RIGBY, Alexander I (1594-1650), of Middleton Hall in Goosnargh, Kirkham, Lancs.

Background and early career

In the early 1600s the Rigbys were apparently unable to trace their descent back more than a few generations, and it therefore seems unlikely that they had joined the ranks of the Lancashire gentry before Tudor times. It was Rigby’s father, ‘a rising Wigan attorney’, who perhaps did more than anyone to consolidate the family’s fortunes, acquiring a secure grip on the lucrative office of clerk of the peace for Lancashire and purchasing an extensive estate in and around Middleton Hall, near Preston.50B.G. Blackwood, ‘The Lancs. Gentry, 1625-60: a Social and Economic Study’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1973), 325; Long, ‘Lancs.’, 153-4, 155; Earwaker, ‘Col. Alexander Rigby’, 137; G. Inn Admiss. i. 124; ‘George Rigby’, Oxford DNB.

Rigby received a gentleman’s education at St John’s, Cambridge – one of the university’s more puritanically-inclined colleges – before following his father into the legal profession.51Blackwood, ‘Lancs. Gentry’, 189. He probably spent much of the 1620s and 1630s building his practice, and among his clients was the mother of the leading Essex puritan Sir Thomas Barrington*. It was probably though the Barringtons that he became acquainted with the family of his second wife, Anne Gobert.52Barrington Lttrs. 5, 190-1. In 1642, he was described as having ‘a good estate and interest’ in Lancashire, although he would claim in 1646 that his ‘profession [had been] formerly as profitable to me annually as my estate’.53Lancs. Lieutenancy ed. Harland, 277; Earwaker, ‘Col. Alexander Rigby’, 281. Nevertheless, there is little to suggest that he was one of Lancashire’s top-flight lawyers before the civil war. Nor is there any evidence, pace one authority, that he served as an officer in the county’s trained bands during the 1630s.54‘Alexander Rigby’, Oxford DNB. This was almost certainly his kinsman Alexander Rigby of Burgh and Layton – a Lancashire magistrate and deputy lieutenant – with whom he is often confused.55Lancs. RO, DDN/1/64; D.J. Wilkinson, ‘The commission of peace in Lancs. 1603-42’, in Seventeenth-Century Lancs. ed. J.I. Kermode, C.B. Phillips, Trans. Historic Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, cxxxii. 66.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Rigby was returned for Wigan after a vigorous contest involving at least six candidates and ending with a poll in which he came second to Orlando Bridgeman.56Supra, ‘Wigan’. The nature of Rigby’s interest at Wigan is not immediately apparent, for most of his father’s properties in the borough had been inherited by his sister, while the bulk of his own estate lay well to the north around Preston.57Lancs. RO, WCW, will of A. Rigby of Wigan, 1622; Lancs. IPM ed. Rylands, 458. He himself did not own enough property in the borough to be classed as an ‘in-burgess’.58Sinclair, Wigan, i. 215. His popularity with the voters probably derived from a combination of his family’s long-standing ties with Wigan and the local influence wielded by his younger brother Alderman George Rigby and by his sister’s husband Alderman Robert Maudesley – both of whom acted as his electoral managers.59Lancs. RO, DDKE/9/23/29, 52, 54, 56, 57; DDKE/9/27/9; HMC Kenyon, 58; Sinclair, Wigan, i. 208, 218; ‘George Rigby’, Oxford DNB.

Once at Westminster, Rigby belied his lack of experience as a Parliament-man by contributing frequently and forthrightly to debate and by showing a confident grasp of parliamentary procedure (his tally of only two committee appointments in the Short Parliament was poor by comparison).60Aston’s Diary, 11, 22, 45, 77, 98, 101, 105, 114, 130, 132, 139; CJ ii. 17b, 18b. His stance on what he called the ‘great work of the day of the time’ – whether to accept the king’s offer to relinquish Ship Money in return for a vote of 12 subsidies – was reasonably clear, although expressed through a cloud of legal argumentation. On 30 April 1640, he declared that ‘no aid, charge, or other such thing shall be levied of the subject but by act of Parliament’ – thus effectively pronouncing Ship Money illegal – and invoked the terms of the Petition of Right (1628), ‘which is fresh in our memory’. These two points of reference, thought Rigby, ‘may lead us to give our vote’ – that is, to reject the king’s offer.61Aston’s Diary, 101. He took a similar line on 4 May, questioning the legality of Ship Money and declaring that if it was legal, Parliament’s grant of 12 subsidies was ‘far too little’.62Aston’s Diary, 130; Procs. Short Parl. 194.

Rigby and reform, 1640-1

In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, Rigby was returned for Wigan again, and on this occasion he outpolled the other five candidates – although it is likely that the runner-up, Bridgeman, retained the senior place in accordance with his status as the son of a bishop. Rigby’s victory over Bridgeman in the poll may indicate that his criticism of royal policy had gone down well with the voters and that Bridgeman’s interest had suffered as a result of his own and his father’s close association with Archbishop William Laud and the court.63Supra, ‘Wigan’.

On returning to Westminster, Rigby took up where he had left off that spring, quickly establishing himself as one of the Long Parliament’s most dedicated Members (though he never became ‘the most industrious MP of the 1640s’ as one authority has suggested).64‘Alexander Rigby’, Oxford DNB. In the 19 or so months between Parliament assembling and his posting to Lancashire in June 1642, he was appointed to almost 80 committees and was named first to, and either chaired or reported from (or both), at least seven of them.65CJ ii. 59b, 90a, 102b, 112a, 113b, 120a, 123b, 161a, 165b, 193a, 215b, 258b, 365a. As one of George Rigby’s correspondents gushed in March 1641, ‘your brother in London ... keepeth the chair of three of the greatest committees: the star chamber, the council board and the high commission’ – although, in fact, this was a single committee, set up on 3 December 1640, for investigating and reforming the prerogative courts.66CJ ii. 44b, 105b; HMC Kenyon, 60-1; D’Ewes (N), 243.

