SANDERS, Thomas (1610-95), of Little Ireton, Mugginton, Derbys.

Sanders’s great-grandfather, the scion of a Surrey gentry family, had settled in Derbyshire by the early sixteenth century.38Vis. Derbys. 1; Hobbs, ‘Sanders fam.’, 2, 3. His grandfather had acquired the manor of Caldwell, near the Derbyshire-Staffordshire border, during the reign of Elizabeth, and his father had added the manor of Little Ireton and other nearby properties to the family’s estate in the early seventeenth century.39Hobbs, ‘Sanders fam.’, 6, 8. Little is known about Sanders’s upbringing, although the fact that he was widely acknowledged in later life as a man of strongly puritan convictions suggests that he was raised in a godly household. His social network by the early 1640s included the future parliamentarians Alderman Robert Mellor of Derby, Sir Samuel Sleigh* and Gervase Bennett*.40C6/144/147; Derby Local Studies Lib. Deeds, no. 387.

Sanders emerged early in 1642 as a leading figure in the Derbyshire parliamentarian interest. In February, he and his father signed a county petition to the Commons calling for tougher measures against papists and the advancement of the ‘blessed work of reformation’.41PA, Main Pprs. 26 Mar. 1642, f. 65. And at some point during the early months of 1642, he signed another petition from the Derbyshire gentry, urging Charles to return to Westminster ‘for the reformation of those great grievances which had crept both into the church and commonwealth’.42G. Sitwell, ‘The Derbys. petition of 1641’, Jnl. of the Derbys. Arch. and Natural Hist. Soc. xix. 23. That autumn, he accepted a commission as a captain of dragoons in the regiment that Sir John Gell (father of John Gell*) raised to secure Derbyshire for Parliament.43HMC 9th Rep. ii. 387; Glover, Derbys. i. app. p. 58. Among the men Sanders recruited for his troop was the godly minister Nathaniel Barton*.44Supra, ‘Nathaniel Barton’. His decision to side with Parliament, like that of Barton, probably owed much to his puritan zeal.

From an early stage in the war there was friction between Sanders and his irascible commander Sir John Gell. In April 1643, Gell sent Sanders with horse and foot to defend Burton-upon-Trent, only for Sanders to accept a commission as lieutenant-colonel of foot under the Lancashire parliamentarian Colonel Richard Hoghton*, whose royalist father-in-law, Philip Stanhope, 1st earl of Chesterfield, was a major landowner in the Trent Valley and a bitter enemy of Gell.45Supra, ‘Richard Hoghton’; E121/5/1/8; Derbys. RO, D1232/O/30; Certaine Informations no. 18 (15-22 May 1643), 137 (E.13.5); no. 20 (29 May-5 June 1643), 157 (E.105.2); N. Barton, The Representation or Defence of Collonel Nathaniell Barton (1654), 11; Glover, Derbys. i. app. p. 60; ‘Philip Stanhope, 1st earl of Chesterfield’, Oxford DNB. When Derby was threatened the following month by the army of William Cavendish, 1st earl of Newcastle, Sanders allegedly sent back his colours and commission to Gell and refused to come to his assistance.46Glover, Derbys. i. app. p. 70. That summer, Hoghton, Sanders and their officers (who included Daniel Watson*) were captured when Burton was overrun by the queen’s army, but they were quickly exchanged.47Bodl., Add. C.132, f. 52; Certaine Informations no. 27 (17-24 July 1643), 212 (E.61.19). Undeterred by this defeat, Sanders set about raising a new regiment of horse in Derbyshire during the autumn of 1643.48CJ iii. 285a; Barton, Representation, 11. To avoid confrontation with Gell, who was determined to retain overall command in the county, he procured, or at least accepted, commissions from Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, appointing Gell colonel of this new regiment and himself major.49Derbys. RO, D1232/O/32; R. Slack, ‘Col. Gell and Maj. Sanders’, Derbys. Miscellany, xvi. 36. Although Essex ordered Sanders to ‘yield all obedience to Sir John Gell as colonel’, Gell agreed that Sanders should exercise actual command so long as he observed Gell’s ‘reasonable desires’.50Derbys. RO, D1232/O/4, 6, 30, 32. Sanders certainly had power to appoint the regiment’s officers, commissioning Barton as one of his captains.51Derbys. RO, D258/12/16, p. 21; D1232/O/4, 15, 25, 32; Barton, Representation, 11.

