CHALONER, Thomas (c.1595-1660), of Steeple Claydon, Bucks., and Guisborough, Yorks.

Background and early career

Descended from a venerable Welsh family, the Chaloners had settled in London by the early sixteenth century and had developed close ties with the court and royal government.39J.W. Ord, Hist. and Antiquities of Cleveland (1846), 221; R.B. Turton, The Alum Farm (Whitby, 1938), 18; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir Thomas Chaloner’. Chaloner’s great-grandfather was an usher of the king’s bedchamber and held the office of teller in the exchequer.40Turton, Alum Farm, 18; J.C. Sainty, Officers of the Exchequer (L. and I. spec. ser. xviii), 231. His grandfather, Sir Thomas Chaloner the elder (a close friend of William Cecil†, 1st Baron Burghley), served as one of secretaries to the privy council during the late 1540s and as ambassador to France in 1553 and, subsequently, to the Netherlands and Spain. He also sat in three Parliaments between 1545 and 1554, representing Wigan, Lancaster and Knaresborough. One of a group of distinguished scholars and humanists at Cambridge during the 1530s and 1540s, his literary achievements included a translation of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and a verse work, De Republica Anglorum Instauranda.41W.S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, NC, 1980), 27, 29, 54, 66-7; HP Commons 1558-1603; ‘Sir Thomas Chaloner the elder’, Oxford DNB.

Sir Thomas Chaloner’s only son, Sir Thomas Chaloner the younger (Thomas Chaloner’s father), began his public career as a protégé of Lord Burghley, but he quickly gravitated towards the court faction headed by the earl of Leicester (Sir Robert Dudley†) and, later, the earl’s stepson Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex. This Dudley-Devereux interest spearheaded English military endeavours in support of the Protestant cause in Europe and against the Spanish at sea. Chaloner travelled extensively on the continent during the later 1590s, acting as an agent and intelligencer in Tuscany and Paris for the Essex circle. Having moved back into the orbit of the Cecilian interest by the early 1600s, he maintained a clandestine correspondence with James VI of Scotland – probably with the knowledge and approval of Robert Cecil†, 1st earl of Salisbury. After Elizabeth’s death, Chaloner attended the royal court in Scotland, accompanied the king on his journey down to London to be crowned and was appointed governor to James’s eldest son Prince Henry. On Henry’s creation as prince of Wales in 1610, Chaloner was appointed his chamberlain, a position that ‘conferred an enormous influence over the young prince and his household’. Chaloner used his office to indulge his interest in and to sponsor colonial exploration, metallurgy and mineralogy, among other things. He was returned as a court nominee for the Cornish constituencies of St Mawes in 1586 and Lostwithiel in 1604.42A. Haynes, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury (1989), 135, 184, 199; HP Commons 1558-1603; ‘Sir Thomas Chaloner’, HP Commons 1604-29; ‘Sir Thomas Chaloner the younger’, Oxford DNB.

Sir Thomas’s four sons from his first marriage, and particularly Thomas, shared their father’s lively sense of inquiry. Having matriculated from Exeter College, Oxford, Thomas Chaloner did not stay to take his degree but left early, ‘and what was fit to accomplish his natural parts, which were good, were not omitted by his father’. It was probably to broaden his intellectual horizons, as much as to complete his education as a gentleman, that Chaloner travelled into France, Italy and Germany during his youth, returning to England, according to the antiquary Anthony Wood, ‘a well-bred gentleman but tinged, as it seems, with anti-monarchical principles, if not worse’.43Ath. Ox. iii. 531. He seems to have been particularly interested in Italian affairs, to the extent that he kept ‘Italian relations’ among his personal papers in the 1630s.44SP16/354/94, f. 187. His European travels before the civil war also took in the Low Countries and a sojourn of ‘some years’ in Ireland.45W. Prynne*, Canterburies Doome (1646), 414, 415. When back in England, his main residence seems to have been the family’s estate at Guisborough, in Cleveland, north Yorkshire – rather than its seat at Steeple Claydon, Buckinghamshire – which his grandfather had acquired in the mid-sixteenth century.46Ath. Ox. iii. 531; Turton, Alum Farm, 19-20; ‘Sir Thomas Chaloner’, HP Commons 1604-29.

The Chaloners’ lands at Guisborough were potentially their most valuable asset, for they were the site of England’s first alum mines (alum, at that time, being vital as a mordant, or ‘fixer’, of dyes). Although the discovery of alum-stone at Guisborough has often been credited to Chaloner’s father, the actual mineralogical find was made, after ‘many chargeable trials of sundry minerals’, by one of Sir Thomas’s cousins.47CSP Dom. 1611-18, p. 276; Turton, Alum Farm, 63, 76; HP Commons 1604-29. In 1606, Sir Thomas, his brother-in-law Sir David Foulis, and Edmund Lord Sheffield (the future 1st earl of Mulgrave), the president of the council of the north and the grandfather of Sir Thomas Fairfax*, obtained a patent from the king for the sole right to work and manufacture alum. However, the huge costs incurred in setting up this business prompted the patentees to surrender their interest in the works at Guisborough to the crown in 1609. One of the terms of this agreement stated that in the event of Sir Thomas’s death the crown was to pay his children an annuity of £1,000 from 1617 until 1638. This annuity represented ‘all the portions and the only means’ left by Sir Thomas – who died, heavily indebted, in 1615 – to his children ‘for their whole maintenance and livelihood’. Consequently, when the crown failed to pay even the first annual installment, they were understandably aggrieved.

In 1621, Sir Thomas’s eldest son, Sir William Chaloner, brought a suit against the crown for non-payment of the annuity, claiming that he and his brothers and sisters were ‘destitute of all present convenient means for their maintenance’. The situation became even more desperate in 1629, when the crown claimed the mines at Guisborough as royal property and granted them to the entrepreneur and customs farmer Sir Peter Pindar and several other lessees. In total, the Chaloners received only £1,250 of their £21,000 inheritance. The onus of pursuing the family’s case against the crown fell mainly on Sir Thomas’s second son Edward and, after his death in 1625, on his fourth son James Chaloner*.48C2/JAS1/F11/44; C8/55/123; PSO2/180, unfol. (entry 16 Mar. 1637); PROB11/190, ff. 120r-v; N. Yorks. RO, ZFM/Alum mines, 1, 3, 4; Turton, Alum Farm, 72, 73, 76, 86-7, 122; ‘Sir Paul Pindar’, Oxford DNB. According to John Aubrey, the crown’s failure to honour their agreement with the patentees was ‘the reason that made Mr [Thomas] Chaloner so interest himself for the Parliament cause and, in revenge, to be one of the king’s judges’.49Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 159. But it would be simplistic to assume that the sole, or even the main, reason that Chaloner opposed the crown in the 1640s was because he had been deprived of his inheritance. His acutely critical mind and free-thinking attitudes were probably much more powerful stimuli to opposition.

Among Chaloner’s formative intellectual experiences, it seems, was a trip to Asia Minor and the Levant, which he probably made some time during the late 1630s to visit his brother Sir William, who died in Turkey in about 1641.50CB i. 154. Although Chaloner left no direct account of his time in the Near East, it was the inspiration for his pamphlet, published anonymously in 1657, entitled A True and Exact Relation of the Strange Finding out of Moses’s Tomb. A scholarly practical joke, purporting to be an eye-witness account of the discovery in Palestine of Moses’s tomb, ‘it did set the wits of all the rabbis of the [Westminster] Assembly then to work’, commented Aubrey, and ‘twas a pretty while before the sham was detected’. Aubrey’s reference to the Westminster Assembly suggests that the work was first published, probably in manuscript form, during the mid-1640s.51[T. Chaloner], A True and Exact Relation of the Strange Finding out of Moses’s Tombe (1657). Despite its profane nature – a send-up of what Chaloner clearly regarded as the empty pretensions of clerical learning and authority – the work nevertheless represents an impressive display of scholarship. Chaloner, it seems, was well versed in the customs and topography of the Holy Land and had a detailed knowledge of early Christianity, Judaism and Islam. His evident hostility to formalized religion does not appear to have been that of the atheist or the debauchee, as many of his contemporaries believed, but rather of a man whose wide learning and experience made him unable to accept the often narrow, dogmatic piety of his day. Reference to his supposed ‘Socinianism’ is not only misleadingly precise – it is very doubtful whether his religious beliefs tallied with this or any other form of heterodoxy – but also rests on nothing more, it seems, than the alleged tendency of his friend Thomas May (the Long Parliament’s historian) to speak ‘very slightly of the Holy Trinity’ when drunk.52Ath. Ox. iii. 810; D. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic (Cambridge, 1999), 272; B. Worden, ‘Classical republicanism and the puritan revolution’, in History and Imagination ed. H. Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl, B. Worden (1981), 195.

In the spring of 1637, Chaloner’s unorthodox opinions almost proved his undoing. Archbishop William Laud, keen to stop the flow of puritan and separatist tracts into England, took violent exception to Chaloner ‘by reason of a book printed in Brussels’.53CSP Dom. 1637, p. 176. This seems to have been anti-popish polemic of some kind, and although Chaloner denied having written it, his irreverent views and his apparent contacts with anti-Laudian writers on the continent had rendered him fair game for Laud’s informants. The archbishop would later refer to ‘high offences charged against him [Chaloner], amounting to little less than treason’; Laud’s enemies would claim that he had sought Chaloner’s punishment ‘only for speaking of the priests’ and Jesuits’ plots to bring in popery and [of] some of our bishops compliance with them’.54Prynne, Canterburies Doome, 545-6, 547. Chaloner had certainly visited Brussels on at least one occasion during the 1630s, for at Laud’s trial, in the mid-1640s, he would testify that 11 or 12 years earlier (i.e. in about 1632-3) he had discoursed in Brussels ‘with an English gentleman ... touching the then late rooting out of sundry English able and orthodox ministers for not complying with the bishops in divers new idolatrous ceremonies’.55Prynne, Canterburies Doome, 414. According to Chaloner, the publication that landed him in trouble had been ‘laid to his charge by a captain that would swear anything against him’.56CSP Dom. 1637, p. 176. This officer was a Captain Innis, from Scotland, whom Chaloner would allege at Laud’s trial was ‘both a priest and Jesuit [and was] now in actual arms against the Parliament in the king’s army’.57Prynne, Canterburies Doome, 547; Strafforde Letters, ii. 172. At the archbishop’s instigation, Chaloner was arrested and would have been imprisoned in the Tower had he not escaped custody and fled abroad.58CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 560; 1637, pp. 44-5; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 105. Chaloner’s younger brother James was arrested as an accomplice in Thomas’s escape and was imprisoned in the Tower for several months, although he vehemently denied helping his brother.59CSP Dom. 1637, pp. 44-5, 109. Laud, as is clear from several of his letters to Thomas, Viscount Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†, the future earl of Strafford) during the summer and autumn of 1637, was incensed by what Chaloner had written and even more so by his escape.60Strafforde Letters, ii. 99, 119, 131, 172.