A number of Rigby’s early appointments and contributions in debate reflect his commitment to what he termed ‘the punishment of offenders and reformation of grievances [of the personal rule of Charles I], which had almost made a deluge of the whole kingdom’.67CJ ii. 30a, 41a, 44b, 52a, 52b, 53b, 56a, 97a, 99a, 100b, 119a, 157a, 184b, 229a, 253b; Procs. LP ii. 694, 698; HMC Kenyon, 60. It was to the 3 December committee and to another on 17 December to which Rigby was also named that the petitions of the puritan ‘martyrs’ John Bastwick, John Burton and William Prynne* were referred.68CJ ii. 44b, 52b. Rigby burnished his credentials as their champion in the House by making a well-publicised speech on 21 December in which he demanded justice against Lord Keeper Finch (John Finch†), who had been one of the principal actors against the three men.69Northcote Note Bk. 94; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 128-9; Master Rigby’s Speech in Answere to the Lord Finch (1641, E.198.27); Earwaker, ‘Col. Alexander Rigby’, 139; ‘John Finch’, Oxford DNB. Between 22 February and 20 April 1641, Rigby made five reports from the 3 December committee to the effect that the treatment of Bastwick, Burton and Prynne had been ‘against law and the liberty of the subject’ and that those responsible should compensate them for their ‘imprisonments, loss of ears, exile and other evils ... by the said unjust and illegal proceedings’.70CJ ii. 90a, 102b, 112a, 120a, 123b; Procs. LP ii. 506-7, 509, 546, 552, 554-5, 595, 725, 729; iii. 108, 111, 113-14, 548, 554; iv. 22-3, 24, 25. Having amassed a large amount of what he doubtless saw as incriminating material in the course of his investigation, he handed it over to Prynne, who used it to produce another major publication against Laudian prelacy.71Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 210. Rigby consolidated his attack upon the ‘illegal and unjust proceedings’ of Laud and his confederates by reporting a bill in May 1641 for abolishing the court of high commission, and the following month he was named to a conference-management team and a committee concerning both this bill and that for abolishing star chamber.72CJ ii. 161a, 189b, 191a; Procs. LP iv. 639. Yet for all his zeal against the machinery and ‘wicked instruments’ of the personal rule, he was only peripherally involved in the trial of that ‘arch-malignant’ the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†), although he did speak in favour of proceeding against him by act of attainder.73CJ ii. 64a; Procs. LP iii. 555, 566; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 129.

At the top of Rigby’s reformist agenda during the early months of the Long Parliament was apparently the suppression of popery – in which category he evidently included Laudian prelacy as well as outright Catholicism. Among his earliest recorded contributions to the House’s proceedings was a speech on 9 December 1640, denouncing the new Canons as ‘illegal in the whole’ and the product of overweening clerical authority. If the new Canons were allowed to stand, he argued, ‘then are we to be subject to an arbitrary law’. Revealingly, he contrasted the authority of the ‘congregation of the faithful’ in the ‘primitive church’ with the ‘ecclesiastical mandate’ exercised by Laudian clerics.74Procs. LP i. 526, 534, 540, 544; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 232. On 16 December, he was included on a committee to investigate the promoters of the new Canons and to consider Archbishop Laud’s role in what was perceived as the ‘great design of the subversion of the laws of the realm and of religion’. This committee was given the weighty task of drawing up a charge against Laud.75CJ ii. 52a. And on 22 December 1640 and 5 June 1641, Rigby was named to committees for drawing up charges against the Laudian bishop Matthew Wren of Ely and for expediting the prosecution of Laud.76CJ ii. 56a, 168b. He was likewise involved in drafting legislation for preventing the clergy from exercising temporal power or holding lay office.77CJ ii. 94b, 99a; Procs. LP ii. 692, 694, 698.

But if Rigby’s activities in the House during 1640-1 are any guide, he focused most of his energy in the cause of godly reformation against Catholicism itself – which is perhaps not surprising, given that he hailed from England’s most Catholic county. On 11 November 1640, he presented a letter to the House that purportedly revealed the existence of a ‘popish ecclesiastical hierarchy’ in England, centred upon the queen, and that the Catholics in Lancashire were stockpiling arms. This was the cue for John Pym to expound on a popish plot ‘to cut the Protestants’ throats’.78CJ ii. 26a; Procs. LP i. 97, 100, 102, 110; Gardiner, Fall of Monarchy of Chas. I, ii. 19-20. Rigby was added to the committee for recusants on 1 December 1640, he seconded Pym on 16 March 1641 in urging the removal of Catholics (and specifically the queen’s secretary Sir John Wintour) from court, and he was named first to a committee on 26 March, which he probably chaired, on a bill ‘to prevent the dangers arising from popish recusants’.79CJ ii. 42b, 113b; D’Ewes (N), 493; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 267. He may also have been involved in drafting legislation for preventing Catholics exercising any trade in London.80CJ ii. 258a. Revelations concerning the army plots against Parliament of the spring and summer of 1641 appear to have spurred his efforts to counter the perceived popish threat. On 2 and 3 June, he reported from the 26 March committee a bill for disarming recusants (and was named to a 19 July conference-management team on this issue), and he reported a bill on 30 June for ‘regulating’ (i.e. expropriating) their estates – which even his fellow godly Members thought ‘too rigid’, and it was eventually laid aside.81CJ ii. 153b, 165b, 193a, 216b; Procs. LP iv. 701, 707; v. 418, 421, 425; PJ i. 486; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 340-1. Catholic influence in Montgomeryshire was the subject of a report he made on 16 August from a ‘committee of seven’ set up two days earlier (14 Aug.) to investigate what was evidently perceived as a plot to intrude Catholics or their sympathisers into the county’s government.82CJ ii. 257b, 258b; Procs. LP vi. 433.

Suppressing prelacy and popery was not an end in itself for many of the more puritan Members but was a necessary step in the introduction of a godly and perhaps even Presbyterian religious settlement. Rigby was evidently aligned with this constituency in the House, for in the marathon debate on 8 February 1641 on the London root and and branch petition (presented to the House the previous December) for the abolition of episcopacy – which turned on whether the petition should be referred to a committee or effectively laid aside altogether – he joined those Members (mostly, but by no means exclusively, future parliamentarians), who urged that the petition should be committed.83Procs. LP ii. 391-2. The great obstacle to reforming church government was the pro-episcopal interest in the Lords, which included Catholic peers as well as the bishops. One of the reformists’ tactics for neutralising this interest involved setting up a three-man committee on 30 July 1641 – to which Rigby was named – for preparing a bill stipulating that ‘no man [i.e. peers as well as commoners] that will not take the oaths of allegiance or supremacy [i.e. Catholics] shall give a vote in any Parliament in England in matter of religion or church government’.84CJ ii. 230b. Similarly, on 11 August, he was named to a committee to forward the impeachment (and thus removal from the Lords) of 13 bishops accused of approving the ‘popish’ new Canons.85CJ ii. 252b. He repeatedly argued that in supporting the new Canons the bishops had acted to divide king and Parliament and were therefore guilty of treason.86Procs. LP vi. 182, 183-4, 383. His first appointment on returning to the House after the autumn recess was on 31 December, when he was named to a committee to consider the impeachment of 12 bishops who had rashly protested that Parliament was not properly constituted so long as crowd-intimidation around Westminster prevented them from taking their seats in the Lords.87CJ ii. 364b, 385b; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 483-4.

