STRODE, William I (?1594-1645), of Meavy, Devon.

William Strode I came from an important and well-connected south Devon family, settled there by the thirteenth century, and established at Newnham, Plympton St Mary, during the reign of Henry IV. The parliamentary experience of the Strodes was kindled in the Parliament of 1437, and William Strode’s forebears sat for Plympton regularly in subsequent assemblies. As well as sitting in eight Parliaments, his father was a powerful figure in the affairs of Plymouth, which he served as recorder for a decade, and in the south Devon hinterland, where he held a very wide range of local offices and appointments. William Strode senior was also wealthy. He inherited over 1,700 acres of land, enjoyed lucrative tin-mining interests, and invested in overseas expansion in the shape of the Virginia Company.13J. Prince, Worthies of Devon (Exeter, 1801), 730-2; HP Commons 1604-1629. Not all the Strodes were political activists – William Strode’s brother was a man-about-town, ‘counted the best bowler in England’ – but they were well connected and able to deploy to political effect the influence they commanded.14Harl. 6861, f. 1v. It was entirely on his family’s interest that William Strode himself served in the Parliaments of the 1620s, a decade which culminated in the tumultuous scenes in the Commons on 2 March 1629, when he was prominent and vocal in support of the protest by Sir John Eliot†. Strode fiercely denounced the Speaker to his face, and was subsequently targeted, arrested and imprisoned by the government as a co-conspirator.

Strode spent ten years in prison for refusing to find sureties for his good behaviour after his arrest in April 1629; the warrant his release was dated 10 January 1640.15Stuart Royal Proclamations ed. Larkin, ii. 228-9; Bodl. Bankes 37, ff. 108-9. This prolonged imprisonment was a political protest. His release would have been secured had he been willing to provide sureties for his good behaviour, a gesture which a well-connected gentleman from a wealthy background could easily have made had he wished to. Never appearing, therefore, before a court of law, Strode was at least granted a limited degree of access to normal life by the government during his time in the prisons of king’s bench and Marshalsea.16C15/M35/8397; HMC Verulam, 30; Eliott-Drake, Fam. and Heirs, i. 231-2. During the 1630s, he acquired from his father the advowson of Bishopsteignton and estates there.17Devon RO, 1039M/F16. Although William Strode was the second son and confined to prison, his father named him, rather than his elder brother, Sir Richard Strode†, as executor of his will, and he was able to fulfil this duty after his father died in June 1637. The main residence of Newnham was left to Sir Richard, but Sir William provided his second son with a Devon property of his own, the manor house at Meavy.18PROB11/176/273. Strode’s release from prison came as a conciliatory signal from the king on the eve of the first parliamentary election for 11 years. Three months after leaving prison, he was once again elected for Bere Alston, but in an irregular contest which was referred to the privileges committee of the Short Parliament when it met. In essence, the electors agreed to return Strode to Westminster on the first day of polling, with the other seat to be determined when it was known whether either of the other two candidates had been returned as knight of the shire. A subsequent poll saw Strode returned with a minority of voices, but on 28 April Strode’s election was declared good, with the principle of conditional election rejected.19Aston’s Diary, 77, 78, 149, 152; CJ ii. 14b.

Short Parliament

Strode entered Westminster again as a notable sufferer for parliamentary privileges, whose pronouncements were guaranteed attention. As soon as Parliament assembled, the Commons called for scrutiny of the records of his case and those of the others involved in the episode of March 1629.20CJ ii. 6a. Once the confusion over his election had been cleared up, Strode resumed his wonted outspoken style in the Commons. On 29 April, he spoke on breaches of liberty in Parliament, and on 1 May complained about the Speaker’s framing of the question in a division on whether to summon Dr William Beale, for preaching at Cambridge on the king’s unlimited prerogative. Strode, a teller, was in favour of an immediate summons, before the committee on his case had reported.21CJ ii. 18a; Procs. Short Parl. 205; Aston’s Diary, 115. The following day, as the king pressed for an answer to the request for supply, Sir Francis Seymour* urged that if the king renounced Ship Money, the Commons should grant the king his taxes. Strode in response advocated adherence to the three heads of grievances outlined by John Pym* on 17 April. One of these had been religion, and Strode asserted that ‘if we forgo the service of God, we had as good forgo all as not to adhere to all’.22Procs. Short Parl. 189, 207; Aston’s Diary, 122. On 4 May, the last working day of the Parliament before the king in exasperation came to dissolve it, Strode continued vocally to call on his colleagues to take their time in identifying and debating their grievances. Rejecting the advice of those who would have skated over debate on one of these, Ship Money, which the king would give up in exchange for parliamentary supply, Strode saw MPs as analogous to those of buyers in a transaction: ‘If the question were upon exchange of a house and land, were it impertinent to desire to see his land, to see his title before he [ex]change?’23Aston’s Diary, 135, 140.

According to Edward Hyde*, Strode observed ‘with much pleasure and content’ a riot at Lambeth in May, targeted against Archbishop William Laud.24Clarendon, Hist. i. 188. Even if this was an exaggeration born of hindsight, Strode’s conduct during the Short Parliament had been unhelpful to the government, and the vagaries of his election to that assembly must have brought into doubt whether he would find a seat when the king was obliged to issue writs for another one later in 1640. An effort was evidently made by the government’s most influential opponents to make sure he secured a place. One of the seats at Tamworth, Staffordshire, a place where the Strodes had no interest of their own, was associated with the manor of Drayton, which belonged to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex. The Strodes were a family which by marriage and by office-holding was well connected to the peerage. William Strode’s father was related to the Barons Cromwell and the earls of Hertford. In the 1570s the Strodes were clients of the earls of Bedford in south-west Devon and in east Cornwall.25HP Commons, 1604-1629; Plymouth and West Devon RO, 349/1/1. Despite this family history, William Strode’s absence from public life during the 1630s tends to rule out any immediate avenue of patronage that links him with Essex, other than their shared critique of the Caroline government. Strode’s election at Tamworth speaks of links between Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford, the earl of Essex and their gentry associates in preparations for the Parliament of November 1640. Strode was, however, evidently close to John Pym, a man-of-business for Bedford. In January 1641, the marriage settlement of Pym’s daughter with Sir Francis Drake* was underpinned by a group of west country trustees that included Strode, Sir John Bampfylde* and John Upton*, all of them critical of the Stuart regime.26Somerset RO, DD/BR/ely/1/3; Eliott-Drake, Fam. and Heirs, i. 276.

The opening session of the Long Parliament, 1640-1

If as seems likely the seat at Tamworth was given to Strode to avoid the earlier difficulties at Bere Alston, his supporters need not in fact have worried. Both Bere Alston seats went to associates of Pym’s, and there is no record of any conflict there. Strode’s colleague at Bere Alston was Sir Thomas Cheke, son-in-law of Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, another of the king’s leading critics. In the event, Strode chose the Devon borough and waived Tamworth, while Cheke waived Bere Alston in favour of Harwich.27CJ ii. 23a. Apart from a period in the autumn of 1642 when he accompanied the army of the earl of Essex, Strode can hardly have had time during what remained of his life to leave London, to judge from the ubiquity of his appearances in the Commons Journals. His impact on the Commons was immediate. Following on from his choice of Bere Alston as his seat, he intervened in a number of issues relating to the conduct of Parliaments, as if to underscore his status as their staunch champion. On 9 November he moved changes to the Speaker’s daily prayer, and the following day insisted that those Members joining the Lords for a conference on fasts should be named ‘distinctly’.28CJ ii. 25a; Procs. LP i. 67. On 4 December he successfully moved for fines to be levied on loud talkers and late entrants to the chamber.29Procs. LP i. 456, 458.

Strode’s interest in procedure was a product of his hard-won authority on the subject of privilege. He was inevitably named to two committees on that subject (14 Nov., 18 Dec.), but more significantly there was a personal element in this, naturally deriving from his experience as a victim of a notorious breach of parliamentary privilege himself.30CJ ii. 29a, 53b. His speech on 9 November on how one in the king’s disfavour might expect a bill against him in star chamber must have commanded attention, and on 8 December he called for Sir Ranulph Crewe†, a judge ejected from office in 1626 for refusing the Forced Loan, to be brought to the House to testify on the treatment meted to him.31Procs LP i. 64, 514. When Sir Thomas Jermyn tried to deflect Pym’s motion of thanks to the Lords for the treaty with the Scots by moving that the king should first receive thanks (18 Nov.), Strode proposed en revanche that the Twelve Peers should be thanked for petitioning for a second Parliament in 1640.32Procs. LP i. 167. Himself from a family that had profited from the tin industry, he evidently considered the stannary courts to be an aspect of the royal prerogative worthy of further investigation, and wanted the committee on the northern parts, a body critical of the royal policy towards the Scots, to do so (23 Dec.). In the event, the House was persuaded to refer the matter to a committee on a local Cornish topic.33D’Ewes (N), 183.

Strode’s defence of parliamentary privilege, his views on how the Commons should operate and his own peculiar standing in the House all fitted for him for the task of framing a bill for annual Parliaments, which was read on 24 December. As Strode conceived it, the bill provided a mechanism for a Parliament to meet even if sheriffs and other responsible officers of the king failed in their time-honoured duties. No Parliament was to be dissolved within 40 days of its first meeting unless king and both Houses were agreed.34Northcote Note Bk. 112; D’Ewes (N), 188. On 30 December, Oliver Cromwell* called for Strode’s bill to be read a second time. It has been argued that the bill was subsequently taken away from Strode and rewritten.35Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 225. What became the act of February 1641 in fact remained associated with Strode, because it was he who took it to the Lords the day before it received royal assent. In its final form it retained much of its original overall shape, but crucially was altered so that Parliaments would meet at least once in three years, not annually, and specified a minimum duration of 50 rather than 40 days.36CJ ii. 60a, 85b; D’Ewes (N), 196; SR.

In purely political terms, Strode was outspoken on the perceived iniquities of the government, having much to say about the condign punishment he wanted to see visited on those ministers most closely associated with the king’s personal rule. His uncompromising approach to the government’s record was adumbrated in a speech on 9 November when he argued that those who drafted schemes for monopolies and projectors were as culpable as monopolists themselves, who should be expelled from the Commons.37Procs LP i. 65, 72; Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 219-20. When Lord Keeper John Finch† tried to offer an apology to the House before impeachment proceedings against him were commenced, Strode dwelt on the irony that the king’s servant who now wished to be heard had been silent when critics like Strode himself had pressed him for answers on his conduct while Speaker. A relentless Strode went so far as to assert that Finch’s behaviour during the episode in the chamber in 1629 which led to his long imprisonment was the ‘cause of all miseries since’, more than a suggestion that he held Finch partly to blame for his own sequestered existence during the intervening decade.38Procs. LP i. 663; CJ ii. 39b; Northcote Note Bk. 76, 86, 95-6. He was equally unsympathetic towards Robert Hyde*, the Salisbury recorder, asserting on 30 November that ‘a county prosecutor and a great man did far more hurt than a courtier’.39Procs. LP i. 383.