Chaloner was well taken, extremely ill let go; for, if I be not mistaken (which I may, not knowing him so much as by face), his hanging might have been a Paracelsian cure for that liberty of speech men take to themselves nowadays. Certainly it is a most pestilential-natured companion, and very well it would be to recover him, if you may; the gallows groans for him, and I am persuaded (if all be true is said of him) first or last they will have right at his hands.61Strafforde Letters, ii. 119.

After fleeing to the continent, Chaloner may have joined his elder brother William in Turkey.

Chaloner versus the Scots and Presbyterians, 1645-6

Chaloner had returned to England by the summer of 1642 and was described as residing at Steeple Claydon that August, when he contributed a horse valued at £20 to Parliament’s field army under Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.62SP28/131, pt. 3, f. 51v. Nothing is known about his activities and whereabouts thereafter until June 1644, when he appeared as a witness at the parliamentary trial of the man responsible for his exile, Archbishop Laud. Chaloner testified that at Rome (which he had visited seven or eight years previously, possibly en route to Turkey) and other places in Catholic Europe, Laud had been spoken of with ‘great applause’ as a secret introducer of popery.63Prynne, Canterburies Doome, 367, 414-15; HMC Lords, xi. 420-1, 445. In December 1644, Parliament passed an ordinance that Chaloner’s nephew, Edward Chaloner, be discharged from all fees arising from his minority in regard that his uncles, Thomas and James, had advanced £200 towards bringing Buckinghamshire under parliamentary control.64LJ vii. 114a.

By August 1645, Chaloner was in Yorkshire, where he and several other leading members of the committee of the Northern Association (to which he had been named in June 1645), among them Francis Pierrepont*, Thomas Stockdale* and Francis Thorpe*, wrote anxious letters to the Commons, informing Members of the mutinies in the northern army due to lack of pay.65HMC Portland, i. 252, 254. That summer and autumn, he and his brother James were also among the signatories to letters from the parliamentary committees at York to the two Houses, complaining of the ‘infinite oppressions and extortions’ of the Scottish army and pleading that the Scots be removed from Yorkshire immediately, ‘for they demean themselves not as if they came only for our subsistence but as if purposely to destroy us’.66Bodl. Nalson IV, ff. 212-13, 244; LJ vii. 640b. These and similar reports concerning the ‘abuses’ of the Scottish army in northern England were correctly perceived by the Scots as part of a highly orchestrated attack by the Westminster Independents upon the entire Presbyterian programme for settlement.67D. Scott, ‘The “northern gentlemen”’, HJ xlii. 354-65.

In October 1645, Chaloner and Francis Thorpe were returned as ‘recruiters’ for the Yorkshire borough of Richmond. Chaloner’s estate at Guisborough, in Cleveland, lay almost 30 miles east of the borough, and he is unlikely to have possessed a strong interest of his own in the Richmond area. There is a possibility that he was returned on the interest of the Fairfaxes, to whom he was related through his brother James, who was the nephew by marriage of Ferdinando 2nd Baron Fairfax.68Supra, ‘James Chaloner’. At about the time that Thomas was elected at Richmond, Lord Fairfax* attempted to obtain a seat at Scarborough for James, although without success.69Supra, ‘Scarborough’. But a more plausible electoral patron at Richmond than the Fairfaxes was Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton. Wharton owned the lordship of Aske, which lay near Richmond, and appears to have enjoyed considerable influence in the borough.70Supra, ‘Richmond’. Thorpe, who was even more of a carpet-bagger at Richmond than Chaloner, was certainly on friendly terms with Lord Wharton. In addition, he was retained legal counsel to another leading northern magnate (and Wharton’s close political ally in the Lords), Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland.71Infra, ‘Francis Thorpe’. Another possible patron for either Chaloner or Thorpe, or both, was Sir Henry Vane I* – a friend and ally of Northumberland and Wharton – who was bailiff and steward of the liberty of Richmond.72Supra, ‘Richmond’; infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’. Both Thorpe and Chaloner, in common with Northumberland and Wharton, were opposed to continuing Scottish intervention in England affairs – a fact that may have played well with the townspeople. Like many parts of the North Riding, the Richmond area was forced to play host to the ill-maintained Scottish army during the mid-1640s, and anti-Scots feeling was probably rife in the town by late 1645.73Supra, ‘Richmond’.

Although Chaloner’s first official act after entering Parliament was to take the Covenant, on 25 March 1646, he was always firmly aligned with the anti-Scottish, Independent interest at Westminster.74CJ iv. 489a. Perhaps the clearest indication of his political allegiance was his addition, on 7 May, to the Star Chamber Committee of Irish Affairs*, together with the earls of Northumberland, Essex and Nottingham, Viscount Saye and Sele, Philip Viscount Lisle, Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire, Sir Gregory Norton, Sir John Temple and Nathaniel Fiennes I.75CJ iv. 532a, 549a; LJ viii. 305a, 320a. With the single exception of Essex, these nominees were prominent Independents and allies of the newly-appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland – Northumberland’s nephew and protégé, Viscount Lisle. Their addition to the committee was part of a larger design by the Independents to undermine the Covenanting interest in both England and Ireland by placing the war-effort against the Irish rebels under exclusively English control.76Supra, ‘Irish Committees’; J. Adamson, ‘Strafford’s ghost’, in Ireland from Independence to Occupation 1641-1660 ed. J. Ohlmeyer (Cambridge, 1995), 128-59. Chaloner and several others added to the committee in May attended it on a regular basis and ensured an Independent majority at almost every meeting.77Supra, ‘Irish Committees’; CSP Ire. 1633-47, pp. 450, 451 and passim.

Between his taking the Covenant in March 1646 and the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster late in July 1647, Chaloner was named to 40 committees and reported (18 Aug.) from a committee set up to examine breaches of the Oxford surrender articles – an issue that touched closely upon the army’s sense of honour and fairness in its treatment of enemy soldiers.78CJ iv. 651a. Despite his contemporary reputation for godlessness, three of these appointments were to committees for supplying the ministry and weeding out ‘malignant’ clergymen.79CJ iv. 502a, 719b; v. 119b; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 12 (30 Nov.-7 Dec. 1647), sig. Mv (E.419.12); The Kentish Fayre (1648), 6, 7 (E.446.21); Troy-Novant Must not be Burnt (1648, 669 f.12.21). On 10 July 1646, he was named to a committee on the controversial ordinance for the sale of delinquents’ estates – the proceeds of which were earmarked for paying Parliament’s soldiers and the maintenance of the war in Ireland. This legislation was opposed by the Presbyterian grandees, who were conspicuous by their absence from the committee.80CJ iv. 613a; J. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics 1645-9’ (Cambridge Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1986), 162.

But Chaloner rendered what was perhaps his most signal service to the army and its allies at Westminster that summer as a member of several committees for prosecuting the Commons’ various grievances against the Scots. At the forefront of this campaign was a committee set up in March 1646, chaired by Lord Fairfax’s man-of-business Thomas Stockdale. Chaloner was added to this committee on 1 June, specifically, it seems, because he possessed particularly damning evidence against the Scots – including, no doubt, the letters written to him during the spring by some of his kinsmen and tenants in Cleveland relating the misdemeanours there of ‘the unruly and merciless’ Scottish soldiery.81CJ iv. 560b; Mems. of the Great Civil War ed. Cary, i. 64-6, 68, 82-3. From Stockdale’s marginal notes among his committee’s papers, it can be seen that Chaloner was one of several northern MPs who furnished him with anti-Scots material.82Bodl. Nalson XIX, f. 396v; Tanner 59, ff. 238-9, 278. Moreover, a suspiciously large number of complaints about Scottish depredations in the north emanated from the Chaloners’ neighbourhood in Cleveland.83S. Barber, Regicide and Republicanism: Politics and Ethics in the English Revolution, 1646-59 (Edinburgh, 1998), 21, 35, 78. On 9 June, Chaloner and many other Independents were named to a committee for preparing a declaration stating ‘what cause this House of complaint and jealousies’ against the Scots.84CJ iv. 570b. On 11 July, he was named to a committee for investigating the promoters of the City’s May remonstrance – in which London’s ‘Covenant-engaged’ faction had reiterated the Scots’ demands for the establishment of Presbyterian church discipline and an immediate settlement with the king – and any who had laboured to ‘disaffect the people and the City from Parliament’.85CJ iv. 615b. Such was his antipathy towards the Scots that it drew the attention of the parliamentary diarist John Harington, who noted an outburst of Chaloner’s on 22 July against the ‘bad dealings of divers Scots’.86Harington’s Diary, 29.

