WITTEWRONGE, Sir John (1618-93), of Rothamsted, Wheathamstead, Herts., and Talerddig, Mont.

On 3 May 1664, the fiftieth anniversary of his parents’ marriage, Wittewronge wrote a brief history of his family for the benefit of his children. The tale he told was a dramatic one of flight from religious persecution, emigration to England and worldly success in their adopted homeland.34Herts. RO, DE/Lw/Z21/4. Wittewronge admitted that he knew nothing of his Flemish forbears before his paternal grandfather, although he was confident that they must have come from ‘an honourable stock’.35Herts. RO, DE/Lw/Z21/4, p. 1. That was perhaps optimistic as his grandfather’s immediate ancestors had been tinsmiths in Ghent.36‘Peds. of Wittewronge’, 6-8. That grandfather, Jacob Wittewronge, had fled from Ghent to England in 1564 to escape the repressive policies of Philip II and the 3rd duke of Alba.37Herts. RO, DE/Lw/Z21/4, pp. 2-4. This MP’s father, Jacob the younger, had married a wealthy heiress, Susanna Tielman, and had gone on to make a fortune as a London brewer.38Herts. RO, DE/Lw/Z21/4, pp. 4-5; I. Scouloudi, Returns of Strangers in the Metropolis 1593, 1627, 1635, 1639 (Huguenot Soc. lvii.), 220. None of the three sons born to Jacob and Susanna survived. His second wife, Anne Van Acker, was the daughter of another Protestant émigré from Flanders.39Herts. RO, DE/Lw/Z21/4, pp. 5-8. When he died in 1622, he left £16,534 6s 6d, of which John, his son, received £3,925.40Herts. RO, DE/Lw/Z21/3.

In 1611 the Bardolph family had mortgaged their lands at Wheathamstead, four miles to the north of St Albans, to Jacob Wittewronge. In 1623 Wittewronge’s widow bought out those lands, the manor of Rothamsted, from them in order to provide her young son, John, the future MP, then still just a young boy, with a country estate when he came of age.41VCH Herts. ii. 303. John Wittewronge’s prospects were further advanced by his mother’s second marriage that same year to Sir Thomas Myddelton†, the very wealthy former lord mayor of London. Wittewronge would later recall that Myddelton as his stepfather ‘gave me the same breeding, as if I had been his own child’.42Herts. RO, DE/Lw/Z21/4, p. 9. Once Wittewronge reached a marriageable age the two families moved to reinforce this connection by marrying him off to the first available female member of the family directly descended from Sir Thomas. In 1638 Wittewronge therefore married Mary, one of the daughters of Sir Thomas’s eldest son, Sir Thomas Myddelton*.43Herts. RO, DE/Lw/Z21/4, p. 9; DE/Lw/F10; ‘Observations of Weather’, ed. Williams and Stevenson, 76. Then or shortly afterwards, he took possession of the Rothamsted estate.44VCH Herts. ii. 303n. He received a knighthood on 16 February 1641 ‘by the means of some good friends’, presumably the Myddeltons.45Herts. RO, DE/Lw/Z22/6. His first wife had since died but later that same year he married the daughter of another of his mother’s stepsons.46Herts. RO, DE/Lw/F11; DE/Lw/Z21/4, pp. 9-10.

Years later, after the Restoration, Wittewronge would acknowledge that he had held office as a parliamentarian official during the civil war, although he would keenly insist that he had done so ‘without any by-ends or interest of my own’ and ‘without the least intention to be anyways instrument in the horrid consequences of that unhappy war’.47HMC Verulam, 64. That was probably true, in so far as few foresaw just what those consequences would be. But at the time he had given every indication of being one of Parliament’s more enthusiastic supporters in Hertfordshire. He was quick to offer his services. In late August 1642 the lord lieutenant of Hertfordshire, Viscount Cranborne (Charles Cecil*), appointed him as one of his deputy lieutenants and as a captain in the county militia commanding the troop to be raised in the south west of the county.48Herts. RO, DE/Lw/Z22/5; Impact of the First Civil War ed. Thomson, 1. He kitted himself out by buying a velvet saddle, pistols, leather from which he had a buff coat made, a breastplate, a helmet, a sword and a flask.49Herts. RO, DE/Lw/F18, p. 17.