Ship Money judges and bishops were also in the line of Strode’s fire. He spoke on 8 December in favour of a prosecution of the Ship Money judges. A few days later, his speech in support of the despatch of assize judges on their circuits provided an opportunity for him to call again for the judges to be examined, to criticise Edward Atkyns, a client lawyer of William Cecil, 2nd earl of Salisbury, recently created serjeant-at-law by the king, and to link judges and bishops as proper objects of legal process.40Northcote Note Bk. 44, 56, 60. On 11 December, the House was petitioned by Londoners hostile to the bishops. Speaking against the scandalised commentary from government ministers, Strode sought to give support to the London masses ‘in their just complaints’ by working to get the petition referred to the standing committee on religion.41Northcote Note Bk. 52. He was careful to frame his objections to the bishops in terms of conventional puritan piety and not mere personal animosity, agreeing with Sir Miles Fleetwood* that religion was the ‘chiefest pillar of happiness’.42Procs. LP i. 567.

The highest enemy that Strode wished to strike at was Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford. He was named to conferences with the Lords on Strafford’s case (11, 30 Nov.), and took to the Lords the impeachment articles against Sir George Radcliffe, Strafford’s henchman in Ireland (28 Dec.).43CJ ii. 26b, 39b; Northcote Note Bk. 116. He was one of a committee of five, including Pym and John Hampden, which drew up the heads of the charge against Strafford (16 Feb.) and was took a leading role in conferences between the Houses on the trial.44CJ ii. 86b, 98a, 119b, 120b, 122a, 126a. On 18 February, he spoke in favour of laying aside the issue of the City of London loan in favour of progressing Strafford’s case.45D’Ewes (N), 371. Chaired by Bulstrode Whitelocke* – unwillingly, according to his own later testimony – the members of the committee which drew up the charges against Strafford took a voluntary oath of secrecy, and on 26 February 1641 defended themselves against suggestions from within Parliament that they had broken their oath.46Whitelocke, Mems. i. 113; Whitelocke, Diary, 124; Procs. LP ii. 565. Strode sought to widen the scope of the prosecution to include Strafford’s own legal counsel, as conspirators in treason (12 Mar.), but sometimes let his enthusiasm for the prosecution run away with him, as on 7 April when he went to the Lords to tell them that the heavy burden of Commons business on Strafford would not be completed the following day, only to find the peers were not sitting.47Procs. LP i. 729, ii. 454, 455.

It has been suggested that as a member of the opposition group associated with the earl of Bedford, Strode aimed during the prosecution of Strafford to humiliate him and hound him from office, rather than to encompass his execution. The impeachment and the trial it entailed would not necessarily have led to Strafford’s death; only the attainder bill would have secured his execution. As late as 15 April, on this reading of the evidence, Strode was in favour of allowing legal arguments to proceed as a way of keeping open the possibility of a non-lethal impeachment, but by 21 April had become converted to the need for the attainder bill and Strafford’s execution.48J.S.A. Adamson, The Noble Revolt (2007), 244-5, 247, 253, 257. Strode’s views on the aims and outcomes of the Strafford trial have to be deduced mostly from his actions rather than from his words. He was certainly an enthusiast for the impeachment and imprisonment of all upholders of the royal prerogative, doing his best to hasten on Strafford’s trial as punishment for his tyranny ‘over the lives, liberties and estates’ of the people.49Verney, Notes, 54. Striking sideways as he went, he pursued relatively obscure clergymen like Dr Chaffin (1 Mar.), who had preached in Salisbury back in the 1630s.50Procs. LP ii. 589. It is clear that by 20 April a division was evident between fellow reforming MPs like John Maynard, who thought Strafford’s case would be resolved within days, and Strode and John Glynne, who predicted it was not going to end so quickly.51Add. 64807, f. 6v. Recently, Maynard and Strode had been on opposing sides on matters of procedure and strategy, but an important ingredient in the moves towards attainder was the ominous behaviour of the London crowd.52Procs. LP i. 739; iii. 566; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 253.

Strode habitually expressed himself in the language of crisis, conspiracy and imminent disaster. He was driven in 1640-41 by an overwhelming sense that the king was in the hands of counsellors so evil that they had blinded him to what treason consisted in. By early May he believed that the king was about to dissolve Parliament.53Procs. LP iv. 177, 181. On 6 February he had been in trouble for using the phrase ‘the sons of Zeruiah are too strong for us’ in a speech. King David had admitted that the sons of Zeruiah were ‘too hard’ for him, in the aftermath of the slaying of Abner by Joab, one of Zeruiah’s sons. No record of Strode’s speech has survived, but the immediate context seems to have been the treaty with the Scots, rather than as one commentator has it, the trial of a Catholic priest, and the offence Strode gave probably arose from the associations his quotation invoked of royal weakness and brutal associates. The critic who started the debate against Strode was Robert Trelawny*, who in June 1641 considered the king ‘very gracious’. In the end, Strode escaped censure.54Two Diaries of Long Parl. 80; Procs. LP ii. 380; CJ ii. 80b; 2 Samuel 3:39; ‘Robert Trelawny’, infra. There is no doubt that Strode’s sympathies were entirely with the Scots Covenanters. On 28 January he had been one of those charged with framing questions to put to the courtier Sir Kenelm Digby about the queen’s scheme to raise money from Catholics to finance the second bishops’ war with the Scots. On 27 February he was critical of Edward Hyde* for suggesting that a paper of the Scots commissioners was an obstacle to a loan of £50,000 from City financiers: the spat provoked one of the greatest uproars that Sir Simonds D’Ewes could remember.55CJ ii. 74b; D’Ewes (N), 296; Procs. LP ii. 576.

Edward Hyde’s assessment of Strode’s conduct during the opening months of the Parliament was that he was among the most hostile of the Parliament-men towards the king, but that he was a secondary figure in terms of leadership. Hyde was surely right on the first point. In his pursuit of so many aspects of the king’s style of government, Strode revealed himself to be ‘one of those ephori [magistrates] who most avowed the curbing and suppressing of majesty’, by his own implacable conduct vindicating Hyde’s view that he was among the most hostile towards Strafford.56Clarendon, Hist. i. 188, 250. At the start of the Long Parliament, in Hyde’s view, the inner circle of the opposition junto did not include Strode, who was one of a second circle of peers and Parliament-men including the earls of Essex and Warwick, trusted ‘upon occasion and made use of according to their several gifts’.57Clarendon, Hist. i. 263. It is quite clear that in fact Strode’s vehemence and energy derived from his own bitter and long experience as a victim of the Caroline regime, rather than from any client-patron relationship with any in either House, and that the extent and depth of his involvement in the Strafford trial brought him closer to the heart of the opposition campaign.

Strode was named to the committee which drew up Parliament’s Protestation of 3 May 1641. He feared the imminent dissolution of the Parliament at that point, believing the king to be blind to the dangers the kingdom faced: ‘he that hath been most abused doth not perceive it’.58Verney, Notes, 67; Procs. LP iv. 177, 181; CJ ii. 132b, 133a. After Strafford’s execution on 12 May, Strode’s energies were directed more fully towards other topics which had already attracted some attention from him. On 22 May he was a teller on the winning side in a division on the clauses of the treaty with the Scots that dealt with trade (although the clerk mistakenly recorded him as one of the minority tellers), and was added on the same day to the committee on Charles I’s customs farmers.59CJ ii. 154b; Procs. LP iv. 532, 538. Three days later, the Barnstaple MP George Peard spoke in favour of an exception to be made in the treatment to be meted to the farmers and those who were employed by them and acted in ignorance. Strode supported that line, citing the case of John Baber*, who had been suspended from sitting in the 1628 Parliament for choosing to approve the billeting of soldiers in Wells at a time when that was one of the bones of contention between king and Commons.60Procs. LP iv. 561, 566. As an assertion of the liberties of the subject, and as part of the junto’s plan to limit the grant of taxation, Strode spoke to urge that the grant of tonnage and poundage be made over to trustees rather to the king directly. He took an active part in the progress of the bill on 1 June, and six days later, warned that any agreement with the old customs farmers on retrospective payments needed to avoid the pitfalls of their reneging either through their own unwillingness to pay or because they were pressed beyond their means. Strode’s reference in his speech to ‘the tale of the calf’ seems more likely to refer to the medieval story of a bargain made and then reneged upon, rather than to the golden calf of Exodus 32.61Procs. LP iv. 627, 676; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 48; W. Hansen, Ariadne’s Thread (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 435. A speech of his in mid-June dwelt on the money still detained in the hands of the customs farmers.62Procs. LP v. 213.

On raising loans to manage the disbanding of the armies in the north, Strode had made a memorable intervention on 20 February, when he asserted that if the City refused a loan in times of emergency, Parliament should simply confiscate the sum required.63Procs. LP ii. 502. He was not always so hostile to City interests. The effect of his speech on 27 February had been to exonerate the financiers from charges that they were reluctant to lend, and on 25 March he was part of a delegation to the City to raise money on the security of the subsidy, and reported from the committee on the tortuous passage of the subsidy bill through the Commons.64D’Ewes (N), 296; Procs. LP iii. 136; iv. 256. Strode moved that the equivalent of three subsidies be levied on the non-culpable clergy (15 June), but in a speech on 8 August, he made it clear that any further progress on the lay subsidy bill depended on the speed of the king’s redress of grievances: specifically the complete removal of the remaining ‘evil councillors’ and of the bishops.65Procs. LP v. 177; vi. 299.

