ST NICHOLAS, Thomas (1602-68), of The Mote, Hoaden, Ash, Kent.

Thomas St Nicholas was one of the most zealously godly of the lawyers who came to prominence during the 1650s. His favourite pastime, certainly in later life, was writing poetry, and a constant refrain in his verse is the contemptibility of vain, worldly pleasures, particularly ‘cards or dice or tavern folly’.38At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 3, 29-30, 38-9, 78, 86, 108, 140. Although he was to sit for Yorkshire in the Nominated Parliament, he belonged to a family that had settled in Kent by the mid-fourteenth century and in the parish of Ash, near Sandwich, by 1462.39J.R. Planché, A Corner of Kent, 361-71; Vis. Kent (Harl. Soc. lxxv), 28, 144; At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, xxvi; B. Cope, ‘List of the gentry of Kent in the time of Henry VII’, Arch. Cantiana, xl. 97. Raised in a household with a ‘strong puritan bias’, he and his younger brother John St Nicholas* were sent to the most godly of the Cambridge colleges, Emmanuel.40Supra, ‘John St Nicholas’; At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, xxvii. That he himself was a man of puritan convictions is evident from his employment during the early years of Charles I’s reign as secretary to the feoffees for impropriations – a godly project to finance a parochial preaching ministry.41Harl. 832, ff. 8, 25v; E.W. Kirby, ‘The lay feoffees: a study in militant Puritanism’, JMH xiv. 7. It is very likely that this position was secured for him by the Kentish lawyer Sir Heneage Finch†, the attorney for the project, who was a leading barrister at the Inner Temple, where St Nicholas was admitted in 1624.42Kirby, ‘The lay feoffees’, 7; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir Heneage Finch’.

In 1625, St Nicholas married the niece of the man who had sponsored his admission to the Inner Temple, the judge Sir George Croke. Her father, a distant kinsman of the St Nicholas’s, was Henry Croke – an Inner Temple barrister and the younger brother of the judge, MP for London and Speaker of the Commons in 1601, Sir John Croke (father of Unton Croke I*).43PROB11/113, f. 196v; Col. Top. et Gen. v. 217; CITR ii. 58, 143; HP Commons, 1558-1603, ‘John Croke III’; At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 220. Following his second marriage, in 1633, to a daughter of the godly West Riding gentleman William Copley of Wadworth – father of the future parliamentarian officers Lionel* and Christopher Copley – St Nicholas transplanted much of his life and business interests from Kent to Yorkshire.44At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, xxviii, 8, 200-1. In December 1639, he and his two brothers-in-law secured a 21 year lease from the earl of Arundel of two ironworks near Sheffield at the substantial rent of £2,120 a year. The partners had solid financial backing, and, though they incurred heavy losses during the mid-1640s, when the royalists seized the ironworks, they subsequently invested (or so they claimed) £6,000 in the venture.45LC4/202, f. 156v; Sheffield City Archives, WWM/D1715; CCC 2476; Yorks. Royalist Comp. Pprs. ed. Clay, 130; At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 200-2. For at least its first 15 years, however, the ironworks did not prove particularly profitable – partly, it seems, because of financial wrangling among the partners. In 1655, St Nicholas claimed that he had received only £1,056 from the venture – a poor return on what was probably a much larger investment.46C5/22/27.

St Nicholas was living near Rotherham, Yorkshire, by early 1642, when he emerged as one his adoptive county’s leading upholders of the authority of Parliament.47At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 18, 237. In January, he signed a petition to the king from a group of prominent Yorkshire gentry – many of whom would support Parliament in the civil war – protesting at the attempted arrest of the Five Members and at Charles’s withdrawal from Parliament.48Eg. 2546, ff. 23-4. The following month, he signed another Yorkshire petition, this time to the Lords, requesting that the peers work more closely with the Commons for the relief of Ireland’s Protestants.49PA, Main Pprs. 15 Feb. 1642, f. 55. With the king raising troops in Yorkshire by the summer, St Nicholas and many of the county’s future parliamentarians petitioned Charles on 6 June, complaining about the king’s abandoning Parliament and drawing together the county’s trained bands – illegally, as the petitioners conceived it.50PA, Main Pprs. 6 June 1642, ff. 84-5. And late in August, he signed an address to Parliament, headed by the leader of the nascent West Riding parliamentarian party, the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*), protesting at the king’s issuing of a commission of array at the Yorkshire summer assizes.51Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 649.