The establishment of Oxford as the royalist headquarters made Buckinghamshire the front line, so the immediate role for the Hertfordshire parliamentarians was to support the defence of that neighbouring county. The plan was therefore that a regiment of volunteers would be raised in Hertfordshire with Wittewronge as its colonel. The major-general of the new Eastern Association, 1st Lord Grey of Warke (Sir William Grey†), may have issued Wittewronge with his commission as early as 31 January 1643.50Herts. RO, D/Z55/01. But the funding for this was not finalised until late March when Parliament imposed an additional weekly assessment on Hertfordshire. Wittewronge was one of the commissioners appointed to levy it.51A. and O. This regiment was certainly in existence by April 1643.52CJ iii. 54a; Herts. RO, DE/Lw/O2; DE/Lw/Z21/28; D/Z55/02; L. Spring, The Regts. of the Eastern Assoc. (Bristol, 1998), ii. 111-12. Its officers included Isaac Puller*.

On 24 April they set out from Hertfordshire. Their destination however was not too distant, as they joined the garrison at Aylesbury.53Herts. RO, D/Z55/02; Impact of the First Civil War ed. Thomson, 2, 101-3. On 16 May Wittewronge and Thomas Tyrrell* wrote to John Hampden* passing on news of various atrocities being committed by royalist soldiers in Buckinghamshire. This was read in Parliament on 18 May and was subsequently printed.54CJ iii. 91a; LJ vi. 52b-53a; The Copy of a Letter from Alisbury (1643), sig. A2-A3 (E.102.15). That August, after Parliament had voted more money for the Aylesbury garrison, the lord general, the 3rd earl of Essex, wrote to Wittewronge encouraging him to do what he could to keep his regiment together.55Impact of the First Civil War ed. Thomson, 3. In the short term he did manage to do so, as the regiment remained in existence until the following December.56SP28/11, ff. 143, 145, 147. But during those final months its effective commander seems to have been his lieutenant colonel, Thomas Sadler (who was probably not Thomas Sadleir*).57Spring, Regts. of the Eastern Assoc. ii. 112.

In the summer of 1644 Parliament created a new army under the command of Richard Browne II*, whose purpose was to keep up the pressure on the royalist forces around Oxford. Some of the men in that army had been raised in Hertfordshire. On 26 June the Committee of Both Kingdoms sent a blank commission to the committee at St Albans so that they could choose who to appoint to command those men. However, in their covering letter, the Committee of Both Kingdom also indicated their preferred candidate for that position was Wittewronge.58CSP Dom. 1644, p. 280. But it is unclear whether he was actually then appointed.

The focus of his activities was now in Hertfordshire, where he was an active member of the county committee at St Albans.59Impact of the First Civil War ed. Thomson, 28-9; Add. 40630, f. 151; HMC Var. vii. 346. Indeed, in late July 1644 he headed the delegation from Hertfordshire that presented a petition to Parliament complaining about the state of the county militia. Their main grievance seems to have been the poor quality, the ‘mean fellows’, of its men.60Harl. 166, ff. 101-101v; CJ iii. 572a-b. Three months later the Commons wrote to the relevant county committees reminding them of the money they ought to be paying towards the garrison at Newport Pagnell.61CJ iii. 679b. The members of the Hertfordshire committee, including Wittewronge, immediately sent £500.62Luke Letter Bk. 378. This meant that Wittewronge and the rest of the committee adopted a testy tone when later that same month they wrote to the Speaker, William Lenthall*, replying to the accusations that Hertfordshire had failed to meet their obligations. They argued that they had sent all the money owed by them but that, in any case, the financial burdens being placed on the county were far too onerous.63HMC Portland, i. 195-6. The following spring they made it clear to the Newport Pagnell governor, Sir Samuel Luke*, that they considered his continuing demands for assistance from them to be unreasonable.64Luke Letter Bk. 533-4.

Wittewronge’s involvement in local politics became less conspicuous once the civil war had ended. Yet, despite his subsequent attempts to distance himself from the war’s messier consequences, he continued to serve as an assessment commissioner and as a justice of the peace under the republic. In September 1649 he was one of the local gentlemen whom the council of state ordered to investigate some disorders at Berkhampsted.65CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 279, 301.