Strode had maintained his assault on the bishops, using the debate prior to a division on whether to proceed to the second reading of the bill to abolish episcopacy, on 27 May, as a stick with which to chastise Sir Charles Williams, who exclaimed that even if there were only six opponents of this bill he would force a division on it. Strode accused Williams of reckless talk, for which the Monmouthshire MP apologised, but the incident showed Strode at his most self-deprecating; he describing himself, a veteran of six assemblies, as ‘a young Parliament-man’.66Procs. LP iv. 606, 614; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 344. (There was evidently a perennially youthful quality about Strode; although he was aged 47 in January 1642, D’Ewes described him then as ‘a young man’.67PJ i. 11.) Although the row which broke out between Strode and Sir John Strangways, another west country Member, was ostensibly over honour and reputation, it was on the subject of the bill against bishops that Strode had really given offence, with verbal ‘slashing’ between the two men reported on 7 June.68Procs. LP v. 8, 12, 16. Strode moved ‘in a jocularly way’ (in other words with heavy sarcasm) that William Pleydell* be asked to print his speech in defence of episcopacy (11 June), but with the Latin quotations translated.69Procs. LP v. 92. He was characteristically uncompromising in his insistence that Sir William Savile* should remain in the Tower for a breach of parliamentary privilege committed during the Short Parliament, on 19 June comparing Savile unfavourably with Strode’s own fellow-sufferer, Sir John Eliot†, who had died there for his belief in the liberties of Parliament.70Procs. LP v. 194, 243, 408. Not long after this, the Commons committee on the breach of privilege in 1629 reported, helping cement Strode’s own reputation as a martyr.71CJ ii. 200b.

In the heightened atmosphere of fear inspired by the first army plot of 1641, Strode followed the line taken by the junto, and was one of the ‘close committee’ of seven appointed to investigate it.72CJ ii. 135a; Procs. LP v. 479. He praised George Goring* on 8 June as ‘a great preserver of his country’ because he had revealed the plot to the earl of Bedford, William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, and Edward Montagu, Viscount Mandeville (later 2nd earl of Manchester).73Procs. LP v. 37; The Declaration or Remonstrance of the Lords and Commons (1642), 27 (E.148.17). Later that day, Herbert Price* brandished a candle in an effort to get the Members to continue an evening sitting, provoking Strode the following day to declare that there had been danger of bloodshed, a commentary on the state of everyone’s nerves at the time.74Procs. LP v. 65, 71. Noting the implied defence of the army plotters by the Digby family, Strode maintained his hard line against offering any of the plotters bail. He struck at the recently-elevated George Lord Digby* on 13 July by arguing against his being sent to France as ambassador, on the grounds that a young man should not be sent to France where there were many young enemies of the English state already. His arguments cut no ice with the king, of course. Strode had made himself an enemy of the Digbys.75CJ ii. 209b; Procs. LP v. 261, 479, 622.

The condition and deployment of the army and navy strongly interested Strode during 1641. Apart from his part in examining the army plotters, he was named to six committees on the subject down to 3 January 1642.76CJ ii. 109a, 131b, 135a, 201b, 232a, 366b; Procs. LP v. 656. He intervened in debate on several occasions on the question of the army in Ireland, arguing in support of Pym on 8 July against leaving the army there in the hands of Catholics.77Procs. LP i. 739; v. 565. In similar vein, he urged a purge of officers from the navy (30 July).78Procs. LP vi. 162. Strode maintained a drip-feed of details from the army plot investigation into the Commons throughout the summer of 1641.79Procs. LP vi. 84, 127, 173, 386, 420, 685. These included allegations that there were still officers dangerous to the state in post, and retrospective commentary on how he had observed leading officers William Ashbournham* and Henry Wilmot* react with fury at the news that money was being diverted from the English army to the Scots.80Procs. LP vi. 362, 403. On 7 August he proposed a thanksgiving prayer, comparable with that read in the service to remember the gunpowder plot, to commemorate the deliverance of the Parliament from the army through the frustration of the conspiracy. Three days later he asserted that by the recently-passed Triennial Act, the Commons had power to make ordinances which would be as binding as parliamentary acts.81Procs. LP vi. 280, 341. The effect was of course to sustain an atmosphere of political crisis.

In his overall pattern of activity through 1641, communications with the Lords formed a major part of Strode’s parliamentary work. He took messages to the Lords on 18 occasions, was a member of 21 conferences with them, managed eight and reported back on six. On top of this, he was named to 55 Commons committees during 1641, in which the peers were not involved.82CJ ii; LJ iv. His closeness to the Lords can be seen in his nomination of the earl of Salisbury, father-in-law of junto peer Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland. Salisbury was a Dorset landowner and lord lieutenant there, to whom Strode’s associate Sir Walter Erle* reported on military preparations against invasion.83Procs LP iv. 304, vi. 322; ‘Sir Walter Erle’, supra; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 340. The co-operation of Strode and Erle during 1641 is a striking aspect of their political behaviour. That year, they were named to 34 committees together. As well as both being west country men with effective relationships with members of the upper House, they were related by marriage. Erle’s sister had married Strode’s brother, Sir Richard†, providing a family link but without making them, as one authority has it, brothers-in-law.84CJ ii; Vivian, Vis. Devon, 719; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 139. Both men feared the advance of Catholicism in the king’s armies, and Erle’s many interventions on papists in the Irish army were vocally supported by Strode.85Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 188. The drive to render harmless popish recusants wherever they might be was another of Strode’s themes. He took up the case of a Montgomeryshire magistrate put out of commission for presenting recusants on 14 August, and a week later called for an urgent conference with the Lords on disarming recusants.86CJ ii. 260b, 261a, 267a, 267b, 268a; Procs. LP vi. 421, 458, 512. Strode was never short of a horror story with which to shock his colleagues: the case of the queen’s priest, Robert Philips (25 June); that of a man who had wished a plague on king and Parliament (29 July); that of a woman arrested for complaining about an Irish priest (31 Aug.).87Procs. LP v. 345; vi. 142, 627.

The Grand Remonstrance

Strode was a member of the Recess Committee that managed the affairs of the Commons between 9 September and 20 October 1641 with what Clarendon considered ‘extravagant’ powers.88CJ ii. 288b; Clarendon, Hist. i. 386-7. Strode had lost nothing of his vehemence when the House reassembled. On 22 October, it was Strode’s idea to add to the preamble of the bill against secular employments by clergy that ‘much mischief and scandal’ had been engendered by the abuse, and he ‘stirred’ a motion on abolishing bishops (26 Oct.) that came as a surprise to Members, or at least to D’Ewes.89D’Ewes (C), 25, 39. Strode’s impatience was perhaps understandable. Some of these topics, such as the bill to levy the subsidy on the clergy, which Strode revived on 25 October with a successful motion for another bill, had been simmering for months.90D’Ewes (C), 35-6. He was named to a committee to draw up the heads of the case against evil counsellors (28 Oct.), having seconded the motion with what D’Ewes considered such ‘great violence’, ‘in so extreme a strain’, that the cooler government spokesman, Edward Hyde, was able more easily to deal with him than if he had been dispassionate.91CJ ii. 297b; D’Ewes (C), 45. An even more explosive subject to be revived on Strode’s motion came with the reconvening of the committee that had been named on 3 August to work on a remonstrance to the king on political and religious grievances.92CJ ii. 234a, 253a. Hyde attributed the renewal of this line of attack on the king directly to Strode: an attack which culminated in the Grand Remonstrance, presented to the king on 1 December.93Clarendon, Hist. i. 400.

Whether for strategic reasons or from a genuine sympathy for the people, Strode backed broadly-based London petitions on a number of occasions. Hyde noted this even during Short Parliament. In December 1640, Strode scandalised government ministers by supporting the London crowd ‘in their just complaints’ against bishops.94Northcote Note Bk. 52. In August 1641 he had been named to the committee to consider the petition from poor London tradesmen, and on 6 November was an important figure in the decision to free the London trained bands from their duty of night watching in London, preparatory to the creation of another force to guard Parliament.95CJ ii. 258a, 306b. Strode was named to the Commons committee on the petition from the London militia (10 Nov.), which was followed within days by the authority granted to his patron, Essex, and two other peers, to call out the trained bands.96CJ ii. 310a; LJ iv. 441. This sensitivity to popular concerns in London, as opposed to those of the moneyed City interests, was visible in Strode’s call (30 Oct.) for a sermon on deliverance from the gunpowder plot (with, incidentally, a protégé of the earl of Bedford as proposed preacher), and his sang froid towards unrest in London, contrary to the opinion of the Lords, nervous at what they judged to be tumultuous crowds in the streets.97D’Ewes (C), 55, 230; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 424.

A stimulus to the anxieties over the guarding of Parliament and the safety of London were the reports from Scotland suggesting that the closest advisers of the king, during his visit there, had become implicated in the plot known as the Incident. When these reports reached London, Strode advocated another use of select committees to examine them, a committee of the two Houses rather than a general conference between them. It was clear that he and his parliamentary allies sought to use the news of the Incident to maximum political effect. Strode tried to tighten communications between Parliament and their allies in Scotland (9 Nov.) and to regain the momentum on the Grand Remonstrance, lost when news had come through of the Irish rebellion. While Hyde’s committee on financing the punitive expedition to Ireland had recommended unconditional supply to the king, Strode moved that passing the Remonstrance should take precedence (11 Nov.). The same day, he urged sending to the City to ask them to hurry their loan of £50,000, the bone of contention between Hyde and himself back in February.98CJ ii. 308b, 309a; D’Ewes (C), 90, 110, 121, 123, 149. The appeal to the people inherent in the Remonstrance itself, as designed by its architects, Strode among them, can thus be seen as the culmination of an interest in extra-parliamentary metropolitan opinion in cultivation during 1641.

On 27 November, Strode moved for a bill to put the kingdom in a posture of defence. Against a background of falling attendances in the House, Strode was vocal in promoting changes in the way Members conducted themselves, whether in the chamber or outside it. He wanted gangways and passages kept clear (17 Nov.) and demanded that Members leaving London without permission should be fined £50 or be expelled (14 Dec.).99D’Ewes (C), 155, 202, 287. On 27 November, he urged that the committee which sought to petition the king about the Remonstrance should add to its agenda the question of maintaining guards on Parliament.100D’Ewes (C), 202-3. On 7 December, Strode supported Sir Arthur Hesilrige’s bill for a new national militia under the control of a lord general.101D’Ewes (C), 245. To cap this, he successfully bumped the same question of security on to the business before a conference with the Lords on events in Scotland and Ireland (28 Dec.), helping to secure the principle that the proposed new parliamentary militia should be commanded by Essex.102D’Ewes (C), 356.

Relations between the Houses were becoming strained, as the Lords dragged their feet on the growing list of urgent matters before Parliament. With John Pym, Sir Walter Erle and others, Strode prepared the heads of a conference (3 Dec.) with the peers to tell them, defiantly, that the Commons was the

representative body of the whole kingdom, and their lordships being but as particular persons, and coming to Parliament in a particular capacity ... if they shall not be pleased to consent to the passing of those acts, and others necessary to the preservation and safety of the kingdom, that then this House, together with such of the Lords that are more sensible of the safety of the kingdom, may join together and represent the same unto his majesty.103CJ ii. 330b.

