of London for an advance of £4,000 for the garrison, and later drafted an ordinance to raise £5,000 for it (3 Feb. 1644). Along similar lines to the Committee of the West, three peers joined six from the Commons, Prideaux first named among them, to take care of Plymouth, but with a brief to include the Dorset garrisons of Lyme and Poole in their deliberations.206Add. 18779, ff. 19, 60v; CJ iii. 275b, 300b. Prideaux was regularly occupied in mediating between the Lords and the Essex and Waller camps, over unfolding developments in mobilizing Waller to move west (5, 7, 31 Oct.) and was prominent in the various financial expedients that seemed to hold out the best prospects for an injection of cash to hasten the general’s departure.207CJ iii. 263a, 267a, 297a. Among these were confiscations from the East India Company (19 Sept.), the use of fines from prominent royalists (26 Oct.), the proceeds of the excise (8 Jan. 1644), and by late January 1644 an ordinance specifically for raising money for a campaign in the western counties.208CJ iii. 289a, 360a, 383b; Add. 18778, ff . 43, 75. Prideaux’s prominence in the re-organization of the south-western war effort provoked a grand jury indictment of him for treason at the December 1643 Devon quarter sessions.209CCAM 957; Devon RO, Devon QS order bk. 1/8.

On 20 November, a series of votes and papers together signalled a shake-up in the composition of Waller’s army, until this point deployed only as far as Surrey and made up mostly of City forces. It had become clear that Londoners would not march to Devon. Prideaux was involved in considering a range of views and evidence, including from an unlikely source, the French ambassador, d’Harcourt.210CJ iii. 315b-316b; Add. 18779, f. 9v. On the 24th, at a committee of the whole House chaired by Laurence Whitaker, apparently the northern gentlemen opposed a group led by Prideaux on the arrangements for funding the armies. By 6 December, D’Ewes and Thomas Erle*, ruminating on that occasion, concluded that the northerners, led by Sir Henry Vane II, wished to constrain the Scots, while a second group, led by Prideaux and Trenchard, stood for the principle of regional associations, with Waller’s going to the west as their prime goal. But according to these two analysts, a third body of MPs, nearly as large as the other two together, continued to support Essex.211Harl. 165, ff. 215v, 233. Despite this indication of the constraints on his influence, by this time, Prideaux’s standing as de facto postmaster-general (he was explicitly asked to set up post stages between London and Great Yarmouth to improve the transmission of intelligence between the capital and the Scots, 13 Nov.), as chairman of the Committee of the West and as commissioner of the great seal, made him a powerful parliamentary figure in any reckoning.212CJ iii. 310b.

During the 1640s, Prideaux remained consistently a Presbyterian in his religious outlook. He was a Calvinist, with a respect for ancient authorities, cultural and scriptural, which suited him for the task of preserving books and manuscripts threatened by sequestration and pillage (2 Nov). No local sequestration committee could henceforth dispose of such materials without the permission of the body set up by ordinance. He was thus a natural enough successor to John Pym on the main Committee for Sequestrations (9 Dec.) – which he had been attending since at least early October – and no-one seems to have raised in objection the recent referral of his own case to that body.213CJ iii. 298b, 335a; Add. 18778, f. 85; SP20/1, ff. 58v, 60, 65, 67. He remained in favour of preserving the rights of patrons to livings, but took an Erastian position on compulsion. Some clergy from the Westminster Assembly lobbied for ordinances that would compel the laity to pay tithes directly to ministers in regions under the control of Parliament. Prideaux spoke to remind MPs of Henrician statutes which already provided that defaulters should be sent by church courts to magistrates to pay (28 Oct.), but was evidently happy to serve on the committee for a new ordinance (6 Nov.).214Add. 31116, pp. 173-4; CJ iii. 302b. He must have been enthusiastic about the ordinance against scandalous clergy which was to be applied specifically in those counties affiliated to a military association (12 Dec.).215Harl. 165, f. 241; CJ iii. 338b.

As a commissioner of the great seal, and thus a principal law officer, from November 1643 Prideaux was active in considering the conduct and appointments of judges and other legal officials, including justices of the peace. He was involved with reviewing the proceedings of royalist judges in the west (18 Dec.), and tendering the Covenant to chancery officers (12 Jan. 1644). In connexion with this last duty, he and Samuel Browne*, as two of the four commissioners of the great seal from the Commons, refused to swear Walter Long* as registrar of chancery (20 Jan.).216Add. 31116, p. 218. Long was an irascible, combative individual with a chequered past in the eyes of many of his parliamentary colleagues, but to refuse office to a well-known Parliament-man with a record pre-1640 of defiance of the king was bound to be controversial, and provoked a heated debate in the House. In the circumstances of January 1644, the entering of the Scots into the war, the moves to establish the Committee of Both Kingdoms and the concurrent re-positioning of parliamentary factions, it seems likely that behind the allegations that Long was inexperienced and lacked appropriate qualifications for the post lay political motives on the part of Prideaux and Browne. Long was a client of Essex, active in liaising between the peer and the Commons, and Prideaux had consistently pressed for alternatives to Essex’s command.

Prideaux’s attitude towards the Scots is harder to pin down. Certainly his personal religious sympathies were likely to dispose him favourably towards them, as was his membership of the Westminster Assembly, an honour bestowed on parliamentarians noted for their piety. From October 1643 he managed a number of conferences with the Lords on the Scots alliance, in the company of Sir Henry Vane II, among the keenest on making the most of the fresh injection of military power the Scots brought with them.217CJ iii. 290a, 296b; Harl. 165, f. 286. To be set against this is Prideaux’s suspicion of delegated authority: in January 1643, he had been critical of the extent to which the Commons ceded power to the Committee of Safety. He himself seems to have been a nominee in the first ordinance for a new joint executive committee with the Scots, brought into the Commons (30 Jan. 1644) by John Crewe, and was certainly active with Vane in presenting the case to the Lords at that time.218‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’, infra. This ordinance made no progress, however, and his name did not appear on the enabling ordinance passed by the Lords on 1 February. D’Ewes thought that Prideaux managed a conference on 10 February on the Anglo-Scots relationship ‘singularly well’, and this was probably because he had trenchant things to say about relations between the Houses.219Harl. 166, ff. 10v, 11v. This was likely to have been the conference at which the Lords were perturbed to hear Prideaux assert that without a joint standing committee between the English Parliament and the Scots, ‘the war will be carried on without the two Houses’, and interpreted his words as prejudicial to Essex.220LJ vi. 423a.

Certainly the purpose of that conference, from the Commons’ perspective, was to reject Lords’ amendments on setting up what would become the Committee of Both Kingdoms.221CJ iii. 395b, 396a. Prideaux joined Vane and St John to become the main drivers of these meetings with the Lords, and he is therefore best thought of as pro-Scots, anti-Essex and protective of the Commons’ privileges.222CJ iii. 397b, 398b. Only three days after D’Ewes had recorded his admiration of Prideaux’s diplomatic skills, he angrily lumped him in with St John and other ‘violent spirits’ in his account of how his own proposal for a limited army committee was closed down by them when they successfully pushed through a motion (13 Feb.) confirming the plenary powers which the new committee would wield.223Harl. 166, f. 3v. Prideaux’s stance was clear enough from his speech (16 Feb.) rejecting the mere six weeks to which a Lords amendment had sought to limit the CBK’s duration, but the three months proposed in the original ordinance, which he seems to have supported, was a hardly an expression of confidence that the committee would endure.224Harl. 166, f. 13v.

Prideaux’s standing in the House was high in the early months of 1644, as his substantial contribution to negotiations over the CBK proved. His commitment to mobilizing Waller to relieve south-west England remained undimmed, and it is possible that he visualized, or perhaps even gave his colleagues to understand, that his support for the Scots alliance was part of a broader strategy to maintain regional military associations as a means of progressing the war. The day after he had spoken memorably against aspects of the Lords’ ordinance on the CBK, he reported from the Committee of the West (17 Feb.), the first indication that he was by this time in the chair at its meetings. He wanted the House to advance £20,000 on the credit of the western men themselves, with a view to their being repaid from the excise within the year. The westerners sought the further consent of the House on raising a second sum equal to the first, but this was left unresolved, as well it might, since Prideaux had no suggestion as to how this might be achieved. D’Ewes thought the House thus ‘cheated’ into agreeing by means of Prideaux’s report to an expansion of Waller’s army from 5,000 to 9,000 men.225Harl. 166, f. 14, 14v; CJ iii. 402a. He made sure he was included on 26 Feb. in a committee on raising new regiments under Essex’s immediate command, but was first named to another the following day on securing stable funding for Waller’s expedition.226CJ iii. 408b, 409b.

He had become the most vocal MP from a Devon gentry background in energetically talking up the potential of Waller’s army as the salvation of the west. Northcote and Sir Samuel Rolle were hors de combat after the fall of Exeter, George Peard had gone to Barnstaple, Sir John Yonge and John Waddon were obliged to prioritize the cause of their borough, Plymouth, William Strode I was practically running the Committee for Advance of Money, leaving the peace party lawyer, John Maynard, who would do nothing which might invigorate the conduct of the war, the elderly Walter Yonge I and the unenthusiastic Sir Edmund Fowell. Furthermore, Prideaux demonstrated his war party credentials in areas of parliamentary business with little or no connexion to the efforts being made on Waller’s behalf. With William Strode I, he opposed the release from detention of Sir John Evelyn* of Wiltshire for unauthorized approaches apparently made in the interests of securing peace (2 Mar). Probably with this case in mind, he moved soon afterwards in favour of an ordinance that would bar from re-admission members of either House who had deserted Westminster, and reported from the north good news of victories by Sir William Constable* – visible proof that locally raised military associations could succeed.227Harl. 166, ff. 20v, 30v, 31v; CJ iii. 414a He was prominent in fresh efforts to impeach or fine leading royalist ‘delinquents’, doubtless with their revenue potential in mind, and was willing to work to this end with political opponents such as Sir William Lewis*.228CJ iii. 412b, 416b, 425b, 429a,

In March 1644, against the background of the controversy surrounding the CBK, Prideaux was prominent in defying the will of the House of Lords on other matters relating to the conduct of the war. He and William Ellys* took the lead in insisting on continuing the expedient of the ‘weekly meal’ in London. This had begun as a device whereby the London militia committee had collected a voluntary financial contribution from households equivalent to the cost of a family’s dinner once a week. The Lords were opposed to it, but on 25 March, Prideaux defended the scheme, and the following day an ordinance was passed which in effect made it a compulsory levy in London, with assessors for each ward. Members of both Houses and of the Westminster Assembly were allowed the privilege of self-assessment, a concession which may have met the Lords’ objections.229CJ iii. 437a, 438a; An Ordinance of the Lodrs [sic] and Commons (1644, E.39.15). Of wider significance was his part in re-opening the question of Waller’s command. The association of Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex and Kent was to sponsor Waller as sergeant-major-general of an army in southern England, with the co-operation of the Committee of the West (1 Mar.). The Lords agreed to the legislation establishing his command, but their amendments were challenged by the Commons. On 13 March, Prideaux, Sir Henry Vane II and Sir Arthur Hesilrige were the most vocal in seeking to reverse votes which the Commons had themselves taken. A clause of the original ordinance stipulated that the force should not leave its home region without Waller’s consent, but the Lords sought to bestow this authority equally upon Essex. Evidently a letter earlier in the week from Waller had provoked indignation among his Commons supporters. In the event, Waller’s authority was asserted in the strongest terms in the ordinance, which passed the Houses on 30 March.230CJ iii. 412b, 422a, 424b, 427a, 429b; Harl. 166, f. 32v; Add. 31116, p. 245. In both these cases, the principle of local or regional self-determination lay behind Prideaux’s uncompromising interventions, and he evidently supported the new southern association as the first step towards a re-conquest of the south-west.

Beyond the immediate practical matters of supporting the military lay wider issues of conflict between the Houses, none more portentous than proposals for peace. Ambassadors from the states-general brought proposals for mediation between king and Parliament from the Dutch, and in the latter half of March 1644 Prideaux was a manager of several committees with the Lords on the Dutch paper.231CJ iii. 432a, 433a, 436b. By 30 March he had become the lead reporter on what appeared a stalemate between the Houses. He brought from the Lords a statement from the earl of Essex insisting that the peers’ proposal of a fresh joint committee, which would have given the Commons a membership on it of 18, was in line with precedent. In the division that followed, Sir Henry Vane II and William Strode I opposed Holles and Sir Philip Stapilton, and the Lords’ proposal was rejected after the Speaker joined his casting vote to the noes.232CJ iii. 441a, 441b, 442b-443a, 444b, 445b, 446a. The running on this was being made by Prideaux, Vane, Strode and Samuel Browne, and their interest in peace at this juncture was minimal. Prideaux’s hawkish attitude was entirely consistent with his support for alternatives, by means of regional associations, to Essex’s command. On 3 May he was against discussing peace proposals after the debate on an ordinance to give maximum powers to the command of the 2nd earl of Manchester (Edward Montagu†), which he surely supported, and three days later was asked to introduce the ordinance to continue the life of the CBK. On the 11th he singled out the 4th earl of Lincoln (Theophilus Clinton) in his report as proposing ‘unparliamentary’ procedures, as a way of blocking a suggestion from the Lords that the CBK be expanded.233CJ iii. 458b, 460b, 466a, 478b, 481a, 489a, 490a, 490b, 491a. Stalemated conferences on the future of the CBK dragged on until mid-May, with Prideaux playing a central role in them, until at last on 23 May an ordinance of 1 February went through both Houses, after Prideaux had been asked to draft a ‘declaratory’ ordinance, which filled out the details of how the CBK was to operate.234CJ iii. 497b, 503a, 504a; Add. 31116, p. 279; M.P. Mahony, ‘The Presbyterian Party in the House of Commons, 2 July 1644-3 June 1647’ (Oxford Univ. DPhil thesis, 1973), 97; ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’, infra.