Securing Lancashire for Parliament, 1641-2

Rigby must have been deeply concerned by the outbreak of the Irish rebellion late in October 1641 and its possible knock-on effects among the Catholic community in Lancashire. It was via a letter sent to him from Lancashire and communicated to the House by Harbert Morley that MPs were first informed of claims by the putative leader of the rebellion, Sir Phelim O’Neill, that he was acting under a commission from the king ‘to restore the Roman religion in Ireland’.88D’Ewes (C), 227. Nevertheless, Rigby was apparently not closely involved in Parliament’s efforts to raise and dispatch forces in support of Ireland’s beleaguered Protestants. Between December 1641 and June 1642, he received only four (or possibly five) appointments that related directly to the Irish service.89CJ ii. 365a, 391a, 401a, 605a; PJ ii. 384. And curiously for a godly Member with an interest (certainly by 1643) in ‘foreign plantations’, he did not invest any money as an Irish Adventurer.90CJ ii. 974b, 988a, 994b; iii. 24a; iv. 476b, 477b; v. 83b; LJ v. 632b; viii. 718b; Harl. 164, f. 317; Winthrop Jnl. ed. Dunn, Savage, Yeandle, 495-6, 619, 640. The fact that he was a bit-part player when it came to several major policy initiatives at Westminster during the winter of 1641-2 – notably, securing Scottish military resources to suppress the Irish rebellion and securing English military resources to suppress the king – is a likely indication that he was not privy to the plans of the parliamentary leadership, known as the ‘junto’. Most of his parliamentary activities during these months were associated with the issues of securing the kingdom’s safety, putting it into ‘a posture of defence’ and prosecuting the king’s supporters – particularly after Charles’s attempted arrest of the Five Members on 5 January 1642.91CJ ii. 365b, 370a, 372a, 376b, 382b, 383b, 387a, 393a, 406a, 449a; D’Ewes (C), 378; PJ i. 51, 438.

Rigby made his greatest impact at Westminster during the winter of 1641-2 as a regional spokesman. On 10 January, he and Raphe Assheton II opposed (unsuccessfully) the appointment of James Stanley†, Lord Strange as lord lieutenant of Cheshire in favour of Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton.92JRL, Legh of Lyme corresp., Lttrs. to Francis Legh, folder 10: Peter Legh* to Legh, 10 Jan. 1642; Newton, House of Lyme, 166-7. Undeterred by this defeat, Rigby returned to the attack a month later, on 10 February, in a debate on whether to nominate Lord Strange as lord lieutenant of Lancashire, when he delivered what his fellow godly MP Sir Simonds D’Ewes described as a ‘long, invective, malicious speech against the Lord Strange, consisting of many falsities, pretending that he was a favourer of papists and very forward against the Scots [in the bishops’ wars] and had much oppressed the country with raising of men and levying of money’.93PJ i. 338-9; iii. 350. D’Ewes described Lord Strange – soon to become the 7th earl of Derby and the commander of the king’s army in the north-west – as ‘a great countenancer of religion and a constant practiser of it in his own family’.94PJ i. 491. Roger Kirkbye, one of the Lancashire county MPs, also refuted Rigby’s attack upon Lord Strange.95PJ i. 339. But at least one of Rigby’s fellow Lancashire Members, Thomas Standish, thought he had made ‘a good speech’.96Add. 64807, f. 46. The House had already voted to have Lord Strange confirmed as lord lieutenant of Cheshire; but apparently as a result of Rigby’s speech, it resolved to confer the lord lieutenancy of Lancashire upon Lord Wharton.97CJ ii. 424b; PJ i. 341; iii. 350. On 1 March, Rigby informed the House that he had received letters from the mayor of Preston that a petition was being touted around Lancashire on Lord Strange’s behalf, as if the petitioners would ‘check the proceedings of this House in having appointed another lord lieutenant there’.98PJ i. 491.

Rigby was away from Westminster for most of the spring of 1642 – having been granted leave on 22 February – and in his absence he was commissioned by Wharton, on the Commons’ recommendation, as one of his deputy lieutenants for Lancashire.99CJ ii. 449a, 495b. References to Rigby in the Journal and diaries after his return to the House, probably some time late in May, suggest that he supported the junto’s defiance of the king and its military preparations against him, which centred upon raising a field army under Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.100CJ ii. 602a, 610b, 615a; PJ iii. 21. Rigby was evidently trusted by the parliamentary leadership, for he and three other Lancashire MPs (all future parliamentarians) were sent home in mid-June to oversee the enforcement of the Militia Ordinance – a duty that he performed with zeal and at some personal risk given the increasing royalist activity in the county.101CJ ii. 615a, 619a, 625b; LJ v. 137a; PJ iii. 61, 63, 65, 263; Lancs. Civil War Tracts, 16-18, 20-1, 325-30; Earwaker, ‘Col. Alexander Rigby’, 140; J.M. Gratton, ‘The Parliamentarian and Royalist War Effort in Lancs. 1642-51’ (Manchester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1998), 86. Every member of his immediate family would go on to support Parliament in the civil war, and his younger brother and eldest son would take up arms against the king.102Blackwood, ‘Lancs. Gentry’, 143; Broxap, Lancs. 137.

War-party MP, 1642-3

Rigby had returned from his mission to Lancashire by mid-July 1642 and soon emerged as a committed member of the war party at Westminster. Indeed, so great was his antipathy towards the king’s supporters that he ‘urged ... with much earnestness’ that some royalist prisoners be sold as slaves to Algiers or the West Indies – and he seems to have chaired a committee set up on 14 October for precisely this purpose.103CJ ii. 807b; Add. 18777, f. 28v; The Declaration of the Lords and Commons of Parliament Assembled at Oxford (1644), 20 (E.38.3); J. Barwick, Querela Cantabrigiensis (1647), 6. In February 1643, D’Ewes referred to Rigby, his fellow Lancashire MP William Ashhurst and the notorious Commons hard-liner Henry Marten as the ‘great promoters of this destructive civil war amongst us’.104Harl. 164, f. 287.

The period between July 1642 and June 1643 was probably the busiest in Rigby’s parliamentary career. Appointed to almost 100 committees during these months, he reported from or was named first to 16. He also served as messenger to the Lords on nine occasions and either managed or reported from four conferences.105CJ ii. 689b, 699b, 713b, 730a, 740b, 741b, 742b, 771a, 774b, 787b, 801a, 807b, 819b, 820b, 851a, 879b, 907a, 909b, 915b, 916b, 917a, 943b, 953a, 953b, 954a, 988a; LJ v. 282b, 376a, 393a, 393b, 416a, 499a, 532b, 632b. A great many of his appointments during the first year of the civil war bear out D’Ewes’s claim that he was one of the ‘violent spirits’ in the Commons. Together with Ashhurst, Rigby was the ‘chief spokesman for Lancashire at Westminster’ and spent considerable time and effort in trying to advance the war effort in the region and to raise men and money for Parliament’s commander there, Sir William Brereton*. He likewise played a leading role in Parliament’s attempts to protect its adherents in the region and to calumniate and indict its opponents – notably, Lord Strange.106CJ ii. 699b, 702a, 742b, 743a, 767a, 787b, 801a, 802a, 907a, 909b, 917a; iii. 9a; LJ v. 376a, 393a, 393b, 499a, 532b; PJ iii. 349-50; Harl. 164, ff. 9v, 10v, 11v, 338v; Add. 18777, ff. 4-5, 19v, 44v; Gratton, Lancs. 87. When a radical initiative was brought to the Commons in September 1642 for raising and maintaining a thousand dragoons for deployment in ‘Lancashire and other places’, the House put Rigby in charge of securing the necessary legislation.107CJ ii. 774b, 787b, 792a, 801a, 802b; LJ v. 376a, 380b, 382a, 393.