This was a retrospective commentary on the activities of the junto since the opening of the Parliament. In the second half of December, a number of strands in Strode’s remorseless critique of the government seemed to be coming together. The Remonstrance was presented to the king and on 15 December was printed, and Strode was active in soliciting the support of the Lords for a plan to get the king to declare against any religious toleration for Catholics in Ireland in revolt: this was accepted by the upper House on the 17th.104D’Ewes (C), 296; Gardiner, Hist. Eng. 1603-1642, x. 100.

Strode made a speech on 16 December demanding that Catholics in the king’s army be expelled from Berwick-on-Tweed and Newcastle, and that Henry Percy* and other army plotters be prosecuted with attainder bills as traitors.105Add. 64807, f. 11. Again with Erle, joined by his fellow-Devonian Sir Samuel Rolle and Sir Robert Cooke, Strode examined Sir John Glanville* and another king’s counsel (20 Dec.) on whether during the course of examining some London citizens, they had been told there would soon be bloodshed in the streets. As the parliamentary context to Strode’s involvement in this was an investigation into obstacles put in the way of London petitioners, the grilling of Glanville and Sir Ralph Whitfield† was probably uncomfortable for them.106CJ ii. 350a; D’Ewes (C), 283. Over several days in later December, Strode turned his fire on the Lords, demonstrating, if proof were needed, that his face, though familiar in the upper House, was not always a friendly one. On the 27th, he criticised lack of progress in sending the lord lieutenant (Robert Sidney, 2nd earl of Leicester) to quell the Irish rebellion: ‘we may sit here to undo the commons of England but cannot send over a man which is hindered by the Lords’.107Add. 64807, f. 17v. Strode threatened exalted friends of the king when on 28 December he supported Oliver Cromwell in calling for John Digby, 1st earl of Bristol, to be removed from the king’s council for having advised the king to use the army in the north against Parliament. Strode himself took the lead in denouncing Bristol the following day as an evil counsellor. This was an even stronger attack on the Digby family than the one he had launched in July.108D’Ewes (C), 357, 361; Add. 64807, f. 20. It was this kind of boldness on Strode’s part, remarked Sir Edward Nicholas†, no friend of the junto, that ‘made many think him wise’, and which, Nicholas acidly added, drew Strode himself ‘into the same conceit’.109D’Ewes (C), 45n. On the 30th, Strode made a speech in which he apparently advocated the hanging of the bishops at Tyburn, to trump Sir John Clotworthy’s proposal that they be sent not to the Tower but to Newgate prison.110Add. 64807, f. 21v.

The Five Members and the road to civil war, 1642

When the king, whose patience was now exhausted by the junto, launched his ill-fated coup against Parliament early in January 1642, Strode’s name was on his list of Members to arrest. On the 3rd came the message to the House, delivered by the serjeant-at-arms, that the king intended to arrest the Five Members for high treason. A speech apparently made by Strode that day in response, was published. In it, Strode is made to attribute the attack on him to the king’s wish to have him and his colleagues out of the way so that they could not vote on the fate of the bishops. It is almost certainly a forgery, part of a propaganda effort by the Commons. The consternation with which the serjeant’s message and the news of the sealing of the Five Members’ studies were greeted by the House fits ill with the lofty and lapidary words attributed to Strode. There is in the speech no trace of Strode’s habitual inclination towards uncontrolled passion and extreme language, and none of the diarists note any speeches that day on the topic.111CJ ii. 367a; PJ i. 1-6; Master Strowd his Speech (1642, E.199.50). The following day, the king came in person to the House, looking for the Five Members. A defiant Strode was reluctant to leave the chamber before Charles and his retinue entered it, and Erle, ‘his entire friend’, had to pull him out by his cloak.112PJ i. 9, 11. A story recorded in the 1690s has it that Strode and the four others escaped to the house in the City belonging to a woollen-draper, son-in-law of the future ‘recruiter’ knight of the shire for Devon, Sir Nicholas Martyn*.113Harl. 6861, f. 11v.

In his retrospective commentary on the affair of the Five Members, Hyde reckoned that the botched arrests were made worse by the king’s selecting the wrong targets. While the ‘virulence and malice’ of Strode and Hesilrige were unsurpassed, they were ‘persons of too low an account and esteem’ for the king to be bothered with. To Strode’s earlier sufferings was now added another layer of martyrdom, which enhanced the ‘credit and authority’ he would not otherwise have enjoyed.114Clarendon, Hist. i. 506. Hyde was writing in exile and after Strode was long dead; but to accept his judgment would be to underestimate the potential of Strode’s boundless energy and his capacity for inflicting political damage. It is clear from Strode’s conduct in Parliament during the latter part of 1641 that he was becoming more, not less, determined in his pursuit of the issues that preoccupied him, and he seemed increasingly to be cultivating a taste, which in a later age might almost be called Robespierrean, for appealing to the sympathies of the people. This in itself would be sufficient to explain the odium in which he was held by the king’s most intimate advisers, without adding to the mix the concentration of fire Strode was directing at the Digby family. George Lord Digby was influential in planning the 4 January coup.115HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 410.

The effect of this episode was to burnish Strode’s name as a signifier of suffering under Charles’s arbitrary government, in an enduring output in print, in words and visual imagery. This was easily sustained without any consultation with the Five Members themselves. They disappeared into the City, showing themselves at the Guildhall the following day. Strode returned to the Commons on the 11th, when he was named to a committee on a bill to allow Parliament to adjourn from place to place.116CSP Ven. 1640-2, p. 280: CJ ii. 370a. He was fully involved in the retaliatory measure the Commons took in the aftermath of 4 January. When Sir John Byron, lieutenant of the Tower, declined to attend the House on the grounds that he needed the king’s permission, Strode noted that James I had not stood in the way of the House summoning even his favourite. He wanted the queen’s evil counsellors brought to account, in a recognition of whence much of the royal animus against him derived. Strode attacked the attorney-general, Edward Herbert I*, as ‘head of the conspiracy’ against the House (15 Jan.), for having drawn up the charges against the Five Members.117PJ i. 47, 82; Add. 64807, f. 28v; CJ ii. 377a. Even before January, Strode had been calling for a recess, undoubtedly with the precedents of the ‘close committee’ and the Recess Committee in mind, as a means of continuing parliamentary business in a more secure environment, and he now called for an adjournment and the enlarging of powers for the committee of safety at Grocers’ Hall and the committee for Irish affairs.118PJ i. 91.

The Five Members affair was a stimulus to Strode’s already hectic work schedule: in the first six months of 1642 he was named to 33 committees. The great majority of these were in connection with the political emergency. He maintained the level of his visits to, and conferring with the Lords during 1642, despite his sometimes bitter attacks on the peers. On 19 January, he moved that six peers made during this Parliament, including his would-be nemesis, Digby, be removed from the upper House, asserting that they had bought their places. On the 27th he named James Stuart, 4th duke of Lennox and 1st duke of Richmond, as another evil counsellor, for having proposed an adjournment of Parliament for six months. The day that the attorney-general was impeached (1 Feb.), Strode argued that if the Lords refused to join the Commons in pressing for the kingdom to be put on military alert, communications between the Houses should be cut off.119PJ i. 108-9, 195, 248. By 12 February, Strode had developed the theory that Herbert not only drew up the articles against the Five Members but also was up to his neck in the attempt to execute the arrests: the attorney-general, he said, was ‘another man’ when he saw the plot fail. D’Ewes, for one, remained unconvinced.120PJ i. 357, 359.

In a five-hour debate on 22 January at Grocers’ Hall, Strode supported the motion to request that compulsory church attendance be laid aside by the king until a reformed church structure was settled. John Glynne opposed him, on the grounds that it would ‘let loose the reins of liberty to so many idle persons’.121PJ i. 141. He was among the Members who on 4 February thanked the London women for their petition against bishops, against popery in the queen’s court and against Laud.122CJ ii. 413a; PJ i. 277-8. The following week, he brought to the attention of the House that undergraduates in Cambridge were being denied their degrees for refusing the now nullified Canons of 1640, and was one of a quartet asked to write to both universities on the subject.123PJ i. 350; Add. 64807, f. 46v; CJ ii. 425b. Strode shared the puritan and anti-papist outlook of the leaders of the opposition to the king. He took his share of inviting ministers to preach before the Commons and thanking them afterwards in 1641-2.124CJ ii. 452b; PJ i. 458, 464; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 424. Yet he showed more compassion towards Catholics than some of his colleagues. He proposed that priests who co-operated with Parliament should be spared their lives after questioning, losing the debate to an implacable John Maynard (10 Dec. 1641), and had wanted to restore a psalter to a Catholic lady, in the teeth of opposition from those, including D’Ewes, who wanted the book destroyed as superstitious and idolatrous.125D’Ewes (C), 141, 261.

In the first three months of 1642, Strode was busy in trying to identify and bring down Parliament’s enemies, on the one hand, and on the other intervening in the Commons on behalf of persons he considered deserving of Parliament’s support. He kept going the momentum of the impeachment of Attorney-general Herbert by proposing a number of motions in the case.126PJ i. 442, 453; ii. 19. Joining Herbert, Lord Digby and the earl of Bristol in the pantheon of Parliament’s enemies were Edward Sackville†, 4th earl of Dorset, implicated by Strode in the sending of messages by papists (21 Feb.), and the London merchant, Sir George Benion, who vocally opposed the Militia Ordinance. Strode managed relations between the Houses which led to the Lords fining and imprisoning him.127PJ i. 430; ii. 65, 78, 90; CJ ii. 490a, 512a, 529a. A gap opened between Strode and his fellow Devonian, John Northcote*, who took a lenient line on Sir William Killigrew†, fen drainer and publisher in the inns of court of the charge of high treason against the Five Members. Strode wanted Northcote to be questioned for moving that Killigrew be bailed.128PJ i. 368. Among those whose interests Strode advanced in the Commons were Thomas, Lord Cromwell, whom Strode, perhaps at the behest of Oliver Cromwell, a distant kinsman, proposed for a command in Ireland (27 Jan.); the earl of Salisbury, who lent money for the planned Irish expedition (18 Feb.); his fellow sufferer in 1629, Walter Long* (22 Feb.), later to join Strode as a stalwart of the Committee for Advance of Money; and the minister Stephen Marshall, whom Strode wanted to see leave his Essex parish to preach full-time in London.129PJ i. 193, 410, 417, 438; ii. 86; CJ ii. 409a. A former ally in the campaign against bishops, Sir Edward Dering*, was now an apostate. When rumours reached Parliament that 20,000 men of Kent were on their way to show support for Dering, Strode saw their march in apocalyptic terms: ‘within a month, the poorest man will be equal with the greatest lord in the kingdom’.130Add. 64807, f. 46v. Despite his willingness to invoke the London populace, he was dreading the impending social dislocation, not welcoming a revolution.