A further dimension to the stand-off between the Houses was the view taken of Members who had ‘deserted’ Westminster. The most odious of these in the eyes of war party colleagues who remained were of course active royalists at Oxford, but others had slipped away into retirement from public life or neutrality. Inevitably, the Lords objected to debates in the Commons on their own members’ cases, and in the lower House they found sympathizers. Prideaux reported on two conferences (15, 18 June) aimed at producing an ordinance on the subject, where the case of Henry Rich†, 1st earl of Holland, who had been allowed back into the Lords, was held up as a precedent by the peers. D’Ewes recorded how in the Commons ‘many foul mouths bespattered’ Holland, whose example provided a test case.235CJ iii. 532a, 532b, 533b. The draft legislation in Prideaux’s hands took a sterner line against defectors of either House who sought to make their way back to the parliamentary fold. At a conference with the Lords, Prideaux insisted that the Commons would stick to its own ordinance – his ordinance – and spoke persuasively in its favour. It passed the Lords on 29 June, and held out the possibility of rehabilitation to all except those who had chosen to ‘adhere’ to the king.236CJ iii. 546a; LJ vi. 611a; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 272. A further push on this front came on 10 August, when Prideaux, Strode and William Ellys seconded Sir Henry Mildmay in proposing that peers who had not taken the Covenant should be expelled their House.237Harl. 166, f. 106.

Thus the repeated clashes between Lords and Commons had echoes in the Commons itself, as the peace group found itself bested on a range of issues. During this period, D’Ewes recorded Prideaux’s partisanship, noting how although the latter was sympathetic to the self-interested petitions of peers like Lord Howard of Escrick (Edward Howard*), a close ally of the hardliners in the Commons, he dismissed any initiatives towards peace as they arose. Prideaux was evidently a forceful speaker. D’Ewes, a long-term supporter of the prince palatine, Charles Lewis, moved for a sympathetic hearing for a letter from him (26 Mar. 1644), which only met with withering sarcasm from Prideaux, who ‘basely scoffed’ and made a joke of the plight of the ‘poor, distressed prince’. He managed conferences on the prince elector in much the same way as he ran them on the exclusion of peers: brusquely and with little sympathy. ‘Proud corrupt Prideaux’ earned the enmity of D’Ewes as a result.238Harl. 166, ff. 35v, 40, 40v, 41, 42v, 43v. When the departing Dutch ambassadors complained about the treatment afforded their shipboard entourage, it became clear that however guarded he may have been about them previously, Prideaux was now hostile to their mission, speaking openly against them as arms suppliers to the king (24 July).239CJ iii. 568a, 593a; LJ vi. 675a; Harl. 166, f. 100.

An important part of Prideaux’s growing confidence and authority was his tightening grip on postal communications. The establishment of the CBK enhanced Prideaux’s standing and provided his case to be confirmed as postmaster-general with a fresh source of support, if not fresh legitimacy. In the early months of its existence, the CBK dealt directly with Prideaux in order to settle a postal system between London and Hull, and by August 1644 it was extending its reach to Berwick-on-Tweed. He was given charge of all mail despatches between the CBK and senior military and civilian personnel, and was asked (23 Aug.) to settle the posts between London and his parliamentary seat of Lyme, which was as far west as they could safely be taken.240CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 25, 144, 265, 400, 407, 447. In September he was given permission by the Commons to set up his postal headquarters at a house in London, accommodation he was to share with the Committee for Taking the Accounts of the Kingdom.241CSP Dom. 1644, p. 477. These arrangements were codified in an ordinance bestowing on him the mastership of the posts, which passed the Commons on 7 Sept. The ordinance authorized Prideaux to establish post stages in the west and provided indemnity for the carriers. It received a frosty reception in the Lords, however, where by this time Prideaux had few friends. It was read once but laid aside (14 Sept.), pending consultations with the earl of Warwick.242CJ iii. 619b, 621b; LJ vi. 707a. In defiance of this snub, he seems to have carried on as postmaster-general de facto. By November, he was supervising the shipped carriage of mail between Portsmouth and Plymouth.243WO55/460, unfol.

The protracted fencing between the two Houses did little to advance the cause of relieving western England, but Prideaux found time to persist with attempts to improve the fiscal infrastructure which would benefit the field armies. In particular, the excise, from which since September 1643 the western men had hoped for recovery of sums advanced on their own personal credit, was the object of his attention. He was prominent in discussions with the excise commissioners (30 Mar. 1644) and later the same day was asked to bring in an ordinance to continue the existing commissioners in post for another year. He had a personal interest in the ordinance he and John Glynne drafted on 2 April which assured repayment to those who lent on the security of the excise and with Glynne and Giles Grene*, the leading naval administrator, drew up another ordinance which secured continuity in payments of the tax.244CJ iii. 442a, 442b, 445a, 452a. This period of close working with the excise commissioners culminated in a delegation of western MPs to them (20 Apr.) with a request for an advance to Essex’s army of £20,000. A week later, in the unwonted company of Denzil Holles and Sir Thomas Barrington, a tireless worker on the finances of the Eastern Association, Prideaux assured Essex that money would be available for the forthcoming campaigning season.245CJ iii. 466a, 473a. With his frequent collaborator William Ellys he was asked to draft an ordinance to allow interest to those who did not reclaim their loans to Parliament (15 Apr.), but it seems not to have been presented to the Houses.246CJ iii. 460a.

As his mastery of the inland letter office grew, Prideaux was in a position to reveal to the House the military news from parts of the country where the posts were under his control. Letters came separately to him and to the Speaker reporting the surrender of York to Parliament (16 July), and of particular interest to him were reports coming to him from the west country, where Plymouth and (from 20 Apr.) Lyme Regis were under siege.247Add. 31116, pp. 302, 320. Both towns were able to withstand sieges because they could be supplied by parliamentary forces by sea, but Plymouth in particular was subject to internal rivalries and conflicts within the town and garrison which allowed local expression of the conflict between Essex and Waller. The day after a group of western gentlemen petitioned the Lords to appoint the staunch Essexian, the 2nd Baron Robartes (John Robartes) to the command of Plymouth (9 May 1644), the same petitioners turned up at the Commons. It was doubtless Prideaux who came up with the formula by which Sir John Bampfylde*, who seems to have been more sympathetic to Essex than was Prideaux, took command of Plymouth fort and island (10 May 1644) under Essex. At the same time, the career soldier James Kerr was made governor of Plymouth town and the counties of Devon and Cornwall, an appointment that was entirely theoretical, since the counties lay under royalist control. But crucially for those running the Committee of the West, Kerr was made a subordinate to Waller. When Prideaux and Bampfylde worked together to extract sequestration fines from Sir Robert Berkeley, Prideaux must have worked to ensure the order stipulated that the Committee of the West was to manage the money.248LJ vi. 545a, CJ iii. 488b.

During April and May, the partisans of Waller, led in effect by Prideaux, worked hard to secure ready funds for him to march. On a number of occasions, it seemed that a day could be announced for Waller’s departure.249Harl. 166, ff. 47, 52v, 54v. Prideaux intervened in the proceedings of the House on 4 May, to insert into its business an ordinance to fund both Essex and Waller, and such was the ‘violent carriage of things’ on that occasion that D’Ewes left the House in disgust.250Harl. 166, f. 56. But the attempt to enhance the authority of Robartes turned out to be a harbinger of things to come. In June 1644, the strategy of putting an army into the field under Waller to re-conquer the south-west, which had been the dominant political objective pursued by Prideaux, was suddenly scotched by Essex’s decision, in defiance of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, to march to the south-west himself. Chief among his advisers on this course of action was Robartes.251LJ vi. 616b-617a. The lord general had been asked to send a detachment to relieve Lyme, but decided to make Lyme the first port of call on the march of his entire army to the western peninsula.252M. Wanklyn, The Warrior Generals (2010), 97. After Prince Rupert had begun besieging Lyme, Prideaux had been the focal point of financial collections in aid of the town, such as advances from the Committee for Advance of Money and elsewhere.253CJ iii. 491b, 494b, 513a. Prideaux and William Strode I drafted a letter to Essex asking him to relieve Lyme (10 June), but the Commons voted the following day that Waller, not he, should go to the west.254CJ iii. 525b, 526a. Over the next few months, until Essex’s campaign reached its disastrous conclusion at Lostwithiel (1 Sept.), Prideaux was confined to continuing the work on the excise that he had begun in the spring, and to reporting snippets of good news, such as the break-out raid by the Lyme garrison on Honiton (1 Aug.). His adherence to the Committee of the West was unshaken by Essex’s march, and when an ordinance had to be drafted for a county force in Wiltshire, the task was referred to the Committee of the West, with Prideaux the first named.255Add. 31116, p. 304; CJ iii. 532b.

It was not long before the need for Waller to set out after Essex became pressing, to relieve the lord general from the king’s army closing in on him in the west. This re-energized Prideaux and his ‘western gentlemen’ colleagues. On 12 August, Prideaux opposed the Committee of Both Kingdoms and Sir Arthur Hesilrige*, who were in favour of supplying arms to the 6th Baron Inchiquin [I] (Murrough O’Brien), Roger Boyle* (Lord Broghill) and others in Munster. Prideaux argued that the needs of western England were greater than those of any army in Ireland, but lost the day.256Harl. 166, f. 106v. On the 20th, he reported that the sum of £10,000 was now promised by the excise commissioners for Waller, and expressed the hope that the general could now march west, a note he had struck on many previous occasions.257Harl. 166, f. 108v. To help the wider war effort he played a leading part in drafting ordinances for the Hertfordshire militia (19 July), the ordinance for martial law in London (12 Aug.) and an ordinance for stores for local army units (24 Aug.).258CJ iii. 565a, 587a, 588a, 606a, 606b, 607a. On 29 August he was named to a committee charged with drawing up thanks to Essex, but two days later the lord general and Robartes were compelled to flee Cornwall by boat. Only the recognition by the Commons of his important services in postal affairs (7 Sept.) relieved the gloom.259CJ iii. 611a, 619b; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, ii. 17-18.

Most of Prideaux’s parliamentary activity in the spring and summer of 1644 was devoted to supporting the war effort. It seems likely that he was typical of the lay members of the Westminster Assembly in playing a minimal part in its deliberations, his only recorded contribution being a message he brought to the Assembly (30 June 1645) from the Commons about a day of prayer for the armies.260Minutes ... of the Westminster Assembly ed. Mitchell and Struthers, 108. Even so, through 1644 there were a few indicators of his commitment to the Presbyterian confessional vision. He drafted the ordinance for Francis Rous* to become provost of Eton (29 Jan.) and on 29 March was named to a committee of 17 on sabbath observance, which under the chairmanship of Sir Robert Harley produced the ordinance of 8 April.261CJ iii. 381a, 440b; A. and O. i., 420.

The disaster which befell Essex in Cornwall and the quarrel between the earl of Manchester and Oliver Cromwell* subjected the alliance between the Scots and the English Parliament to severe strain, as those who had been unsympathetic to the Scots’ religious outlook took advantage of a discomfited Presbyterian cause to promote a more permissive religious polity. To the Scots, the defection to the religious Independents of Sir Henry Vane II was a major blow, but in October 1644 some were hoping that a purge of Essex’s demoralized army would heal the political and religious rifts that were so apparent. Such a weeding out would complement the attempts in the Assembly to settle the differences the Presbyterian majority had with the Independent ‘dissenting brethren’. Such optimism by the Scots was misplaced, and the proponents of liberty of conscience made progress in the Commons, hoping to push through an order before a scheme for church government came from the Assembly. It must have been during the debate on the request to the Assembly for a Directory of Worship (23 Oct.) that Prideaux, Rous and Zouche Tate, ‘among the ablest of the House of Commons’ in the eyes of Robert Baillie, opposed Vane and St John ‘to their face’ on the issue.262Letters and Jnls. of Robert Baillie, ii. 231, 232, 235, 236-7; CJ iii. 675a. On 1 November, in a Commons debate in response to a message from the Scots urging progress at the Westminster Assembly, Prideaux stood out as making more than one speech.263Harl. 166, f. 151v.

Through the second half of 1644, an especially turbulent time for western men obliged to watch Essex march to ignominy, Prideaux maintained a determination to fund an association army at the same time as displaying a willingness to stand by Presbyterian religious principles in the face of those looking for a more accommodating religious settlement. Whether he had become noted as an ally of the Scots before his confrontation with Vane and St John is unlikely, but from the summer he had been part of a group that worked on what recent legislation might form the contribution of the Commons to peace proposals to the king. The group consisted mainly of lawyers and included Oliver St John as well as the peace party figures, Maynard and Holles.264CJ iii. 569a.