St Nicholas’s decision to support the parliamentary cause probably owed much to his religious convictions. There is ample evidence in his poetry, as well as from his later career, to suggest that he was a staunch puritan. In a poem written at the opening of the Long Parliament in November 1640, he had attacked the Laudians as servants of Rome, denouncing their ‘popish altars’ and their jure divino claims for episcopacy.52At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 11. He had also expressed the hope that ‘bishops’ heads for preachers ears be given’ (a reference to the punishment meted out to the godly minister Henry Burton court of high commission in 1637). In a later poem, St Nicholas claimed that he had never sought ‘...to oppose my prince, nor to rebel against the laws’. Rather, his desire had simply been

...to stand and fall with those
That did defend, ʼgainst such as did oppose,
The Parliament’s results, and furthered

The distance ʼtwixt the body and the head.53At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 15-16.

St Nicholas was given a chance to put this resolve into practice in May 1643, when Rotherham was besieged by the earl of Newcastle’s ‘popish legion’. He was one of the leading figures in the town’s gallant but brief resistance to Newcastle’s forces and, on its surrender, which he helped to negotiate, was fined £50 and his share in the Sheffield ironworks (worth £1,800) distrained.54CCAM 1430; Yorks. Diaries ed. C. Jackson (Surt. Soc. lxv), 372; At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 16-17, 18-19. His house and goods were also comprehensively plundered by both parliamentarian and royalist soldiers to the tune of £2,000. His losses were so great that he was unable to pay his £50 fine, and he thus spent most of May and June 1643 a prisoner of Newcastle’s army, before being incarcerated in Pontefract Castle. In true puritan fashion, however, he took heart from his sufferings, expressing confidence that from the kingdom’s troubles a new Jerusalem would arise.55At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 14, 15, 18, 20-4, 28. He may have been released or exchanged by 20 December 1643, when he commissioned as a captain of horse in Parliament’s northern army under Lord Fairfax. St Nicholas was to claim after the Restoration that he assumed command of his troop in June 1644 – a few weeks before the battle of Marston Moor – and had ‘continued in that service’ until October 1645. But his regiment and other details of his military career are obscure. It is likely that he made his most significant contribution to the northern war effort as receiver-general of public revenues in the West Riding – in effect, paymaster to Lord Fairfax’s army. He was appointed to this office early in 1644 by Sir Thomas Fairfax*, the future commander of the New Model army.56E113/7, pt. 2; Jones, ‘War in north’, 400.

Between July 1645 and May 1649, St Nicholas served as one of the principal receivers and accountants for the Northern Association army and its successor, the Northern Brigade under Major-general John Lambert*. His official title as receiver of public revenues in the West Riding conceals both his role as a military paymaster and the fact that his activities sometimes extended to include all three ridings.57E113/7, pt. 2; SP28/249, unfol.; SP28/250, f. 116; Hull Hist. Cent. C BRL/354, 364. In fact, during the mid to late 1640s, he was active across a range of local parliamentary committees and offices. He was a prominent member of the Northern Association committee, steward of the sequestered manorial courts in the wapentake of Barkston Ash, treasurer to the standing committee of the West Riding and played a leading role in mobilizing and supplying the parliamentarian forces in Yorkshire during the second civil war.58SP28/250, ff. 49, 50; Bodl. Nalson IV, ff. 212-13; Nalson V, f. 16; Tanner 57, ff. 109, 378; Add. 36996, ff. 12, 66, 76, 113, 116, 118, 121, 122; LJ viii. 135b-136a; CCC 380.