He had meanwhile dabbled in art collecting. He was, in own words, ‘ever a lover of pictures’.66HMC Verulam, 64. He had been collecting as early as 1640, when he bought several paintings, including one depicting the calling of St Peter.67Herts. RO, DE/Lw/F18, p. 5. But his most spectacular acquisitions were made in 1644 as an accidental result of his late stepfather’s money-lending activities. His mother’s second husband, Sir Thomas Myddelton, had at some point in the past made a loan to a nephew, Sir Richard Pryse*. Pryse had since married Mary Ruthven, widow of Sir Anthony Van Dyck, and thus gained ownership of 23 paintings from Van Dyck’s art collection, mostly works by Van Dyck himself or by Titian. The Titians included The Vendramin Family and Perseus and Andromeda. Acting on behalf of his mother, Wittewronge had those paintings seized in 1644 as recompense for Pryse’s failure to repay the debt. The resulting court case dragged on until Pryse’s death in 1651 and the Pryses never regained these paintings.68C. Brown and N. Ramsay, ‘Van Dyck’s collection: some new documents’, Burlington Magazine, cxxxii, 704-9; J. Wood, ‘Van Dyck’s “Cabinet de Titien”: the contents and dispersal of his collection’, Burlington Magazine, cxxxii, 683-6, 695. (Later in the 1650s Wittewronge became involved in further protracted litigation with Pryse’s son, Sir Richard Pryse†, 2nd bt., over lands in Wales.)69Whitelocke, Diary, 392, 393, 456, 461. But Wittewronge had not held on to all these paintings. Almost as soon as he had gained possession of them he had begun to dispose of the more important items. In October 1645 he sold The Vendramin Family and Perseus and Andromeda to the 4th earl of Northumberland (Algernon Percy†) for £200. Six months later he also gave Northumberland one of the Van Dyck equestrian portraits of Charles I in exchange for six smaller paintings. At about the same time he sold ‘Venus Blinding Cupid’, probably a copy by Van Dyck of Titian’s Venus Blindfolding Cupid, to another purchaser.70Wood, ‘Van Dyck’s “Cabinet de Titien”’, 684, 686, 695; Brown and Ramsay, ‘Van Dyck’s collection’, 706.

Less clear is the extent of Wittewronge’s purchases from the sale of Charles I’s art collection after 1649. In 1660 he returned a number of paintings which had apparently come from the royal collection.71Whitelocke, Diary, 609. But there is no evidence that he had bought anything directly from the sale. That however did not mean that he did not acquire them later. Other collectors, such as Lord Lisle (Philip Sidney*), Chaloner Chute* and Thomas Povey*, are known to have bought such works only subsequently from dealers. Indeed, this is consistent with Wittewronge’s own defence of his collecting, which was that

when that lamentable dispersion was made of his majesty’s goods, I did, in several places, buy several pictures that were his majesty’s; some out of shops in London, others of some of his majesty’s servants that had them assigned for satisfaction of the king’s debts…72HMC Verulam, 64.

He also claimed that those purchases were worth about £300.73HMC Verulam, 64. Moreover, there was one other possible source for such acquisitions. His distant kinsman, Humphrey Jones, elder brother of John Jones I*, was closely involved in Wittewronge’s financial affairs in this period, probably helping him in the management of some of his Welsh estates.74PROB11/199/232; Herts. RO, DE/Lw/E69; DE/Lw/F11; DE/Lw/E26. Jones was also, as it happened, the joint treasurer of the sale of the king’s goods.75Aylmer, State’s Servants, 229-30.