The discussions over the basis of future peace negotiations continued to be a significant though not dominant element in Prideaux’s workload during the last few months of 1644. On 16 September he was named to a joint committee with the Lords on composing a letter to the king, and a month later with Maynard and Robert Reynolds he was asked to prepare a proposal that transactions passed under the king’s great seal at Oxford should be void. Later that day (15 Oct.), again with Maynard, he was included in a committee put into the care of Walter Long which was to give consideration to what the City wanted from the peace proposals.265CJ iii. 629a, 665a. The controversy of the spring on the treatment of Members who had gone to Oxford was revisited on 7 November, when a committee was formed to present something on exclusions to the Lords to be included in the peace proposals. As the subject had previously been a bone of contention between the Houses, it is unsurprising that this committee was finely balanced between Independents and Presbyterians, with Long and Glynne named with St John and the younger Vane. The wavering William Pierrepont and the seemingly pro-Scots Prideaux were the fulcrum, and the latter spoke often in the debate.266CJ iii. 690a; Harl. 166, f. 153. When this work by Prideaux is considered with the stance that he took on religion, it seems likely that he was in the summer and autumn of 1644 beginning to diverge from the set of views associated with the leading Independents in the Commons, perhaps only because his thinking on religion and the value of the Scots did not change. But his political behaviour was flexible. The Scots complained of arrears in the sums promised by Parliament to support their army, and a debate on 11 October over whether support for the Scots should come from taxation other than sequestrations was pushed to a division. The tactics are hard to read, but Prideaux and Zouche Tate opposed Holles and Stapilton, indicating to the proponents of a soft peace with the king that he could still not be regarded as any ally of theirs.267CJ iii. 659b; Add. 31116, p. 330. A similarly clear political division was apparent on 2 December over a high profile prisoner exchange involving the royalist son of Endymion Porter* and a west country parliamentarian officer. The debate was fought to a division in which Essex supporters opposed those of Waller, the peace party once again clashing with the war party men. Prideaux once again was prominent in proceedings, once again backing Waller’s judgment.268CJ iii. 711b; Harl. 166, f. 168v; Add. 31116, p. 353.

Uxbridge and the west, 1645-6

As the year 1644 drew to a close, Prideaux was called with three other lawyers, Roger Hill II, John Wylde and John Glynne, to draft an ordinance on the ‘reformation of manners’ aimed at suppressing incest, adultery and drunkenness and other social expressions of unregenerate human nature. His involvement must have further suggested to the Scots commissioners that he was their friend, and when he was nominated as a commissioner for the peace talks to be held at Uxbridge it confirmed a pattern in Prideaux’s activities evident in the past months. The Uxbridge discussions were mainly driven by the Scots, whose intention to impose the Covenant on the king formed the lynch-pin of their proposals. It has been doubted whether St John or Vane II were in the context of these talks serious about peace at all.269Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, ii. 121. Clarendon considered Prideaux to be the third man of a cynical Independent triumvirate, but there is room to suspect the Devonian of a more nuanced view. In the context of the religious settlement at least, he represented a genuine strand of English enthusiasm for a Presbyterian church settlement, even if he remained ambivalent about other aspects of the negotiations. What precisely he contributed to the negotiations at Uxbridge seems largely beyond recovery. Among his servants there was the faithful Edward Raddon, and Prideaux seems to have pressed Parliament for the commissioners to have full negotiating powers, taking a permissive view on the size of the king’s retinue.270Clarendon, Hist. iii. 491-2; TSP i. 59, 62, 63.

The work of the Committee of the West ground to a halt while Prideaux was at Uxbridge.271Mercurius Aulicus (23 Feb.-2 Mar. 1645), 1392 (E.273.13) At one point in the negotiations, however, Prideaux returned to Westminster from Uxbridge (18 Feb. 1645), to be included in a committee to borrow money for Fairfax’s army on the security of the monthly assessment.272CJ iv. 52a. The net effect of his experiences at Uxbridge may well have propelled Prideaux away from the Scots to bring him back into alignment with the mainstream Independents. On the eve of the talks he had been a manager of three conferences with the Lords on what became known as the Self-Denying Ordinance, which had originally been brought into the House by Zouche Tate (Prideaux’s associate in drafting an ordinance on blasphemy and sexual offences) and of which Prideaux is likely to have approved.273CJ iv. 11b, 13b, 17a, 88a. Typically, he was involved in objecting to some of the Lords’ tactics as a breach of Commons’ privilege (8 Jan.), but he seems to have played no part in the earliest discussions over the composition of the New Model army. Instead he committed himself yet again to supporting the latest attempt to launch Waller into the west. The officer list for the New Model was read first in the Commons on 28 February. Prideaux joined Ellys, St John, Sir Thomas Widdrington and Alexander Rigby (11 Mar.) in drafting an ordinance to bring the soldiers of Waller, Manchester and Essex under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax*, by which time he must have accepted the principle of the unified command. Certainly on the 4th he joined Strode and Vane II in objecting to a paper from the Scots laying claim to a power of nominating officers to the new force. His particular contribution was to confront the Lords over their unwillingness to accept the Commons’ nominations, preparing reasons with eight other Commons men why they should adhere to the list of 28 February. With Sir William Lewis and Denzil Holles, former Essexians, he was delegated to report from the conference with the Lords on this issue (15 Mar.), and two days later it was Prideaux alone who reported back that the Lords refused to budge. Nevertheless, in the face of matching intransigence by the Commons, the peers backed down on 18 March.274CJ iv. 75a, 77a, 80a, 81a; Harl. 166, f. 181; Temple, ‘Original Officer List’, 51.

The issue of allowing Members to return to the Houses had hobbled relations between the Houses in the spring of 1644, and had returned as a live issue on the eve of the Uxbridge negotiations. Prideaux had been a hardliner on the question, seeking to assert the authority of the Commons over the Lords. In December 1644 he was included in the committee charged with devising an oath to be administered to all coming to London from the king’s headquarters, whether or not they were formerly in either House.275CJ iii. 733a. On 24 March 1645 it was Prideaux who reported the text of the oath, which passed the Lords on 5 April. It became known as the Negative Oath, and the accompanying ordinance authorized not only the Committee for Examinations and local committees to impose the oath on those it deemed appropriate subjects, but also empowered the commissioners of the great seal to impose the oath on peers, thus settling the account that Prideaux had opened with the Lords the previous year.276CJ iv. 87b, LJ vii. 308b. He was first named in the committee to meet the Lords on 1 April, and took a leading part in the conference with them on the commission to Fairfax as commander-in-chief of the New Model. Essex and the 2nd earl of Denbigh (Basil Feilding) argued forcefully for the retention of a reference in the text to safeguarding the king’s person, but in the event, the commission emerged with no direct reference to the king at all.277CJ iv. 91b, 95b; LJ vii. 298b-299a; Harl. 166, f. 196v.

Having helped remodel the army, Prideaux now played a part in remodelling the navy, working with Giles Grene, John Maynard and Samuel Browne. Warwick, Prideaux’s former rival over the post office, was obliged by the terms of the Self-Denying Ordinance to resign his commission as lord high admiral. The group of four had to draft legislation that would vest the admiralty in a committee of both Houses, and do the same for the navy, continuing a distinction between the two centres of naval operations that was in practice often blurred. Yet again, it was Prideaux, with Browne and (unusually) Holles who went to the Lords on 17 April to insist on the Commons’ unamended ordinance for the Committee of the Admiralty and Cinque Ports, which passed the upper House two days later.278CJ iv. 102b, 114b; LJ vii. 327a. But crucially, what should have been the parallel task of remodelling the navy under a committee of both Houses never happened, and the well-established Committee of Navy and Customs, drawn from the Commons only, continued as before. By mid-September Prideaux had been appointed to the two main executive committees dealing with naval matters, but attended its meetings only occasionally. He invested much more of himself in the Army Committee, to which he was appointed in March. By mid-1645 he was one of the core group who ran its affairs as it grappled with the complexities of funding the New Model.279Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; SP28/30/4/337-94.

The Self-Denying Ordinance was not necessarily welcome to agencies of town government. On 9 May, during the day’s business in the Commons, a typically determined Prideaux ‘thrust in’ the affairs of Plymouth. He reported petitions from elements of the Plymouth garrison and inhabitants, together with nearby gentry, seeking to continue the command of Lord Robartes as governor there. The view of the Committee of the West, according to Prideaux, was that authority over the town should be vested in a committee, and he intimated to the House that Edward Massie* had accepted the position of major-general of a new western brigade.280Harl. 166, f. 208; CJ iv. 136b, 137a. The effect of his announcement was to secure agreement for the committee’s recommendations, but it was not until a week later that the ordinance appointing Massie to his command was read. It was referred to the Committee of the West, but the principal nurse of the ordinance through revision was the peace party man John Maynard*, supported by a group from Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, where Massie had held his former command.281Add. 31116, p. 420; CJ iv. 145b, 152b. Massie was to be subordinate to Fairfax when the forces of the pair of them operated in the same region, a formula which was doubtless intended to preclude a repetition of the earlier conflicts of Essex and Waller, but Prideaux seems to have played no significant part in this development, showing how his dominance of the Committee of the West could be challenged by the Presbyterians.282Add. 31116, p. 422. He may well have been indifferent towards Massie’s commission, however. On 9 April it had been Prideaux who had drawn the attention of the House to the dangers it faced from the inevitable joining up of royalist forces under Sir Richard Grenville and George Goring*, whose unenviable reputation in the west country for cruelty and plundering helped pre-dispose the Commons to despatch Fairfax and the New Model to the west in the first orders he received.283Harl. 166, f. 199.

Prideaux’s religious convictions seem to have been unaffected by the shifts in factions at Westminster, and he continued to associate with conservative strands of reformed Protestantism. At a meeting of the committee of the whole House (24 Apr.) on the projected government of the church, he opposed the Erastianism of D’Ewes, who wanted laymen in authority, such as magistrates, to judge scandalous behaviour in the context of parish church polity. Prideaux argued successfully that to allow this would undermine the standing of ministers and elders.284Harl. 166, f. 204v; Add. 31116, pp. 412-13. He was named to a committee (which included Maynard) on a petition from masters of Cambridge colleges on university governance (14 June, 4 Aug.), and at the end of that month was deputed with other leading western Members Francis Rous and Denis Bond to approach the Assembly for prayers to bless the forces in the west as Fairfax and Massie were on the point of joining together. On 14 July Prideaux and Anthony Nicoll were asked to give notice to the Assembly member Gaspar Hickes, a client clergyman of Rous’s, to preach to the Commons as towns in Somerset began to fall to Parliament.285CJ iv. 174a, 189b, 207a, 214a, 217b, 229b. Further victories in the west were marked by more sermons, Prideaux prominent in organizing them, and each clergyman invited was of unimpeachable Presbyterian credentials.286CJ iv. 245a, b. Hickes’s efforts in the pulpit impressed the Parliament-men sufficiently to secure his appointment a few months later as preacher at the funeral of William Strode I, of which Prideaux was one of the managers (10 Sept.).287CJ iv. 268b. He was also entrusted on 5 August with drafting an ordinance to assess the lawyers of the Inner and Middle Temples on a levy to provide a minister there, revisiting a task he had first undertaken in 1643.288CJ iv. 231b.

Through the summer of 1645, Prideaux’s work on the floor of the House was marked by a commitment to maintaining the financial support for Fairfax’s army, and a series of conferences with the Lords. He successfully moved a contribution of £2,000 from the Committee of Advance of Money for the New Model’s relief of Taunton (29 Apr.) and was once again prominent in visits to the excise commissioners, invariably part of small delegations deputed for the delicate task of securing advances on the tax (14 Apr., 20 May, 1, 9, 13 Sept.).289Harl. 166, f. 205v; CJ iv. 111a, 125b, 126a, 149a, 259a, 267b, 273a. With the former treasurer-at-war, Sir Gilbert Gerard, he was part of a committee of six required to bring in an ordinance for collecting assessment arrears in London (14 July) and was named to a committee on setting out a London militia regiment to assist Fairfax (6 Sept.).290CJ iv. 207a, 264b. After a cache of the king’s papers fell into the hands of the New Model at Naseby, Prideaux was active in examining the haul, and when a published edition of the correspondence was rushed out for propaganda purposes very soon after, his name appeared as examiner of a dozen of the letters.291The Kings Cabinet Opened (1645), 1, 2, 4-8, 10, 12, 13, 16, 24 (E.292.27). Two months later (15 Aug.), copies of this publication and the Directory of Worship, the Presbyterian handbook for clergy superseding the Book of Common Prayer, were given to the Committee of the West, with instructions that they should be distributed in western England by the advancing army.292Add. 18780, f. 97v.