The speech without doors controversy, 1646-7

Chaloner became even more closely embroiled in Parliament’s war of words with the Scots on 26 October 1646, when he made a speech in the House in answer to papers from the Scots commissioners concerning the disposal of the king. Proceeding from the assumption that a distinction existed between the office of the king ‘in abstracto’ and the person of the king ‘in concreto’, Chaloner argued that although the Scots had sole interest in the office of the king of Scotland, wherever the king’s person might be, they had no interest in the king’s person whilst he remained in England. Although aimed ostensibly at the Scots, this so-called ‘speech without doors’ was as much a critique of the parliamentary Presbyterians for backing the Scots’ insistence that Charles should be allowed to come to London to conclude a personal treaty. This suggestion had always been anathema to the Independents, who feared that once in London, the king would be able to dictate his own terms for a settlement. Chaloner put this case forcibly.

Be wary that in receiving him with safety you do not thereby endanger and hazard the commonwealth; be advised lest in bringing him home with freedom you do not thereby lead the people of England in thralldom ... First settle the honour, safety and freedom of the commonwealth and then the honour, safety and freedom of the king, so far as the latter may stand with the former, and not otherwise.87[T. Chaloner], An Answer to the Scotch Papers...Concerning the Disposal of the King’s Person (1646), 15 (E.361.7).

Chaloner concluded by requesting that the House adhere to its former vote that the king be disposed of as Parliament should think fit ‘and that you enter into no treaty either with the king or your brethren of Scotland, lest otherwise thereby you retard the going home of their army out of England’.88Answer to the Scotch Papers, 15. It is very likely that Chaloner delivered this speech, and subsequently had it published, with the knowledge and encouragement of the Independent grandees, who that very same day (26 Oct.) exchanged angry words with the Scots commissioners concerning custody of the king.89NLW, Wynnstay ms 90/16. Probably on the strength of this speech, Chaloner was named on 29 October, with three other leading Independents – Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire, Nathaniel Fiennes I and William Pierrepont – to prepare an answer to the Scots’ papers.90CJ iv. 708b.

When, in November 1646, Chaloner’s speech was printed, it provoked a minor pamphlet war; it even led to the launching of a new, if short-lived, newsbook, Mercurius Diutinus, whose first issue carried what were purportedly letters out of Yorkshire, relating the plight of the inhabitants of Cleveland and Richmondshire at the hands of the Scots.91Mercurius Diutinus no. 1 (25 Nov.-2 Dec. 1646), E.364.7; A.N.B. Cotton, ‘London Newsbooks in the Civil War’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis., 1971), 144. Several pamphleteers attacked Chaloner’s speech, while others leapt to his defence (or to refute the Scots’ papers), among them his friend Henry Marten*.92Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; [J. Birkenhead] An Answer to the Speech Without Doores (1646, E.362.9); The Moderator in Reply to Mr Thomas Chaloners Speech (1646, E.362.11); A Reply to a Namelesse Pamphlet (1646, E.362.26); An Answer to Severall Obiections made against…Mr Thomas Chaloners Speech, E.362.27; The Justification of a Safe and Wel-Grounded Answer (1646, E.363.11); [H. Marten], An Unhappy Game at Scotch and English (1646, E.364.3); [Marten], A Corrector of the Answerer to the Speech out of Doores (1646, E.364.9); [Birkenhead], The Speech Without Doores Defended Without Reason (1646, E.365.5); P.W. Thomas, Sir John Berkenhead 1617-79 (Oxford, 1969), 130-1; S. Barber, A Revolutionary Rogue: Henry Marten and the English Republic (Stroud, 2000), 170; C.M. Williams, ‘The Political Career of Henry Marten, with Special Reference to the Origins of Republicanism in the Long Parliament’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesus, 1954), 237. The furore surrounding the speech is not surprising, for Chaloner had touched upon several highly controversial issues – in particular, the nature and extent of the king’s powers and the relationship between the two kingdoms. At several points in the speech, Chaloner made it clear that he considered the king to be entirely subject to the laws of England and that the ‘rights of Parliament and the liberties of the kingdom’ took precedence over the king’s person and authority. Parliament, he argued, constituted the supreme authority in the kingdom, ‘accountable to none but God Almighty’ and, as such, could dispose of the king’s person and office as it saw fit.93Answer to the Scotch Papers, 6, 7, 9; Lex Talionis, or a Declamation against Mr. Challener (1647), 4 (E.396.20). When the Scots finally chose to hand over Charles, Chaloner was in no doubt how Parliament should receive him.

And whereas they [the Scots] expect the king should be received with honour, safety and freedom, I beseech you ... consider whether (as the case now stands) his reception with honour can stand with the honour of the kingdom, whether his safety be not incompatible with the safety of the commonwealth, and whether his freedom be not incompatible with the freedom of the people.94Answer to the Scotch Papers, 14.

Although Chaloner did not discuss the king’s powers within the parliamentary trinity, he clearly believed that these should be exercised solely by the two Houses. From the Scots’ perspective, Chaloner’s speech had alarming implications. If Parliament upheld Chaloner’s doctrine that the two Houses had sole power over the person and authority of the king, then Charles would be rendered nothing more than a puppet of the dominant Independent interest at Westminster. Since the Scots had little choice but to hand over the king (the Commons being determined to withhold their army’s arrears until they did so), they were extremely anxious that he be allowed to retain his powers and independence. Should Parliament ever succeed in entirely appropriating the king’s office and, with it, the powers and instruments of royal government in the three kingdoms, then the Independents would be able to exercise a monarchical, not to say imperial, dominion over the entire British Isles. In pressing for the subordination of the king’s person and office to the English Parliament, Chaloner’s speech evinced a deeply Anglocentric view of the relationship between the three kingdoms. It also reveals that he was feeling his way towards a republican position. Indeed, to the extent that he supported the appropriation of the king’s powers entirely to Parliament, to the denial of any personal sovereignty, he was already a republican.

Chaloner and the radical Independents, 1647-8

Chaloner continued to attend the Commons during the Presbyterian ascendancy of early 1647 and was included on several committees relating to the House’s (increasingly fractious) dealings with the army and its radical supporters in London.95CJ v. 125b, 132b, 147b, 167a, 174a. On 13 May, he was named first to a committee for considering a petition from the earl of Mulgrave concerning the Guisborough alum works, as well as the ‘damages and interest’ of the Chaloners.96CJ v. 170b. It was probably his adherence to the army that earned him a place on committees set up on 21 and 22 for investigating the Presbyterians’ military build-up in London and the ‘solemn engagement’ of their supporters among the citizenry to restore the king on his mere promise to abandon episcopacy for three years and the militia for ten.97CJ v. 253a, 254a. But before these committees could commence any anti-Presbyterian witch-hunt, a pro-Presbyterian mob overran both Houses on 26 July, forcing the two Speakers and many of the army’s friends to quit Westminster. Although Chaloner almost certainly abandoned his seat after these ‘riots’, he did not sign the engagement of the Members who fled to the army, and it seems likely that he went to ground in London. On 11 August – a week or so after the army had entered London and restored the fugitive Members – he was named to a committee on an ordinance for repealing all the legislation passed during the Speakers’ absence.98CJ v. 271b. A week later (18 Aug.), he was named to a committee for drafting an ordinance to this effect.99CJ v. 278a.

Between his return to the House in August 1647 and Pride’s Purge in December 1648, Chaloner was named to approximately 35 committees – the clerk of the House’s occasional failure to distinguish between Chaloner and his brother James (who was returned for the Yorkshire constituency of Aldborough in April 1648) making it impossible to arrive at a precise figure for his appointments. That Chaloner assumed a more prominent role in the House’s proceedings during this period than he had in 1645-7 is strongly suggested by his appointment as a messenger to the Lords, as a teller and as chairman of several important and politically sensitive committees. Nevertheless, his services in the House were considered sufficiently dispensable in September 1647 to occasion his appointment with two other Commons-men – William Jephson and James Temple – as commissioners to oversee the war-effort in the province of Munster, Ireland, where the Presbyterian sympathiser Murrough O’Brien, 1st earl of Inchiquin, commanded the Protestant forces.100Supra, ‘Irish Committees’; CJ v. 309b; LJ ix. 444b, 446a; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 2 (21-28 Sept. 1647), 4-5 (E.409.8). In the event, all three men remained at Westminster – why they were not dispatched to Ireland is unclear – and their commission was superseded in March 1648.101Supra, ‘Irish Committees’; infra, ‘William Jephson’; ‘James Temple’. On 1 November 1647, Chaloner was added to a committee to raise money and provide clothes for Parliament’s forces in Ireland.102CJ v. 347a.

It was during the final quarter of 1647 and the early months of 1648 that Chaloner established his reputation as one of the most militant members of the Independent interest. In the first tellership of his parliamentary career, on 25 September, he partnered the Independent grandee Sir Arthur Hesilrige in favour of impeaching Captain John James, one of the leading actors in the July ‘riots’, for ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’.103CJ v. 316b. Chaloner was subsequently added to the committee for investigating the forcing of the Houses (23 Nov.) to examine information against the suspected Presbyterian plotters Thomas Gewen* and Edward Stephens*.104CJ v. 366b. As well as hounding the Presbyterian leadership that autumn, Chaloner was involved in the task of revising Parliament’s terms for a settlement with the king (Charles having rejected the Newcastle propositions in mid-September). On 30 September, he was appointed a committeeman to consider a proposition ‘touching religion, in the points of government and doctrine’, and he was named on 6 October to a committee for preparing a proposition ‘concerning the settlement of the Presbyterian government and concerning the exemption of such tender consciences as cannot conform to that government’.105CJ v. 321b, 327b. In an effort to force the king’s compliance with Parliament’s terms – and perhaps also to appease radical opinion in the army – the Commons set up a committee on 5 November for inserting a clause in the propositions that Charles was ‘bound in justice and by the duty of his office to give his assent to all such laws as by the Lords and Commons, in Parliament, shall be adjudged to be for the good of the kingdom, and by them tendered unto him for his assent’.106CJ v. 351b. The House referred this task specifically to Chaloner, and the next day (6 Nov.) he reported his handiwork.107CJ v. 352a. A holograph draft of Chaloner’s report has survived and is revealing of his political thinking at this juncture. In addition to the demand that Charles give his assent to all laws presented to him by Parliament, Chaloner asserted that

in case the laws so offered unto him shall not thereupon be assented unto by him, that nevertheless they are as valid ... as if his assent had been thereunto had ... which they do insist upon as an undoubted right. And for a present settling of a safe and well grounded peace, they do expect that the king shall so acknowledge it by giving his assent thereunto and to the ensuing propositions.108Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 569.