Sanders’s importance to the war effort in Derbyshire was acknowledged in October 1643 with his addition to the county committee – of which he became a leading member.52CJ iii. 276a; LJ vi. 256b; SP28/226, unfol.; Derbys. RO, D258/30/28/5; Derby Local Studies Lib. Deeds, no. 4980. He and his men played a vital role in helping to clear most of Derbyshire of royalist garrisons in 1644.53Beats, ‘Derbys.’, 154; Hobbs, ‘Sanders fam.’, 11-12. Predictably, however, the unwieldy power-sharing arrangement between Sanders and Gell had begun to break down by the end of that year. Sanders and his captains believed that Gell was using his ascendancy on the county committee to distribute money in favour of his own troops, and they petitioned Parliament for the addition of less biased men to the committee.54Derbys RO, D258/12/16, pp. 2, 6, 9-10, 20-1, 41, 47; D1232/O/13, 25, 32; Slack, ‘Col. Gell and Maj. Sanders’, 37-9. Sanders also took exception to the election of Gell’s brother Thomas Gell* as recorder of Derby in December 1644, declaring him unfit for the post not only ‘in respect of his mean estate, want of learning, law and honesty’, but also because it would strengthen the Gells’ stranglehold on power in the county.55Derbys. RO, D1232/O/9a, 9b; Slack, ‘Col. Gell and Maj. Sanders’, 38-9. Sir John Gell hit back by calling Sanders ‘a Brownist, a coward and a knave’.56Derbys. RO, D1232/O/9b. The result was a bitter factional feud between Gell and Sanders and their respective followers that was to divide the county’s parliamentarian leaders for the duration of the war.

The opening round in this quarrel went to the Gells, who presented charges against Sanders to the earl of Essex early in 1645 and placed him, briefly, under house arrest for refusing to receive a new commission from the earl that would have put him entirely under Gell’s command.57Derbys. RO, D258/12/16, pp. 20, 22; D1232/O/11, 15, 18, 21-2, 24-5, 28-9; Beats, ‘Derbys.’, 202; Slack, ‘Col. Gell and Maj. Sanders’, 40. But their decision to solicit help from Essex was unwise given the lord general’s waning military authority by this time. Conscious of this fact, Sanders and his friends cultivated Ferdinando 2nd Baron Fairfax* and his son Sir Thomas Fairfax*, the soon-to-be appointed commander of the New Model army.58Derbys. RO, D258/12/16, p. 33; D1232/O/14, 28, 40, 65. Indeed, one of Sanders’s captains declared in February that ‘so soon as Sir Thomas is settled, we shall have our hearts’ desire’.59Derbys. RO, D1232/O/14. This split within the Derbyshire parliamentarians had acquired a visual aspect by the summer, with Sanders’s men sporting the Fairfax colours and Sir John Gell’s men wearing those of Gell.60Derbys. RO, D1232/O/40. Yet despite enjoying the goodwill of the Fairfaxes and the support of Nathaniel Hallowes*, Sir Samuel Sleigh* and other senior Derbyshire parliamentarians, Sanders and his regiment remained firmly subordinate to Sir John Gell.61Supra, ‘Gervase Bennett’; ‘John Dallton’; ‘Nathaniel Hallowes’; infra, ‘Sir Samuel Sleigh’; Derbys. RO, D258/12/16, p. 56, 64; D1232/O/22, 37-8, 40, 42-4, 56, 59. As a result, Barton was effectively driven out of Derbyshire and joined the New Model, while Sanders himself was content to serve in neighbouring Cheshire under Sir William Brereton*.62Supra, ‘Nathaniel Barton’; Derbys. RO, D1232/O/16, 46.