In his dealings with the Lords, Prideaux was generally disobliging towards the upper chamber, thus continuing his stance towards them over the New Model officer list, and very obviously partisan. He was one of the three Independents who told the Lords of the Commons’ intransigence in support of Francis Russell* as governor of the Isle of Ely (5 Aug.), went to inform them that the House would not agree with the Lords over proposals from the Scots (18 Aug.), and was part of the committee that formulated a statement to the Lords rejecting bail for Thomas, Lord Savile.293CJ iv. 232a, 233a, 246a, 257b. During the Savile affair, he clashed with D’Ewes and was unhelpful towards Holles, who was accused of consorting with the enemy by accepting a note from the peer, but Prideaux was defeated in a division when he was paired with John Lisle against Stapilton and Lewis (19 July).294Harl. 166, f. 242; CJ iv. 195a, 213a. He proved himself hostile to the earl of Stamford, backing Hesilrige in his violent quarrel with the peer.295CJ iv. 150b, 188a, 296a. Conversely, he actively supported the Independent peer the 4th Baron Wharton (Philip Wharton), (8 July), helping him to the sequestered estate of Lord Savile’s kinsman, Sir William Savile*: Prideaux and Wharton had been collaborating politically since at least October 1643, and were colleagues on the Committee for Plymouth, Poole and Lyme.296CJ iv. 201a; Add. 31116, p. 437; Harl. 165, f. 198v; LJ vi. 293a.

The fall of Bristol to the New Model early in September put the Independents in the ascendancy politically, and from that point Prideaux began to work closely with Sir Thomas Widdrington*, Fairfax’s brother-in-law and man-of-business back at Westminster. They worked together on approaches to the excise commissioners, on drafting formal thanks to Fairfax, on an approach to the earl of Pembroke to appoint an under-sheriff, on swearing sheriffs in London and on the Stamford-Hesilrige quarrel, all within a three week period after 29 Sept.297CJ iv. 267b, 277a, 286a, 292b, 296a. During this period, Prideaux dominated both the Committee of the West and the separate parliamentary committee for Plymouth, Poole and Lyme. His report on 26 Sept. on the whole condition of the west was made from the Plymouth, Poole and Lyme committee, although it might just have easily have come from the parallel one, and despite the obvious overlap of business between these two bodies, their independent existence as executives persisted down to 1649. Both were perfect vehicles by which Prideaux could exert political influence. Massie’s habit of complaining to his paymasters met with little sympathy from Prideaux, who was able to demonstrate in the House that his brigade was well enough provided for in comparison with Fairfax’s main army. It is telling that when it came to bestowing a reward on Massie, an iron-works in the Forest of Dean, not an estate in the peninsula of the south-west, was settled on him, in the teeth of opposition from the Gloucestershire Independent, Thomas Pury I.298CJ iv. 290b; Harl. 166, ff. 234, 267. In the wake of Fairfax’s conquest of the south-west, Prideaux was added to the Committee for the Admiralty, and found a place on the committee for privileges.299CJ iv. 296b, 311a.

A flurry of decisions and appointments relating to the south-west followed immediately from Prideaux’s report on 26 Sept. Over two days a delegation of eight Members to visit the region was put together, and also Prideaux was given leave to go the west, in a separate, although obviously related, order.300CJ iv. 292a, 292b, 293a. The delegated committee reached Fairfax’s headquarters at Chard by 7 October, but Prideaux did not leave Westminster immediately: the Journal shows him occupied in various committees of the House until 1 November.301CJ iv. 296a,b, 300b, 311a, 312a, 313a,b, 314a, 319b, 330a. The Journal clerk made no mention of him from then until 25 November, so it seems likely that for this three-week period he was away from London. Because of the telling additive effect of his various offices – commissioner of the great seal, chairman of the Committee of the West, postmaster-general – he has been identified as the manager, on behalf of the Independents, of the ‘recruiter’ elections in the west.302D. Underdown, ‘Party Management in the Recruiter Elections, 1645-1648’, EHR lxxxiii. 253. To these qualifications of his might be added his chairmanship of the Committee for Plymouth, Poole and Lyme and his membership of the privileges committee, but while Prideaux was certainly an active Independent in politics and a very powerful figure by this time, it is doubtful whether the future by-elections mattered as much as appointments to garrison commands. His journey to the west in October 1645 was just as likely to have been in aid of the appointment of Ralph Weldon, a Kentish Independent, to the command of Plymouth. Prideaux had brought in the ordinances to maintain a Kentish regiment there, and an ordinance imposing martial law on the town, but it emerged as soon as Prideaux returned to Westminster that since Robartes’s forced resignation as governor the townsmen of Plymouth had remained in active communication with the peer.303Harl. 166, f. 267; Add. 31116, p. 495; CJ iv. 355a.

Political Independent, 1646-8

By January 1646, by virtue of his office as a commissioner of the great seal, with a reinforcing role as a member of the Commons committee of privileges, Prideaux had become established as a pivotal figure in the timing of by-elections, acting in the Independent interest. Sir William Brereton* wrote to him in shamelessly partisan terms about elections in Staffordshire, where the Presbyterians, ‘the worse party’ scored some successes.304Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 216. But his power-base remained south-west England, where he was the most powerful figure in the politics of the region, the determining, if not controlling, figure in the despatch of writs for by-elections, playing a critical part in the distribution of electoral patronage. His hand has been suspected in the election of Walter Strickland at Minehead around November 1645.305D. Underdown, Som. in the Civil War and Interregnum (Newton Abbot, 1973), 131. More certainly, Fairfax consulted Prideaux about a seat for his brother-in-law, Sir William Selby*: first at Tiverton; then, with success, at Ilchester (Feb. 1646), after Prideaux had lent on John Pyne* to secure the seat for him.306Fairfax Corresp. ed Bell, i. 267, 268-9, 283-4. Following his return to the House after his election had been challenged, John Harington I* went, Nicodemus-like, to see Prideaux late at night (17 July 1646).307Harington’s Diary, 28.

The ordinance for ridding the Bristol city government of royalist aldermen and councillors had been referred to a committee which included Prideaux (24 Oct. 1645), and the strength of his interest in that city was confirmed when he was voted recorder there on 6 January 1646.308CJ iv.319b; Bristol RO, 04264/4, pp. 131. Prideaux was the reporter from the Committee of the West on the situation in Somerset, where John Pyne’s enemies were building up a head of steam in denouncing his manipulation of the by-elections in the county. Prideaux merely presented the view of the Committee of the West that the ‘distractions’ in Somerset were chiefly electoral. The matter was referred, not to the privileges committee, chaired by the Presbyterian Sir Robert Harley, but to the Committee of the North, where Fairfax’s brother-in-law and Prideaux’s ally, Widdrington, presided, a referral that did nothing to put pressure on Pyne.309CJ iv. 403b, 405a. Further west still, relations between Prideaux and the New Model became even closer after the foiled attempt by royalist grandees to bribe the garrison officers into surrendering Plymouth; Prideaux’s report to the House (1 Jan.) brought a financial reward to the outgoing garrison colonel with a recommendation that he be given a command in Fairfax’s army.310Add. 31116, p. 502. News from the field of the army’s further advance into Devon came first to Prideaux as the representative Parliament-man.311The True Informer no. 38 (10-17 Jan. 1646), 298-9 (E.316.21)..

For much of the first half of 1646, much of Prideaux’s time in Parliament was occupied in chairing meetings of the Committee of the West and generally acting in support of the advancing parliamentary armies. Sir William Brereton in Cheshire was acting on an order sent down by Prideaux to enable money to be raised from surrounding counties, and Brereton had urged Prideaux (7 Nov. 1645) to do what he could to pass an ordinance for martial law, which he thought would improve military discipline. Prideaux had been involved in legislation on that topic since the summer of 1644, but a general ordinance on the subject fell short of completion on several occasions.312Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 216; CJ iii. 587a, 588a, 607a; iv. 110a, 394a, 490a, 498b. He was on surer ground in western affairs. He secured a referral to the Committee of the West to determine the location and size of garrisons in the region once the fighting was over (7 Mar. 1646), and managed to cock yet another snook at the House of Lords, which had other ideas, while doing so.313CJ iv. 456a, 467a, b. The excise still provided a main element in funding the forces, including Massie’s, but it can hardly have been a surprise that immediately after the surrender of Exeter to Fairfax (13 Apr.), Prideaux brought in a report from the Committee of the West that recommended that there should be no standing force in the west after the remaining pockets of royalist resistance were subdued. The House accepted Prideaux’s report.314CJ iv. 467a, b, 472b, 496b, 521b.

Some of his activity in supporting the western campaign was honorific work, as primus inter pares among the western gentlemen. He was put in charge of drafting thanks to Fairfax (23 Jan.), and in February called upon a number of preachers to deliver sermons appropriate for the victories of the army, such as at Torrington.315CJ iv. 416a, 449b, 451b. Tellingly, one of these preachers he invited to the pulpit was Hugh Peters, whose theology was unambiguously Congregationalist. His sermon, delivered on 2 April to celebrate the advance in the west, dwelt on the significance of the campaign in the west as setting the seal on Parliament’s victory over the king, portraying the whole war from a western perspective. It singled out a large number of milestones on the road to victory, and Peters asserted how ‘Lyme and Plymouth deserve a story by themselves’ in their long endurance of siege; Prideaux must have been particularly gratified to hear this passage.316CJ iv. 484a, 499b; H. Peters, Gods Doings, and Mans Duty (1646), 25 (E.330.11).

Peters’s religious Independency was quite removed from the Presbyterianism of the majority of the Devon gentry in Parliament. As for Prideaux himself, his invitation to Peters must surely have signalled a change in his own religious sympathies, and put a distance between him and the Assembly; which within two weeks of the sermon was defending itself to the Commons on an allegation of breach of parliamentary privilege. Prideaux sat on the committee which investigated it, led by Hesilrige and Henry Marten.317CJ iv. 511a, 518a. Any evidence for the interiority of Prideaux’s religious thinking at this point is hard to come by. He was a member of Commons committees on what constituted sins serious enough to prohibit individuals from the Lord’s Supper under the still officially projected Presbyterian church structure. His willingness to participate suggests that he was reconciled to the fact that Parliament had settled on lay judges to determine these cases, despite the position he had apparently taken in April 1645.318CJ iv. 553b, 562b. But a number of committees with a Presbyterian flavour to which he was named, such as on the plan to make the Serjeants’ Inns the basis of a Presbyterian classis (Oct. 1645), and the scheme to impose the Covenant throughout the land (12 Oct. 1646) came to nothing.319CJ iv. 300b, 691a. A similar stalemate may have blighted his work with the Presbyterian John Maynard (9 Dec. 1645) on a proposition to be put to the king that a settlement would include guarantees of freedom for urban corporations against royal interference. When eventually the propositions were tendered to the king at Newcastle, no such proposal was included.320Add. 18780, f. 178; Gardiner, Constitutional Docs. 290-306.

Through 1646, Prideaux did little to help Massie, whose western brigade was becoming a by-word for indiscipline. He was part of a delegation that approached the excise commissioners for another advance for Massie’s soldiers, but seems not to have helped draft the ordinance of September granting half the western excise to the forces there.321CJ iv.615b; LJ viii. 501a. Massie himself came into the House on 9 July, and was as marked a partisan for the Presbyterians as Prideaux was for the Independents. Prideaux doubtless took satisfaction from the acceptance by the House of his recommendation from the Committee of the West that Massie’s brigade should be disbanded (3 Oct.).322CJ iv. 681b. As a measure of the intensity of party strife at this time, Prideaux’s only tellership during 1646 (22 July), on whether or not to keep the king’s emissary, William Murray, in prison, was a typical stand-off between Hesilrige and Prideaux against Stapilton and Holles.323CJ iv. 624a. Most of Prideaux’s 85 committee appointments during 1646 gave no special task or responsibility to him as against other members, suggesting that the Committee of the West and the duties as great seal commissioner, not to mention the post office, occupied most of his time. His high standing as recorder of Exeter was illustrated by the appeals to him from the beleaguered civic authorities in August, who felt threatened by the unruly soldiery, and he cemented his relationship with Bristol corporation when he secured 10 days’ leave to be sworn recorder there in September.324T. Edwards, The Third Part of Gangraena (1646), 42-3 (E.368.5); CJ iv. 663b. He went in the company of John Ashe*, and they identified a number of royalist delinquents in the city, proceeding mainly by extracting from them written engagements that they would submit themselves to the Committee for Compounding, at Goldsmiths’ Hall.325CCC 73. Later that year, Prideaux as recorder and chairman of the Committee of the West was the most important figure in re-establishing Bristol garrison, which later became noted for its sectarianism.326Bristol RO, 04264/4, p. 152; vide Bristol, supra.

The period when Prideaux went down to Bristol was marked by an intensifying party struggle over the great seal, marked by interventions by Roger Hill II and Sir Thomas Wroth, the former an associate of Prideaux’s since the early 1640s, the latter someone who like Pyne represented the Independent interest in Somerset. This conflict had begun earlier in the year, when ordinances to continue Prideaux and the other commissioners in office had immediately become a bone of contention between the Houses.327CJ iv. 477b; Underdown, ‘Recruiter Elections’, 257-8. In a period of such faction-fighting, control over the great seal was a great prize. The commissioners were not only controlling the commissions of the peace but instructed judges, and in August 1646 seemed likely to control sub-commissioners investigating concealments of royalists’ estates, all of which impacted heavily on the factionalized county committees.328CJ iv. 583a, 637b. In the dying days of Prideaux’s custody of the great seal, he was one of the committee instructed to select suitable men to be sheriffs and magistrates (30 Oct.), another means of keeping factionalism alive. Prideaux’s views on the control of the great seal can only be inferred from his position as a prominent Independent; according to the political pattern, he would have been in favour of continuing it in commission, but finally on 31 October, faute de mieux, it was settled in the Speakers of both Houses.329CJ iv. 709b, 711b. Prideaux’s involvement with the great seal continued in another capacity; in January 1647 he drafted the ordinance to appoint three lawyers, not of the House, as commissioners, helping perpetuate the controversy.330CJ v. 52a.