In contrast to Christopher and Lionel Copley, who were closely associated with the Presbyterian interest by the late 1640s, St Nicholas appears to have been broadly aligned with the Independent interest. Between October 1645 and January 1646, he signed numerous letters from the Yorkshire Northern Association and county committees relating the Scots’ ‘oppressions’ in the region and pleading that their army be deployed elsewhere.59Bodl. Nalson IV, ff. 212-13, 309; Nalson V, ff. 16, 99; Nalson VI, f. 14; Tanner 59, ff. 75, 168, 195, 290, 294, 357, 366, 389, 399, 473. Such letters were regarded by the Presbyterian grandee Denzil Holles* as part of an orchestrated campaign by the Independents to ‘embitter men’s spirits’ against the Scots and their English Presbyterian allies.60Holles Mems. (1699), 46. In requesting St Nicholas’s assistance for the supply of Hull garrison in November 1648, Oliver Cromwell* addressed him as ‘my noble friend’.61Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 693-4. St Nicholas’s loyalty to the army was unshaken by its imprisonment of Lionel Copley in December on charges of conspiring to incite the Scots to invade; and he would remain active in local government in the wake of the regicide, when Presbyterians such as the Copleys generally withdrew from public life. Indeed, the first (and only) meeting of the West Riding quarter sessions he is known to have attended was in April 1649.62W. Yorks. Archives (Wakefield), QS 10/2, p. 247.

During the summer of 1649, St Nicholas moved his family back to Kent.63SP28/258, f. 116. In September, he wrote to Captain Adam Baynes* – the Northern Brigade’s London agent – asking him to purchase former crown lands in Kent on his behalf. ‘If you will venture upon anything in Kent for me’, he told Baynes, ‘I shall make it good as far as £2,000’. However, the following month he informed Baynes that his stock would not reach above £900.64Add. 21418, ff. 33, 52. St Nicholas’s motive for leaving Yorkshire and his obviously lucrative office as receiver for the West Riding are hard to fathom. It may have been linked to his appointment as ‘counsellor for the commonwealth’ in the Committee for Compounding* early in 1650 – an office he retained until at least May 1652.65SP28/250, f. 116; CCC 180, 231; St Nicholas, The Case of Tristram Wodward, 19. Or perhaps he saw greater opportunities for advancement in his home county. He certainly lost no time in securing a place on the Kent bench (Sept. 1649) and within a few years had acquired the office of steward of the court of chancery and admiralty of the Cinque Ports, at a salary of about £10 a year.66C231/6, p. 165; Add. 32471, f. 12v; CSP Dom. 1651, p. 47. By the mid-1650s, he was also serving as recorder of Canterbury and steward of the liberty of St. Augustine in Canterbury.67C6/170/114; Oxinden and Peyton Letters ed. Gardiner, 137. His friends in the county appear to have included the Rumper and regicide Sir Michael Livesay*. In January 1654, Livesay and St Nicholas, who was acting as ‘judge’ of the sessions at Canterbury, forced the jury to bring in a guilty verdict against a maidservant of Sir Thomas Peyton* on a charge of murdering her child, although according to Peyton she was entirely innocent.68Add. 44846, f. 64v. Whether St Nicholas and Livesay were trying to spite Peyton, a prominent royalist, or genuinely believed the woman guilty, is not clear.

St Nicholas had apparently become a Congregationalist by May 1653, when 19 of Kent’s gathered churches recommended him to Cromwell for membership of the Nominated Parliament.69Original Letters, ed. Nickolls, 95-7. One of the signatories to this letter was the Independent minister Charles Nichols, who was to hold conventicles in St Nicholas’s house after the Restoration.70Bodl. Tanner 124, f. 108v; Calamy Revised, 365. St Nicholas’s recommendation by the Kent churches also suggests that he had forsaken private legal practice, for his sponsors were adamant that ‘lawyers, especially in practice (we are for those that, out of conscience, have laid it by) ... shall never warm a seat in the supreme trust more’.71Original Letters, ed. Nickolls, 96. The anonymous author of the 1654 broadsheet A Catalogue of the Names of the Members of the Last Parliament identified him among the MPs in the Nominated Parliament who were at least tolerant of the sects and willing to overhaul the tithe system.72A Catalogue of the Names of the Members of the Last Parliament (1654, 699 f.19.3). Also included in this group was St Nicholas’s ‘dear friend’ Praise-God Barbon*, the London leather-seller and Independent lay preacher.73Supra, ‘Praise-God Barebon’; At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 101. St Nicholas himself, in one of his poems, while deprecating the generality of those who pursued the ‘steeple-monger’s trade’ (i.e. the ministry), professed to reverence the office and persons of those ‘sent out by Christ’.74At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 87. Nevertheless, his appointment to the March 1654 commission for the approbation of public preachers and as an ejector for Kent the following August strongly suggests that he favoured some form of publicly-maintained parochial ministry. His brother John, who represented Warwickshire in 1653 and with whom he enjoyed a close relationship, was an entirely orthodox Presbyterian minister.75Infra, ‘John St Nicholas’; Calamy Revised, 423-4.