Brereton had repeatedly tried to enlist the help of Oliver St John* in Sanders’s cause, praising his regiment as ‘most serviceable ... and worthy of encouragement, many of the officers and men being godly men and such as serve out of conscience ... there is not any regiment that I know in the kingdom which might be more useful and faithful to you’.63Brereton Letter Bks. i. 126. In November 1645, he wrote to another Independent grandee, Sir Henry Vane II*, insisting that if Sanders

be discouraged and his regiment disbanded, I do not know where such another will be raised, consisting of so many faithful, godly, valiant men, in this part of England ... He hath a great dependence upon you, and my earnest desire is that neither he nor that business [his dispute with Gell] (which I conceive to be very just) may suffer in his absence, his presence with his forces being now [more] absolutely necessary than Sir John Gell’s at Derby.64Brereton Letter Bks. ii. 194, 219, 242.

The Gell-Sanders rivalry had a national political dimension therefore, with Sanders having ‘a great dependence’ on the Fairfaxes and other Independent grandees, and the Gells relying on Essex, who headed the Presbyterian faction at Westminster. Nevertheless, though the Gells were often depicted as ungodly and dissolute, it was Sir John Gell’s ‘pride and policy’ to which his local rivals mainly objected, rather than his politics or religion.65Supra, ‘Thomas Gell’; Derbys. RO, D1232/O/32, 38, 57; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 67. Likewise, allegations by the Gells that Sanders and his captains were separatists and ‘that they go about to suppress the gentry’ were vigorously denied by Sanders’s friends in the ministry.66Derbys. RO, D1232/O/23, 25. Although Sanders has been described as an ‘Independent in religion’, the evidence suggests that he was a non-‘Scottified’ Presbyterian in the mould of Brereton.67Supra, ‘Sir William Brereton’; Derbys. RO, D1232/O/23; CSP Dom. 1672, pp. 100, 101, 237; Beats, ‘Derbys.’, 340. His regimental chaplain in the late 1640s was either Jonathan or Timothy Stanniforth, both of whom were, or would become, Presbyterians.68A. Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains, 176-7; Calamy Revised, 458-9. And in 1656, Sanders and Gervase Bennett recommended the Presbyterian minister Robert Seddon to Charles Viscount Mansfield* for his vacant living of Kirk Langley.69Add. 70499, ff. 333, 335; Nottingham Univ. Lib. Pw 1/10, 96; Calamy Revised, 431.

Wearying of his struggle against Sir John Gell, Sanders was seeking a position for himself and his men in the New Model army by the spring of 1646. Barton, now a captain in the New Model, informed Sanders that Fairfax, Oliver Cromwell* and Henry Ireton* desired him ‘to keep your horse together and to signify both to officers and soldiers the respect that the general [Fairfax] and others bear to them; and withall the general intends, as soon as his army shall march eastwards [from Cornwall] ... to endeavour that your and your regiment may be wholly brought into the army’.70Derbys. RO, D1232/O/65, 67. In the event, Sanders’s attempts to gain employment in the New Model came to nothing (he should not be confused with the New Model officer Major Robert Saunders), and by September 1647, he was serving as major in the regiment of Nottinghamshire horse commanded by Colonel Francis Thornhagh*.71Derbys. RO, D1232/O/73; Clarke Pprs. i. 19, 109; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 182. He had almost certainly supported the New Model’s struggle against the Presbyterian majority at Westminster during the first half of 1647, having ‘gone to the army with a petition from some of the horse of his faction’ in June.72Derbys. RO, D258/17/31/6. And he was apparently a leading figure in organising an address from Thornhagh’s regiment to Fairfax in December, expressing its support for the army’s representation of its grievances to Parliament.73Derbys. RO, D258/33/14/22; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 923-5, 930. A manuscript found among Sanders’s papers, and probably drawn up towards the end of 1647, suggests that he was at least aware of the agenda for radical constitutional reform advanced by the agitators and Levellers at Putney.74B. Taft, ‘The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army’, HLQ xlii. 27.