The friction between the Houses meant that a number of bills on land confiscations made little progress. Prideaux was called to serve on a number of committees on sales, but was not the principal architect of any of them. They included sales of lands of delinquents (10 July, 21 Aug. 1646) and bishops (12 Nov. 1646, 20 Aug. 1647). He was one of a group of only five requested to bring in a bill on deans and chapter land sales (29 Sept. 1646), but it was not until April 1649 that a bill was passed, with a similar story for delinquents’ lands.331CJ iv. 613a, 651a, 678a, 720a. Only the bishops’ lands ordinance was immediately successful, driven forward by the need to pay off the Scots, a demand which saw Prideaux among a new intake of members to the Committee for Compounding (21 Aug. 1646) and to the committee to the City to borrow £200,000 for that purpose.332CJ iv. 650b, 673b. His attacks on bishops’ estates notwithstanding, it was Prideaux who successfully moved for clemency towards his distant kinsman, Dr John Prideaux, the Calvinist bishop of Worcester, who had many Devon family and patronage connexions, including with Sir Edmund Fowell*, John Maynard* and Thomas Reynell*.333Add. 31116, p. 588; Oxford DNB, ‘John Prideaux’. He was similarly forgiving on a number of other cases, including that of William Coryton*, pardoned in December 1647, and some of his apparent magnanimity on these occasions can be explained as incidental to his acting primarily as spokesman for the Committee of the West.334Add. 31116, p. 603; CJ v. 353b.

During 1647, Prideaux’s parliamentary activity as measured by the Journal clerk, decreased markedly, from a total of 85 committee nominations in 1646 to 38, for most people a respectable total but not by the prodigious standard maintained by Prideaux in previous years. This must have owed not a little to the burden of work outside the Commons chamber associated with his continuing dominance of the Committee of the West, and also to his directorial role in the inland letter office, in both cases marked by minimal survival of documentary evidence. The political crisis between the parliamentary factions, by now directly drawing in the army and the City, also led to a decrease in routine parliamentary business. The affairs of the Committee of the West were marked by a policy of leniency towards delinquents on the one hand, and by what was seen by the regional military as disobliging approach to local garrisons, in which Prideaux’s personal position, given his political history, must have been uncomfortable. Early in the year, he and Laurence Whitaker reported from the Committee on the case of Cornish royalist gentry who had asked to compound for their estates on the favourable terms of the articles of surrender signed at Truro and Exeter. Fairfax had ‘particularly recommended’ their cases, and any reluctance by either the Committee or the House was overborne by the general’s intervention (15 Feb.).335CJ v. 81b, 88b; Add. 31116, p. 603.

Prideaux found it harder to oblige Ralph Weldon, the embattled governor of Plymouth, who faced a threatened mutiny by his soldiers, whose arrears of pay were serious enough to cause social disorder. By 30 July, Weldon was complaining to the Speaker that his petition to the Houses had not been read, and made it clear that he now wished to resign his command, alleging now that he had been appointed to it without his own consent or knowledge. He told Lenthall that he was copying his letter to the City, the lord mayor and to the Committee of the West, but no relief was forthcoming. Instead began a period of chronic unrest in Plymouth, to which the standard parliamentary response was to vote allocations from the revenue of the assessments on Devon. Weldon wrote to Prideaux specifically on his troubles, and on 19 August one of his letters generated a Commons debate, from which emerged an order to the Committee for Plymouth, Poole and Lyme and the Committee for Irish Affairs to reduce the garrison. The eventual result of this approach was to make more certain the long-feared mutiny, which occurred in February 1648.336Bodl. Tanner 58, ff. 427, 476; CJ v. 278b; S.K. Roberts, Recovery and Restoration in an Eng. County: Devon Local Administration, 1649-70 (Exeter, 1985), 5-6. It is striking that Prideaux kept away from the committee for Devon which met in the county, and whose meetings attracted many of the Devon Members between 1646 and 1648. He was very much a Westminster-based politician, and highly influential in the most important west country cities, never just a ‘local boss’.

On the face of things, it was perfectly reasonable of Weldon to have looked for support from Prideaux, who had a broader interest in army matters than might have been supposed from his chairmanship of the Committee of the West. He had been a regular presence at the Army Committee in 1646, if not attending as frequently as he had done in the committee’s early days back in 1645. But in the winter of 1646-7 his interest visibly tailed off, and he only turned up once a month or not at all between June and December 1647.337SP28/29-33, 36-9, 41, 46-9, 50-7. This meant that he was no longer a main player in managing army supply on a regular basis, and his involvement in military affairs in the House has to be judged with that in mind. He was named to committees on a paper to Fairfax from army officers (27 Mar. 1647) and on the legislation to afford indemnity to soldiers (5 June).338CJ v. 127b, 199a. He was included in large committees on restructuring the London militia (2 Apr.), and played a significant part in managing the conflict-ridden relationship between the two Houses in the continuing struggle to pay off the Scots by means of a loan from the City (23 Apr., 11 May).339CJ v. 132b, 153b, 167b. These were essentially political rather than administrative bodies, and his political behaviour in the first half of 1647 reveals Prideaux as representing those Independents whose political base lay in the Commons, not by direct connexions with the army. His associates in such matters as the questions of who should guard the Commons against the Presbyterian-inspired disorder in the summer, and who should take responsibility for guarding the king, were Roger Hill II, Miles Corbett and Sir Michael Livesay, unmistakeable Independents.340CJ v. 211a, 237a

Enough of Prideaux’s religious conservatism remained intact for him to be named not only to a committee on keeping royalist clergy out of their livings (22 Mar.), but also to be called with Harbottle Grimston* to draft an ordinance (22 Apr.) on how to dispose of sequestered church livings and to ensure that tithes should continue to be paid: legislation to be supervised by the Committee for Plundered Ministers.341CJ v. 119b, 152a. He would have been a cautious enough member of committees to regulate Oxford University, and doubtless supported the appointment of the 4th earl of Pembroke to the chancellorship there (20 July).342CJ v. 51b, 121a, 251b. This outlook in religious matters he shared with the majority of the non-royalist Members of the House from the south-west, but he was unusual among that peer group in fleeing to the army after the forcing of the Houses by the Presbyterian-manipulated mob on 26 July.343LJ ix. 385b. Just before that event, Prideaux had been active in working on a declaration to counter the engagement by the London militia, which had called on the king to return to London for a settlement; and on a move to shift control of the militia to safer hands.344CJ v. 255b; To the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor (1647, 669.f.11.47). This activity of course marked him out as an enemy of the Londoners, but for years he had backed the Independents against the Presbyterians, and his reputation alone would have distinguished him as one hostile to peace party and Presbyterian interests. After the Commons reassembled, he was included among those investigating the violent interruption, but on 9 August he tempered the severity of the backlash against the Presbyterians that might have been expected, by refusing to fall in with Sir Arthur Hesilrige’s motion that those who had remained at Westminster after the flight to the army should be expelled the House and instead siding with Lionel Copley* on a point of voting procedure.345HMC Egmont, i. 444; CJ v. 270a.

In his subsequent involvement with establishing the dominant, official parliamentary narrative for the reading public of what had happened at Westminster during July and August 1647, Prideaux reverted to type, taking the part of the Independents.346CJ v. 279a, 279b. His behaviour on 9 August, a departure from the norm for him, was surely motivated by a wish to maintain his own credibility with the ‘western gentlemen’, hardly any of whom were partisan Independents in the mould of Prideaux’s temporary antagonist, Hesilrige. He was pursuing the same policy of damage limitation when he took on the task of mediating between the Commons and his former war party ally of 1643, Anthony Nicoll, now fingered as one of the Eleven Members. Prideaux drafted a letter allowing Nicoll his freedom (18 Aug.) but after Fairfax had had him arrested, wrote another to demand Nicoll’s presence at the bar of the House, in an assertion of parliamentary privilege.347CJ v. 275b, 278a. By drafting on the same day the letter to Fairfax from the Commons asking that he rid himself of the counsels of John Chieslie, the secretary to the Scottish commissioners, and still in London, he was conveying to the general some of his civilian parliamentary Independent identity that army leaders could not take for granted.348CJ v. 277a. On 6 September, Prideaux was given leave to go to the country. A month later, at a call of the House, he was listed with the majority of south-western MPs as absent.349CJ v. 292b, 330a. Many of the Devon Members had taken themselves to Exeter to address the question of the unruly soldiery and their lack of pay.350Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 507. Prideaux first visited his constituency. At Lyme Regis, as recorder, he swore in a number of MPs as burgesses of the borough. Thomas Erle and Sir John Yonge had obvious local connexions, as did Francis Chettle*, but the admission to the corporation of Sir Thomas Wroth* was an obvious favour to a political crony.351Dorset RO, DC/LR/B1/9. After Lyme, Prideaux pushed on to Exeter, where he attended the city quarter sessions, again as recorder.352Devon RO, Exeter City Archive, bk. 64, f. 119v. He was evidently reinforcing his regional power-base.

When next recorded as in the House (28 Oct.), Prideaux was named to a committee for removing obstructions to sales of episcopal estates.353CJ v. 344a. He then began work on the proposals to be put to the king at the next round of peace talks. This included a committee with the Lords to determine the extent and shape of the propositions (30 Oct.), and a committee of 19 members with a brief to incorporate into the proposals a vote that the king was bound in justice and duty to assent to laws tendered to him by the two Houses (5 Nov.), which formed an element of the Four Bills which passed the Lords the following month. A few days later, Prideaux and Robert Reynolds prepared a letter to Fairfax condemning the Levellers’ Agreement of the People and the accompanying petitions from 11 regiments as ‘destructive to the being of Parliaments, and to the fundamental government of the kingdom’ (9 Nov.). The response was a defiant second petition.354CJ v. 346b, 351b, 354a; Two Petitions from the Agents (1647). On the 23rd, however, news from Bristol of a garrison mutiny there meant that Prideaux had to write his fourth letter to Fairfax in as many months, on this occasion asking him to intervene on behalf of the Bristol corporation.355CJ v. 366b.

During the winter of 1647-8, Prideaux continued to be a high profile advocate of a tough line on the king, and an assertive voice vis-à-vis the army. He was one of the Commons delegation which worked with the Lords to determine the final shape of the Four Bills (29 Nov.). He was one of the leaders of the Independents who shaped the final Vote of No Further Addresses, taken on 17 Jan. 1648.356CJ v. 371a, 416a. He was the leader of the Commons group which instructed Thomas Rainborowe* to take charge of the fleet off the Isle of Wight (1 Jan. 1648), in further defiance of the Lords, who considered his appointment ‘dangerous’.357CJ v. 406a, 413b; ‘Thomas Rainborowe’, infra. Only days later, Prideaux reported a complaint by the earl of Manchester that John Lilburne was going in and out of the Tower, where he was supposed to be incarcerated; on this occasion a conciliatory note was struck.358CJ v. 437a. He was reported in late February to have met with army leaders Sir Thomas Fairfax*, Oliver Cromwell* and army treasurer Francis Allein* in the dead of night to discuss ways of detaching the king from the Scots.359Bodl. Clarendon 30, f. 134. He was included as an assistant at the trials of prominent royalists including Sir Lewis Dyve†, and was appointed counsel to Richard Jennings*, ordered to waive his privilege and respond to a suit against him by his sisters (19 Jan., 25 Feb. 1648).360CJ v. 437b, 472a. Much more significant legal work was entrusted to him when he was given sole charge of drawing up the ordinance to appoint new commissioners of the great seal (2 Mar).361CJ v. 477a.

Prideaux opposed an award of arrears of pay to Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle*), (16 Feb.), but his objection may have been to the raid on the source of funding, the excise, the mainstay of earlier payments to western causes, rather than to the principle.362CJ v. 465b. Western affairs continued to be dominated by Prideaux, who drafted the letter of thanks to Weldon, now released from his burdens at Plymouth (13 Mar.), and he won an order to draft a new charter for Taunton, acting in response to a petition from that town. Similarly it was Prideaux who was asked to draft an ordinance for a preaching ministry in Exeter, developing a scheme which had begun in the Exeter city council chamber a few weeks earlier, described in error by the Journal clerk as a plan for Oxford.363CJ v. 494a, 497b, 525b; Devon RO, Exeter city act bk. ix, f. 10v. He was said during April, as ‘king of the west Saxons’, to have worked with Pyne to elicit petitions from the west country in favour of the Vote of No Addresses.364[C. Walker], Hist. of Independency (1648), 91 (E.463.19). But Prideaux’s standing as more than a regional boss, as an Independent grandee in fact, was confirmed on 1 June when he was among the additions to the Derby House Committee, the supreme executive body of both Houses.365CJ v. 578b; LJ x. 295b. The most important of the political tasks that were allotted to him as a Member of the Commons following that appointment was his part in insisting to the Lords (15 July) that the king should accept three propositions, thus abandoning his declarations against Parliament, promising a Presbyterian church settlement and putting the militia under parliamentary control.366CJ v. 624a, 637a; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, iv. 159. In similar vein, Prideaux helped manage a conference between the Houses on control over the soldiery, where again there was conflict between them (29 July), the day after a compromise was reached which allowed a treaty to be negotiated, on the Isle of Wight. Prideaux was one of the five Members who were to draw up instructions for the parliamentary commissioners.367CJ v. 651b, 659b.