Although St Nicholas was recommended by the Kent churches for membership of the Nominated Parliament, he was selected to represent Yorkshire – possibly because his home county had too many suitable nominees, whereas most of the leading godly figures in Yorkshire, such as Sir William Allanson*, Sir John Bourchier* and Henry* and Richard Darley* were too closely identified with the Rump. St Nicholas was named to ten committees in this Parliament, including the standing committees for poor relief and regulating the magistracy, for legal reform and for prisons and prisoners.76CJ vii. 283b, 285b, 287a, 287b, 319b, 322a, 340a, 344b, 346a. He also served as teller in six divisions.77CJ vii. 298b, 342a, 344b, 351a, 359a, 362a. Some of these appointments may have been his brother’s – the clerk of the House sometimes referring to both men simply as ‘Mr St Nicholas’. But Thomas was evidently the more active Member, and his appointments can usually be distinguished from those of his brother on the basis of the men he was appointed with. The ‘Mr St Nicholas’ who was regularly associated, either as teller or in drafting legislation, with the Kentish radicals Thomas Blount and Andrew Broughton, or the London Independent, Samuel Moyer, is far more likely to have been Thomas than his Presbyterian brother.78Supra, ‘John St Nicholas’; CJ vii. 298b, 322a, 340a, 342a, 344b, 351a, 359a; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 222-3, 300. It was certainly Thomas who was added by the House on 14 July to the sixth council of state, which had been set up following the dissolution of the Rump in April.79CJ vii. 284b, 285a. There is probably substance to the claim that it was the radical element on the House’s committee for nominating councillors that put his name forward.80Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 156-7. He attended 72 of the council’s 242 meetings, made several reports from it to the House and was named to numerous conciliar committees, mostly of minor significance.81CJ vii. 301b, 328a; CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. xxxviii-xli; 1653-4, pp. 44, 66, 224. He failed to retain his place on the succeeding council, whose membership was determined by election early in November.

The main focus of St Nicholas’s activity in the Nominated Parliament was the reform of the law – a reflection not only his professional expertise, but also, it seems, a genuine concern on his part for the eradication of legal abuses. On 9 July 1653, he was named to a committee set up to consider the Engagement (abjuring monarchy and the House of Lords), the Rump having enacted that those refusing to take it should be denied recourse to the law.82CJ vii. 283b. The committee apparently recommended that the Engagement be abolished altogether, although the House decided to retain it as a political test and simply removed the legal disabilities on non-subscribers.83Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 294. The area of legal reform with which St Nicholas was most closely associated was the prevention of delays and ‘mischiefs’ arising by writs of error (writs by which the judgement of a lower court could be referred to higher court on grounds of an error of procedure or law). He reported from, and may well have chaired, a four-man committee established on 16 July to draft a bill for this purpose; and four days later (20 July), he was named to the ‘committee for regulating [i.e. reforming] the law’, which was then ordered to prepare a bill for remedying the abuses associated with writs of error and similar injunctions.84CJ vii. 285b, 287b. On 26 October, St Nicholas and his fellow Kentish lawyer Andrew Broughton were ordered to draft an amendment to this bill.85CJ vii. 340a. Three days later (29 Oct.), however, after a clause was added to the bill making it a probationer (i.e. of limited duration), he acted as teller with Moyer against having the bill engrossed for its third reading.86CJ vii. 342a. St Nicholas and Moyer were evidently determined that the act would remain in force permanently (unless repealed, that is), preferring to delay the bill’s passage rather than have it reach the statute books as a probationer. The House subsequently voted that the probationary clause be removed from the bill and that it be entered onto the statute books immediately, by-passing the third reading stage altogether.87CJ vii. 346. On 3 November, St Nicholas and the Fifth Monarchist leader Major-general Thomas Harrison I were added to a committee established on 19 August to consider ‘a new body of the law’ – which had superseded the 20 July committee – to which was committed a highly contentious bill for abolishing the court of chancery.88CJ vii. 346a; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 297-8. Although most of the lawyers in the House were said to have been opposed to this legislation, St Nicholas was almost certainly among its advocates. His support for wholesale legal reform was probably a factor in his addition on 16 September to the radical-dominated committee for prisons and prisoners, to which was committed a bill for the relief of creditors and poor prisoners.89CJ vii. 319b.