These were years in which Wittewronge was expanding his land holdings. When his mother had died in 1647, she had left him lands at Talerddig in Montgomeryshire.76PROB11/199/232. Because of his kinship with the Myddeltons, his indirect links with north Wales were not new. But this bequest meant that he now counted as a Montgomeryshire landowner and he was soon included on the local commission of the peace.77Justices of the Peace ed. Phillips, 143. Other additions nearer home were made by purchase. In 1650 he bought former church lands adjacent to Rothamsted when he spent almost £1,800 to buy two manors at Wheathamstead which had hitherto belonged to the dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey.78VCH Herts. ii. 297. Three years later he also took advantage of the intractable financial difficulties faced by Sir Peter Temple* to buy lands at Stantonbury in Buckinghamshire for £400.79Herts. RO, DE/Lw/E44; VCH Bucks. iv. 464. In 1653 and 1654 he was allocated lands in Leinster and West Meath as part of the Irish Adventure.80CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 416, 452, 461, 547; CSP Ire. Adv. 1642-59, p. 348; Herts. RO, DE/Lw/Z21/47. The expansion of his estates were combined with a bout of house building. The existing manor house at Rothamsted was substantially altered, while he built a new house for his son at Stantonbury.81Pevsner, Herts. 159; VCH Herts. ii. 304-6; VCH Bucks. iv. 462, 464.

Wittewronge was elected to Parliament for the first time in 1654 when he was one of five candidates, headed by the 2nd earl of Salisbury (William Cecil*), who together contested the Hertfordshire county seats.82Herts. RO, DE/Lw/Z9. He was one of the four of them who was elected. From late September 1654 he began to be named to committees by the Commons, including those on abuses by printers (22 Sept.), Irish affairs (29 Sept.), Irish elections (5 Oct.), the size of the navy (5 Oct.), the bill for regulating chancery (5 Oct.), the petition from the Lincolnshire fen drainers (31 Oct), abuses in the use of the writs of certiorari and habeas corpus (3 Nov.) and the misuse of funds for the construction of the Surrey gaol (9 Nov.).83CJ vii. 369b, 371b, 373a, 373b, 374a, 380a, 381b, 382a, 383b.

His most prominent contributions to this Parliament would however be as one of the critics of the Instrument of Government, led by the ‘country’ or Presbyterian interest. Those wary of the protectorate considered the Instrument to be flawed and so promoted a bill intended to remedy its defects. Wittewronge strongly supported this bill, although he did so less as an orator (it is possible that he never spoke in any of the debates on the subject) and more as a teller in several of the key divisions. One proposed clause would have made clear that laws could be amended and taxes imposed only with Parliament’s consent. When MPs voted on 21 December on whether to vote on this, Wittewronge and the leading Presbyterian Sir Ralph Hare* were the tellers who thought that they should and who therefore presumably wanted to see the clause adopted. They were however outvoted by the court’s supporters.84CJ vii. 406b. On 2 January 1655 he and Thomas Kelsey* were the tellers for those who wished to suppress Queenborough’s right to return an MP.85CJ vii. 411b. On 12 January he was among the MPs appointed to consider the proposed amendment specifying that any future amendments to this legislation would require the consent of both the lord protector and Parliament.86CJ vii. 415a. The next day he was also included on the committee asked to set a figure for the customs revenues to be granted in the bill.87CJ vii. 415b. When, on 15 January, the House approved the figure that the committee recommended (£400,000), MPs then discussed whether that clause should clearly state that this could only be continued with the consent of the lord protector and Parliament. Wittewronge and another Presbyterian MP, Joachim Matthews* were tellers against that being included.88CJ vii. 417a. The next day they moved on to debating whether the total grant of money for military purposes should be extended from 1656 to 1659. Wittewronge, again acting in conjunction with Hare, was the teller against the motion.89CJ vii. 418a. In the series of divisions on 19 January on the control of the militia which precipitated this Parliament‘s dissolution, Wittewronge and Sir William Boteler* acted as the teller against a second reading for the clause on joint control.90CJ vii. 420b.

In December 1655 the major-general for north Wales, James Berry*, advised the secretary of state, John Thurloe*, that Wittewronge should be appointed as sheriff of Montgomeryshire. That seems to be because Berry viewed him as being neither one of their ‘friends’, for whom the appointment would be an imposition, nor one of the ‘knaves’ who would fail to perform the duties.91TSP iv. 287. Berry’s suggestion was however ignored. That Wittewronge was not serving as sheriff meant that he was then able to stand for re-election as MP for Hertfordshire in August 1656. He was however, along with the four other Hertfordshire MPs, excluded by the council of state.92CJ vii. 425a. One contemporary listed him with the republicans, Sir Arthur Hesilrige* and Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*, and the Presbyterian John Bulkeley* as the ‘fiery spirits’ who would ‘make disturbances in the House if they were in’.93HMC Egmont, i. 579. Wittewronge then signed the remonstrance of the excluded Members protesting against this ban.94To all the Worthy Gentlemen ([1656], E.889.8). In late 1658, following the death of Oliver Cromwell*, Wittewronge was named as the new sheriff of Hertfordshire.95List of Sheriffs, 64; Herts. RO, DE/Lw/O4. That has the appearance of a transparent ruse to prevent him standing for the forthcoming Parliament. He tried to encourage (Sir) Harbottle Grimston* to stand for one of the county seats but Grimston declined.96Herts. RO, DE/Lw/Z21/56. Wittewronge would claim that his year as sheriff and the death of his third wife in April 1659 together cost him almost £2,000.97Herts. RO, DE/Lw/F24.