Rigby’s support for the vigorous prosecution of the war went well beyond purely local interest, however. He was named to a host of committees for securing London and mobilising its military resources, for maintaining Parliament’s army in Yorkshire under Lord Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*), and generally for strengthening the parliamentary war-machine across the kingdom.108CJ ii. 689b, 699b, 701a, 702a, 705a, 706b, 730a, 732a, 774b, 818b, 831b, 835a, 841a, 843b, 845b, 847b, 851a, 852a, 891b, 994a; iii. 78a, 89a, 105a; Add. 18777, f. 59. Speaking on 26 January 1643 in support of draft legislation – brought in by another war-party stalwart John Blakiston – for raising a volunteer army under commanders that would ‘have power to lead their forces where they seem fit and to fight and kill any such as shall plunder and spoil’, Rigby moved that a committee be set up to treat with the City ‘for some course for raising of a constant army of 20,000 men so as we be not troubled for money and be always borrowing’. The House referred the consideration of these radical proposals to a committee to which Rigby was named in first place and Blakiston in third.109Supra, ‘John Blakiston’; Add. 18777, ff. 133r-v; CJ ii. 943b; D. Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford, 2018), 157-8.

Perhaps nowhere did Rigby’s zeal to carry the fight to the king emerge more clearly than in his willingness to tap every available financial source, including sequestering the estates of ‘notorious delinquents’, for the maintenance of Parliament’s armies. In his very first tellership, on 17 August 1642, he partnered Marten in favour of summoning Sir William Uvedale* to the House in order to ‘make up his account’ as treasurer of the king’s army during the bishops’ wars. Apparently the more hard-line MPs were hoping that Uvedale’s accounts might help to locate hidden caches of money.110CJ ii. 724b. Rigby matched his political actions with deeds, contributing a horse ‘furnished complete’ (and valued at £30) to the commissary of the earl of Essex’s army in September.111SP28/131, pt. 3, f. 97. The House regularly enlisted his services to help raise money for the war-effort – often by expropriating royalist property – and he scandalised D’Ewes on 29 November by asserting that ‘the two Houses of Parliament had a legislative power to lay taxes upon the subjects of England, [even] though the king did refuse to assent to it, and that we might compel them to the payment of such taxes by distress and imprisonment’. ‘If we have power to do the thing’, he argued in a debate on 7 March 1643 concerning the sequestration ordinance, ‘we have power to direct the means’.112CJ ii. 711a, 743a, 763a, 804a, 808b, 860a, 879b, 882a, 951a, 953b; iii. 18b; Harl. 164, ff. 113, 316; Add. 18777, f. 176. Yet for all his determination not to let constitutional niceties hobble the war effort, it seems that he never entirely forsook his legal training, receiving a series of appointments in 1642-3 for the prevention and punishment of those (including parliamentarian soldiers and officials) who seized horses and other private property without due authority.113CJ ii. 740b, 741b, 825b, 915b, 916b, 943a, 953a; iii. 73a, 74b.

Rigby’s relationship with the war-party grandees – John Pym, Oliver St John, John Hampden and their circle – was not always an easy one during the early months of the war. He seems to have worked most closely with them whenever the prospect of a negotiated settlement threatened to result in a soft peace with the king. On 5 September 1642, for example, he was named to a high-powered committee (which included Pym, St John and Sir Philip Stapilton) to prepare heads for a conference at which the Commons intended to reject the king’s offer of peace talks.114CJ ii. 752a. When the issue of an accommodation with the king re-surfaced again over the winter of 1642-3 (the start of a process that would lead to the Oxford peace treaty), Rigby collaborated with Sir Henry Vane II and Marten in an effort to stiffen Parliament’s peace proposals to the point where they were sure the king would reject them – a tactic that Pym, Hampden and Stapilton also pursued, although with greater subtlety than their more militant allies.115Infra, ‘Sir Philip Stapilton’; Harl. 164, f. 301v; Add. 18777, ff. 112v, 146v. Speaking on 3 January in response to Pym’s call for a ‘national association between us and Scotland’ to resist international popery, Rigby sought to widen the attack to Protestant anti-Calvinists.

If we suffer Arminianism to be preached in pulpits and if we suppress them not, the law against recusancy will be turned against us, for the law do punish only such as refuse conformity but touch nothing upon points of doctrine. And therefore would have us to propound propositions to root out popery.116Add. 18777, f. 112v.

On 30 March, while Parliament’s negotiating team was locked in talks with the king at Oxford, the Commons sent Rigby, Marten and other fiery spirits to the queen’s former chapel at Somerset House, where they ‘caused all the idolatrous pictures and statues ... to be taken down and defaced’ and removed ‘all the vestments, altar-cloaks, copes and other superstitious relics’ – which D’Ewes conceded ‘was indeed a good work if it had been done seasonably and with the Lords’ consents and not thus precipitated as it was, just when a treaty of peace was on foot’.117Harl. 164, ff. 348v, 349.

That Rigby was aligned with the war-party grandees but did not enjoy their confidence can perhaps be inferred from his failure to receive any appointments relating directly to their main strategy from November 1642 – the conclusion of a military alliance with the Scots. Nevertheless, he was named to a committee set up on 1 September 1642, which included Pym and Stapilton, for giving assurances to the Scottish Kirk of Parliament’s hostility to episcopacy.118CJ ii. 748a. Moreover, on 24 December, Rigby spoke in support of a motion by Denis Bond and

some other violent spirits ... that we might let the Scots know that by reason of the king’s raising an army against us and of the papists joining with them we were disabled to make payment unto them [for their army in Ulster]. That therefore we should desire them to come in with sufficient strength to satisfy themselves out of the estates of the papists and other malignants in northern Ireland and the other northern parts [of England].119Harl. 164, f. 273v.

Rigby was also involved in initiatives in the Commons from late 1642 to abolish episcopacy, proceed with the trial of Laud and to set up what became the Westminster Assembly – all of which the war-party grandees hoped would send signals to the Scots of Parliament’s commitment to a thoroughly reformed, possibly Presbyterian, church settlement in England.120CJ ii. 767b, 798b, 858b, 903a; iii. 68a. It was perhaps to make a statement of godly intent to the Scots as much as to distinguish potential enemies in Parliament’s midst that moves were made in October 1642 – which Rigby apparently endorsed – to introduce a Scottish-style ‘oath of association’.121CJ ii. 819b.

But although Rigby evidently shared the war-party grandees’ objective to secure outright victory against the king, he sometimes vehemently disagreed with their methods, and in particular their efforts to preserve a good relationship with the Lords and the earl of Essex, whose dilatory generalship was a cause of much resentment among the hottest of the fiery spirits. What particularly vexed Rigby, Marten and their like was the grandees’ use of a standing committee of both Houses, the Committee of Safety*, to coordinate military strategy and channel money to Parliament’s forces – which the fiery spirits thought gave too much power to Essex and pro-peace elements in the Lords.122Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’; L. Glow, ‘The Cttee. of Safety’, EHR lxxx. 299-310. On 12 September 1642, Rigby complained to the House that he had informed the committee of the need to send forces for the relief of the ‘Protestant party’ in Lancashire and Cheshire and that a group of London citizens had offered to send 1,000 dragoons there at their own charge, but that the committee ‘had taken no course therein and therefore that he was enforced to address himself to the House for remedy’. In response, Anthony Nicholl – Pym’s nephew and a member of the committee – informed the House that the committee had decided ‘to lay aside all further care therein in respect that they did conceive that there could not any force be so soon made ready to send from thence as from the lord general [Essex], who was himself now marching that way with his army’.123PJ iii. 349-50. This evidently did not satisfy Rigby, and on 23 November and again on 14 February 1643 he supported Marten in calling for the committee’s dissolution, although without success.124Harl. 164, ff. 122, 297v.