St Nicholas’s tellerships in the Nominated Parliament reflected his radical alignment in the House. None were in divisions of great political importance, but it is significant that all but one of his fellow tellers – Robert Tichborne – were men of radical political leanings. Thus he partnered Thomas Blount and Samuel Moyer on two occasions each and the Fifth-Monarchy man Hugh Courtney once.90CJ vii. 298b, 342a, 351a, 359a, 362a. Similarly, the opposing tellers in these divisions were in most cases leading ‘moderates’ and men who would be closely associated with the protectorate – namely, Sir Gilbert Pykeringe, Sir William Roberts, Henry Cromwell, Charles Howard, Philip Jones, Henry Lawrence I, Anthony Rous and William Sydenham. His willingness to work and side with some of the House’s most radical figures is clear from his last appointment in this Parliament, on 3 December, when he and Hugh Courtney were majority tellers against the nomination of Courtney’s friend and fellow Fifth Monarchist John Carew as an admiralty commissioner – Carew having asked to be excused from this employment.91Supra, ‘John Carew’; ‘Hugh Courtney’; CJ vii. 362a.

According to his friend Sir James Hope*, ‘sweet’ Thomas St Nicholas was the first, and only, MP who had time to contest the motion of Sir Charles Wolseley and his backers on 12 December that the House dissolve itself, having done nothing except ‘shaking the very foundations, as by the taking away of tithes, voting a new body of the law ... and every way breaking in upon the property of the people ...’. St Nicholas declared his

dissatisfaction with that resolution and that he would protest against, for that things were not at that distance but that in meekness, love and mutual condescension they might be composed, and [he] called the Lord to witness they were ready to apply themselves to all means of unity. That though he had his summons from my lord general [Cromwell], yet he looked upon his call as from God and could not be so unfaithful to it as to give up his trust and opportunity put in his hands to do good things for the glory of God and good of His people.92‘The diary of Sir James Hope 1646-54’ ed. J.B. Paul, Misc. of the Scottish Hist. Soc. iii (Scottish Hist. Soc. ser. 2, xix), 165-6.

But before any other Member could object to Wolseley’s motion, the Speaker and a majority of MPs rose and departed the House. There is a strong case, therefore, for regarding St Nicholas as the (hitherto unidentified) ‘one good patriot’ (as Samuel Hyland* put it) who stood up ‘and got audience’ after the ‘bitter invectives’ of Wolseley and his confederates to announce that he had in his hand an expedient that would bridge the differences revealed in a vote on 10 December – this was against the first clause in a report from the committee for tithes that would have reformed but substantially retained the established parochial ministry.93[S. Hyland], An Exact Relation of the Proceedings and Transactions of the Late Parliament (1654), 25 (E.729.6); Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 336-9, 344. Furthermore, declared this ‘good patriot’, the committee for regulating the law (of which St Nicholas was a leading member) ‘had ready to be offered to the House bills of very great concernment, to the good and ease of the people; and [he] protested before God, angels and men his dissatisfaction to the thing moved [Wolseley’s motion] as being destructive to the commonwealth’.94A True Narrative of the Cause and Manner of the Dissolution of the Late Parliament (1653), 2 (E.724.11).