An important aspect of Strode’s conduct as one of the ‘fiery spirits’ whom D’Ewes came to excoriate so regularly was his readiness to propose a motion on most of the important political milestone topics on the road to civil war. As the spring of 1642 turned into summer, Strode continually tried to push the Commons towards further confrontation with the king. Among the courses he recommended were postponing replies to the king (31 Mar.), insisting that the Commons should tell the king he had deserted the government of the country (15 Apr.); pressing for a Commons vote in support of Sir John Hotham*, who had denied Hull to the king (26 Apr.); calling for the lands of peers who joined the king at York to be confiscated (2 June) and moving the impeachment of those lords (15 June).131PJ ii. 111, 177, 225-6; iii. 3, 73, 79. Strode’s confrontational and polemical style grated on D’Ewes, who addressed every question before the House in terms of historical and learned precedent. When D’Ewes started a speech in connection with the Hull affair, on the form of the royal assent (21 May), Strode ‘in a gibing, profane way’, compared historical records to the old bottles and shoes of the Gibeonites, tokens used by that people to convince the advancing Israelites of their credibility. When the Gibeonites’ feeble stratagem was discovered, they were enslaved. Strode’s meaning was obvious and deeply wounding: weeks later, D’Ewes was still smarting.132PJ ii. 356-7; iii. 75; Joshua 9: 3-27. Similarly, Strode clashed head-on with Edmund Waller* (27 May, 8 June) for speaking in favour of an accommodation with the king and against the arms race then in progress.133PJ ii. 376, 378; iii. 44.

Through all the build-up to civil war, Strode never left Westminster, either to go home to Devon or anywhere else. His centrality as a voice of the opposition to the king meant that much information from the provinces was channelled through him regardless, and he often intervened on local affairs which had no west country connection. It was on his motion that Thomas Grantham* was recommended by the Commons as a deputy lieutenant in Lincolnshire (31 Mar.), and it may have been a distant family link that impelled him to speak on Kentish affairs, on behalf of the pro-Dering Sir George Strode, before he was forced to admit his mistake (20 Apr.).134PJ ii. 113, 192-3. Nearer home, he drew the situation in Somerset to the attention of the Lords (13 June); on matters in his own county, he instigated the message to the Lords to ask that the Militia Ordinance be implemented (17 June), his breach with Northcote by this time evidently healed. A few days later, it was on Strode’s motion that Northcote left for Devon as a deputy lieutenant, and the two men composed the letter of thanks in the Speaker’s name for the mayor and burgesses of Exeter for their support for Parliament.135PJ iii. 93, 104; CJ ii. 621b, 634b.

Strode played an active part in the managing and promotion of Parliament’s propaganda war with the king. It was he who moved that the Nineteen Propositions be printed (10 June); reported from the committee on how best to defend Parliament’s actions at assize meetings (14 July) and robustly defended the decision to suspend work on a parliamentary declaration once Henry Parker’s Observations was in print, with the implication that Parker’s work was approved by the junto (23 July).136PJ iii. 58, 214-5, 257; CJ ii. 671b, 672a. Strode was just as busy in trying to inhibit the circulation of persuasive statements from the king’s camp, managing the reception of statements from York and clamping down on written material from elsewhere that disparaged Parliament. So he brought to the attention of the Lords letters taken in Bath hostile to Parliament (13 June), moved the reading in the House of the king’s proclamation forbidding financial contributions to Parliament (24 June), advocated that a judge at assizes in Hertford should be interrupted by MPs sent there if he spoke from the bench against Parliament (14 July), and urged rejection of the king’s latest response in the dialogue by this time strained to breaking point (25 July).137PJ iii. 66, 127-8, 213-4, 264. D’Ewes was again the object of his ‘fiery tongue’ when he dared criticise the content of Parker’s Observations, the Suffolk man having decided that Strode was ‘a notable profaner of the Scriptures and a man doubtless void of all truth of piety’.138PJ iii. 257.

Little if any of the propaganda output can be attributed to Strode directly. He was named to the committee with the Lords to answer the king’s declaration (17, 21 June) and to another on 11 August with the task of drawing up what emerged several days later as A Declaration and Resolution, a fierce denunciation of the king’s evil counsellors and a plea to the king to disband. The former aspect of the content is entirely consistent with Strode’s outlook but could equally be attributable to Pym and other junto members.139CJ ii. 715b, 717b; A Declaration and Resolution (1642, E.112.6). The same committee was given the job of drawing up a covenant in support of the earl of Essex, but Parliament seems to have drawn back from making it an appeal to which individuals in the country had directly to respond, along the lines of the Protestation, choosing instead to confine the covenant to Members themselves.140PJ iii. 297; CJ ii. 715b, 717b; E. Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant (Woodbridge, 2005), 53-4. As a client of Essex himself, as well as an implacable enemy of the king’s evil counsellors, Strode would have been an enthusiast for both aspects of the committee’s work. But despite his wholehearted support for Pym and the policies of the opposition leadership, and his attendance at the Committee of Safety (established on 4 July) in connection with another of Parliament’s many declarations, he was not included in the committee’s regular membership.141CJ ii. 651b, 659b; A Declaration of the Lords and Commons (1642, E.154.24).

Strode had consistently been in the forefront of the confrontation, speaking in favour of strengthening both the navy and the various units of Parliament’s army, both locally and under Essex’s command. He pledged £50 of his own money and plate to the cause in June, and between then and mid-August contributed significantly in the House to the process of mobilising the militia in Somerset, Dorset and Devon.142PJ iii. 57, 303-4, 466; CJ ii. 676a, 694b. On 12 August he was again charged by the king with high treason.143Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 334; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 281. Whether this made any significant impact upon him is unclear, but it seemed to D’Ewes that Strode’s hatred of the government by this time extended beyond the evil counsellors. After raising his standard at Nottingham, Charles sent a message to both Houses offering a treaty, but the fiery spirits insisted that the standard be taken down first. During this debate (27 Aug.), Strode ‘exercised his profane and scurrilous wit to scoff and vilify the king himself’.144PJ iii. 324. That day, Strode also acted as teller for a motion to expel Sir John Culpeper, claiming only 26 of the 95 who entered the division lobby.145CJ ii. 739b. Between the beginning of March and the end of August, he was named to 38 committees, not including his many interactions with the upper House.146CJ ii. Unsurprisingly, the majority of these were related to the political and military crisis.

Essex’s ally, 1642-43

After civil war broke out, Strode acted as a liaison officer between Parliament and the earl of Essex, commander of Parliament’s main field army. He was deputed to inform Essex of the training of volunteer soldiers in Middlesex (5 Sept.); and a few days later, he joined Essex in the field with John Pym’s second son, Charles, his fellow MP at Bere Alston since 1641.147CJ ii. 752b, 760a; Eight Speeches Spoken in Guildhall (1642), 11-12 (E.124.32). Strode’s presence in the Commons was not recorded again by the clerk until 3 November. There is no compelling evidence that he ever acquired military rank during this period; most references to ‘Colonel Strode’ are to William Strode II*, and the occasional contemporary description of him with that military rank is surely erroneous.148Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 323. He was at the battle of Edgehill on 23 October as an observer, and gave a short speech at the Guildhall in the City a few days later in support of the main account of the battle provided by Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton. Strode’s contribution is of interest for its reporting the use of the pejorative term ‘roundhead’ early in the war.149CJ ii. 833a, 838b, 840b, 846b, 851b. When he returned to Westminster, he opposed moves towards a truce with the king, arguing (30-31 Oct.) that a cessation could only dishearten Essex and his comrades in arms.150Add. 31116, p. 9. He kept close to Essex during this period, having been instructed to convey thanks to the lord general (3, 7 Nov.), to ask him to find a governor for Exeter (8 Nov.) and, with William Purefoy I*, to take him a letter (15 Nov.). Strode brought back a message from Essex on 12 November, in which the earl assured the Commons that he did ‘not intend to be amused by treaties’.151LJ v. 442b; CJ ii. 846b. Strode had been sent to consult with the earl about the treaty; that it was he who was sent surely indicates the strength of the war party in the House. On the eve of the check given to the king’s advance at Turnham Green, the message Strode brought back was a signal to peace party waverers, and probably the product of his own influence with Essex.

Strode was even more vocal in his hostility towards the peace party on 21 November, when he, Henry Marten* and others blocked the sending of any propositions to the king beyond a simple message that he should return to London. Strode was a teller in a division when he attempted unsuccessfully to prevent the House sitting as a committee of the whole House, and articulated the resentment felt in the Commons that the king had advanced on Brentford after accepting an earlier offer to negotiate.152CJ ii. 858a; Harl. 164, f. 99v; Add. 18777, f. 64v; A Perfect Diurnall no. 24 (21-28 Nov. 1642), sig. A2i (E.242.27). The following day, they successfully argued against a proposition that both armies be disbanded. In pursuit of a long-term goal of his, Strode wanted to add the earl of Bristol’s name to those of Digby and Wilmot on the list of men the king should surrender to Parliament, because Bristol had said he would serve the king ‘as faithful[ly] as if he were a papist’.153Harl. 164, f. 101v; Add. 18777, f. 67v. According to D’Ewes, during these long and turbulent debates, which clarified the existence in the Commons of peace and war parties, Strode and Sir Peter Wentworth excused Marten’s ad hominem remarks against the king himself.154Harl. 164, f. 106.

Generally speaking, Strode was not notably active in managing the war effort so far as it affected Devon. He helped manage a conference with the Lords on western affairs (26 Nov.), but his closeness to the earl of Essex was his chief asset in local matters. From that source he was able to bring war intelligence to the House, not only from his own county, but from other parts of the west (10 Dec.), and was able to report to the House Essex’s military appointments there (21 Dec).155CJ ii. 865b; Harl. 164, f. 246v; Add. 18777, 89, 99v. In the last weeks of 1642 and in early January 1643, Strode was particularly involved in raising money for the army from the City, working with the Lords.156CJ ii. 866a, 867b; Add. 31116, p. 36. He wanted the customs to be farmed by City merchants, advocating further sequestration of the assets of the old farmers.157Add. 18777, ff. 83, 100v. He and Pym advocated a new oath of association for London, which would speed up financial contributions from Londoners (13 Dec.).158Harl. 164, f. 248. From this interest in army finance and his closeness to both the lord general and other Members of the upper House sprang his involvement in the Committee for Advance of Money, to which he was appointed on 26 November and which met for the first time on 1 December at what became its permanent headquarters, Haberdashers’ Hall.159Supra, ‘Committee for Advance of Money’; CJ ii. 866a; CCAM 1; At the Committee of Lords and Commons (1642, 669.f.5.110); SP19/1, p. 22. His colleagues at the outset of this enduring committee were war party stalwarts from the Commons, like Edmund Prideaux I, Pym, Walter Long and William Purefoy I, with Viscount Saye, Lord Wharton and the earl of Manchester providing the most regular input from the Lords.160SP19/1.