Although Sanders was lampooned as a coward by the army’s opponents, he seems to have acquitted himself bravely during the second civil war.75A Case for the City Spectacles (1648), 11 (E.422.7). In the spring and summer of 1648, he assisted Oliver Cromwell* in suppressing royalist uprisings along the Welsh border and in securing the region for Parliament.76Trinity Coll. Camb. R.I.7, pp. 95-7; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 281. As an officer in Thornhagh’s regiment, he would have been in the thick of the fighting at the battle of Preston on 17 August.77Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 635; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 281. The next day, Thornhagh was killed while leading his troops in pursuit of the Scots, and the man chosen to replace him was Sanders. According to Lucy Hutchinson’s highly partial account of Sanders’s appointment, most of the regiment would have preferred her husband Colonel John Hutchinson* as their commander, but Cromwell intrigued successfully on behalf of Sanders in the hope of persuading the latter to sell him Little Ireton as a gift for his son-in-law Henry Ireton. Lucy Hutchinson conceded that Sanders was ‘a very godly, honest country gentleman’, but thought he had ‘not many things requisite to a great soldier’.78Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 181-3.

Sanders, like Barton, attended the debates of the council of officers on the Agreement of the People in December 1648. His voting pattern indicates that while he agreed with Ireton and other ‘conservative’ officers in allowing Parliament to have the final word on moral issues, he desired ‘a reserve [exception] concerning religion’ – which would have gone some way to meeting the Levellers’ demand that toleration and other key liberties were inalienable rights.79B. Taft, ‘Voting lists of the council of officers, December 1648’, BIHR lii. 148, 149. The evidence suggests that he favoured bringing the king to trial. His regiment petitioned Fairfax early in December, requesting that ‘justice might take place upon all, from the highest to the lowest, from the king to the meanest subject’.80The Declarations and Humble Representations of the Officers and Soldiers in Colonel Scroops, Colonel Sanders, Col. Wautons Regiment (1648), 2 (E.475.24). And it was reported in January 1649 that he and Barton ‘censure the king deeply’.81Derbys. RO, D3287/43/27/35; HMC 9th Rep. ii. 394. Sanders was named a commissioner in the high court of justice for trying James Hamilton, 1st duke of Hamilton, and other royalist leaders captured during the second civil war – although he did not attend the trial proceedings and nor did he sign Hamilton’s death warrant.82Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS LXX, f. 16; Judges of the High Court of Justice; HMC 7th Rep. 71. When Fairfax and Cromwell marched to suppress the Levellers at Burford in May, Sanders and his regiment were entrusted with the guard of Parliament.83CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 139. He saw active service again in the Worcester campaign in 1651, and he and his regiment served a brief tour of duty in Scotland during the early 1650s. He wrote approvingly to Cromwell in September 1650 that ‘God hath made you the man of His right hand, strong and successful for Himself, [His] cause and saints’.84Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 22. Like several of his officers, Sanders approved of the army’s dissolution of the Rump in April 1653, signing letters from the council of officers to the commanders of Scotland and Ireland justifying the change of government.85Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 283-5; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 112.

In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in July 1654, Sanders was returned in second place for one of the four Derbyshire county seats.86Supra, ‘Derbyshire’. The first place was taken by Barton. Both men probably owed their return to their reputation as Derbyshire’s most celebrated parliamentarian soldiers. In mid-September 1654, however, following the protectoral council’s exclusion of certain MPs and its imposition on those that remained of a written test of loyalty to the government, Sanders joined Colonel Matthew Alured*, Colonel John Okey*, Colonel Francis Hacker*, the ex-Leveller John Wildman* and Vice-admiral John Lawson* in plotting the overthrow of the protectorate.87TSP iii. 147-8. Their meetings were attended by a variety of the protectorate’s enemies, including the inveterate commonwealthsmen Henry Marten*, Lord Grey of Groby*, Thomas Scot I* and Sir Arthur Hesilrige*. However, the conspiracy was quickly broken by Secretary John Thurloe*, and its only upshot was a petition, drafted by Wildman, attacking the protectoral settlement.88Taft, ‘The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army’, 20, 23, 36-8. This was intended for general circulation in the army, but had only been signed by Alured, Okey and Sanders when it was seized by the government in a raid on Alured’s chambers in mid-October 1654.89St. 189, f. 61; Taft, ‘The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army’, 33.