Despite openly siding against the proto-protectoral interest in the Nominated Parliament, St Nicholas successfully negotiated the transition from commonwealth to protectorate in 1653-4. He continued to receive appointment to local committees and was evidently trusted by Cromwell himself, who appointed him one of six masters in chancery in May 1655 at a reported salary of £2,000 a year.95Abbott, Writings and Speeches, iii. 704; I. Temple Admiss. 237. For his part, St Nicholas appears to have been entirely conformable to the protectorate during 1654 and 1655. When Colonel Thomas Kelsey* (the lieutenant of Dover Castle and de facto president of the admiralty court of the Cinque Ports) recommended St Nicholas to the voters at Rye, Sussex, in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in July 1654, he emphasised not only his ability but also his ‘undoubted integrity’ to the regime.96Supra, ‘Thomas Kelsey’; E. Suss. RO, Rye 47/149/15. This was very much an opportunistic bid for election by St Nicholas, who had apparently decided to stand at Rye only after the town’s initial choice, Harbert Morley, had opted to sit as a knight of the shire for Sussex. Neither Kelsey’s recommendation, nor the fact that St Nicholas was steward of the court of chancery and admiralty of the Cinque Ports impressed Rye’s leaders, who elected a local man, Nathaniel Powell.97Supra, ‘Rye’. It appears that St Nicholas also stood as a candidate at Canterbury, for he was made a freeman of the borough just days before the election. If so, however, he was again unsuccessful.98Supra, ‘Canterbury’; Canterbury Cathedral Archives, AC/4, f. 370v.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, St Nicholas was returned for Canterbury, where he served as town recorder since the previous year and thus enjoyed the backing of the corporation.99Supra, ‘Canterbury’. Yet despite his recent appointment as a master in chancery, he was among the 100 or so MPs excluded from the House by the protectoral council as opponents of the government.100Whitelocke, Mems. iv. 280. Perhaps the most likely explanation for his exclusion is that he was accounted hostile to the rule of the major-generals.

St Nicholas’s exclusion from Parliament in 1656 seems to have driven him into outright opposition to Cromwellian rule, for on being allowed to take his seat at the beginning of the second session in January 1658 he made common cause with the commonwealthsmen – the protectorate’s republican opponents in the House. On 21 January, he joined those Members who favoured toleration (a group which included the commonwealthsmen) in opposing a Presbyterian motion for an assembly to settle religion. ‘I am as much sensible of the growth of errors’, he declared to the House

and would as fain have a oneness of mind as any man. Yet it has been a great satisfaction to men’s spirits that they have not been imposed upon. It will look ill abroad that you are going again to impose a government upon men’s consciences.101Burton’s Diary, ii. 335-6.

However, he devoted most of his time in the House not to religious issues but to attacking the protectoral constitution. A fierce critic of the Cromwellian Other House, he joined Thomas Scot I and other commonwealthsmen on 22 January in a motion not to receive any messages from the Other House as the House of Lords: ‘They are at last but a swarm from you’, he declared, ‘you have resolved that they shall be another House, but not Lords’.102Burton’s Diary, ii. 339. He also demanded that those responsible for the exclusions of 1656 be called to account and ‘that men’s persons may not be restrained or imprisoned sine judice parium [without the judgement of their peers]’ – that is, by a high court of justice or council rather than upon the verdict of a trial jury.103Burton’s Diary, ii. 374-5. On 29 January, he supported a motion of Sir Arthur Hesilrige that the issue of the Other House be debated by a committee of the whole, ‘it being a business of eminent consequence and that whereon depends a great deal of our liberties ...’.104Burton’s Diary, ii. 392. He went further on 2 February, moving ‘strongly against the House of Lords and in the very bowels of the whole Petition and Advice, launching throughout and citing a great many authorities’. He was followed by Hesilrige, who ‘moved strongly and passionately’ against the Other House.105Burton’s Diary, ii. 406. St Nicholas received only four committee appointments during the second session, none of any great political importance.106CJ vii. 580b, 581a, 588b, 589a.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, St Nicholas was returned for the senior place at Canterbury and immediately took up where he had left off in 1658.107Supra, ‘Canterbury’; Add. 22919, f. 78; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 472. In a debate on 9 February on the bill of recognition (the bill confirming Richard Cromwell as Protector), he delivered another lengthy criticism of the Humble Petition and Advice.108Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, pp. 102-3; W.A.H. Schilling, ‘The Parliamentary Diary of Sir John Gell, 5 Feb.-21 Mar. 1659’ (Vanderbilt Univ. MA thesis, 1961), 34-5; I. Roots, ‘The tactics of the Commonwealthsmen in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament’ in Puritans and Revolutionaries ed. D. Pennington, K. Thomas, 302. The protectoral constitution, he declared, was ‘but a sandy foundation’ and had been passed in the previous Parliament