During 1643, Strode was a teller in 23 divisions in all, three times the number of divisions he told for in any other year. He took 32 messages to the Lords that year, another personal record, and sustained the number of committees to which he was named. All in all, he must have been one of the most active Members in the Commons. His industriousness in so many aspects of Parliament’s work ensured that he was influential in proposals that affected the Members personally. Another of the Five Members, Denzil Holles, had always been a partner of his when they served as tellers.161CJ ii. 154b, 595b, 641b, 645b. Now, for the first time (15 Dec. 1642), they found themselves on opposing sides in a division on whether Members of the Commons should be assessed financially by their own colleagues only. Strode wanted external scrutiny by a committee – his own Committee for Advance of Money, most likely – but lost the division.162CJ ii. 890a; Add. 18777, f. 102v. Having newly pledged £50 in plate within six months, he returned to this theme on 23 January, when he was given leave to bring in a list of Members who had failed to make good on promises of money or plate.163Add. 18777, f. 109; CJ ii. 939b.

Early in February (‘in his usual manner’, complained D’Ewes), Strode lambasted MPs for not setting a good example with their contributions, and compared Members with parts of a building: ‘as in a building men would look to their materials and not take that which is unfit, so we should do with our own Members’, implying that some were not paying because they were not committed to the parliamentarian cause. Peace party members challenged the terminology and the inference, and Strode had to withdraw (9 Feb). Some detected an opportunism in the radicals’ proposals to impose a levy on Members of one twentieth of their estates, pushed through a House thinned by the departure of many to their counties.164Harl. 164, ff. 287, 293, 345v. Unsurprisingly, he was in favour of the general sequestration ordinance proposed by John Wylde on 27 February, and later took it to the Lords.165Harl. 164, f. 308; CJ iii. 6b. He successfully moved clarificatory legislation that provided for the tenants of sequestered persons to continue paying their rents, and with Wylde and William Cage* was responsible for distribution of the sequestration ordinances in the country at large.166Harl. 164, f. 347; CJ iii. 24a. On the special case of lands confiscated from the bishops, Strode’s proposal was more nuanced. Critical of the waste implicit in leaving the sees vacant in the king’s hands, he wanted the lands settled in trust, with one third of their profits allowed the king, and the remainder deployed for the ministry and charitable uses.167Add. 18777, f. 115. On general taxation he advocated a tax on luxury goods (26 Jan.), pre-empting the establishment of the excise.168Add. 18777, f. 133v.

Debate in Parliament on what propositions should be put to the king in order to secure a peace dragged on through the winter of 1642-3. Strode was named to committees on various parts of the proposals, including the preamble, which was to state the case for taking up arms (26 Dec.), and between January and the end of March 1643 was a teller in five divisions on the content and presentation of Parliament’s proposals.169CJ ii. 903a, 905b, 911a, 918b, 959a, 960b; iii. 17a. He wanted to extend the range of persons excepted from pardon, to truncate debates on two of the proposals, and sought a longer discussion on a Lords’ request for a conference. Only in one of these divisions was Strode on the winning side, and in four of them he again opposed Holles, who had by this time become convinced of the peace party case. On 11 February, Strode made a speech urging an all or nothing approach to judging the king’s response, and the treaty was subsequently voted down, its peace party advocates blaming Strode and other diehards.170Harl. 164, ff, 295v, 296v. When the embers of the peace process were fanned into life again in April, Strode opposed Holles on a motion to withdraw the parliamentary delegation from Oxford if the king made no concessions, and shed no tears when the commissioners came back to London empty-handed on the 14th.171CJ iii. 27b, 28b.

In parallel with his close links with Essex and the main field army, Strode was active in promoting a number of other military ventures in 1643. He and Pym brought in the commission for the earl of Warwick to be commander-in-chief of the navy, and supervised its passage through both Houses.172CJ ii. 918b, 930b, 932b, 933a He took to the Lords the ordinance to raise money for Sir William Waller’s* force in Gloucestershire (10 Feb.), and delivered reminders to the peers as they dawdled over ordinances for financing the west midlands military association under Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke (17 Feb).173CJ ii. 961a, 968b. He was hostile to the treaty between the Cornish royalists and the Devon parliamentarians, and helped draw up instructions forbidding the city of Exeter to participate in it (11 Mar.).174CJ ii. 998b, iii. 38b. To discomfit those who would have treated with the Cornishmen, he brought into the House a letter showing that if Sir Ralph Hopton* had been pursued from Plymouth by the local parliamentarian forces, he could have been routed. Strode had more reason than most to be angered by the half-hearted approach to war in Devon: his own house had been ransacked by Hopton, and an ordinance was brought in by his ally, Edmund Prideaux I, to compensate him from Hopton’s own property.175Harl. 164, f. 328; CJ ii. 966b, 973b. This was reported in the royalist press as an appointment to Strode to be the sequestrator of Hopton’s estate; this and the general sequestration ordinances provoked a royal proclamation declaring their illegality.176Certaine Informations no. 6 (20-27 Feb. 1643), 45 (E.90.28); Mercurius Aulicus no. 9 (26 Feb. 1643), 114; no. 11 (12 Mar. 1643), 136.

Because Strode was always so uncompromising and often shocking in his utterances, it is possible to exaggerate the extent to which he was successful in promoting his own views. In the 23 divisions for which he acted as a teller in 1643, he was on the winning side in only seven. Despite the obstacles repeatedly put by the king in the way of compromise, there was a tide running in favour of peace in the Commons in March, supported by a number of important peers, including the earls of Northumberland and Bedford, George Manners, 9th earl of Rutland, Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, and Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland. An active but critical presence in committee, Strode found himself arguing for the inclusion of fairly basic caveats in the peace proposals being drafted by the Commons, such as the need for the Commons not to hand over towns and cities to the king without nominating commanders.177CJ iii. 34a, 50b, 58a; Harl. 164, f. 334. When the Commons ordered the guns at the Tower not to be fired on the king’s accession day, the Lords voted to continue the practice, and Strode, Marten and Erle, opposed yet again by Holles, struggled without success to prevent the order being overturned on 25 March.178CJ iii. 18a; Harl. 164, f. 342v.

During April and May, Strode engaged in parliamentary activity that ran counter to the moves towards peace. Rebutting Holles once more, he argued necessity compelled the earl of Essex to introduce levies in support of his army, and saw through the House an ordinance for the sequestration of the estate of Lord Capell (Arthur Capell*) for Essex’s benefit. He helped prepare a rebuff towards those who had hoped for a treaty in the west (11 Apr.), while preparing a fulsome letter of thanks to Devon military officers who had fought the Cornish.179Harl. 164, ff. 350, 366; CJ iii. 38a, 38b, 43b, 63b, 83b, 89a. He was among those who drew up the impeachment of the turncoat Sir Hugh Cholmeley*.180CJ iii. 28a. He demanded (18 Apr.) that the whole House should attend the Lords in pursuit for reparations for his ally, Henry Marten, who had been physically abused by the earl of Northumberland.181Harl. 164, f. 373. It took the discovery of the plot associated with Edmund Waller, a figure with whom Strode had clashed in earlier encounters, to revive the flagging energies of the war party. Revelations from the evidence gathered on the plot detailed particular MPs, including Pym, John Hampden and Strode as targets.182Harl. 164, f. 397a. To D’Ewes’s mind, Strode was made to look ridiculous when on 31 May he called for a day of thanksgiving for the discovery of the plot: Gilbert Millington* pointed out that thanksgiving was a solemn act which should not precede a full inquiry into what actually happened.183Harl. 164, f. 210v. But Strode’s pre-emptive zeal suggests how the plot played into war party hands. He argued that Northumberland, named in the revelations, should be arrested for his own good, in doing so appearing to his enemies as an ‘arch-hypocrite’. During a debate on the plot, Strode interposed a motion that £500 in plate at the Guildhall be melted down, an obvious attempt to capitalise on the fraught circumstances to improve army funding; and when the new vow and covenant emerged from the unravelling of the plot, he inevitably loudly denounced those like Sir Thomas Dacres* who displayed ambivalence towards taking it.184Harl. 165, ff. 103v, 143v, 180.

The Committee for Advance of Money, 1643-44

Since his election to the Long Parliament, Strode had been the staunchest supporter of the earl of Essex, and in the summer of 1643 continued to be a regular intermediary between the lord general and the Commons.185CJ iii. 118b, 143a, 149a, 162a, 165a. But loyalties between the radicals and Essex were under strain. Pym wrote to the earl calling into question his zeal for a victory, provoking en revanche an indignant response, on 29 June. The fiery spirits, led by Pym and Strode, in turn composed a conciliatory reply characterised by D’Ewes as ‘low, unworthy and submissive’.186Harl. 165, f. 101. When Essex subsequently asked for a delegation of peers and Commons men to attend him, neither Pym nor Strode was among them. On 10 July, in what has been described as ‘perhaps the most gothic moment of the civil war’, Essex proposed that there should be either a peace settlement or a set-piece trial by battle to determine the winner of the war.187Harl. 165, ff. 106, 122v; J.S.A. Adamson, ‘The Baronial Context of the English Civil War’, Trans. Royal. Hist. Soc. ser. 5, xl. 103. Essex clung steadfastly to the doctrine that the king had been captured by evil counsellors, evincing none of Strode’s evident hostility towards the person of the king; and was motivated by a chivalric code shared by few of the Parliament-men directing the war effort in the Commons. When the earl’s proposal for trial by battle was read in the Commons, Strode and Sir Peter Wentworth were seen to ‘pluck their hats over their eyes’ in embarrassment at what must have seemed to them an absurd suggestion.188Harl. 165, f. 122v.