Wittewronge probably stood as a candidate in the elections for the 1660 Convention. It is just conceivable that he stood for Aylesbury or Buckinghamshire, as he spent £1 13s. at Aylesbury on 3 and 4 April ‘at the election’, although such a small sum makes it more likely that he was merely attending as a voter.98Herts. RO, DE/Lw/F20, p. 163. (If so, he had probably missed the borough poll, while the county poll was not until the following week.) But he probably stood somewhere, most probably in the Hertfordshire election on 12 April. That can be inferred because at some point before 23 April he spent £68 10s. ‘at the late election’, including payments to two bakers, a grocer and a butcher, as well as to ‘Mr Kent of Stevenage’ for the use of his house.99Herts. RO, DE/Lw/F20, p. 165; DE/Lw/E26, account, 23 Apr. 1660.

At the Restoration Wittewronge hastened to obtain standard pardons for himself and his father-in-law, Maurice Thomson, brother of George Thomson*, Robert Thomson* and William Thomson*.100CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 44; Herts. RO, DE/Lw/F12. On 3 July he also presented Charles II with several paintings from the sale of the late king’s goods.101Whitelocke, Diary, 609. Two years later he was granted a baronetcy.102CSP Dom. 1661-2, pp. 333, 346; CB iii. 247. He was however removed from most of his local offices, although he did continue to be named to the Montgomeryshire commission of the peace and in 1664 he was appointed as that county’s sheriff.103List of Sheriffs, 263.

In 1666, during the second Anglo-Dutch war, Wittewronge ‘was conveyed away from his own house with a party of horse’ by virtue of a warrant from the acting lord lieutenant of Hertfordshire, 2nd Viscount Fanshawe of Dromore (Thomas Fanshawe†).104HMC Verulam, 70. In Wittewronge’s own words, the accusations against him were that he had been ‘a committee man, a decimator, a persecutor of all the king’s friends, and one who had the king’s goods in my house, when his majesty returned’. Writing to Grimston, who was now master of the rolls, he vigorously denied the second and third charges.105HMC Verulam, 63-5. Grimston then wrote to the lord chancellor, the 1st earl of Clarendon (Edward Hyde*), in his defence:

he constantly keeps his parish church, attending there diligently from the beginning of divine service to the end. That all this time he was all alone in his own house and no arms found there but such as he stands charged with all for the service of the country, that no dangerous ill-principled people have ever been observed to resort to his house or [be] entertained by him, and never known or suspected to be at any unlawful schismatical meeting. That he lives very kindly amongst his neighbours and is very charitable and hospitable as all about him are ready to attest.106HMC Verulam, 71.

Fanshawe had to admit that there was nothing of which Wittewronge could be accused that was not covered by the 1660 Act of Indemnity and so, on the intervention of Grimston and Sir Henry Caesar†, Wittewronge was released.107HMC Verulam, 70-2.

Wittewronge’s final years are most notable for the important weather diary that he kept.108‘Observations of Weather’ ed. Williams and Stevenson. He died in 1693 and was buried at Harpenden.109Clutterbuck, Herts. i. 411. Having already settled most of his estates on his eldest son, John, the main beneficiary of his will was his second son, James. He also left £100 to the ‘poor ministers of the gospel or the widows of such poor ministers’.110PROB11/413/436. His grandson, Sir John†, 3rd bt., sat for Aylesbury and later Chipping Wycombe between 1705 and 1722. The baronetcy became extinct on the death of Sir John, 6th bt. in 1771.111CB iii. 249.