It appears from the draft that whereas Chaloner employed the phrase ‘as the people represented in Parliament’ – in other words, the Commons – the clerk of the House, Henry Elsynge, changed it to the more conventional ‘as by the Lords and Commons in Parliament’. Chaloner’s original phrasing is significant, especially considering that just across the Thames at Putney, the Levellers and the army radicals were demanding that ‘all government be in the Commons’. The whole tone of the draft, but particularly the phrase ‘as the people represented’, suggests that Chaloner favoured, at the very least, a shift in the distribution of power within the legislative trinity of Parliament towards the Commons and possibly even the removal of the Lords’ veto. As amended by Elsynge, the Commons accepted the first clause in Chaloner’s draft – that the king was bound in justice to give his assent to all laws that Parliament should tender him – but rejected the second clause, removing the king’s negative voice.109CJ v. 352b.

The king’s escape from Hampton Court on 11 November 1647, contrary to the terms of his parole, was probably the last straw as far as Chaloner was concerned; from that point onwards he appears to have been resolutely opposed to having any further dealings with Charles. When Thomas Rainborowe and the pro-Leveller MP Thomas Scot II were reportedly suspended from the House on 18 November for having incited the army to mutiny at Corkbush Field, it was rumoured that Marten, Chaloner and Sir Henry Mildmay – ‘who are branded to be the most bloody minded against the king’ – would soon follow.110BL, Verney mss: Alexander Denton to Ralph Verney*, 18 Nov. 1647 (M636/8); Bodl. Clarendon 30, ff. 188-9. Like Marten and Mildmay, Chaloner retained his seat, but by this stage he may have lost all inclination to toe the more moderate line of the Independent grandees. When the Commons voted on 26 November on whether to accept the Four Bills (the Lords having thus reduced the propositions), together with the Lords’ recommendation that if Charles assented to them, he should be allowed to treat with Parliament in person, Chaloner very probably sided with Marten and the radical Independents in opposing any moves towards a personal treaty.111Infra, ‘Henry Marten’. As much as Chaloner may have disliked the Four Bills, he disliked the Scots even more, and on 15 December he was named to a 14-man committee, dominated by the Independents, for framing the House’s refusal of the Scots commissioners’ request to peruse and discuss the Bills before they were sent to the king.112CJ v. 385a.

‘King-cudgeling’ Chaloner was also active in hammering the royalist press during the winter of 1647-8, serving (apparently diligently) as chairman of a committee set up on 27 November for suppressing the royalist newsbooks Mercurius Elencticus, Mercurius Pragmaticus ‘or any other pamphlet of the like scandalous or seditious nature’.113CJ v. 371a; SP16/516/6, f. 10; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 28 (3-10 Oct. 1648), sig. Pp4v (E.466.11). The editor of the Mercurius Elencticus acknowledged that Chaloner and another Independent MP, Miles Corbett, had been ‘foremost of the pack that hunted me’, although he partially excused Chaloner, ‘because I know he does not hate me for myself or my ill opinion of the state but only for my too much loving the king ... and I am sorry so wise a gentleman should so willingly be made a fool on for the public use’.114Mercurius Elencticus no. 6 (29 Dec. 1647-5 Jan. 1648), 42 (E.421.34); Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 12 (30 Nov.-7 Dec. 1647), sig. Mv. On 21 December, the Commons ordered Chaloner’s ‘committee for printing’ to investigate the publication of a paper from the Scots denouncing the Four Bills.115CJ v. 395a.

Following the king’s rejection of the Four Bills, the Commons set up a nine-man committee on 3 January 1648 – to which Marten and Chaloner were named in first and second place – to prepare a declaration justifying the vote of no addresses: an initiative widely perceived as a major step towards the Independents ‘settling the republic they have long since resolved on and modelled’.116CJ v. 416a; Bodl. Clarendon 30, f. 288; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 22 (8-15 Feb. 1648), sig. Y2 (E.427.7). Chaloner and the prominent Independent MP John Lisle were subsequently tasked with ensuring that this declaration ‘be true and well printed’.117CJ v. 462a. Chaloner was included the next day (4 Jan.) on a committee to draft 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 and in matters of trade and of all others things of public concernment’.118CJ v. 417a. Still eager to take the fight to the Presbyterians, he was a messenger to the Lords on 29 and 31 January to deliver articles of impeachment against seven peers accused of complicity in the July 1647 riots.119CJ v. 449a, 449b, 450a, 450b; LJ x. 10a. And on 4 March, he was named to a committee to consider the accounts of the customs commissioners, in what was possibly an attempt to bring to book the syndicate of Presbyterian and crypto-royalist City merchants that had taken over the commission in 1645.120CJ v. 480a; R. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), 520. Later that month, he carried up articles of impeachment to the Lords against four London aldermen for their part in the July riots.121CJ v. 503a, 507b; LJ x. 125a.

Chaloner was named to several committees during the spring and summer of 1648 for suppressing royalist insurgents during the second civil war.122CJ v. 537b, 599b, 631b. But his only conspicuous contribution to the war effort was his report on 10 July from the committee for suppressing scandalous publications, in which he denounced a pamphlet attacking Major-general Philip Skippon*, the commander of Parliament’s forces in London. In response to this report, the Commons took steps to ensure that Skippon’s honour and authority was publicly re-affirmed.123CJ v. 630a. With the renewal of efforts that summer to reach a personal treaty with the king, the ‘main obstructers’ of such a treaty in the Commons were reportedly Chaloner, Marten, Corbett, Sir Henry Vane II and Thomas Scot I.124Mercurius Melancholius no. 49 (24-31 July 1648), 296 (E.455.12); The Cuckoo’s-Nest a[t] Westminster (1648), 6 (E.447.19); The Mad Dog Rebellion, Worm’d and Muzzl’d (1648), 5 (E.452.22). In mid-August, when the Lords sent down the king’s answer to Parliament’s request for a treaty, Chaloner launched a heated attack on the parliamentary commissioners to the king (Sir John Hippisley and John Bulkeley) for holding a private conference with Charles. Chaloner cited the case of a Venetian ambassador who, having held a private meeting with his Spanish counterpart whilst Venice was at war with Spain, was condemned to death on his return home. When it was objected that Chaloner’s example was not relevant because he had not demonstrated that the king was an enemy, Scot interjected that the king was indeed an enemy for having raised a war against the kingdom by inviting in the Scots.125Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 21 (15-22 Aug. 1648), sigs. Aav-Aa2 (E.460.21).

As an opponent of a personal treaty with the king, Chaloner received only a handful of appointments during the autumn of 1648 while Parliament attempted to come to terms with Charles at Newport. Only when it came to defending the army does Chaloner appear to have made his presence felt in the House. During a debate on the army’s arrears on 4 October, he fulminated against the City, saying that the £80,000 that the City owed to the soldiers was

an argument of the City’s high ingratitude to the army for all those famous good services done for them and the kingdom and also of the great modesty and good temper of the army, that after so many affronts and provocations given them by the City … .they should withdraw themselves with so much patience and be content so long without a farthing of their arrears.126Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 28, sig. Pp4v.

He then ‘pressed earnestly that some speedy course might be taken for the satisfaction of the soldiery’, whereupon the Commons ordered him and three other Independents – namely, Fiennes, Oliver St John and Sir Thomas Widdrington – to attend Sir Thomas (now 3rd baro) Fairfax and inform him of its efforts to collect money for the army’s arrears of pay.127CJ vi. 43a.

Chaloner was one of four MPs – the others were Marten, Scot and Alexander Rigby I – nominated late in November 1648 to the Levellers’ committee for redrafting the Agreement of the People. Of these ‘honest’ Commons-men, however, only Marten attended the committee’s meetings.128J. Lilburne, The Picture of the Councel of State (1649), 22 (E.550.14); Lilburne, The Legall Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England Revived (1649), 19 (E.560.14); Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 131. Part of the committee’s purpose was to arrive at a timetable for dissolving Parliament – a move that most parliamentary Independents (Chaloner presumably among them) opposed on the grounds that it would devolve too much power upon the army. Two days before Pride’s Purge, on 4 December, Chaloner was a minority teller with John Ashe against a resolution that the army’s removal of the king from the Isle of Wight to Hurst Castle was without the House’s approval.129CJ vi. 93a.

Pride’s Purge and the regicide, 1648-9

Pride’s Purge, on 6 December 1648, allowed Chaloner’s radical convictions to achieve much fuller expression. Indeed, it has been argued that he, Marten and Scot were ‘the major parliamentary figures between the purge and the execution’, providing much of the necessary leadership and impetus for the trial of the king and the establishment of the commonwealth.130Worden, Rump Parl. 35-6, 37; Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2012), 268. There is no denying that Chaloner was very close to the centre of events during the early months of the Rump. However, the importance of his contribution, compared with that of Marten and Scot, has perhaps been overstated. Certainly in terms of his appointments during this period, he appears to have been less prominent than either Marten or Scot and probably less active in committee than Augustine Garland or John Lisle.131Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; ‘Thomas Scot I’. Between the purge and the regicide he was named to a maximum of 23 committees (some of these appointments may well have been his brother James’s), whereas Marten was named to 28 and Scot to 31. Moreover, only three items of parliamentary business were specially referred to Chaloner’s care before February 1649, and none were matters of the first importance. His only recorded contributions to debate in the early weeks of the Rump were made in relation to naval affairs, when he emerged as the ‘principal spokesman’ in the House for augmenting and supplying Parliament’s fleet under the earl of Warwick.132Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 38 (12-19 Dec. 1648), sig. Ddd4 (E.476.35); no. 39 (19-26 Dec. 1648), sig. Eee2 (E.477.30).