Rigby clashed with Pym himself on 22 March 1643, when he complained that he had spent many fruitless hours waiting upon the committee for an order to dispatch 60 barrels of gunpowder to Parliament’s forces in Lancashire. An angry Pym then ‘stood up and with much heat and vehemence said that that was an injury to the committee who had done him [Rigby] all justice that could be and therefore desired that he would shew in what particular they had failed him’. At which Rigby explained that

whereas the House had granted that the county of Lancaster should have a regiment of dragoons sent down to them for their relief and that they had raised about 900 of them ... the said committee had diverted them to another service and then to satisfy them had ordered that the[y] should receive £3,500 to raise another regiment of them, of which money the[y] could never since get £400.

‘Whereupon’, according to D’Ewes, ‘the House rested very well satisfied of the said Mr Rigby’s just complaint against the said committee’ and ordered that 40 barrels be sent to Lancashire from the magazine in the Tower.125Harl. 164, f. 338v; CJ iii. 13a.

Fighting for Parliament, 1643-4

Pym probably breathed a quiet sigh of relief when Rigby, apparently on his own initiative, left Westminster for Lancashire in June 1643 with a commission as a colonel of foot and a resolve to join the fight against the earl of Derby’s army in person. But though gone from Westminster he was not forgotten – at least by the fiery spirits – for he was named on 20 July to the committee for the ‘general rising’.126CJ iii. 176a. Established in response to a petition from a group of ardent war-party supporters in London, this committee was assigned the task of mobilising and maintaining an army of citizen volunteers under a commander independent of the earl of Essex – an idea that Rigby and his friends among the London militants had been pushing since the autumn of 1642. In flagrant violation of the Commons’ privileges, the petitioners had presumed to name the committee’s membership, and the result was a body made up almost exclusively of well-known hawks, among them the two men whom D’Ewes had lumped Rigby with in February – Ashhurst and Marten. The strategy behind the general rising was to wrest the military initiative from Essex, whose zeal for a military solution to the war had cooled considerably over the summer. In the event, the idea of a general rising proved unworkable and the scheme quickly collapsed.127Supra, ‘Henry Marten’; CJ ii. 845a, 845b, 847b, 943b; L. Glow, ‘Pym and Parliament: the methods of moderation’, JMH xxxvi. 375-8.

By contrast, Rigby’s military endeavours in Lancashire met with considerable success, at least initially. Despite being a complete novice as a field commander, he raised a sizeable body of troops in the north of Lancashire, and in the autumn of 1643 he captured two royalist strongholds and won a small pitched battle.128Warr in Lancs. 40-3; Lancs. Civil War Tracts, 148-51; Gratton, Lancs. 104, 179, 191; ‘Alexander Rigby’, Oxford DNB. Small wonder, given his lack of military experience, that many in London regarded his victories as little short of miraculous.129CJ iii. 314a; Add. 31116, p. 184; J. Vicars, Gods Arke Overtopping the Worlds Waves (1645), 78 (E.312.3); Whitelocke, Mems. i. 226. He was probably present at Sir Thomas Fairfax’s* victory at Nantwich in January 1644. But he suffered a harsh reality check in May, when he and his forces tried to defend Bolton against Prince Rupert’s army. Perhaps as many as 1,500 of his troops were killed upon the place, and he himself may only have escaped the same fate by pretending to be a royalist soldier before slipping away and fleeing into Yorkshire. However, he presumably had his revenge a few months later, when he and several other Lancashire officers fought under the Fairfaxes at the battle of Marston Moor.130Warr in Lancs. 50-1; Lancs. Civil War Tracts, 183, 191-2, 197; CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 191, 206, 224; CJ iii. 581a; Broxap, Lancs. 121-2; P. Young, Marston Moor (Kineton, 1970), 66; Gratton, Lancs. 108-9, 112. With the war in Lancashire now all but over (bar a few sieges), Rigby duly returned to London, where he was to be furnished with a ‘convenient house’ by order of the Commons.131CJ iii. 559a. Before the end of 1644, he had been assigned lodgings in the sequestered residence of the royalist Sir Thomas Fanshawe* on Warwick Lane, near St Paul’s – although Rigby later claimed that he had resided there for only three or four weeks. By early 1647, he had been assigned accommodation in the deanery of Westminster Abbey.132Bodl. Nalson XIV, f. 221v; Earwaker, ‘Col. Alexander Rigby’, 281.

Rigby and the Westminster factions, 1644-8

Rigby was named to 19 committees between mid-July and late September 1644, when he took what appears to have been a five-month leave of absence. None of these committees were of major importance, although most of his appointments during these months suggest his continuing support for advancing the war effort and godly reform and for prosecuting Archbishop Laud. He also chaired a committee of the whole House on 9 August to consider an ordinance for the sale of delinquents’ estates – what D’Ewes termed ‘that deadly bill for selling the lands and estates of the convicted’ – and a committee set up on 24 August relating to a legacy of Lady Campden.133CJ iii. 565a, 566b, 567b, 574a, 579b, 580a, 580b, 584a, 589a, 601a, 602a, 602b, 605a, 609a, 612a, 624a; Harl. 166, f. 105v; Harl. 483, f. 102. On his return to Westminster, apparently some time in mid-February 1645, his factional alignment became abundantly clear with his selection alongside Sir Arthur Hesilrige, Sir Peter Wentworth and Sir Thomas Widdrington to request that the general of the New Model army, Sir Thomas Fairfax, attend the House to receive his commission.134CJ iv. 53b.

For the next 15 months or so, punctuated by a three month period of absence in the autumn of 1645, Rigby was active in the House as a committeeman, messenger to the Lords (on five occasions) and on several conference-management teams.135CJ iv. 229a, 418b, 431a, 491b, 493b, 496b, 553a; LJ vii. 524b; viii. 127a, 242a, 248b. Nevertheless, his haul of about 55 committees was not particularly impressive compared with that of some other MPs, and there is no evidence to suggest that he contributed regularly on the floor of the House. War-related business probably continued to account for much of his time at Westminster, at least in 1645 – the House entrusting him with legislation concerning the New Model, Parliament’s forces in the north-west, martial law in London and rewarding Parliament’s senior officers (including the now discarded earl of Essex).136CJ iv. 57a, 59a, 71a, 75a, 83b, 99b, 110b, 112b, 115b, 117a, 146a, 146b, 148b, 149a, 163a, 176a, 203a, 225a, 490a, 491b, 493b; Harl. 166, f. 201. It was Rigby who brought in an ordinance in March 1645 for placing the troops in the armies of the earl of Manchester and Sir William Waller* under the command of Fairfax.137CJ iv. 75a; Harl. 166, f. 183.