when above two hundred Members of the House, duly elected, were kept out by force, and many that voted there, I mean the Irish and Scottish Members ... had no more right to vote than the vintner at the bar ... I think that that law called the Petition and Advice is the most destructive to the nation of any that ever passed within these walls, because the militia and negative voice are placed in the single person...if you will confirm [Richard Cromwell] as this makes him, you will put as great power into his hands as ever king had. I profess ... I know not what the messengers of the people shall then answer at their return, to such as shall ask what we have done for their liberties, but only ruina Angliae.109Burton’s Diary, iii. 118-19.

Throughout the debate on the bill of recognition, which took up most of February, St Nicholas worked closely with Hesilrige, Thomas Scot I and other commonwealthsmen in their efforts to impede its progress.110Roots, ‘Tactics of the Commonwealthsmen’, 307. On 14 February, he took issue with the wording of the bill, claiming that it opened the way for Cromwell to exercise unlimited power: ‘I would have it [the office of protector] but by way of appointment. If you take not care now for the limitations, I never expect to hear of them again’.111Burton’s Diary, iii. 283. Four days later (18 Feb.), he opened proceedings for the commonwealthsmen in a debate on whether to give the protector a negative voice in the legislative process.112Burton’s Diary, iii. 327-8; Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 82-3. In a powerful and coherent speech, he took issue with the protector’s serjeant-at-law, John Maynard, and his defence of the bill of recognition

There is as much reason to bind up an Aristides [an Athenian general, called ‘the Just’] as a Dionysius [an ancient Greek tyrant] ... It is not properly incident to that office to have a negative. You have not made him king ... if he have a negative, what signifies your sitting here? When you have done all you can to make good laws and he refuse, all your pains and hopes are lost...113Burton’s Diary, iii. 327-8.

One of St Nicholas’s principal fears in giving either the protector or the Cromwellian Other House a negative voice was that it could jeopardize freedom of conscience

Suppose the major part should propose a law for the liberty of men’s consciences, or to take away a law that entrenches upon that, and the single person or another House have a negative, where are we then? ... I had rather trust my liberty among seven times seventy in this House, than with seventy in another.114Burton’s Diary, iii. 328.

He opened the debate for the commonwealthsmen again on 2 March, this time on the question of whether to transact business with Other House.115Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, p. 160; Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 148-9. ‘I am a plain countryman’, he declared, somewhat disingenuously

and shall offer you what country experience tells us. If a man hath got young colts, he will make good chains before he useth them ... This Other House is young and of high mettle. I think it necessary you should fetter and bound them before you work with them ... All the footing they have had hath been from the Petition and Advice ...116Burton’s Diary, iii. 579-80.

Again, he brought the argument back to what he saw as the invalidity of the Humble Petition and Advice. There had been no ‘authentic instrument’ to provide for a legal successor to Oliver Cromwell, he argued, and therefore the present protector had no legitimate right to issue warrants for summoning the Other House.117Burton’s Diary, iii. 580.

On questions concerning the Commons’ membership and therefore the relative strength of the court interest and its opponents, St Nicholas again sided with the commonwealthsmen. On 12 February 1659, he joined Hesilrige and other republican MPs in demanding the expulsion of Edmund Jones and Robert Danvers alias Villiers for their alleged delinquency.118Burton’s Diary, iii. 239, 250. And on 17 March, he moved that the Scottish MPs – whom the republicans regarded as little better than Cromwellian placemen – had no legal right to sit.119Burton’s Diary, iv. 167; Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 230-1. His hostility towards cavaliers and members of the Cromwellian court interest was matched by his concern to defend the government’s republican opponents. Thus on 16 March, he supported Hesilrige and other commonwealthsmen in calling for the release of Colonel Robert Overton, who had been imprisoned for disaffection to the protectorate.120Burton’s Diary, iv. 152. St Nicholas’s only appointment in this Parliament occurred the same day (16 Mar.), when he was named to a committee to prepare a bill concerning prisoners of state on islands – and specifically Jersey, where Overton was held – who were denied the right of habeas corpus.121CJ vii. 614b. In the last major debate of this Parliament, on 21 April (the day before Parliament was forcibly dissolved by the army), he seems to have made common cause with the republican interest in opposing what it perceived as an attempt by the court party to vest control of the armed forces in the protector and his civilian allies.122Burton’s Diary, iv. 481.