Chaloner’s first appointment after Pride’s Purge was on 13 December 1648 to a committee for repealing all votes and legislation that authorised treating with the king or the revoking of orders proscribing the army’s Presbyterian enemies. It was probably as a member of this committee that Chaloner was charged with drafting a declaration justifying the repeal of these votes, which the House now deemed ‘dishonourable to the proceedings of Parliament and...destructive to the good of the kingdom’.133CJ vi. 96a, 111a, 112b. That same day (13 Dec.), he was named to a committee for drafting what would become the ‘dissent’ – the formal renunciation required of all Rumpers of the vote of 5 December that the king’s answers at Newport were a sufficient grounds for a settlement.134CJ vi. 96b; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 38, sig. Ddd3. Chaloner and the committee’s chairman, Scot, were tasked on 19 December with gathering material on the vote of no addresses to assist in its deliberations.135CJ vi. 100a. As several contemporary sources confirm, he was not among those MPs who entered their dissent on 20 December – the day of its introduction as a test of the Rump’s membership (Mercurius Pragmaticus evidently mistook James Chaloner for Thomas).136PA, ms CJ xxxiii, pp. 473, 625; NLS, Adv. ms 35.5.11, f. 50; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 39, sig. Eee3; [W. Prynne], A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members Case (1660), 21, 23 (E.1013.22). Nevertheless, later the same day (20 Dec.), he was named to a committee for drafting a declaration justifying the dissent.137PA, ms CJ xxxiii, p. 474; Mercurius Elencticus no. 57 (19-26 Dec. 1648), 544 (E.477.31). Given his evident enthusiasm for the fledgling Rump’s proceedings, his failure to take the dissent until 1 February 1649 – two days after the regicide – seems to have been nothing more than an oversight on his part.

Chaloner ‘the king clapper’ played a leading role in bringing Charles to trial and in effecting the prerequisite for that process – the assertion of the Commons’ supremacy.138Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 39, sig. Eee3. On 23 December 1648, he was named to a committee, chaired by Scot, ‘to consider how to proceed in a way of justice against the king’. Known variously as the committee ‘to draw up a charge against the king’ and ‘for trial of the king’, this body may have been conceived as part of another effort to wring concessions from Charles.139CJ vi. 103a; Bodl. Clarendon 34, f. 17; Whitelocke, Diary, 227. Nevertheless, the fruit of its deliberations, which Scot reported to the House on 28 December, was an ordinance to try the king and other ‘capital offenders’, and Chaloner was included on the committee set up the next day (29 Dec.) for preparing the trial commission.140CJ vi. 105b, 106a. When this first ordinance was rejected by the Lords, Chaloner was named to the committee on 3 January 1649 for bringing in a new ordinance to the same effect.141CJ vi. 110b. If the later testimony of the MP Simon Mayne can be credited, Chaloner was a particularly aggressive member of the pro-trial faction in the House. Mayne claimed that when he had risen in the Commons to have his name removed from the list of judges to try the king, Chaloner had ‘laid hands upon him and prevented him from speaking, threatening that if he should attempt to free himself therefrom he would be taken for a delinquent ... And has (since) often boasted to others that he was the man that made Mr Mayne a man of courage and resolution’.142Somers Tracts, vii. 456. Mayne, a regicide, made this claim after the Restoration, however, in what was clearly an attempt to excuse his role in the king’s execution.

Anticipating that the Lords would reject the second ordinance for trying Charles as they had the first, the Rump appointed Marten, Chaloner and 12 other Members on 4 January 1649 to frame the resolutions adopted later that day – that the people under God were the origin of all authority, and that the Commons, chosen by the people, held supreme power.143CJ vi. 111a. After adopting these resolutions, the Commons set up a committee, chaired by Chaloner, to prepare a printed vindication of its newly-claimed supremacy.144CJ vi. 111a. Published a few days later, and probably penned by Chaloner, this declaration justified the three resolutions with reference to the king’s coronation oath and an ‘ordinance’ of 2 November 1642 – in fact, a ‘remonstrance’ of both Houses – which asserted that Parliament was the only proper judge in matters ‘wherein the safety of the kingdom depends’.145LJ v. 423a; A Declaration of the House of Commons (1649, E.537.18); A Remonstrance of the Lords and Commons (1642), 15 (E.126.10). On 6 and 15 January, Chaloner reported the declaration justifying the Rump’s repeal of votes it deemed ‘dishonourable’ and ‘destructive to ... the kingdom’, which the House ordered to be published.146CJ vi. 112b, 118a. Here, Chaloner reiterated the radical Independents’ conviction that Charles, ‘our implacable enemy’, could never be trusted and that both he and the Presbyterians had endeavoured repeatedly from 1646 to subject England to a foreign power (i.e. the Scots). This declaration also contains strong echoes of Chaloner’s ‘speech without doors’ of October 1646, in which he had argued that the best interests of the commonwealth were fundamentally incompatible with those of the king.

Unless we should value this one man, the king, above so many millions of people whom we represent and prefer his honour, safety and freedom before the honour, safety and freedom of the whole nation ... unless we should stake all which we have to the king’s nothing and treat with him ... unless we should value the blood of so many innocents and [of] the army of so many martyrs who have died in this cause, less than the blood of a few guilty persons, by what name or title soever styled, we could do no less than repeal those votes before specified ... Yet we are resolved (by God’s assistance) ...to settle the peace of the kingdom by the authority of Parliament, in a more happy way than can be expected from the best of kings.147A Declaration of the Commons...Expressing Their Reasons for Adnulling...These Ensuing Votes (1649, E.538.23).

Chaloner can be described as a republican insofar as he was a convinced Commons supremacist. But the contention that he was a ‘classical republican’ – that his political objectives were consciously shaped by classical and Machiavellian literature – is harder to substantiate. Unfortunately, but perhaps not accidentally, he left no corpus of republican writings. He was clearly on close terms with two of the era’s foremost classical republicans: Henry Neville* and Thomas May.148Infra, ‘Henry Neville’; N. Yorks. RO, ZFM/Alum mines, 5; Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 159; Ath. Ox. iii. 531; Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 43; Worden, ‘Classical republicanism’, 184, 190-1. But there is little to indicate that he enjoyed similarly friendly relations with the commonwealth’s other noted republican ideologue, Neville’s cousin Algernon Sydney*.149J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623-77 (Cambridge, 1988), 94. Chaloner’s ‘boon companion’ – and probably his closest collaborator in the Rump – Henry Marten, never looked readily to classical antiquity for political inspiration.150Infra, ‘Henry Marten’.

Chaloner was one of the more active members of the high court of justice, attending 12 of the 18 meetings of the trial commission.151Muddiman, Trial, 195, 226. He was also named to the court’s committees of 10, 15 and 24 January 1649 for determining the ‘order and method’ for managing the trial; to compare the charge against the king with the evidence; to devise ‘such general rules as are fit for expediting the business of the said court’; to examine the witnesses against the king; and to collect several of Charles’s letters to Parliament to be used in evidence against him. Chaloner reported these letters to the court on 25 January.152Muddiman, Trial, 198, 202, 212-13, 223. However, he was not named to the committee set up that day (25 Jan.) to draft the sentence against the king; nor did he attend the 15th session of the court, on 26 January, when this sentence was debated, amended and approved.153Muddiman, Trial, 223-4. His attendance record at the trial itself also contains a glaring omission. He attended the first, second and third days, on 20, 22 and 23 January, but not the final day, on 27 January, when sentence against the king was pronounced.154Muddiman, Trial, 76, 89, 96, 105. Furthermore, although he signed the king’s death warrant on 29 January – unlike his brother James, who would claim after the Restoration that he had been utterly opposed to the regicide – he was among a group of 13 commissioners who had not attended the trial commission that day and who had to be sought out in the Commons or wherever and prevailed upon to append their signatures at the foot of the warrant.155Supra, ‘James Chaloner’; Muddiman, Trial, 228; S. Kelsey, ‘The death of Charles I’, HJ xlv. 751.

Why Chaloner apparently sought to distance himself from the court’s proceedings during the final days of the king’s life is not clear. Perhaps, like Scot – who was also among this group of late signers – he was worried by the geo-political implications of regicide. Scot would later claim that he had delayed signing the warrant ‘that so the Dutch ambassadors, who had an audience granted them, might be heard and the Parliament have time and opportunity to consider more advisedly of that business’.156Infra, ‘Thomas Scot I’. It may be significant, therefore, that Chaloner was named to committees set up on 29 and 30 January – the second of which he reported from and probably chaired – to receive and respond to the ambassadors’ request for a stay of execution.157CJ vi. 124a, 125a, 130a.

Defining and defending the revolution, 1649-52

Chaloner was named to a maximum of approximately 170 committees in the Rump, although it is likely that some of these appointments were those of his brother James. The clerk of the House sometimes distinguished between the two men – especially when they were named to the same committee – and when he referred simply to ‘Mr Chaloner’, he generally seems to have meant Thomas, who was the elder brother and the more prominent politician. With at least 100 committee appointments to his name, Chaloner was clearly one of the most active and dedicated Members of the Rump. Nevertheless, his tally of no more than 14 tellerships – most of which were in divisions on relatively minor issues – was far surpassed by those of Sir Arthur Hesilrige, Marten and Scot (to name but three leading Rumpers).158CJ vi. 294a, 330a, 438b, 510b, 589b, 596a, 606b; vii. 42b, 50b, 81b, 86a, 123a, 136b, 239b.