The petition, The Petition of Several Colonels, as it came to be known, has been seen as the last of the Army-Leveller manifestoes.90Taft, ‘The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army’, 15, 41. Addressed to Cromwell, it was essentially a denunciation of the protectorate as contrary to parliamentary government and the ‘fundamental rights and freedoms of the Commonwealth’. Echoing the language of the army manifestoes of the late 1640s, the petition declaimed against Cromwell’s king-like control over a standing army and his negative voice upon the legislative, and demanded ‘constant successive Parliaments ... without any imposition upon their judgements ... and that nothing should be imposed upon or taken from the people but by their Parliaments’.91St. 189, ff. 60-1; The Petition of Several Colonels of the Army (1654, 669 f.19.21); CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 302-4. The petition concluded by asking for a ‘full and truly free Parliament’ – a thinly veiled denunciation of the recent exclusions – to settle the government according to the ‘fundamental rights .. .proposed to the late Parliament [the Rump] by the general council of the army in the Agreement of the People’.92Taft, ‘The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army’, 22. This was the version of the Agreement that the general council of officers (not the general council of the army) had agreed upon in the winter of 1648-9, which incorporated the essence of the Levellers’ demands, but proposed slightly more restrictions on religious liberty.93Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 348. The petition’s most obvious consequence, however, was the cashiering or resignation of the three men who had signed it. On 16 December, Sanders attended Cromwell, ‘and after he had delivered his dissatisfactions, his Highness told him the trust which was formerly reposed in him must not be longer continued’.94Clarke Pprs. iii. 12. Whereupon Sanders replied that he would surrender his commission. The ‘Colonel Sanders’ who had been named to a Commons committee set up on 22 November to consider the public accounts may have been the Derbyshire man.95CJ vii. 387b. But given his conviction that Parliament as constituted under the Instrument was illegitimate, it is perhaps more likely that the clerk of the House was actually referring to the Devon MP Major Thomas Saunders.

Although clearly an opponent of the protectoral settlement, Sanders was allowed to retain his place on the Derbyshire and Staffordshire benches under Cromwell. Even more surprisingly, he was one of the commissioners appointed for Derbyshire in the autumn of 1655 to assist Major-general Edward Whalley* in administering the decimation tax and securing the county against the royalists. As might have been predicted, Sanders refused to serve on this commission – Whalley complaining to Thurloe that ‘notwithstanding he [Sanders] lived but four miles from Derby, yet neither would come to me, nor send his answer. He is a good man, but too much over-persuaded by Colonel Barton’.96TSP iv. 241. In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in August 1656, Sanders was returned in third place on a poll for one of the four county seats.97Supra, ‘Derbyshire’. But this time his hostility to the protectorate was not overlooked, and he was excluded from the House as an opponent of the government and, no doubt, the rule of the major-generals.98CJ vii. 425b.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, Sanders was again returned for the Derbyshire, taking second place to John Gell.99Supra, ‘Derbyshire’. However, he received no committee appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate. Despite his professed reverence for parliamentary government, he apparently approved of the army’s forcible dissolution of Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, and later that month (29 April) he was restored to the command of his horse regiment.100Clarke Pprs. iii. 195, 196; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 509; Baker, Chronicle, 642; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 112. In July, when the restored Rump divided England into ten districts under senior officers, Sanders was given charge of the regular and militia units of Derbyshire, Cheshire and Lancashire and ordered (as were the other regional commanders) to prevent all suspicious meetings, confiscate the weapons of royalists and generally to crack down on the disaffected, in a scheme ‘strikingly similar to the major-generals’.101Bodl. Rawl. C.179, p. 183; H. Reece, The Cromwellian Army in Eng. 1649-60 (2013), 168. Despite the evident trust that the Rump reposed in Sanders, and the fact that it agreed to his request that Barton serve as his major, there are hints in the two men’s correspondence that they had powerful enemies in London – a group that may have included Colonel John Lambert*.102Derbys. RO, D1232/O/80, 85; CJ vii. 709b.