But Rigby no longer had the high profile at Westminster that he had enjoyed in 1642-3. Indeed, the piece of legislation he was most closely associated with in the mid-1640s was not a major policy initiative but the introduction of the £4 weekly allowance for those Members who were in financial straits. In the spring and summer of 1645, he made several reports from the committee to prepare an ordinance for this purpose, and he also chaired a committee to consider MPs’ offices. On 3 June, he reported a list of Members who were thought fit to receive the allowance – and, not surprisingly, it included Rigby himself.138CJ iv. 96a, 115a, 132b, 141b, 161a, 194a. The following year, he claimed that he had been ‘extremely plundered [by the Lancashire royalists] in my houses and goods and lost the greatest part of the profit of my estate for my service for the Parliament, oftentimes to the hazard of my life’. This, at any rate, was his excuse for not paying a rent-charge on his estate of £30 a year (due to Sir John Barrington*) while it was in enemy hands, and although he promised prompt payment once the war had ended, he seems to have used his privileged position as a Parliament-man and other ‘sleights and tricks’ to avoid honouring his debt to the Barringtons.139Eg. 2648, f. 126; Eg. 2649, f. 41v.

Although Rigby was evidently aligned with the Independent interest at Westminster in 1645-6, very few of his appointments during the mid-1640s offer much insight into his political sympathies. In contrast to the Independent grandees who weighed into the debates concerning the Savile affair in the summer of 1645, for example, he did not use this controversy to target leading Presbyterians but Speaker William Lenthall, whom the London radicals accused of shielding his brother Sir John Lenthall from accusations of royalism. Interestingly, Rigby was persuaded to make this ‘discovery’ to the House by the future Leveller leader John Lilburne and his confederates.140CJ iv. 215a; Harl. 166, f. 245; Como, Radical Parliamentarians, 325-6. Rigby’s appointment on 26 January 1646 to convey two Commons’ votes to the Lords concerning the ‘unjust sentence’ passed upon Lilburne by the court of star chamber in the 1630s may well be further evidence of a connection between the two men.141CJ iv. 418b; LJ viii. 127a. Lilburne would refer to Rigby later that year as ‘that heroical, true and cordial lover of his country’, and he claimed that Rigby had prepared ‘the draft of an ordinance forever to destroy all monopolies and absolutely to set trade free, but for want of more help then he had [he] could not then get it on in the House’.142J. Lilburne, The Charters of London (1646), 64 (E.366.12).

Rigby played a minor part in drawing up what became the Newcastle peace propositions – a process that the Independents largely controlled and which they exploited for their own ends.143CJ iv. 423a, 431a. Similarly, and perhaps more revealingly, he was named to a series of committees in 1645-6 concerning Parliament’s increasingly fraught relations with the Scots – which was again an issue that the Independents exploited to their own advantage.144Supra, ‘Richard Barwis’; ‘Henry Darley’; CJ iv. 121b, 194b, 226a, 491a, 540a, 548b. Following Charles’s flight to the Scottish army in England in May 1646, Rigby was appointed to a conference management team, headed by the Independent grandees Nathaniel Fiennes I and Samuel Browne, to put the case for a Commons’ vote that the king’s person be disposed of as both Houses of Parliament (and not the Scots) thought fit.145CJ iv. 553a. Nevertheless, Rigby was the only MP who consistently backed the Scots commissioners and the Cumberland lawyer and separatist John Musgrave in their quarrel during the mid-1640s with Richard Barwis* and his allies – a group that included a number of the Independent grandees.146D. Scott, ‘The Barwis affair: political allegiance and the Scots during the British civil wars’, EHR cxv. 854.

Although the Presbyterian propagandist John Vicars referred to Rigby as ‘a most desperate enemy to the Presbyterians’ church discipline’ and a ‘great Independent’, it is easy to take these remarks the wrong way.147J. Vicars, Dagon Demolished (1660), 12 (E.1021.2). In fact, Rigby’s parliamentary employments during the mid-1640s strongly suggest that he favoured a tithe-maintained national ministry and that he approved of the Directory and other aspects of Presbyterian church government as introduced by Parliament in 1645-6.148CJ iii. 566b; iv. 97b, 114a, 156a, 211b, 218b, 502a, 549a; v. 35a. He was evidently keen to settle an ‘orthodox’ godly ministry, chairing a committee set up in April 1646 to fill sequestered and vacant livings and securing addition in 1647 to the Committee for Plundered Ministers*.149CJ iv. 502a; v. 83b, 407a. When, on 18 May 1646, the House re-opened the whole debate surrounding exclusion from the sacrament – possibly as an olive branch to the Scots, who now had custody of the king – it referred the task of enumerating further scandalous offences (for which presbyteries could exclude communicants) to a small group of MPs – of which Rigby was one – that was dominated by prominent Presbyterians.150CJ iv. 549a; Add. 31116, p. 539; Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, i. 295-6.

Rigby’s purchase on 7 April 1643 of the patent of Lygonia, in what is now Maine, New England, was not motivated primarily, it seems, by interest on his part in establishing a godly haven, free of the constraints on liberty of conscience and freedom of worship that existed at home. Commercial considerations were probably uppermost in his mind – securing a slice of New England’s lucrative fur trade – and it was probably no coincidence that his acquisition of Lygonia occurred only a few months after the Commons had selected him to draft an ordinance removing export and import duties for the New England colonists.151CJ ii. 974b; Farber, ‘Province of Lygonia’, 493. Shortly after Rigby reported this ordinance to the House and carried it up to the Lords (Mar. 1643), he was added, with Pym and other Members, to the committee for New England, to which the House referred a petition on 8 April from George Cleeve – the Maine planter who had arranged the sale of the Lygonia patent to Rigby the day before.152CJ ii. 987, 988a; 994b, 998; iii. 24a; LJ v. 632b.

Rigby reportedly spent ‘much time’ and ‘considerable sums of money’ in the mid-1640s

in furthering and promoting plantations there [in New England], and he drew up several constitutions for the well-governing of the inhabitants of [the] said province [of Lygonia], which were about the 30th July 1644 confirmed by the earl of Warwick and others the commissioners appointed by Parliament for foreign plantations [the Committee for Foreign Plantations*].153C.E. Banks, Col. Alexander Rigby (Portland, ME, 1885), 47.

But nothing seems to have survived of Rigby’s ‘several constitutions’. In 1646, he was added to the Committee for Foreign Plantations, which granted him a patent that year, extending Lygonia to the Maine coast.154J. Winthrop, Hist. of New England ed. J. Savage (Boston, MA, 1853), ii. 390-1; Winthrop Pprs. (Mass. Hist. Soc. ser. 4, vii), 91; Winthrop Jnl. ed. Dunn, Savage, Yeandle, 619, 705; Banks, Rigby, 53-4. However, he apparently played little part in the committee’s handling of the disputes between the Massachusetts Bay colony’s Congregationalist leaders and their radical puritan opponents in Narragansett Bay.155Supra, ‘Committee for Foreign Plantations’. Revealingly, the Bay colony’s leaders appear to have known of him only by report.156Winthrop Pprs. (Mass. Hist. Soc.), iv. 428; Farber, ‘Province of Lygonia’, 505.