Chaloner’s tellerships reveal little about his allies in the House. Despite agreeing on a range of issues, Chaloner and Marten were opposing tellers on either three or four occasions in the Rump; they were partners only once – in a minor division in May 1652 concerning the library of the dean and chapter of Winchester.159CJ vi. 294a, 606b; vii. 42b, 86a, 136b. Their tellerships also indicate that they were on opposing sides in the high-profile debate on whether to include the estate of William Craven, 1st Baron Craven, in the 1651 bill for the sale of delinquents’ estates: Chaloner favoured inclusion, Marten was against (as was James Chaloner).160Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; CJ vi. 545, 587a, 596a; A True and Perfect Narrative of the Several Proceedings in the Case Concerning the Lord Craven (1653), 7, 9, 11 (E.1071.1); M. Brod, ‘The uses of intelligence’, in Revolutionary England ed. G. Southcombe, G. Tapsell (2017), 111, 116, 117. They clashed, too, in the debates on the 1652 bill for oblivion and general pardon, with Chaloner again taking a hard line against the perceived opponents of the commonwealth while Marten favoured leniency.161CJ vii. 86a.

Chaloner chaired, reported from, or was assigned responsibility for (sometimes with other MPs) nine ad hoc committees between the regicide and the Rump’s dissolution in April 1653. However, he can plausibly be identified as the drafter of only one major piece of legislation – the August 1650 ordinance establishing a council of trade.162CJ vi. 144a, 150b, 151a, 199a, 347a, 363b, 365b, 383b, 458a, 526a. In contrast to Marten and another of his close allies in the House, Thomas Grey, Lord Grey of Groby, he failed to secure nomination to the Rump’s first council of state in February 1649 – a setback that reflected not so much his unpopularity with more moderate Rumpers as his lack of close friends on the nominating committee itself, which comprised the zealously godly Thomas Scot, Edmund Ludlowe II, Cornelius Holland, John Lisle and Luke Robinson.163Infra, ‘Thomas Scot I’; Worden, Rump. Parl. 179. Besides their prominence in the House, Marten and Grey of Groby had a strong constituency within the army to be taken into consideration; Chaloner had no such military following. His omission from the first council of state probably served to limit his role in framing the Rump’s public imagery, which was apparently confined to advising the February 1649 conciliar committee on the manner of receiving foreign diplomats (he would be named to the committee itself in the third and fourth councils).164CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 14, 18; 1651, p. 235; 1651-2, p. 43. He was elected to the second council of state, early in 1650, and to three that followed under the Rump and was relatively diligent in attending conciliar meetings.165CSP Dom. 1650, p. xli; 1651, p. xxxv; 1651-2, p. xlvii; 1652-3, p. xxxiii. He was also named to numerous conciliar committees and is known to have delivered at least 16 reports to the House as a councillor – although this was a modest number compared with the 70 or so made by Scot, for example.166Infra, ‘Thomas Scot I’; CJ vi. 379b, 424b, 436b, 437b, 444b, 470b, 478b, 489a, 504b, 513b; vii. 74b, 80b, 81b, 89b, 124b, 192a.

His omission from the first council of state notwithstanding, Chaloner was part of that relatively small group of Members which shaped and gave voice to the Rump’s political priorities in the first few months after the regicide.167Worden, God’s Instruments, 269 Named to the committee set up on 1 February 1649 to take the dissent of Members seeking admission to the House, he reported the cases of George Fenwick (17 Feb.) and William Carent (5 Mar.).168[Prynne], Secluded Members, 25; CJ vi. 144b, 155b. This body, which operated like a committee for absent Members, was obviously important in determining the Rump’s membership and therefore its political complexion. He was very probably the ‘Mr Chaloner’ who was named to the 6 February and 7 March committees for preparing bills to abolish the House of Lords and the office of king – the latter being declared ‘unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the liberty, safety and public interest of the people’.169CJ vi. 133a, 158a.

One of the Chaloners – almost certainly Thomas – was among the four Members who were charged on 16 February 1649 with drafting a declaration vindicating Parliament’s recent proceedings.170CJ vi. 143b-144a. Bulstrode Whitelocke reported the first draft of this declaration on 16 March, whereupon the House recommitted it to Marten, one of the Chaloners (again, almost certainly Thomas) and several other Members, and, as a result, it was rendered ‘much sharper’ by the inclusion of references to the late king’s ‘usurped tyranny’ and the burdensome nature of kingly government in general. The declaration’s celebration of England’s newfound kinship with the Netherlands, Venice and other republican states certainly bears the hallmarks of Chaloner’s confidently cosmopolitan outlook.171CJ vi. 165b; Whitelocke, Diary 235; A Declaration of the Parliament of England Expressing the Grounds of Their Late Proceedings (1649, E.548.12); Worden, Rump Parl. 188; God’s Instruments, 269. He was probably the Chaloner named to several committees in January and February 1649 for organising a parliamentary delegation to Edinburgh and to prepare the Rump’s response to Scottish protests at the regicide.172CJ vi. 120a, 131b, 150b. And on 26 February, ‘Mr Chaloner’ reported the draft of a declaration in answer to a remonstrance from the Scots in which they had charged Parliament with breach of the Covenant, the suppression of monarchy and promoting a ‘licentious liberty and ungodly toleration in matters of religion’. This remonstrance, countered Chaloner’s committee, contained ‘much scandalous and reproachful matter against the just proceedings of this Parliament ... and [revealed] a design in the contrivers of it to raise sedition and lay the grounds of a new and bloody war’.173CJ vi. 151a; The Desires of the Commissioners of the Kingdom of Scotland (1649, E.545.28).

Chaloner showed little interest in the ‘new and bloody war’ that would indeed materialise in the early 1650s or in the prospect of Anglo-Scottish union. Similarly, his role in Irish affairs under the Rump was relatively limited. He was named to only a handful of ad hoc committees on Irish matters (and some of these appointments may have been his brother’s) and was not included on those mainly responsible for organising the expedition to reconquer Ireland in 1649.174CJ vi. 507a, 512b, 563a; vii. 49b, 162a. He remained active on the Star Chamber Committee of Irish Affairs, but his several reports from this body in 1649 and 1651 concerned relatively minor matters – for example, the payment of Viscount Lisle’s arrears as lord lieutenant and recompensing those who had lent money to the Irish Protestant commanders Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle*) and the earl of Inchiquin during the mid-1640s.175SP63/344, ff. 17, 30, 32, 34, 36; CJ vi. 232b, 596a; CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 382.

Chaloner was more conspicuous in defending the fledgling Rump on its right flank – against its royalist, Presbyterian and Scottish enemies – than upon its left, against the Levellers. Not only was he a combatant in the war of words against the Scots in the early months of 1649 (as noted above), but he also supported the work of suppressing royalist and other anti-Rump publications in England.176CJ vi. 131b, 187a, 276a; vii. 11b; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 473; 1651, p. 438. Indeed, he retained the chair of the committee for scandalous pamphlets until at least March 1649 – although this body seems to have been superseded that autumn with the creation of several conciliar committees for investigating seditious and unlicensed publications.177Infra, ‘Thomas Scot I’; CJ vi. 166b. When, on 1 May, Hesilrige reported a bill for settling the government of the commonwealth, which – so the newsbooks claimed – ‘doth much vindicate them [the Rump] from that false aspersion of malignants and others that would possess the people that the Parliament intend to sit always and engross all power into their hands’, the House referred the bill to a committee of MP-councillors and to the specific care of Hesilrige and Chaloner.178CJ vi. 199a; The Impartial Intelligencer no. 9 (25 Apr.-2 May), 73 (E.529.29); Continued Heads of Perfect Passages no. 3 (27 Apr.-4 May 1649), 20 (E.529.30). This was rightly perceived as a major initiative of the Rump’s ruling ‘junto’, but there is no evidence that Chaloner was closely involved in its subsequent evolution.179Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls II) no. 3 (1-8 May 1649), sig. C2v (E.554.12). Like Marten, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Engagement (abjuring monarchy and the House of Lords), which was introduced as a test of the Rump’s membership in October 1649, but was quickly adopted as a means of rooting out Presbyterian and crypto-royalist opposition in the country generally and in local office in particular.180CJ vi. 307b, 312b, 326b, 370b; Worden, Rump Parl. 219-20.

In contrast to his brother James, Chaloner had no hand in the Rump’s campaign to crush the Levellers (equally, he did not succour John Lilburne and his confederates after their defeat, as Marten did).181Supra, ‘James Chaloner’; infra, ‘Henry Marten’. Nevertheless, he was undoubtedly mindful of the connection between satisfying the army’s material needs and keeping a lid on radical dissent within its ranks. Among his motives in seeking appointment to committees on the sale of crown and other sequestered property, the management of state finances, and for improving the machinery of composition and the taking of public accounts, may well have been a concern (shared by many Rumpers) to improve pay and conditions for the soldiery.182CJ vi. 154a, 167b, 178b, 218b, 254a, 259b, 318a, 358b, 382a, 393b, 400a, 459b, 524a, 528a, 556a; vii. 14a, 104a; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 81. In November 1649, he was added to the Committee for Compounding* – although he never showed much interest in proceedings at Goldsmiths’ Hall – and he also attended meetings of the committee for removing obstructions on the sale of dean and chapter lands, despite the fact that he was never formally appointed to this body.183CJ vi. 318a; Add. 37682, f. 30. He made his strongest commitment to the army’s interests as an active member of the Committee for the Army*.184SP28/67-92; CJ vii. 58a. Even so, for a prominent Independent he was added to this committee relatively late in his parliamentary career – that is, February 1650.185CJ vi. 357b.