Following the outbreak of Sir George Boothe’s* rebellion in the summer of 1659, Sanders and Barton helped to head off a rising in Derby in support of the rebels.103Derbys. RO, D1232/O/87, 103. However, the reluctance and indecision that Sanders showed in dealing with the insurgents – they dispersed largely of their own accord – raised suspicions that he was complicit in the rebellion, or at least so sympathetic to the insurgents’ demands for a ‘free Parliament’ that he could not bring himself to crush them by force.104Derbys. RO, D1232/O/89, 96, 102, 103; The Copy of a Letter from an Officer under the Lord Lambert (1659), 2-3 (E.995.3); Beats, ‘Derbys.’, 351-3. An informer for the commissioners for sequestrations in London claimed that there was ‘more than [a] suspicion that Colonel Sanders and Major Barton were traitors in neglecting their duties at the breaking out of the rebellion at Derby’.105CCC 755. One of their leading accusers was a man whom Sanders had removed from his regiment that summer – reportedly for holding views that Sanders found disagreeable.106Derbys. RO, D1232/O/89, 93; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 378. Sanders and Barton compounded their offence in the eyes of many in the army when they joined Okey, Hacker and other officers in denouncing a petition that Lambert’s forces sent to Parliament in September, demanding, among other things, their colonel’s promotion to major-general and the establishment of a senate as a check upon the legislative.107Supra, ‘John Lambert’; Baker, Chronicle, 655-6; Clarke Pprs. v. 312; Mayers, 1659, 244, 246; D.P. Massarella, ‘The Politics of the Army 1647-60’ (York Univ. DPhil. thesis, 1977), 609. It may be significant that the prosecution of Sanders and Barton was apparently encouraged by Lambert’s main political ally Sir Henry Vane.108CCC 755. Lambert and Vane headed the Wallingford House republicans, who were determined to limit parliamentary sovereignty – an idea anathema to Sanders. In October, Sanders’s real and personal estate was seized by order of the sequestration commissioners pending his trial on charges of abetting Boothe’s rebellion, but the case against him foundered with the fall of the Wallingford House republicans in December.109Derbys. RO, D1232/O/91-6, 101-2; CCC 3251.

Sanders and Barton were among a group of senior officers that opposed the army’s dissolution of the restored Rump in mid-October 1659 – and later that month, they and about 15 other officers were removed from their commands for refusing to subscribe an ‘engagement’ pledging loyalty to Lambert and his confederates.110Declaration of the Officers of the Army Opened, 29; Clarke Pprs. iv. 62; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 148. In a petition to General Charles Fleetwood* on 1 November, nine of the ejected officers, including Sanders, Alured, Barton, Okey and Harbert Morley*, denounced the army’s proceedings. It had never been part of the Good Old Cause, they argued, ‘to wrest all power and authority out of the hands of the people’s representatives in Parliament and to fix it in the army’ – conveniently overlooking the fact that some of them, Sanders included, had endorsed a not dissimilar course in April. They insisted that all standing forces should be subordinate to Parliament – an echo of The Petition of Several Colonels – and demanded the holding of new elections on as broad a franchise ‘as the safety of the cause will bear’.111Add. 4165, ff. 38-42; A True Narrative of the Proceedings in Parliament (1659), 55-62 (E.1010.24); TSP vii. 771-4; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 618-21. The committee of safety (the interim government set up by the army in October 1659) evidently regarded Sanders and Barton as a security threat, for at some point in November or December they were imprisoned at Coventry.112CJ vii. 797b. Late in December, the two men joined with Colonel Francis Hacker* in seizing Coventry and securing the north midlands for the re-restored Rump.113Supra, ‘Francis Hacker’; Mercurius Politicus no. 601 (29 Dec. 1659-5 Jan. 1660), 998-9 (E.773.39); HMC Leyborne-Popham, 138-9; CCC 773; Z. Grey, An Impartial Examination of the Fourth Vol. of Mr Daniel Neal’s History of the Puritans (1739), 136-7; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 289; Beats, ‘Derbys.’, 357-9.