During this period, Strode was becoming a ubiquitous presence at the Committee for Advance of Money, in July attending all but two of the 12 meetings, and in August turning up to all 12. His closest associates during the summer in this context were Viscount Saye and Sele, the earl of Manchester, Lord Wharton and from the lower House Denis Bond, Miles Corbett and Roger Hill II.189SP19/1, 2. The committee was one of the arenas for war party ideas to flourish unchallenged, and was counterweight to the tendency of the upper House towards leniency and appeasement of the king. When the Lords granted bail to Edward Conway, 2nd Viscount Conway and Jerome Weston, 2nd earl of Portland, both involved in Waller’s plot, Strode is said to have warned the peers that ‘there would be no sitting for them, if those lords were released and restored to the freedom of their votes again’.190Mercurius Aulicus no. 32 (6-12 Aug. 1643), 423 (E.65.26). Strode was one of those in support of a new commission to Sir William Waller to head a new army raised in London, and was reported as a member of the committee to which this new force would be accountable. Tensions between Lords, Commons and their army were palpable, and it seemed to royalist newspapermen that rivalry between committees was an additional strain at Westminster, with Strode resisting moves to investigate how money was handled by the committees. More certainly, on 3 August Strode was one of three MPs deputed to visit Essex to persuade him of the value of the strategy: no easy task.191Harl. 165, ff. 128, 134v; Mercurius Aulicus no. 30 (23-29 July 1643), 397 (E.64.11); no. 32, 424; Gardiner, Hist. Great Civil War, i. 180. With the failure of Waller’s campaign in the west behind them, as well as Essex’s shortcomings, the committeemen including Strode who met on the same day to consider a way forward for the south west must have been acutely aware of the sensitivities involved.192CJ iii. 192b, 193a.

On 26 August, Strode attended a meeting of the Committee for Advance of Money, and was sent by the Commons with John Glynne to see the customs commissioners about a £2,000 advance to the navy. He did not appear in the House again until 14 September. He attended some meetings at Haberdashers’ Hall during that time, but his absence from Westminster during that period, and from London for some of it, may suggest that he was an observer at Essex’s departure from the capital to relieve Gloucester. After Strode returned in September, the Committee for Advance of Money claimed even more of his time than before, so that of the 228 meetings it held between 1 October 1643 and 31 December 1644, he attended all but three.193CJ iii. 219b, 243b; Harl. 165, f. 191; SP19/2. Haberdashers’ Hall became his home from home, and by means of the committee there he acquired the lease of a house in Aldermanbury, near the Guildhall.194CCAM 351. A Londoner whose case came before the committee complained that Strode ‘sat as a prince at Haberdashers’ Hall and that he was an unjust, unworthy man, and would undo all the gentlemen in the country’.195CCAM 297. A royalist source reported Strode as insisting to citizens reluctant to pay up that ‘there was no denial, for their money was demanded by the supreme court of judicature’, exploding when one of them expressed the hope it was also a court of justice: ‘Sir, do you teach us justice? I tell you justice is blind, these are times of necessity’.196Mercurius Aulicus no. 6 (4-10 Feb. 1644), 822 (E.34.12).

In the Commons in the autumn, Strode was involved in moves to clamp down on the movements of those inimical to Parliament. He argued that those who had fled the country should have their property sequestered, and was active in pushing through the ordinance to impose a levy of one-twentieth on MPs who had deserted Westminster, legislation that would widen the powers of the committee at Haberdashers’ Hall.197Harl. 165, f. 191; CJ iii. 250a, 265a, 269a, b. He was reported to have moved in the House on 19 October that refusers of the Solemn League and Covenant should be treated as outlaws.198Mercurius Aulicus no. 42 (15-21 Oct. 1643), 593 (E.74.10). Much of his activity in the House was related to the work of the Haberdashers’ Hall committee, whose full title, Committee for Advance of Money and Other Necessities for the Army, pointed to the direction of his efforts. His commitments were now divided in support of both Essex and Waller. He wanted Essex to authorize a standing commission to introduce martial law across the country, to apply to soldiers outside his army, and brought back the lord general’s consent to that and a commission to try the turncoats Sir John Hotham* and John Hotham*, his son.199CJ iii. 281b, 286b. Strode scraped together a package of funding for Waller’s march to southern England. He procured a loan on the credit of assessments at Haberdashers’ Hall, worked to secure a further advance on the credit of the excise and ensured that levies and fines on wealthy individuals such as Lionel Cranfield, 1st earl of Middlesex, who had in fact not declared for the king in the war, and Sir Robert Berkeley, a judge who found for the king in the Ship Money case and further back had been counsel for the king when Strode was arrested in 1629, were appropriated for Waller’s use.200CJ iii. 258b, 286a, 287b, 288b, 289a, 319b, 320a, b.

In December, Strode moved that two of the London regiments be sent out of the City to Surrey in support of Waller, and provocatively proposed Hampton Court as their barracks. Two days later (22 Dec.), he opposed the billeting of these regiments under Richard Browne II* on the Surrey property-holders, earning the grudging respect of D’Ewes, who reckoned that usually Strode ‘seldom spoke anything for the good of the commonwealth or to ease the oppressed people’.201Harl. 165, ff. 351, 254. His endeavours in support of Essex and Waller did not extend to diverting sequestration money away from the Scots army towards Waller, as a report from the Committee of Safety by Sir Henry Vane I proposed on 20 November.202Harl. 165, f. 213v. He seems to have been well disposed towards the Scots. After Parliament requested that a Scots army be sent to assist the English forces in England, Strode was named to the committee negotiating with Scots commissioners (16 Sept.) and requested and managed conferences with the Lords on relations with the Scots. It was Strode who was asked to find the reward for the messenger who brought news that the Scots army had entered England (29 Jan. 1644).203CJ iii. 244a, 258b, 290a, 380a, 396a. In December 1643, during the continuing hunt for sources of finance for the war effort, Strode chaired a committee on the farmers of tin, a subject on which he had some knowledge, as his family had tin mining interests in the Devon and Cornwall stannaries.204CJ iii. 335a, 354b; Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 72/1034. Simon Snowe* was one of these farmers, and Strode advocated that they should forfeit £6,000 which they had given the king when tin worth £20,000 had come from Cornwall. Strode argued that the matter was within the scope of the sequestration ordinance, and deplored the channelling of tin money into the pockets of the royalist Cornish gentry. Unwisely, perhaps, he insisted on a division, and the proposal to recover the £6,000 fell.205Harl. 165, ff. 264, 264v; Add. 18779, ff. 23, 38.

The nascent Independent interest, 1644-45

In the winter of 1643-44, Strode continued to intervene in matters relating to Essex and his other contacts among the peers. On the quarrel between Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh, and the committee at Coventry, Essex was asked to become a mediator, Strode recommending that the committee’s letter to Essex should not be shown to Denbigh. As a regular associate of Lord Wharton, he gave an opinion on Sir Henry Mildmay’s* attempt to discredit the peer (7 Dec.), and argued passionately (20 Jan. 1644) for compensation for Edward Howard*, Lord Howard of Escrick, a colleague at Haberdashers’ Hall, whose estate had been seized by the king.206CJ iii. 333a; Add. 18779, ff. 24, 50v. He was in regular contact with Essex, requesting commissions, informing him of developments at Westminster and bringing back reports. Strode was the intermediary in a jurisdictional dispute involving allegations that Essex intended to try royalist MPs by martial law (24 Jan.).207CJ iii. 362b, 375a, b. With Denis Bond, another Haberdashers’ Hall stalwart, he was naturally responsible for finding another £1,000 for Essex’s infantry (7 Mar).208CJ iii. 420b. To cement further his association with Waller, he was added to the committee for the general’s brigade on 16 January.209CJ iii. 368a.

In his attitude towards peace, Strode followed the line taken by future Independents like Sir Henry Vane II. When ambassadors from the Netherlands offered to mediate between king and Parliament with a view to ending the war, Strode was consistently sceptical. He poured cold water on a suggestion as to which London house should be offered the ambassadors (16 Jan.), acted as a teller with Vane in a division which had the effect of keeping the Dutch envoys waiting (30 Mar.), and when one of the ambassadors requested a cargo of lead for church repairs back home, coolly suggested he should petition in the usual manner (29 Apr.).210Harl. 165, f. 276; 166, ff. 41, 53. The wider background was the emergence of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, which the radicals viewed as a new and more responsive means of prosecuting the war and managing any moves towards peace, whether mediated by the Dutch or with the king directly. It was Strode’s ally, Edmund Prideaux I, who reported from the Lords on 30 March the peers’ views on how best to manage the Dutch, but it was the pronouncement of Essex that he brought back, in which the lord general advocated a more traditional, Lords-led alternative to the Committee of Both Kingdoms as a means of discussing peace.211CJ ii. 442b, 443a. Essex and Vane had clashed in January over an alleged breach of parliamentary privilege when the general arrested a spy, and Strode was left to repair the breach.212Harl. 165, f. 281. Although Strode worked towards establishing the Committee of Both Kingdoms on a permanent basis, being singled out by a non-parliamentary diarist as one who would compel the Lords to agree to it, it was probably his continuing loyalty to Essex that cost him his own place on it, and ensured that the Committee for Advance of Money remained his only political base beyond the Commons chamber.213Harl. 166, f. 64, 64v; CJ iii. 490b, 495b, 497b, 500b, 503a; Juxon Jnl. 53-4.

Whatever the nature of his attachment to Essex, Strode remained undimmed in his vehemence against royalists. It was reported that on 17 July, when Sir John Glanville* was waiting to be called to the bar of the Commons, news of another royalist’s imminent appearance was made known. Strode was said to have exclaimed, ‘yes, there is a bill drawing to hang Kilvert, and ‘twere good to tie those two back to back and let them hang both together’. The royalist press considered him the most bloodthirsty Member of the Commons, and on other occasions in 1644 represented him as cruel and vengeful.214Mercurius Aulicus no. 29 (14-20 July 1644), 1090-1 (E.4.12); no. 34 (18-24 Aug. 1644), 1129 (E.9.5); Court Mercurie no. 4 (20-27 July 1644), n.p. (E.3.16). D’Ewes added a note to his diary entry on Strode’s support in July for an ordinance that would confiscate the estates of all killed fighting against Parliament: ‘crudely, et barbarism’.215Harl. 166, f. 79. It was certainly the case that apostates could expect no sympathy from him. With Prideaux, he took a hard and unforgiving line on Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire* (2 Mar.), suspended from the House for making overtures to the king at Oxford.216CJ iii. 414a. Strode was involved in drafting the ordinance on excluding other non-attending Members 217CJ iii. 423b On the other hand, his loyalty to his allies was evident when he mounted a robust defence of the financier Sir David Watkins, a significant figure in the world of sequestrations and penal taxation who had sought Strode’s help before, when he came under attack from the Committee of Both Kingdoms.218Add. 31116, p. 310; CJ iii. 609a; HMC Portland, i. 130; CSP Dom. Addenda, 1625-49, p. 666.