Chaloner followed Marten and his closest collaborators in 1649 in backing initiatives for lightening the burdens of the poor, the indebted and those enmeshed in the trammels of the legal system. ‘Marten, Chaloner and others of their faction’ (as Marchamont Nedham styled them) were characterised not only by their republican convictions but also by their support for wide-ranging social and legal reform. Chaloner, Marten and Henry Neville were at the centre of this ‘most closely knit’ of the Rump’s political groupings, and they socialised together when in London.186Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 2532 (accts. for ‘secret expenses’ distributed Cárdenas, 1638-55), unfol.; Mercurius Pragmaticus, for King Charls II, no. 12 (3-10 July 1649), sig. M5 (Burney Colln.); Ath. Ox. iii. 532; Worden, Rump Parl. 218-19. Chaloner was included on a series of committees in the spring and summer of 1649 (several of them chaired by Marten) for the ‘enlargement of poor prisoners for debt’, setting the poor on work, establishing courts to determine testamentary and matrimonial causes, and similar ameliorative measures.187CJ vi. 167b, 190b, 201a, 206b, 211b, 213a, 262a, 263b, 270a, 284a, 319b. After 1649, his interest in social and law reform seems to have taken a back seat to his other parliamentary concerns, notably commercial and foreign affairs.188Worden, Rump Parl. 251-2, 259. He received only two appointments relating directly to such issues after 1649 – to the 25 October 1650 committee, chaired by Marten and Walter Strickland, to ‘consider of the delays and unnecessary charges in proceedings in the law and to present one or more bills to the House for redress thereof’; and to the committee, to which he was added in March 1652, for receiving the findings of the Hale commission on legal reform.189CJ vi. 488a; vii. 107b.

Godly reform did not carry the same attraction for Chaloner that social and political reform apparently did. Bishop Gilbert Burnet claimed that Chaloner, Marten, Neville and their friends ‘pretended little or no religion and acted only upon the principles of civil liberty’.190Burnet’s History of My Own Times ed. O. Airy (Oxford, 1897), i. 120. While according to Aubrey, Chaloner was ‘as far from a puritan as the east from the west. He was of the natural religion ... and one who loved to enjoy the pleasures of this life’.191Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 159. Of Chaloner’s friend Thomas May, Wood commented that he became ‘a debauchee ad omnia, entertained ill principles as to religion, spoke often very slightly of the Holy Trinity, kept beastly and atheistical company, of whom Tho. Chaloner the regicide was one’.192Ath. Ox. iii. 810. Following May’s death in November 1650, the council entrusted Chaloner and Marten with securing his papers and overseeing his burial in Westminster Abbey.193CSP Dom. 1650, p. 432. Chaloner’s profane ways did little to endear him to the more godly Members of the Rump, particularly Vane II, who was said to have questioned whether an acquaintance was ‘one of God’s people’, since he suspected him of ‘club[bing] it with Tom Chaloner, Tom May ... and that gang’.194Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 43. The ‘Mr Chaloner’ who was named to various committees in the Rump for the propagation of the gospel and the maintenance of the ministry was probably, in most cases, James Chaloner, who appears to have been more favourably inclined towards such causes than his elder brother.195Supra, ‘James Chaloner’. That said, Chaloner was named to several ad hoc committees for maintaining parish ministers and filling vacant livings, and he was active on the Committee for Plundered Ministers* and, more prominently, on the committee for regulating (reforming) the universities, which were the Rump’s principal agencies for settling a godly ministry.196CJ vi. 116a, 180b, 187a, 215b, 216a, 359a, 388b; SP22/2B, f. 10v; LPL, Sion L40.2/E16, pp. 93-4, 99, 117, 152-3, 260, 341, 375, 482, 584, 629, 653; C. Hotham, Corporations Vindicated in Their Fundamental Liberties (1651), 104. Regardless of his private religious beliefs, he seems to have thought a national, parish-based church worth preserving, presumably seeing it as a vital instrument and buttress of the state’s authority. It is also worth noting that the legal and political writer Thomas Manley junior thought Chaloner a fitting patron for his 1652 verse paraphrase of the book of Job, entitled The Affliction and Deliverance of the Saints.197T. Manley, The Affliction and Deliverance of the Saints (1652, E.1318.2); ‘Thomas Manley’, Oxford DNB.

Commerce and empire, 1650-2

Chaloner’s principal sphere of influence in the Rump lay in the overlapping realms of foreign and commercial affairs. Evidence of his importance in these areas of policy-making is extensive, although at the same time problematic, consisting, as it does, overwhelmingly of his appointment to numerous Commons and conciliar committees on the inextricably inter-related issues of maritime trade, naval administration and foreign relations. Considered piecemeal, such appointments provide little insight into where he stood on the question of the Rump’s major strategic dilemma of whether to pursue a mercantilist-nationalist foreign policy or to build godly alliances with the Dutch and other Protestant states. Taken as a whole, however, and supplemented by other sources, they confirm that he was a leading advocate for the first of these two positions.

Chaloner’s mercantilist approach to commercial affairs – the imposition of centralized regulation over commerce to advance the nation in competition with other European powers – demanded an expansionist foreign policy. Indeed, he has been labelled as an ‘imperialist ... par excellence’.198Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 582, 607. He had certainly taken a crudely imperialist line in his prefatory poem (written in 1648) to his friend Thomas Gage’s A New Survey of the West Indies, assuring readers that with the end of civil strife at home would come a new era of expansion overseas and particularly in the Caribbean, where Englishmen would supposedly free ‘the wronged Indians ... from Spanish yoke and Rome’s idolatry’.199T. Gage, The English-American, his Travail by Sea and Land (1648). Nevertheless, by 1651, at the latest, Chaloner (along with Marten, Neville and Scot) was on the payroll of the Spanish ambassador Alonso de Cárdenas and intervening in debates at Westminster and Whitehall to prevent policies harmful to Spanish interests.200Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 2532. ‘As far from a puritan as the east from the west’, Chaloner was unlikely to have favoured colonial settlement of the Providence Island variety – that is, in order to plunder the Spanish of their New World treasure and challenge Habsburg power in Europe. Commercial expansion, the opening up of new markets, and naval supremacy in the Atlantic were evidently Chaloner’s goals, not puritan colonial ventures of the kind he had endorsed in 1648. Yet as the Western Design of 1655 was to demonstrate, such godly, millenarian objectives were still an important part of English thinking on foreign policy.201D. Armitage, ‘The Cromwellian protectorate and the languages of empire’, HJ xxxv. 531-55. Chaloner’s worldly, pragmatic approach to foreign affairs, and in particular his pro-Spanish sympathies, would not have sat well with the more godly of the Rump’s foreign-policy grandees, notably Cromwell and Vane II.

Chaloner assumed a more central role in the formulation of the Rump’s commercial policies following his election to the second council of state in February 1650.202CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 81, 163, 290, 292, 344, 379, 423. Indeed, his election is probably a sign of his increasing importance in the commonwealth’s affairs generally. To judge by several of his appointments, he played a leading part in the establishment of the second council. On 12 February, he was named second to a committee for deciding how to elect four additional councillors, and when the House rejected the committee’s recommendation that the elections should be by ballot box, it referred the task of reconsidering the manner of election specifically to Chaloner.203CJ vi. 363b, 365b. He was elected to the council on 20 February, picking up more votes than the prominent Rumpers Harbert Morley and Vane II, among others.204CJ vi. 369a. From July until mid-September 1650, he was closely involved at both Westminster and Whitehall in drafting and enacting a bill prohibiting all commerce between England and Scotland (this followed the signing of the Treaty of Heligoland between Charles II and the Scots in June 1650).205CJ vi. 444b, 470b; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 248, 344.

But perhaps Chaloner’s weightiest assignment at Whitehall in 1650 was devising the Rump’s response to the recent royalist take-over of Barbados and the other plantation colonies of Virginia, Antigua and Bermuda. This was as much a commercial as a military problem – the rebels sustaining their opposition to the commonwealth with the help of Dutch merchant interlopers.206Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 586-8. On 16 August, the council referred consideration of this business to Chaloner, Marten, Vane II and three other councillors.207CSP Dom. 1650, p. 290. And on 3 October, Chaloner reported to the Commons the council’s proposals for a fleet to be sent to blockade and retake Barbados. That same day (3 Oct.), a bill was passed prohibiting trade with the island and the other royalist colonies.208CJ vi. 478b; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 591-3. Such a policy was enthusiastically endorsed by the commonwealth’s leading merchant supporters, not least because it served to exclude the Dutch from trading with the English colonies in the Americas.209Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 587, 591-2. The commonwealth’s forceful response to the rebellion had brought the royalist colonies to heel by the spring of 1652, when Chaloner reported from the council that the Barbadians had agreed to drop their claim to political autonomy.210CJ vii. 124b.

The Act prohibiting trade with the royalist colonies was a forerunner of the first Navigation Act (passed in Oct. 1651), by which goods could be imported into territories of the commonwealth only by English ships or ships of the country where the merchandise had been produced. The Act’s immediate purpose was to shift the significant proportion of English overseas trade that was carried in the holds of foreign (mainly Dutch) merchantmen to those of English vessels. But its promoters – or some of them at least – may well have had a more ambitious objective: to build the maritime and financial resources that would enable England to go head-to-head with its more powerful European neighbours.211B. Worsley, The Advocate (1652, 669 f.18/4); Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 625-8; J.E. Farnell, ‘The Navigation Act of 1651, the first Dutch war, and the London merchant community’, EcHR n.s. xvi. 439-54. The Navigation Act emerged from the parliamentary-mercantile clique closely associated with the Rump’s leading think-tank on commercial affairs, the council for advancing and regulating trade. The bill on which the Act would be based had its origins in several reports by the council to the council of state – and those chiefly responsible for drafting it have been identified as the council’s secretary Benjamin Worsley and one of its most prominent members, the London merchant Maurice Thomson, brother of perhaps the Rump’s most influential merchant MP, George Thomson*.212Infra, ‘George Thomson’; SP18/16, f. 206; S. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism (Cambridge, 1996), 46-8; J.P. Cooper, ‘Social and economic policies under the commonwealth’ in The Interregnum; the Quest for Settlement 1646-60 ed. G. E. Aylmer (1972), 134; Farnell, ‘Navigation Act’, 440-43. Nevertheless, the Act, as it emerged from the Rump, may have been shaped as much by the immediate political concerns of Oliver St John and his allies as by the council and its penmen.213Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 47. The council was certainly willing to recommend leniency in its enforcement where circumstances warranted.214SP18/16, f. 206v. Moreover, Chaloner made several reports from the council of state in February 1652 concerning English merchants whose goods had been threatened with confiscation under the Act’s provisions. He was also a minority teller with Denis Bond on 3 February in favour of dispensing with the Act in certain cases.215CJ vii. 80b, 81b, 89b.