With the approval of General George Monck*, the Rump gave Sanders a new regiment of horse and restored Barton as his major.114CJ vii. 804a, 815a, 839a; A Letter Sent from General Monck (1660), 4 (E.1013.6); Clarke Pprs. iv. 240-1, 254, 255; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 289-90. Sanders and Barton had joined Monck in London by 10 February 1660, when, ‘as two officers that very much inclined to admission of the secluded Members’, they were consulted by the general about whether to pressure the Rump into issuing writs for new elections. The two men signed a letter to the Rump from Monck and his officers on 11 February, complaining that Lambert, Vane and their allies continued to enjoy office or influence, urging restrictions on religious toleration and demanding recruiter elections.115Baker, Chronicle, 685, 686, 689; Clarke Pprs. iv. 275; R. Hutton, The Restoration (1985), 93; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 695-7. By this point, it seems, Sanders’s desire for a free Parliament outweighed both his respect for the Rump and his reservations about a return to monarchy, for either the readmission of the secluded Members or fresh elections would very likely result in a restoration of the king. In the last significant act of his military career he helped to suppress what he termed Lambert’s ‘fanatic rendezvous’ in April and was apparently careful to have his participation in this engagement publicised in London.116Derbys. RO, D1232/O/106, 107; A Relation of the Totall Defeat Given to Col. Lambert (1660); Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 726.

Sanders lost all his offices, military as well as civil, at the Restoration, but having purchased only a ‘few small rents’ of the crown during the 1650s, he was required to relinquish very little of his estate.117E113/11. Allegations that he and Barton were involved in fomenting rebellion in 1664 were investigated but proved impossible to substantiate.118CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 663; Hobbs, ‘Sanders fam.’, 21-2. The two men certainly remained on close terms after the Restoration, Sanders settling lands upon Barton and four other gentlemen to hold in trust for his children.119Derby Local Studies Lib. Deeds, no. 2505. Sanders was one of Derbyshire’s foremost patrons of nonconformist ministers during the Restoration period, and his houses at Little Ireton and Caldwell were licensed as Presbyterian meeting places in 1672.120CSP Dom. 1672, pp. 100, 101, 237; Calamy Revised, 371-2; R. Clark, ‘Anglicanism, Recusancy and Dissent in Derbys. 1603-1730’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1979), 204, 205, 208. Sanders, or at least his wife, was a friend by 1660 of the London Presbyterian divine Simeon Ashe.121Derbys. RO, D1232/O/106-7. In the wake of the Rye House plot in 1683, Sanders was required to enter a £2,000 bond for his good behaviour, but this was merely a security precaution it seems, not an indication of his involvement in the conspiracy.122Hobbs, ‘Sanders fam.’, 22-3.

Sanders died in the summer of 1695 and was buried at Mugginton on 15 August.123Mugginton par. reg. Having settled the bulk of his estate on his eldest son Samuel, who had predeceased him, he bequeathed his remaining lands to Samuel’s heirs on condition that the latter’s executors pay a debt of £700 due to Sanders. If they failed to do so, Sanders bequeathed these lands upon his only surviving son Thomas. He also charged his estate with bequests of £3,300 as portions for his younger daughters.124Staffs. RO, B/C/11. Sanders was the first and last of his line to sit at Westminster.