Prideaux’s election to the Derby House Committee brought him under the hostile scrutiny of the royalist pamphleteers. Initially he was dismissed as not worth writing about, but he was quickly bracketed with ‘his spaniel’ John Swynfen* in early July as opponents of both Covenant and the Newport Treaty. In fact, both men were in favour of an anglicized, Erastian version of Presbyterianism, both among the five Members given responsibility a month later for an ordinance to introduce such a national church.368Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 12 (23-30 June 1648), sig. M6 (E.448.17); no. 14 (27 June-4 July 1648), sig. O2(ii) (E.450.27); CJ v. 662a. In the wake of the second civil war, Prideaux was aggressively in favour of the Commons vote condemning all who had encouraged the Scots to re-enter the kingdom in recent months as traitors, and in the House singled out Sir John Maynard* for particular venom on this score.369Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 17 (18-25 July 1648), sig. R2(i) (E.454.4). He was in charge of an ordinance allowing for treason trials in all parts of the country (26 July), and was said to have brought in an ordinance to deal by martial law with all taken in arms (25 Aug.).370CJ v. 648a; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 22 (22-29 Aug. 1648), sig. Dd (E.461.17). On 31 August, he and his Committee of the West colleague Denis Bond supported the decision to execute Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle by firing-squad at Colchester, and a week later Prideaux backed a request from the council of army officers, which arrived without Fairfax’s signature, demanding the approval of the Commons for executions of those who surrendered there.371Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 23 (29 Aug.-5 Sept. 1648), sig. Ec2(v) (E.462.8).

The excoriating newspaper pen-portraits of ‘Mun’ Prideaux made much of the wealth he had acquired by this time. He was said to have enjoyed an estate of only £80 a year before he came into the House, but had begun to make money by fees for orders granted during his chairmanship of the committee on obstructions to justice in 1643, before the great seal had been put into commission. These sums were paltry compared to his income from the post office, stated by his enemies to be £20,000 in the six years he had by 1648 been running it.372Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 24 (5-12 Sept. 1648), sigs. Hhi-Hh2i [Burney Collection alternative version to E.462.33]. An alternative commentary listed his salary as a commissioner of the great seal at £1,500 a year, his law practice as worth £500 a year, and the postmastership, the circumstances by which he acquired it dismissed as corrupt ‘good parliament-justice’, as bringing to him £100 a week.373The Names of the Members of the House of Commons (1648, 669.f.12.103). His income by privileged legal practice alone was said after his death to have been £5,000, but the reported ordinance securing him seniority as king’s counsel, second only to the solicitor-general, has not been found.374The Mystery of the Good Old Cause (1660), 27 (E.1923.2); Old DNB. Some four years previously, D’Ewes had condemned ‘proud, corrupt Prideaux’, but that was a comment on his politics rather than on his acquisitiveness. It was perhaps his conspicuous wealth that made him a target of a street attack in the City on 30 September.375Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 27 (26 Sept. - 3 Oct. 1648), sig. Oo2v (E.564.19) .

In the autumn, Prideaux added to his collection of offices, first by becoming treasurer of the Inner Temple, a position he held for the rest of his life, and – only days later – solicitor-general (25 Nov.). The latter high office came after he had successfully resisted, with the help of Roger Hill II, the wish of elements in the Commons to accept the king’s offer to concede parliamentary appointment of judges. Prideaux’s motion insisted on parliamentary appointments to the judiciary immediately, regardless of treaty proceedings at Newport. According to a hostile observer, Prideaux lay behind the list of judges brought in by the commissioners of the great seal, whose own appointments he had structured by ordinance. Prideaux’s name as solicitor-general ‘crept into’ the list.376CJ vi. 51a, 86a; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 28 (3-10 Oct. 1648), sig. Pp2(iii) (E.466.11); no. 29 (10-17 Oct. 1648), sig. Sf. (E.467.38). Soon after his appointment, the House debated the king’s answers to Parliament’s propositions at Newport, and during one of these debates (2 Dec.), Prideaux adopted a hard-line stance, supported on this occasion by Wroth, whom he had sworn a freeman of Lyme, and Sir Peter Wentworth*. Thereafter, a hostile press noted Wroth variously as Prideaux’s ‘fool’ or ‘monkey’.377Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 36/37 (5-12 Dec. 1648), sig. Ccc2(i) (E.476.2); no. 38 (12-19 Dec. 1648), sig. Ddd2(i) (E.476.35); no. 39 (19-26 Dec. 1648), sig. Eee2 (E.477.30) He was clearly fully in sympathy with the army’s interference with Parliament on 6 December, and on the 12th, again with Wroth, spoke in the purged House in favour of the January vote of no addresses to the king. He was associated with speeches to the same effect on the 20th.378Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 38 (12-19 Dec. 1648), sig. Ddd2(i) (E.476.35); 39 (19-26 Dec. 1648), sig. Eee2 (E.477.30). Later commentators, with the benefit not only of hindsight but also with an eye to the approval of the restored monarchy, identified him as among ‘the protector’s greatest instruments’ for his conduct at this time.379The Devils Cabinet-Councell (1660), 9 (E.2111.2).

Solicitor- and attorney-general, 1649-50

Prideaux played no part in the preparations for the trial of Charles I, nor in the proceedings themselves. However, no record of his formal resignation of the office of solicitor-general has been found, so – pace a modern authority – it seems more a surmise than a proven fact that he resigned and dissuaded John Pyne from involving himself in the events that led to the king’s death.380Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 186-7. John Cook’s role in the trial as ‘solicitor for the commonwealth’ seems to have been the result of an ad hoc appointment, not one by virtue of his holding the title solicitor-general, which in fact he never held.381State Trials ed. Howell, iv. 995, 1001; Muddiman, Trial of Charles I, 196, 198; Sainty, List of Eng. Law Officers, 62. This being the case, Prideaux’s managing to keep clear of the affair while retaining the office bestowed on him in November 1648 seems remarkable, and a tribute to his political dexterity. He continued to attend the House after a trial of the king was virtually certain, and on the eve of the execution was named to a parliamentary committee on repealing earlier legislation (30 Jan. 1649).382CJ vi. 116a, 126a. He attended the Army Committee regularly through December and January.383SP28/56/1-3, 57/2, 58/1-2. Soon after the regicide he was named to the committee for compiling new commissions of the peace, and for the new form of oath to be taken by judges (8 Jan.). In the latter task he was joined by long-standing collaborators of his such as Roger Hill II and Bulstrode Whitelocke.384CJ vi. 134a, b. In the early months of the commonwealth he was involved in various other tasks, mostly of a legal kind, that arose as a result of the transformation from monarchy to republic. These included committees on the bill to abolish kingship, on oaths and on legal proceedings.385CJ vi. 143b, 144a, 152b, 158a, 169a. But despite this show of commitment, he seems to have left it until 1 Feb. formally to register his dissent to the vote of 5 December.386Prynne, A Full Declaration (1660), 23 (E.1013.22); Worden, Rump Parliament, 35.

Prideaux was named attorney-general on 9 Apr. 1649.387CJ vi. 182a. His patent was confirmed by the commissioners of the great seal, who thus returned the compliment Prideaux had done them a week earlier by moving successfully that they be given the title lords commissioners.388Whitelocke, Mems. iii. 6, 11. Between the execution of the king and that date, he had been named to a dozen committees, which had revealed him to be a diligent Rumper but not one of the leading architects of the republic. After his appointment to one of the most senior legal posts, his parliamentary activity was necessarily conditioned by these new responsibilities, and it becomes impossible to distinguish Prideaux the parliamentarian from Prideaux the judicial grandee. Every bill that Parliament passed came in one sense through his in-tray, but in his first year in office, Prideaux took particular responsibility for drafting certain pieces of legislation. These included bills on the coinage and the mint (which reached fruition in July 1649), for general pardon and oblivion (which took until February 1652 to complete), and for the sale of fee farm rents formerly belonging to the crown (Feb. 1650).389CJ vi. 188a, 195a, 196b, 241a, 245a, 250b, 251b, 258a, 262b, 268b, 369b, 377b, 425b. He was forward in rewarding the commonwealth’s friends, drafting the modest award of a hospital mastership on John Cooke, the late king’s prosecutor (July), and framing the grant to Fairfax of £4,000 (24 Aug.).390Mercurius Pragmaticus Pt 2 no. 11 (26 June-3 July 1649), sig. L3(iii) (E.562.21); CJ vi. 258a, 285b. He was summoned, not as a commissioner, but as a witness, to the trials of five leading royalists prominent in the second civil war, and was said by Clarendon to have treated Lord Capel ‘with great rudeness and insolence’.391CJ vi. 146b; Clarendon, Hist. iv. 502.

Prideaux was prominent in the decision to declare the Leveller-inspired mutineers at Burford to be in open rebellion, and drafted the proclamation against them (21 May 1649).392CJ vi. 207b, 213b. To his lot, by virtue of his high office as ‘state’s attorney or hangman-general’, fell the unenviable task of prosecuting John Lilburne, after the council of state had consulted him on how best to proceed against the Leveller leaders.393Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 5 (8-15 May 1649), p. 27 (E.555.14); CJ vi. 196a, 285b, 293a The predictable result of his attempt at a friendly chat with the irrepressible radical (14 Sept.) was Lilburne’s book Strength out of Weaknesse, which detailed the conversation between them, inevitably serving the author’s self-aggrandizing purposes.394J. Lilburne, Strength out of Weaknesse (1649, E.575.18). The publication, which incensed the council of state, appeared just before Lilburne’s trial, a course on which Prideaux was already set before their meeting. Prideaux determined the shape of the trial, ensuring that extensive extracts from the Leveller leader’s writings were read out in court as part of the case for the prosecution. Prideaux was in court, directing proceedings in ‘hugger-mugger’ consultations with the judges, to which the defendant vociferously objected.395P. Gregg, Free-born John (1961), 297-8. When the trial jury brought in a verdict of not guilty (26 Oct.), it was a major blow against the legal establishment of the commonwealth, and Prideaux had to report back on the disaster to the council of state.396Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 27, pt. 2 (23-30 Oct. 1649), sig. Ddv (E.575.40); Gardiner, Hist. Commonwealth and Protectorate, i. 166-9; CJ vi. 315a Only two weeks later, he had to bring the state’s case against Clement Walker*, who months earlier had been among the first to identify Prideaux in print as a political manipulator.397CJ vi. 322a; [Walker], Hist. Independency, 91.

The inauguration of the commonwealth enabled Prideaux to tighten his grip on the inland letter office. A number of petitions, from the public as well as from other MPs, requesting improvements in the postal service, were referred by the council of state to Prideaux.398CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 13, 19, 147, 441. In March 1650, he produced a paper summarizing his policies as postmaster-general in recent years. In essence he had sought to reduce the cost to the state by increasing the charge to individual users of the weekly service, doubtless to the 6d. per letter alleged by his enemies, and claimed by this time to have saved over £7,000 by this means. He faced a challenge from the common council of London, which had established its own postmasters on the road to Scotland, and from the heirs of the earl of Warwick’s interest. Prideaux skilfully argued that this competition encroached on the rights of Parliament, and secured votes in the House that the home and foreign postal services were in its sole disposal and that the council of state should review the arrangements for management.399CJ vi. 385a; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 38, 54, 56, 73, 85; SP18/67/59, SP18/65/51/I; Mystery of the Good Old Cause (1660), 27 (E.1923.2). This seems, for the time, to have seen off the threat to his hegemony over the service, but periodically the council of state took an interest in the dependability and security of the service, issuing instructions to Prideaux on particular managerial issues.400CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 197, 297, 1651-2, pp. 15, 254. Challenges to his monopoly continued to be launched, and by the last months of the Rump, facing petitions for a reduction in the postal rates from his own postmasters, Prideaux had taken to arguing defensively that the office of postmaster and the function of carrying letters were separate entities, and that the resolutions of the House had been about the former, not necessarily the latter.401To the Right Honorable, the Councell of State (1653, 669. f.16. 91); CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 109; J. Hill, A Penny Post (1659), 2-4. The meagre rewards and thanks bestowed on his postmasters in October 1652 suggest a belated concern for the loyalty of subordinates in his fiefdom.402CCC 614.