Any sympathy Rigby may have had for the ‘Congregational way’ was tempered by a concern to maintain a viable, state-controlled national church. Thus he was apparently on good terms with the Presbyterian vicar of Preston, Isaac Ambrose, and had no problem working with the Lancashire Presbyterian MPs Raphe Assheton II and William Ashhurst in the later 1640s to support a preaching ministry in the county.157Lancs. RO, DDHP/20/50; DDM/17/129; DDM/19/37, 38; B. Nightingale, Lancs. Nonconformity (Manchester, 1890-3), i. 3-4; Calamy Revised, 9. It was almost certainly Rigby rather than his eldest son and namesake who was appointed by Parliament as an elder for the seventh Lancashire Presbyterian classis (covering the Preston-Goosnargh area) in October 1646.158LJ viii. 511. What he would not have favoured, however, was a ‘Scottified’ Presbyterian system in which clerics, rather than Parliament, had the final say on questions of church government. In his eyes this would have been to turn the clock back to the days of Laudian prelacy.

Rigby seems to have spent the summer of 1646 in Lancashire, where he figured prominently in the work of the county committee during his absences from the House.159Gratton, Lancs. 83, 87, 117. Between his return to Westminster in December 1646 and another lengthy period of absence from mid-July 1647, he was named to 19 committees and served as a messenger to the Lords once – which again does not suggest that he was in the thick of the political action.160CJ v. 83b; LJ viii. 718b. He probably made his most notable contribution to the House’s proceedings in this period as chairman of several committees set up in February 1647 to examine the workings of the Committee for Compounding*.161CJ v. 70a, 73b. He received no appointments in March or April and was probably absent from the House. He seems to have approved of legislation in May for establishing the Committee for Indemnity*, which addressed a major grievance of the soldiery, and he was twice added to the committee for receiving complaints against MPs – a body chaired by the Independents’ ally John Bulkeley and used by them to pressure their Presbyterian opponents.162Supra, ‘John Bulkeley’; CJ v. 174a, 198b, 205a, 237b.

Yet although it is unlikely that Rigby favoured the Presbyterians’ plans for disbanding the New Model without most of its back-pay, he was included on a committee set up on 12 May 1647 for raising £200,000 for paying off the army – a measure that the Presbyterians hoped would undermine the Independents’ military power-base and thereby clear the way for a moderate settlement with the king.163CJ v. 168b; I. Gentles, New Model Army (Oxford, 1992), 153. Moreover, on 11 June, he was appointed to a conference-reporting team, headed by the Presbyterian grandee Denzil Holles, concerning the scrapping of the county committees.164CJ v. 206b. As Rigby was almost certainly aware, the county committees were a vital part of the administrative machinery that maintained the New Model army. Perhaps even more notable as an indicator of his apparent desire to appease the Presbyterian interest was his nomination with Sir John Maynard on 22 June to draft legislation in response to demands from the London apprentices, who were firmly in the Presbyterian camp on religious questions and a personal treaty with Charles.165CJ v. 220a. Similarly, on 2 July, Rigby tendered to the House a petition of ‘divers reduced officers’, most of whom, certainly in London, aligned with the Presbyterians.166CJ v. 229a, 231a. He took leave of absence on 14 July and was very probably away from the House during the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster on 26 July.167CJ v. 244b.

By the time Rigby had resumed his seat in the autumn of 1647, he seems to have moved back firmly into the orbit of the Independent interest. Most of his 20 or so appointments between early November and late February 1648 – when he took a six-month leave of absence – suggest that he supported the Independents’ increasingly tough line on negotiations with the king and their initiatives to satisfy the demands of the New Model soldiery and the ‘honest party’ in the provinces.168CJ v. 351b, 367a, 371a, 380a, 397b, 405b, 406a, 417a, 447b, 467a. He was part of a strongly Independent team that managed a conference with the Lords on 25 December for justifying the dispatch of the pro-Leveller officer Colonel Thomas Rainborowe* to sea as commander of the navy’s winter guard.169CJ v. 406a. But by far his most notable assignment in these months came on 4 January 1648, when the task of preparing ordinances for redressing the people’s grievances ‘in relation to their burdens, their freedoms and liberties, and of reforming of courts of justice and proceedings at law’, was specially referred to Rigby and the Independent grandee Thomas Scot I.170CJ v. 417a.

Regicide and revolution, 1648-9

Rigby took a leading role in organising the Lancashire parliamentarians’ resistance to the royalists and the Scottish Engagers during the second civil war.171CJ v. 544b; Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 41; PA, Main Pprs. 31 May 1648; Perfect Occurrences no. 76 (9-16 June 1648), 337 (E.522.40); Mems. of the Great Civil War ed. Cary, i. 407-10; Broxap, Lancs. 161-2; Gratton, Lancs. 124. Back at Westminster by 22 August 1648 – in other words, a few days after Parliament’s victory at Preston – he was named to committees for celebrating ‘the late great mercies’ in defeating the king’s forces a second time round and for disposing of the spoils.172CJ v. 683b, 686a, 692a, 695b; vi. 60a, 67a. One of the beneficiaries of this latest round of parliamentary largesse was John Lilburne, to whom the Commons assigned land worth £3,000 out of the estates of ‘new delinquents’, and it was Rigby who assumed responsibility for this piece of legislation, which he reported to the House and, on 19 December, carried up to the Lords.173CJ vi. 7b, 68a, 82b, 101a; LJ x. 634a.

Rigby’s other pre-occupation at Westminster during the autumn of 1648 was the preparation of Parliament’s peace propositions for the treaty with the king at Newport.174CJ vi. 62b, 63b, 79a, 82a, 82b. The consideration of provision in the propositions for indemnifying those who had acted under parliamentary authority, for settling ministers installed in church livings by Parliament and for augmenting ministers’ stipends out of sequestered estates were specially referred to the care of Rigby and the Presbyterian MP Sir Walter Erle (28 Oct.).175CJ vi. 63b. On 21 November, Rigby reported from a conference with the Lords that the peers agreed to exempt from pardon in the propositions those scourges of the northern parliamentarians, William Cavendish, 1st marquess of Newcastle, and Sir John Byron.176CJ vi. 82b.

Although granted leave of absence from the House on 22 November 1648, Rigby may have remained in London in the weeks surrounding Pride’s Purge, for he was one of four ‘honest men’ in the Commons whom John Lilburne and his associates nominated late in November to an informal committee for redrafting the Leveller manifesto, the Agreement of the People. The other three MPs were Marten, Thomas Scot I and Thomas Chaloner.177CJ vi. 82b; J. Lilburne, The Picture of the Councel of State (1649), 22 (E.550.14); Lilburne, The Legal, Fundamental Liberties of the People of England (1649), 33-4 (E.560.14). Evidently Rigby’s commitment to legal and social reform – as evidenced by his appointment as joint-chairman, with Thomas Scot I, of the 4 January 1648 committee – and probably also his work in the House on behalf of Lilburne, had won him the trust of the Levellers.178Leveller Manifestoes ed. D.M. Wolfe (New York, 1944), 102, 319; Leveller Tracts ed. W. Haller, G. Davies (New York, 1944), 211, 421. Nevertheless, of the 16 members of this committee (four London Independents, four Levellers, four army officers and four parliamentary Independents) the only absentees were Chaloner, Thomas Scot I and Rigby.179Lilburne, Legal, Fundamental Liberties, 34.