St Nicholas undoubtedly welcomed the army’s overthrow of the protectorate in April 1659 and its subsequent restoration of the Rump. His reward for adhering to the commonwealth interest was to be made clerk of the Parliament in the restored Rump at a salary of £500 a year.123CJ vii. 652b. Although the bill appointing him clerk never received its second reading, St Nicholas served dutifully in this capacity from May 1659 until the army’s dissolution of the Rump in mid-October.124CJ vii. 659a, 730a, 752a, 767a, 777b, 805b. The army’s subsequent refusal to pay him his arrears as clerk suggests that he had opposed its proceedings that autumn.125CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 254. When the Rump was restored again, late in December 1659, he resumed his duties as clerk and, despite his radical past, was allowed to hold the office until the final dissolution of the Long Parliament in March 1660.126CJ vii. 853b; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 596, 599.

If St Nicholas was still recorder of Canterbury in late May 1660, which is not certain, he would have delivered an address to Charles II when the king stopped at the city en route from Dover to London.127Englands Joy, or a Relation of the Most Remarkable Passages from His Majesties Arrivall at Dover to His Entrance at White-Hall (1660), 4. He had certainly resigned or been removed from his recordership by July; and by the mid-1660s he had apparently retired from legal practice altogether.128CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 139; At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 87. His desire was to be left in peace to tend his gardens and to contemplate God’s saving grace and his own mortality – a theme in many of his later poems. This idyll of a peaceful retirement was disturbed, however, as a consequence of his continued commitment to religious Independency. He was a close friend of Ash’s ejected Independent minister Charles Nichols and was a leading member and patron of Nichol’s congregation, which held conventicles in his house.129Bodl. Tanner 124, f. 108v; At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 93-6, 351; J. Watkinson, Hist. of the Congregational Churches in Kent, 4. Moreover, his ‘eminency as a lawyer and [as] a person of a fair estate’, apparently encouraged others in their defiance and rejection of the established church.130At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 362-3. Not surprisingly, St Nicholas was regarded with considerable suspicion by the local Anglican and crown authorities, and on at least one occasion in the mid-1660s he was arrested for attending a nonconformist conventicle.131At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 94; Watkinson, Congregational Churches in Kent, 4. His ‘eminency’ as an Independent, and perhaps as a lawyer and gentleman too, also seems to have earned him the distrust of the local Quakers. St Nicholas was critical of the Quakers for their failure to put Christ, ‘God-and-man’, at the centre of their soteriology. Yet he believed that ultimately they would be saved ‘from the great consuming wrath of God to come’.132At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 163-4.

St Nicholas died in the spring of 1668 and was buried at Ash on 17 May.133Ash par. reg. No will is recorded. His personal estate was valued at £1,741, but this included £1,300 in ‘desperate’ debts that were owed to him.134Kent Hist. and Lib. Centre, PRC27/20/95; At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 456. Despite his accumulation, or at least expenditure, of ‘great and considerable sums’, he claimed after the Restoration to have derived very little profit from his public employments during the civil-war era and that his ‘outward estate’ was ‘far shorter’ than it had been in 1641.135At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 64, 168. In his penultimate poem, written in March 1668, he referred to one of his enemies

… whose breach of trust
And fraud hath ground m’estate to dust,
Hath been gangrene, brought both me
And mine to some extremity;
And made himself a nest on high
By that and like cursed policy.136At Vacant Hours ed. Neville Davies, 175.

The identity of this man is not known. None of St Nicholas’s immediate descendants sat in Parliament.