Even though Prideaux was by this time a leading republican officeholder, he did not renounce his political interests in the south-west, nor did he ever seek to acquire landed wealth outside his native region. The Committee of the West had ceased to exist when the Commonwealth came into being, but a number of western affairs, left over from the Committee, claimed his attention afterwards, including the cases of Thomas Boone* and Arthur Upton*, whose claims on the state was to be satisfied by a grant of capitular lands.403CJ vi. 193a, 198b. He was given leave to visit Bristol (31 July 1649), doubtless with a view to cementing the loyalty of the city to the republic, and dispensed justice at the city sessions at Exeter at least once during the life of the Rump.404CJ vi. 272b, Devon RO, Exeter City Archive, bk. 64, f. 197. The claim of Charles Vaghan* to the clerkship of the peace in Devon stood no chance of prevailing now that Prideaux was not only custos of the county, but so powerful in government, and the latter’s appointee took the clerkship.405Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8, Jan. 1649. Prideaux trafficked in west country properties. Sometimes this was for the benefit of his client boroughs, as when he secured for Lyme Regis an estate from confiscated lands of the 1st Baron Poulett (John Poulett†).406LJ xi. 116b. But for his own undiluted personal benefit, he speculated extensively in west country lands sold off by the state. In February 1650 he bought the crown property of Sidmouth mills, for just over £400, and acquired the associated fee farm rents, with Ottery St Mary manor and Forde abbey, paying over £1,500. His purchase of Forde abbey itself was a transaction with a private vendor, not confiscated property and not mediated through the state.407Roberts, Recovery and Restoration, 161-2. He bought the house and estate from Sir Henry Rosewell, head of a Somerset gentry family in decline.408F.B. James, ‘Sir Henry Rosewell: a Devon Worthy’, Trans. Devonshire Assoc. xx. 113-22. Prideaux borrowed over £5,000 during the early 1650s in order to fund these transactions. Among his creditors were the 4th earl of Northumberland (Algernon Percy†) and the earl’s agents Hugh Potter* and Robert Scawen*; and among his own agents, Thomas Bampfylde*, who was to succeed him as recorder of Exeter.409Dorset RO, D/FAE/T60.

In February 1651, Prideaux joined the council of state after elections in the House, and retained his place on it until the fall of the Rump in April 1653. He went to meetings regularly, but was never part of its core membership, in terms of frequency of attendance.410CJ vi. 532b; CSP Dom. 1651, p. xxxv. This was doubtless because of his other pressing duties as attorney-general. Among the high profile trials he managed in 1651 were those by summary justice in Norfolk, the trial of the Presbyterian minister Christopher Love, and those of the Scots taken after the battle of Worcester.411CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 169, 205-6, 230, 389, 447, 478; CJ vi. 614b, vii. 14a, b. Inevitably, the number of committees of the House to which Prideaux was named, as opposed to committees of the council of state, was reduced markedly from the levels before he held high office: 20 in 1651, for example. He was involved in drawing up various instruments anathematizing Charles Stuart and his followers as enemies of the Commonwealth.412CJ vii. 12a, 14b, 15b; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 69, 358. Among the most important legislation he took care of in the mid-way phase of the Rump’s life was the postponed bill for indemnity and oblivion (Nov. 1651), and he was inevitably involved in drafting the notorious bill setting limits to the duration of the Parliament (25 Sept. 1651).413CJ vi. 544b, vii. 20b, 44a. His rare appearances as a teller were on 9 Jan. 1652, when he was teamed with Whitelocke against Lisle and Solicitor-general Robert Reynolds on exemptions from the terms of the Navigation Act, and on 15 September, when he opposed the second reading of a bill to enable a peer to sell lands to pay debts. On each occasion he was on the losing side of the division, but what is striking is how minor the issues were, suggesting that Prideaux was no longer a major figure in purely parliamentary terms.414CJ vii. 67a, 182b.

His authority and status in the executive, by contrast, were at their peak. He had never stood down from the Army Committee, and continued to be named to it in successive acts. His London workload made local responsibilities impracticable, but it is a measure of his authority that he was able to divest himself of two recorderships to friends of his: Bristol went to Whitelocke, and Exeter to Thomas Bampfylde. Although he was no longer active in the Committee for Plundered Ministers, he was prominent in nominating individuals to church livings during the Rump, all of them in Devon. He may have been more sympathetic than the local committeemen were towards the moderate episcopalian vicar of Barnstaple, Martin Blake.415Bodl. Walker c.4, f. 552; Roberts, Recovery and Restoration, 91. He had moved a long way in ten years from the pro-Scots Presbyterianism he appeared to have espoused in 1643. His choice of John Tillotson, fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, as tutor for his son in 1656 or 1657, suggests that in Prideaux’s eyes, intellectual distinction, academic attainment and loyalty to the government of which he was a member were more important qualities in a private tutor than precise theological allegiances, since Tillotson and others of his generation at the universities were moving away from the Calvinism that had been a hallmark of Prideaux’s earlier religious orientation. Prideaux helped Tillotson gain access to funding for improvements to his college, and although the modern description of the chapel he built at Forde as ‘high-church’ is an exaggeration, the building is certainly not redolent of Presbyterian plainness.416T. Birch, Life of the Most Reverend Dr John Tillotson (1753), 14, 16, 17; Oxford DNB, ‘John Tillotson’; T. Mowl, B. Earnshaw, Architecture without Kings (Manchester, 1995), 17; P. Hunneyball, ‘Cromwellian Style: the Architectural Trappings of the Protectorate Regime’, in The Cromwellian Protectorate ed P. Little (Woodbridge, 2007), 79.

In the dying months of the Rump Parliament, the complaints against Prideaux from would-be competitors in the postal business reached a new peak. In a paper submitted to the lord protector’s council, it was alleged that a competition by sealed bids for the franchise of running the service was disrupted by Prideaux and his allies, who offered to match any offer his competitors made, had his men attack rival carriers, distributed libels against them, and closed down their operations on Sundays. Prideaux retired from the postmastership after the Rump was dismissed by Cromwell, and the record of ‘the great letter conveyor’ was held up in print as characteristic of the ‘corruptness’ of the commonwealth.417SP18/67/65; N. Burt, An Appeal from Chancery (1653), 22-3 (E.697.21); J. W. M. Stone, The Inland Posts (1392-1672) (1987), 257-61. His agents were invited to continue to serve the new government subject to their accepting its authority.418CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 312. He was not invited to a seat in the Nominated Assembly, nor did Oliver Cromwell invite him to continue on the sixth council of state, which acted as the interim executive. This suggests either that his political credibility may have been damaged by the allegations surrounding the post office, or that his patent lack of interest in millenarian forms of Protestant enthusiasm made him unsuitable for further advancement. Nevertheless, he continued in post as attorney-general, and was faced once again with managing a second trial of John Lilburne. He dismissed legal objections to the proceedings, but they once again ended in the Leveller’s acquittal after Prideaux had been made ‘absolutely to quit the field’.419CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 415; 1653-4, pp. 4, 85; TSP i. 367; Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii. 294-99; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, iii. 77, 87. He made a long opening speech at the trial of Peter Vowell for conspiracy to assassinate the protector, a trial by court of justice, not by jury (June 1654), which ended in Vowell’s condemnation and execution.420CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 233-40; Whitelocke, Mems. iv. 113.

Prideaux returned to his seat at Lyme Regis for the first Protectorate Parliament in a very different political climate from the year before. He was named to the committee of privileges, and as attorney-general drafted the document which formed the basis of debate on recognizing the government (14 Sept. 1654).421CJ vii. 366b, 367b. He was ex officio a manager of the government’s business in the House, sitting mainly on committees involving the law, as might have been expected. Among these topics were the probate judges at Salters’ Hall (15 Sept.), reforming chancery (the court in which he had practised) (5 Oct.), abuses in writs (3 Nov.) and the abolition of purveyance (22 Dec.).422CJ vii. 368a, 374a, 381b, 407b. In none of these matters could anyone have expected anything other than managerial competence from Prideaux; he is not known to have evinced any interest in reforming the law. In the event no bills from this Parliament were passed, and of much greater significance was Prideaux’s work in managing state trials. In the aftermath of Penruddock’s rising, he backed Cromwell to the full, giving a legal judgment to encourage the view that sequestered estates were at the lord protector’s disposal.423TSP iii. 342. Because of his regional standing, he was required to drop his drafting duties and hasten to the west to manage the trials there of the Penruddock rebels, assisted by his old associate, Roger Hill II.424CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 91, 97, 111 Prideaux was afraid that the involvement in the trials of Lord Chief Justice Henry Rolle†, captured by the rebels during the rising, would prejudice proceedings, but Rolle did not act.425TSP iii. 361, 372. Prideaux sat at Salisbury, Dorchester, Exeter and Chard between 12 and 25 April, sending back detailed reports of the trials, which he called the ‘great work’, to John Thurloe*.426TSP iii. 371, 372-3, 377-9, 398, 402, 407. Despite a busy schedule, he managed to find time to lobby Thurloe on behalf of Lyme, where he remained active as recorder, as well as parliamentary burgess, until his death.427TSP iii. 378-9; Dorset RO, DC/LR D2/1; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 233, 235. At the trial of the merchant George Cony in May, he refuted arguments from the defendant’s counsel which seemed to question the legitimacy of the protectorate.428CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 167-8.

In the 1656 Parliament, he was again named to the committee of privileges, and was a teller in favour of a prohibition on private petitioning (23 Sept.), which was threatening to obstruct the flow of parliamentary business.429CJ vii. 424a, 427b. The number of specific legislative items that came his way as an individual to draft was small. With four others including Whitelocke he was asked to draw up a clause to be added to the Declaration on a day of fasting that would strengthen the penalties for profaning the sabbath (22 Sept.), and in the spring of 1657 he was required to bring in a fresh indemnity bill (20 Mar.) and was one of a quartet of senior law officers that penned the important assessment bill (29 May); it widened the social base of the local tax commissioners it appointed, as a ‘healing and settling’ alternative to the principles of ‘decimation’ which had prevailed under the major-generals.430CJ vii. 426a, 509a, 542a. Again with other senior lawyers in the House he was charged with amending the politically sensitive bill that would confirm that the end of the parliamentary session would not be determined by the protector’s assent to bills (27 Nov. 1656).431CJ vii. 459b. If there is any pattern in the subject matter of the 54 committees to which he was named in this Parliament in total, it is that the majority had legal matters, either explicitly or implicitly, at stake in them.

Prideaux had no sympathy for the Quaker, James Naylor. He urged that there were no legal obstacles sufficient to restrain the House from hearing Naylor at the bar and then coming to judgment. He wanted him sent to a country town for punishment, fearing disorder from crowds in a city, and brushed aside a London petition for clemency.432Burton’s Diary, i. 29, 31, 156, 219. When Cromwell sent to the House his famous message querying its procedure against Naylor, Prideaux took a sanguine view of what it meant, reminding Members approvingly that they had ‘asserted’ their ‘judicatory power’.433Burton’s Diary, i. 249. He wanted Naylor first whipped, then hanged, arguing (26 Dec.) that delay would be seen as a tacit admission that they had a case to answer. He saw nothing in the query that implied the lord protector was sympathetic towards Naylor. For a lawyer, he was sceptical about precedents, arguing that ‘certain rules’ counted for more, and was keen that the public should be sent a message of firmness, while a committee should draft a reply to Cromwell.434Burton’s Diary, i. 249, 258, 280-1. At one point during the lengthy debates, Prideaux argued that the House was too thin to debate the Naylor case, instead opportunistically moving a bill for the encouragement of the orthodox ministry in Bristol, where Naylor had allegedly blasphemed and where Prideaux had served as recorder.435Burton’s Diary, i. 267-8. He also actively supported a bill for the ministry at Newport, Isle of Wight (24 Dec.).436Burton’s Diary, i. 224.

Prideaux often spoke to advise on procedure. He urged against debating a possible alteration in a decision by the House (23 Dec.), reminded Members of the precedents that private business would be prepared by committees (1 Jan. 1657) and warned against divisions on a resolution already passed (29 Apr.).437Burton’s Diary, i. 219, 292, ii. 71. Prideaux supported the new civilian constitution, the Humble Petition and Advice, tabled on 23 February 1657, and he was listed as having voted in favour of offering the crown to Cromwell in the first article, on 25 March.438Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 22 (E.935.5). He was not only sympathetic to the idea of a second chamber, but seems to have been keen on the title House of Lords, pointing out on 2 Feb. 1658 that ‘if it had not been for a House of Lords we had not been a House of Commons’, and reminding Members that it was the Lords who had secured Magna Carta. He went further that day, moving that the Other House should be called the House of Lords. He urged negotiations with the Other House, and a settlement of the relationship between the Houses and the lord protector before the House rose, but it was an indication of his managerial function in this Parliament that the following day he spoke in contrary terms, now in favour of adopting the title Other House.439Burton’s Diary, ii. 419-21, 441. As attorney-general and as one with experience during the Rump of legislating on marriage (22 Mar. 1650), he would have expected to command attention when he pronounced against making earlier matrimonial laws void, which would provoke ‘suits all England over’.440Burton’s Diary, ii. 72.