Rigby’s first appointment in the Rump was to a ‘select committee’ established on 13 December 1648 to draw up what became the dissent to the 5 December vote that the king’s answer to the Newport propositions were an acceptable basis for settlement.180Supra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’; CJ vi. 96b; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 38 (12-19 Dec. 1648), sig. Ddd3 (E.476.35); Mercurius Elencticus no. 56 (19-26 Dec. 1648), 544 (E.477.31). Introduced on 20 December, the dissent was immediately taken by about 34 MPs – the majority of whom were hard-liners – and among them was Rigby.181The Substance of a Speech Made in the House of Commons by Wil. Prynn (1649), 117 (E.539.11); [C. Walker], Anarchia Anglicana (1649), 49 (E.570.4). Later that same day (20 Dec.), he was named to a committee for drafting a declaration justifying the dissent.182PA, MS CJ xxxiii, p. 474; Mercurius Elencticus no. 57 (19-26 Dec. 1648), 544 (E.477.31). In all, he was named to five committees in the weeks after Pride’s Purge, including the Army Committee*. But although he was appointed to the high court of justice, he played no recorded part in Charles’s trial and was probably in Lancashire from late December until March 1649.183CJ vi. 96b, 97a, 98b, 137b; LJ x. 631b. Given the radical line he had generally taken at Westminster, particularly since the autumn of 1647, his failure even to participate in the trial is something of a mystery.

Career in the Rump and death, 1649-50

Rigby received 20 or so appointments in the Rump during the spring of 1649 and was apparently one of its more active members during this period – especially in matters relating to managing state revenues and reforming the legal system.184CJ vi. 186a, 186b, 195b, 196a, 199a, 201a, 204b, 205b, 213a, 218b. He was also named to two committees for promoting a godly ministry.185CJ vi. 196a, 213a. Rigby, Henry Marten and a few other ‘radicals’ have been identified as leading figures behind initiatives in the Rump for lightening the burdens of the poor and those involved in litigation.186Worden, Rump Parl. 58, 115, 198-9, 202, 203. A number of his assignments in the House, and in particular his chairmanship of a committee to bring in a bill for the relief of poor prisoners for debt, suggest that he had an unusually well-developed social conscience for a gentleman of the time.187CJ vi. 190b, 192b, 206b, 211b, 217a, 217b, 219a, 225a; The Prisoners Remonstrance (1649), 4 (E.572.8). He was unusual, too, certainly among the lawyers in the House, in his readiness to advocate legal reform. In the second of his two tellerships in the Rump, he partnered Cornelius Holland in rejecting a bill for establishing courts to determine testamentary and matrimonial causes – apparently because the proposed legislation was too tame and too reminiscent of the church and other civil law courts that had supported popery before 1640.188CJ vi. 195b, 211b; Worden, Rump Parl. 115, 202, 203, 205-6.

But despite his sympathy with some elements of the Levellers’ reformist agenda, Rigby seems to have remained on good terms with the Rump’s political leaders – and consequently he gradually forfeited the trust, if not necessarily the respect, of John Lilburne. In the spring or early summer of 1649, Lilburne referred to Rigby, somewhat dismissively, as ‘the mouth of Sir Henry Mildmay*, the grandees’ agent, who had commission (as he said) to proffer me and my comrades large places and preferments so [long as] we would sit still and let the grandees go on with their work’.189J. Lilburne, The Triall of Lieut. Collonell John Lilburne (1649), 10 (E.584.9); Lilburne, Legal, Fundamental Liberties, 75. In August, Lilburne wrote a friendly letter to Rigby, in which he nonetheless made clear that he looked upon himself and Rigby ‘as now positively engaged in two contrary interests that can never subsist one by the other without continual wars each with [the] other’. Yet the following month, Lilburne still insisted that he had ‘great cause to love and honour’ Rigby: ‘he hath been my faithful and true friend, and I have always, to me in particular, found him a very just, righteous and obliging man’.190Lilburne, Strength out of Weaknesse, 22-3. It was Rigby, claimed Lilburne, who tried to bargain with him on behalf of the Rump grandees in September

and, in their names, proffered me no small thing so [long as] I would be a good boy and learn the lesson they would teach me, which when to his face I scorned with the greatest detestation in the world, it was not many hours after till I was in general voted a traitor.191Lilburne, Strength out of Weaknesse, 6.

Despite Rigby’s appointment as one of the judges at Lilburne’s trial that autumn, the Leveller leader pronounced him ‘a gentleman ... I have found very honest and faithful and to whom I have been much obliged to for many hearty favours I have from time to time received from him’.192Lilburne, Triall of Lieut. Collonell John Lilburne, 1, 136.

A sure sign in Lilburne’s eyes that Rigby had been bought off by the grandees and was thus part of a ‘contrary interest’ to that of the Levellers was his acceptance of the office of one of the barons of the exchequer, which the Rump conferred on him in June 1649.193CJ vi. 222a. From that point onwards, Rigby ceased to attend Parliament and devoted himself entirely to his legal duties. One of Rigby’s suitors (an attorney for compounding royalists) complained to his client in June that ‘we were ready for a hearing and only waited on his [Rigby’s] leisure to attend the business, but he being lately made a judge, pretends many weighty affairs which will not permit him to go to Goldsmiths’ Hall’.194Doncaster Archives, DD/CROM/11/31. Among Rigby’s first duties in his new office was to ride the western assize circuit, during which he reported to Speaker Lenthall on the strength of the government’s interest in the region and how it might be improved ‘in the infancy of this republic’.195Bodl. Tanner 56, f. 89.

It was while presiding over the 1650 summer assizes at Chelmsford and Croydon that Rigby and his fellow judge Thomas Gates contracted the illness that killed them both. According to the gloating Vicars, the two ‘grand Engagers [i.e. supporters of the Engagement] ... and deep compliers with the Westminsterian power’ were speedily conveyed to London but expired within a week – on 18 August in Rigby’s case – of ‘a most violent pestilential fever’ (probably gaol fever caught from infected prisoners).196Vicars, Dagon Demolished, 12-13; Desiderata Curiosa ed. Peck, ii. lib. xiv, p. 23. After lying in state at Ely Place, Holborn, he was carried up to Preston, where he was buried on 9 September 1650.197Lancs. RO, DDKE/Box 73/20; ‘Alexander Rigby’, Oxford DNB; H. Fishwick, Hist. of the Parochial Chapelry of Goosnargh (Manchester, 1871), 147. He died intestate, and the administration of his estate was granted to his third son Edward†, who represented Preston in the 1660 Convention, the Cavalier Parliament and in the Exclusion Parliaments of 1679.198PROB6/25, f. 135; HP Commons, 1660-90. Rigby’s eldest son Alexander* sat for Lancashire in Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament and for Preston in the 1660 Convention.199HP Commons, 1660-90.