The decision by Essex in June 1644 to march into the south west to relieve Lyme and then Plymouth before pressing on into Cornwall has been attributed to the influence on the lord general of the western gentry, notably John, 2nd Baron Robartes.219Gardiner, Great Civil War, i. 354. Although Strode’s association with Essex was of long standing, there seems little to link him in any particular way to the counsels which led ultimately to military disaster in Cornwall. In May, he was part of a committee delegated to investigate allegations against an earlier western commander, Henry Grey*, 1st earl of Stamford, and on 25 June was on the committee that wrote to Essex to authorize him to march into Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. He and Glynne drafted the reply under the Speaker’s hand in response to a letter Essex sent the Commons from Tiverton (20 July), and Strode as usual took ordinances and votes on military affairs in the south west to the Lords (19 Aug.).220CJ iii. 498a, 542b, 566a, 596b. But the Honiton MP, Walter Yonge I, whose parliamentary diary naturally gives full coverage to western affairs, is silent on any involvement Strode might have had in the unfolding of the events that led to the debacle in which Essex was forced ignominiously to escape from Cornwall by boat (1 Sept.). Prideaux and other MPs from Dorset seats seem to have carried more weight than Strode in the Committee of the West.

As a key figure in the committee that was supplying ‘money and other necessities’ to the parliamentary armies, Strode was as interested in 1644 in the deployment of Waller’s force as he was in that of Essex. He was also part of the committee that sought to raise money for Waller by means of the excise (14 Aug.) – Strode adopting a typically aggressive approach to the excise farmers – and took Commons votes to the Lords on Waller’s brigade (19 Aug.).221CJ iii. 590b, 596b; Harl. 166, f. 77v. On 17 July, Sir Henry Vane II argued that Waller’s new army should remain in the south east, provoking a coalition of western MPs that for once re-united Holles and Strode to predict the loss of Essex’s army if Waller did not set out to reinforce the lord general.222Harl. 166, f. 98. Three days later, a letter was read in the Commons purporting to show that Sir Arthur Hesilrige, another of the Five Members, was bringing articles of high treason against Essex. Hesilrige denied the rumour as scurrilous, and Strode moved that a letter under the Speaker’s hand should be sent to Essex to deny the report. He and the Presbyterian John Glynne drew up the letter.223Harl. 166, f. 99.

Strode’s peace-making role in the rumours of an Independent-inspired impeachment against Essex raises the question of his political orientation in 1644. Through his continuing uncompromising pronouncements and by dint of his personal record of undoubted activism in the parliamentary war party, by mid-1644 Strode is to be identified politically with the group that would soon become known as the Independent interest. When the subject of peace proposals were half-heartedly raised again in the Commons, Strode had firm things to say about exceptions from any future general pardon, and it was his proposal, later incorporated into the propositions to the king on the table at Uxbridge, that judges and lawyers who had acted against Parliament should be forbidden from practising law ever again.224Harl. 166, f. 101; Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 280. On later discussions of what should be in the peace proposals, Strode acted with Independents such as Oliver St John and Sir Henry Vane II.225Harl. 166, f. 128. With win-the-war partisans Prideaux and William Ellys, Strode seconded a motion by Sir Henry Mildmay (10 Aug.), that all who refused the Solemn League and Covenant be expelled from Parliament. This was an anti-Presbyterian, anti-Lords move, as Sir Walter Erle evidently knew that Lord Robartes, an important influence on Essex at the time, had not taken it.226Harl. 166, f. 106.

In September 1644, in the immediate aftermath of the disaster that befell Essex in Cornwall, Strode was a teller in one division (in pursuit of his old enemy, Sir Edward Herbert) and was named only to two committees, by his standards a very low profile indeed.227CJ iii. 619a, 639a, 640b. Strode was absent from the House but not from Haberdashers’ Hall, and his political stock and confidence may have fallen with the fortunes of Presbyterian lord general to whom he was so closely linked. The relationship survived Essex’s humiliation, but Strode was not as close to him as previously. He was never again asked to visit Essex or bring a message back from him, and his energies were thereafter diluted in larger committees that dealt with the general.228CJ iii. 678a, 685b, iv. 148b. He had been openly critical of the Lords on the question of confirming the standing of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, and on 8 November again spoke irritably and ‘impudently’ about the procedure by which the peers had dealt with allegations against the earl of Denbigh: ‘unsavoury stuff’, commented D’Ewes on Strode’s speech.229Harl. 166, f. 153. Strode was a teller with Vane for a motion (20 Nov.) which declared Denbigh guilty of violating an agreement with the Coventry committee; they won the division by seven voices.230CJ iii. 700b. He was eager to see the death sentence on Archbishop Laud carried through, and took to the Lords the request that the execution be expedited. He was said to have threatened the Lords that ‘the people of London should come to hasten them’, a flash of the populist side to him evident in 1641. The archbishop’s execution provoked the reinstatement of his ritual confrontations with Holles in the division lobby (28 Nov.).231CJ iii. 680a, 707a; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 185. In total, these two led their colleagues into 19 divisions against each other, and evidently personified the war and the peace camps in the Commons, whatever name is given by historians to these factions.

In his last service as a teller in 1644, Strode acted with Oliver Cromwell against a motion that Sir John Hotham should be granted a stay of execution.232CJ iii. 734b. This was a further sign of Strode’s close association with the emerging Independent interest. These links, rather than any special reputation for piety, probably explain his nomination as a lay delegate to the Westminster Assembly on 31 Jan. 1645.233CJ iv. 38a. Despite drifting apart from Essex, Strode played only a supporting role in moves to establish the New Model army. He was named to a committee which dealt with provisos sent back by the Lords to the ordinance for raising the army under Sir Thomas Fairfax* (5 Feb. 1645), and was one of five who managed a conference with the peers on the topic (14 Feb). He was part of the delegation to the common council sent on 10 March to the common council of the City to raise funds for the new force, took a message to the Lords (28 Mar.) and managed or reported two more conferences with the Lords on the very specific question of Fairfax’s commission.234CJ iv. 42b, 48b, 73b, 91a, 91b, 93a, 95b. On 4 March, he, Prideaux and Vane opposed an attempt by the Scots commissioners to ensure that the new officer cadre was in favour of Presbyterianism and had taken the Covenant. He was named to the committee working on what became the Self-Denying Ordinance (24 Mar.) and a few days later he was included on the New Model’s financial executive, the Independent-dominated Committee for the Army.235Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; Harl. 166, f. 181; CJ iv. 88a; A. and O.

March 1645 saw a flurry of committee activity by Strode which ran against the pattern of decline in his nominations to committees which had set in during the last months of 1644. Nearly all his mentions in the Journal after that are related to supporting the army in various ways. In late April he spoke in the House in order to divest the Committee for Advance of Money of the power to seize goods on a mere information that an individual was a suspected active royalist. This power had led to many vexatious suits at law, and other ‘inconveniencies and oppressions’, and was duly revoked, with the same revocation applying to the Committee for Examinations. From this point on, the committees were to need an ad hoc recommendation from the House before they could seize goods.236Harl. 166, f. 205v.

Strode had been granted sequestration powers for his own use over the goods of Sir Ralph Hopton (now 1st Baron Hopton) back in 1643, but when on 3 June a list was drawn up of MPs who were to receive a parliamentary allowance as compensation for their sufferings for Parliament, he was adamant that his name be removed from it.237CJ iv. 162b, Harl. 166, ff. 215, 215v. When the case of his old ally, Walter Long, came before the House on 30 June, D’Ewes noted that Strode ‘did somewhat unworthily undervalue his sufferings ... which ... was generally distasted’.238CJ iv. 222b. Walter Yonge I, less hostile to Strode than D’Ewes, noted that Strode seconded Long’s petition nevertheless, and Strode himself was awarded £500, his share of £1,000 bestowed on John Selden* and himself, which may explain why he was keen a few weeks earlier not to become one of the £4 a week pensioners.239CJ iv. 189b, Add. 18780, f. 57v. July saw a marked slackening of Strode’s pace. He was on committees to supervise propaganda use of the king’s cabinet, captured at Naseby, and was involved in activity in the House relating to the future shape of church government (25 July).240CJ iv. 187a, 191b, 218a.

On 29 August Strode was a teller in favour of moving forward on a report from the grand committee on religion, though his side lost the division. It was the last day his presence was recorded in the House. On 9 September, after an ‘epidemical fever’, Strode died.241Hickes, Life and Death of David, 23. He was buried near Pym in Westminster Abbey, his pallbearers a group of west country MPs; the funeral preacher, Jasper Hickes, a Tottenham clergyman whom Strode had the previous year helped to a handsome augmentation.242CJ iii. 655a, iv. 268b. During his lifetime, Strode received £100 of the £500 awarded him in June 1645, and in January 1647, a further award of £5,000 was made to his relatives.243SC6/Chas I/1662, m. 9d; CJ v. 55b. He had made his will in July 1644, and his estate was entirely patrimonial, with no evidence that he had ever enriched himself through his years of prominence in the committee at Haberdashers’ Hall. He died unmarried, and left the bulk of his estate to a friend, Sir Edward Barkham. His remains were disinterred from the abbey on a warrant dated 9 September 1661, the sixteenth anniversary of his death, and flung into a pit nearby.244Oxford DNB.

Conclusion

Strode re-entered Parliament in 1640 as a symbol of the oppressions of Charles I’s government, but quickly displayed political skills that transcended mere symbolism. He was unusually ready, at an early stage of the conflict, to criticise the king himself, refusing to hide behind the convention that it was always his evil advisers, never Charles or his queen personally, who were to blame for political iniquities. Doubtless ‘of constitution something hot’, as his obituarist put it, it was probably his readiness to appeal to a constituency in London outside Parliament, as well as his unbridled tongue, that earned him the detestation of the king and those close to him.245Hickes, Life and Death of David, 24. His association with members of the Lords, particularly with the earl of Essex, provide another enduring theme in his career, but divisions between the lord general and those in the Commons intent on pursuing the war with the king to the finish, probably account for signs that he was becoming rather marginalised politically during the last year of his life. To set against that, his work at the Committee for Advance of Money reveals him as one of the work horses of the Independents’ mastery of parliamentary executive committees during 1644-5, and there can be little doubt that his early death robbed them of one of their boldest and most energetic champions.