In June 1658, Prideaux was created a baronet, supposedly for his offer to maintain 34 foot soldiers in Ireland, but surely really to recognize his unshakeable loyalty to the protectoral regime.441C231/6, p. 401; CB iii. 6. The last state trial he managed for the Oliverian protectorate was that of the pro-royalist preacher, Dr John Hewitt, where he taxed the defendant with claiming ignorance of the law while pretending to more knowledge of it than the court.442Abbott, Writings and Speeches, iv. 819. By virtue of his office, he walked alongside John Maynard* in Lord Protector Oliver’s funeral procession, on 23 November.443Burton’s Diary, ii. 526. He signed the proclamation of Richard Cromwell* as lord protector, and retained both high office and parliamentary seat.444Whitelocke, Mems. iv. 336. He was one of the commissioners who administered the oath to Members of the 1659 Parliament, doing so in the queen’s court (27 Jan.), and the following day was inevitably called to the privileges committee.445CJ vii. 593a, 594a, 595a. He was named to 7 other committees, including on the old question of relationships with the Other House (6 Apr.), on the preservation of parliamentary records and on security (14, 18 Apr.).446CJ vii. 627a, 639a, 642a. He was a vigorous proponent of the new regime, moving the second reading of the bill of recognition (I Feb.), and working hand-in-glove with Maynard (7 Feb.) to propel the bill along its course through Parliament.447Burton’s Diary, iii. 30, 117. As before, he was free in dispensing advice to the House on procedure, on many occasions (e.g. 9 Feb., 4 Mar., 28 Mar., 31 Mar.).448Burton’s Diary, iii. 192; iv. 19, 282, 291, 311. He was a natural opponent of the commonwealthsmen, on 8 Feb. first speaking for the people, ‘willing to forgive and forget all’, then, against Sir Henry Vane II, declaring impatiently against further debate about recognizing the new lord protector.449Burton’s Diary, iii. 131-2, 150. He clashed with Vane again on foreign policy (24 Feb.), defending the management of affairs in the Baltic by the executive, and refuting the inference he drew from Vane’s speech that Parliament was in danger of losing control over the military.450Burton’s Diary, iii. 451, 459. He seems, as befits a parliamentary manager, to have been accommodating on occasion early in the session towards the republicans such as Hesilrige (17 Feb.), but was soon exasperated by their stonewalling on fundamentals, clashing with Hesilrige, Thomas Scot I and Vane on various matters as the days lengthened into spring.451Burton’s Diary, iii. 318, 327; iv. 13, 37, 326.

Prideaux was still capable of demonstrating clemency. He was sympathetic towards Henry Neville* (16 Feb.), accused of blasphemy (on this occasion backing Hesilrige) and towards William Boteler*: to judge him incapable of holding office was to ‘bury him alive’.452Burton’s Diary, iii. 296-7; iv. 408. His apparent support for Boteler may have been tactical, however, since he argued for a referral of his case to the Other House for trial. On 28 February he made a long speech in favour of the Other House as it stood, against a return of the historic peerage, which would ‘necessarily bring in regality’. That would mean the voiding of all sales of confiscated lands. The Other House, by contrast, would be ‘of great security to this nation’; its members should be men ‘faithful’ to the elected House, whose members should ‘make and mould’ the second chamber. Ancient right played no part in this.453Burton’s Diary, iii. 525-6. In another long speech on 2 Mar. he argued against the hereditary principle for the Other House, but allowed that some loyal peers, who happened to be hereditaries should be included, his exasperation at the slowness of progress showing through his remark that the written constitution ‘had been beaten so thin, nothing more can be said on it’.454Burton’s Diary, iii. 590-1. His made plain his frustration on other occasions: ‘we are in for a month at this rate of speaking’ (5 Mar., on challenges to the Speaker); ‘I see what this savours of’ (8 Mar., after attacks on the right of Scots and Irish Members to sit); ‘the chair deserved no check’ (1 Apr., ditto, after Hesilrige claimed there was no standing order that members should speak to a purpose); ‘it was never known’ (8 Apr., on suggestions about taking messages to the second chamber).455Burton’s Diary, iv. 37, 87, 326, 377.

Beyond the sterility and waste of energy in these exchanges, Prideaux occasionally offered reflections on his long parliamentary experience. He ruminated on the way that the executive committees no longer depended on named chairmen to preside before business could be transacted (17 Feb.), doubtless with his time in the Committee of the West in mind; stood by the procedures he had followed in the Penruddock trials of 1655, protecting John Copleston* from attack (25 Mar.), and gave the House the benefit of his very great experience on how conferences between the Houses should be managed (6 Apr.). He was disobliging towards an old associate of his from Long Parliament days, dismissing John Wylde’s petition to be restored to the post of chief baron of the exchequer as ‘not proper’ (13 Apr.).456Burton’s Diary, iii. 312; iv. 270, 422. His last recorded speeches in this or any other Parliament were on the Quakers (16 Apr.), where he argued that their petitions to the House should only ever be considered if they could prove that all other avenues open to them had failed. Against Solicitor-general Reynolds, who thought that the Declaration against the Quakers would be better worded as a response to their ‘numerous’ meetings, Prideaux wanted to adhere to the reference to their ‘tumultuous’ assemblies, arguing that any assembly in unlawful numbers was a tumult. It seems likely that the protectorate fell before the Declaration reached print.457Burton’s Diary, iv. 444, 445; CJ vii. 640b; Lambert, Printing for Parliament, 194.

When the Rump re-assembled on 7 May, Prideaux found himself attorney-general again (to his critics ‘attorney-general to all governments’), having survived in office through all the vicissitudes of the decade.458England’s Confusion (1659), 10. He was named to 7 committees between 7 May and 9 August, including on tracking the whereabouts of Rumpers of 1649-53 who had not turned up, and on reviewing post-1653 legislation, some of which of course, Prideaux had played a major part in drafting.459CJ vii. 645a, 661b He was asked with Sir James Harington* to review a bill requiring London householders to certify numbers of lodgers, horses and arms, which reached the statute-book on 22 July, and took charge of the proclamation outlawing John Mordaunt, styled Lord Mordaunt (29 July), part of the pre-emptive strike against the royalist conspirator.460CJ vii. 736b, 739a. The last reference to Prideaux in the Journal came on 9 August, when he was included in the committee tasked with drafting the proclamation against Sir George Boothe* and his rebel colleagues.461CJ vii. 754a. Prideaux had drawn up his will, after having ‘called upon ... God and craved his direction and assistance’ in it, on 1 April, a day he spent at Westminster in wearisome conflict with Vane and Hesilrige.462PROB11/296, f. 315; Burton’s Diary, iv. 326. Beyond the bequest to his wife of a pearl necklace and a breast jewel of 46 diamonds, the will read modestly enough, with no mention of most of his estates. Something of the old puritan was visible in the Calvinist preamble and the admonition to his son not to quarrel with his mother over the value of items of property. The marriage settlement he had drawn up when his son married in 1656, two years in the planning, is a better indication of his material condition, as he was able to provide a jointure for his daughter-in-law of £10,000, and listed property in five Devon parishes, separate and distinct from the Forde estate.463Dorset RO, D/FAE/T60.

He died on 19 August 1659 in London, and his funeral procession back to Forde for burial was quite an event. A pass was issued by the council of state for a coach to fetch his relatives for the funeral, and despite the wish he expressed in his will for a plain funeral without pomp, his coffin was judged by a hostile observer of the obsequies to have been ‘so fine a thing that it might have served more fit for a real person of quality’s chamber ornament’.464CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 566; Underdown, Som. in the Civil War and Interregnum, 191, quoting Bristol RO, AC/C64/21. When the procession reached Crewkerne, the town bells tolled.465Som. RO, D/P/crew 4/1/1. Whitelocke, an old associate of Prideaux’s, judged him ‘a generous person, and faithful to the Parliament’s interest; a good chancery-man’.466Whitelocke, Mems. iv. 358. His son, also Edmund, was said to have inherited £60,000. He kept Forde at the Restoration, but lost the baronetcy and the crown property of Sidmouth mills and the fee farm rents. He sat for Taunton in 1680 and 1681, but involved himself with the Monmouth rising, and had to pay an enormous fine to buy his pardon from Judge George Jeffreys. After his death in 1702 Forde passed to Francis Gwyn†, his son-in-law.467HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Edmund Prideaux’. The son-in-law of Edmund Prideaux senior, (Sir) John Churchill†, was the deputy registrar of chancery who was said in 1647 to have lent Prideaux £40 and then worked closely with him to their mutual personal profit during the period before the great seal was put into commission.468HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Sir John Churchill’; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 23 (29 Aug.-5 Sept. 1648), sigs. Hhi-Hh2i [Burney Collection alternative version to E.462.33].

Assessment

Prideaux’s career illustrates how parliamentary service during these decades could provide the means by which not only high legal office could be attained, but held – and sustained – in tandem with an important national executive role and regional political dominance. His background as a son of an ancient gentry family and his standing as not only a successful, if not outstanding pre-civil war lawyer but also a minor sufferer at the hands of the Caroline regime fitted him for a successful career in Parliament. But his work on the triennial bill and other contributions to drafting the ‘remedial’ legislation of 1641 marked his rise to prominence, within the space of a few months. From early in 1641 Prideaux became noticeable for his collaboration with other lawyers with talent at drafting bills, and from this time also emerged a west country bloc of lawyers, driven more than anything else by fear and loathing of popery, in which he was a natural leader. The chairing of a committee on the post office proved in Prideaux’s case to be the opening which led to his acquiring the running of the service, which developed during a period of stalemate between the Houses over the proprietorial rights to it. The tacit grant to Prideaux of the post office proved something of a Trojan horse for him politically, giving him an inside track into news reporting to the House.

To have been allowed to develop his personal hegemony over the post office, Prideaux must have won the approval of the ‘junto’, and his role in managing impeachments in 1642 is further evidence of his political reliability in the eyes of the king’s fiercest critics. He became a leading drafter of declarations put out by Parliament in defence of its strategy vis-à-vis the king, but it was probably his return to Devon at the outbreak of civil war that set him on the path towards political distinctiveness. After building political credibility with the city of Exeter, Prideaux consistently espoused a belief in regional military associations as a way of winning the civil war, and seems to have been strengthened not weakened in his faith in this strategy by the vicissitudes in finding a commander-in-chief for the south-west. He played a key role in quashing the attempted regional peace treaty in March 1643, while maintaining a critical approach to the centralized military command implied by the inauguration of the Committee of Safety. The reward for his work in keeping the Devon men in line with war party parliamentary policy was preferment to the committee on obstructions to justice and then the commissionership of the great seal, positions he retained even as the south-west caved in to the royalists.

Prideaux remained consistent in his support for Waller against Essex as part of this same belief in the virtues of regional command, and from October 1643 Prideaux was the most important driver of the Committee of the West, a vehicle for this approach to military management. The Committee for Plymouth, Poole and Lyme was yet another forum in which Prideaux was able to promote what in effect became parliamentary policy towards the problem of recovering the west for Parliament, until Essex’s fateful decision to intervene personally in the field. The lord general’s campaign which ended at Lostwithiel can be interpreted as an ill-judged response to political rivalries at Westminster in which Prideaux played a leading part as a representative of regional interests. It was during the political turbulence following Essex’s humiliation that the Scots came to see Prideaux as an ally, and his involvement in the Uxbridge peace proposals can be read not as a cynical act in support of openly anti-Scots elements in the war party leadership, but as motivated by a genuine interest in securing a Presbyterian church settlement of some kind. But if this was indeed Prideaux’s position he soon fell into line with what emerged as the Independent view of military command and organization, quickly throwing his weight behind self-denying and new-modelling. This necessarily marked the end of his interest in a purely regional army, and his identification with Independency marked him as at best cool towards Edward Massie and his brigade.

A consistent aspect of Prideaux’s political behaviour during the 1640s was his critical approach towards the Upper House. In the many conferences with the Lords which he managed, he regularly resisted amendments by the peers to legislation drafted by the Commons, and as the likely author of the Negative Oath secured a significant procedural victory over those who would have insisted on the exemption of the peers from loyalty oath taking. The Negative Oath was one of a number of instruments deployed during the ‘reduction’ of the south-west in the wake of military successes by Fairfax, and Prideaux played a crucial part in both restructuring garrisons and managing ‘recruiter’ elections to the Long Parliament. Although he was after securing the recordership of Bristol the most significant politician in the south-west, he was by this time noticeably apart from the majority of MPs of that region in his political Independency, and from his fleeing to the army in 1647 a busy Westminster politician when his Devon colleagues spent an increasing amount of their time in their county. Pride’s Purge was the final confirmation of a pattern apparent from 1646. His appointment to the post of solicitor-general was not followed by an immediate resignation, and there is a case for attributing his apparent inactivity during the trial of the king either to procedural technicalities or to his own political adroitness rather than to principle.

Prideaux’s long career in the 1650s as attorney-general was in purely political terms an extended coda. As against the complexities of his parliamentary career during the 1640s, his role during the interregnum as a principal law officer of successive regimes was politically straightforward, and he seems to have been conscientiously and genuinely loyal to the governments he served. The hostile comment in contemporary newspapers and pamphlets that he attracted is of interest for the light it throws on his behaviour in the House as a leading Independent, and for what it reveals of his tenacious, not to say aggressive, management of the post office. While Prideaux was an exceptionally long-serving attorney-general, the financial rewards he accrued in the office cannot themselves be said to have been exceptional.