Chaloner was very probably among the moving spirits behind the Rump’s establishment of a council of trade.216Worden, Rump Parl. 254. On 11 January 1650, the House was informed that the council of state had received petitions from the East India, Levant and Eastland traders for the renewal of their privileges, ‘which carry with them some restraint to general liberty of trade’. The council deemed that the granting of such trading privileges, ‘if they shall be judged necessary’, was a matter for the Commons to decide, whereupon the Rump ordered that a bill be brought in for establishing a ‘standing council for ordering and regulating trade ... for the best advantage of the commonwealth’.217CJ vi. 347a; Worden, Rump Parl. 254-5. The task of drawing up this bill was specially referred to Chaloner and the London grocer and champion of free trade Richard Salwey. Salwey, like Chaloner, had been part of the committee for framing the Commons’ resolutions of 4 January 1649 and was closely connected with London’s merchant-interlopers.218Infra, ‘Richard Salwey’. The bill establishing the council was given its second reading on 16 March 1650, when it was resolved that Chaloner, Salwey and Vane II be three of its proposed 15 members. A committee was then set up, chaired by Chaloner, for amending the bill and nominating the council’s remaining 12 members.219CJ vi. 383a-b. He reported amendments to the bill on 19 June, and the Act was passed by the Commons on 1 August.220CJ vi. 426a, 451a. The Act’s preamble stated the Rump’s intention to advance the

traffic-trade [mercantile commerce] and several manufactures of this nation ... to the end that the poor people of this land may be set on work ... that the commonwealth might be enriched thereby ... duly weighing that the trade of this nation both at home and abroad, being rightly driven and regularly managed, doth exceedingly conduce to the strength, wealth, honour and prosperity thereof.221A. and O. ii. 403; Worden, Rump Parl. 254-5.

The Act contained a set of 12 instructions to the council – presumably dominated by Chaloner’s and Salwey’s agendas for its proceedings – that included stipulations for achieving ‘a perfect balance of trade’, and ‘whether it be necessary to give way to a more open and free trade then that of companies and societies and in what manner it is fittest to be done’.222A. and O. ii. 404-5. These instructions have been described as ‘the first attempt to establish a legitimate control of commercial and colonial affairs’ and as the source of ‘a policy which had the prosperity and wealth of England exclusively at heart’. It was almost certainly Chaloner who served as the council’s president – not Vane II, as one authority has claimed.223C.M. Andrews, British Cttees., Commissions and Councils of Trade and Plantations, 1622-75 (Baltimore, 1908), 24-5.

No detailed record of the council of trade’s proceedings has survived, but it is clear from a ‘narrative’ of its reports to Parliament and the council of state that it advocated (among other things) an extension of the convoy system beyond coastal waters, improving inland navigation, ‘the drawing of a yearly balance of the general export and import of this nation’, and a system of quality-control for its manufacturing sector.224SP18/16, f. 206; Worden, Rump Parl. 255; Cooper, ‘Social and economic policies’, 132-3. The council and its sub-committees evidently devoted a considerable amount of time to the feasibility of establishing free ports (duty-free entrepôt for encouraging the re-export trade), settling differences among the major manufacturing companies, and in trying to regulate and improve domestic production.225Andrews, British Cttees. 26-30; Cooper, ‘Social and economic policies’, 132-3, 135-8. Without a ‘reforming and regulating’ of manufacturing, the council argued, overseas markets would continue to shrink and unemployment to rise, to the great ‘grief … of the meaner sort of people … For … two thirds of this nation do depend immediately upon the manufactures of it’.226SP18/16, f. 208.

Chaloner may well have used the council of trade to indulge not only his concern to relieve the ‘meaner sort’ but also – if his appointments in the House and at Whitehall are any guide – a keen interest on his part in monetary policy and currency regulation. He was part of a powerful group of Rumpers that was keen to limit the export of bullion, and in a report from the council to the Rump in December 1650 he recommended that the East India Company (which bought Indian wares largely with silver bullion) be allowed to export specie only to the value that it itself had brought into the country. He was also prominent in securing legislation in January 1651 – passed at the council’s behest – for encouraging the import of bullion.. A healthy supply of specie at home was seen as vital in stimulating investment and trade and in strengthening the sinews of war.227SP18/16, f. 206; CJ vi. 251b, 403b, 458a, 513b-514a, 521a-522a; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 29, 483; 1651, pp. 67, 253, 389; 1651-2, pp. 43, 156; 1652-3, pp. 45, 48; The Answer of the Corporation of Moniers in the Mint (1653), 20 (E.1070.2). Although the council expressed no hostility to chartered companies per se, the importance it attached to oversight of domestic production and the balance of trade suggests that when it came to commercial policy, Chaloner was closer in thought to the ‘industrial-capital mercantilists’ than to the ‘monopoly mercantilists’ associated with the East India Company and, later, the tory party.228J. Barth, ‘Reconstructing mercantilism’, WMQ lxxiii. 272-4. In contrast to his interest in the nation’s commerce, Chaloner’s apparent enthusiasm for reforming and improving its postal service does not seem to have made it onto the council’s agenda.229CJ vii. 192a; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 56; 1651, p. 455; 1651-2, pp. 29, 425, 444; 1652-3, pp. 109, 181.

Much of the credit for the council of trade’s most notable achievement – the provision of a convoy for the English traders in the Mediterranean – can probably go to Chaloner. In September 1650, the Levant Company petitioned the council of state for a convoy to protect its ships from French privateers off the Straits of Gibraltar. The petition was referred to the council of trade, which recommended that the state provide a convoy of at least 12 ships and that customs be raised by one fifth to defray the cost of the scheme. On 31 October, Chaloner reported the whole matter to the Commons, which promptly introduced a bill for ‘settled convoys for securing the trade of this nation’ and ordered the admiralty committee to ensure that a convoy accompany the ships bound for the Mediterranean.230SP105/151, ff. 40v-41; CJ vi. 486b, 489a; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 379. Chaloner signed the admiralty committee order of 11 November for victualling the ships that were to make up the convoy.231SP18/12, f. 116; Bodl. Rawl. A.225, f. 14. In a report from the council of trade in January 1651, he backed a proposal from two London merchants for a convoy to guard bullion imports from Spain.232CJ vi. 521a.

Perhaps bolstered by the council of trade’s success in organising the Levant convoy, Chaloner wrote to Thomas Scot – who had been sent by the Rump to liaise with the army in Scotland – in December 1650, urging him to persuade Cromwell to put England’s maritime interests at the top of his agenda: ‘I pray present my humble service to my lord general [Cromwell], who I could wish had settled his business there [in Scotland], that he might look a little towards the sea, which being our main business now, will never be carried on by men of such narrow hearts, as, for the most part, have formerly been employed’.233Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 42-3. This letter reveals not only Chaloner’s friendly relations by this point with Scot, who shared his pro-Spanish sympathies and was likewise in receipt of subventions from Cárdenas, but also his relative lack of intimacy with Cromwell. There is no evidence that Chaloner ever wrote to Cromwell directly.234Infra, ‘Thomas Scot I’.

The Rump’s experiment with a council of trade was of short duration and largely failed to deliver on the lofty aspirations in its founding legislation. The council expired on 31 December 1651, having already suspended its proceedings, pending the Rump’s deliberations on its ‘general report’ of 22 September ‘concerning ... the necessity and benefit that would be of reforming and settling all the inland trade and manufactures of this nation under a certain way of government and super-inspection’.235CJ vii. 21a; SP18/16, f. 207. Following his election to the fourth council of state in November 1651, Chaloner was added to another influential body in the commercial and foreign policy sphere, the council’s standing committee for trade and foreign affairs. This new committee superseded two of Chaloner’s likely powerbases at Whitehall – the council’s committee for trade and what had become its de facto committee for foreign affairs, which had been set up initially, early in 1651, to treat with the Portuguese minister. Between May 1652 and April 1653 – the period for which records of the committee survive – Chaloner attended the new committee on a regular basis and served as its chairman in March 1653.236CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 67, 82; SP25/131-3, passim; R.T. Fallon, Milton in Government (University Park, PA, 1993), 28-31.

Foreign and naval affairs, 1650-3

Complementing Chaloner’s role in commercial policy-making was his contribution to the conduct of the commonwealth’s foreign and diplomatic affairs. His work in this area began in earnest following his appointment with Marten, Scot and Sir Henry Mildmay to a committee set up by the council of state on 16 May 1650 to evaluate the Rump’s foreign alliances.237CSP Dom. 1650, p. 165. In May and June, he was included on both the council’s and the Rump’s teams for treating with an agent sent by the States of Holland to discuss a possible alliance between their province and the Rump. The Hollanders feared that the Dutch stadholder, William II, intended to lead the other provinces against them and in support of a French invasion of the Spanish Netherlands – in which case, it was anticipated that Spain would intervene on Holland’s behalf. It was probably no coincidence that the Rumpers chosen to handle negotiations with the agent from Holland included Spain’s leading friends at Westminster – Chaloner, Marten, Neville and Bond.238Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 2532; CJ vi. 424a, 424b; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 169, 206, 229; H.R. Rowen, The Princes of Orange: the Stadholders in the Dutch Republic (Cambridge, 1988), 84-5.

Following William II’s death late in 1650, the commonwealth sought a more ‘strict and intimate alliance’ with the United Provinces and sent Oliver St John and Walter Strickland* as ambassadors to the republic. As a member of the conciliar committees responsible for preparing their instructions, Chaloner was probably involved in debating and finalising the highly novel proposals for economic and political union that the two men put to the Dutch over the spring of 1651.239CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 19, 53, 122; Fallon, Milton in Government, 29. The Dutch, interested only in the possible commercial benefits of union, were hostile to the idea of a political merger, and the negotiations broke down. Chaloner probably backed the scheme purely on commercial grounds, as a solution to the problem posed by Dutch maritime supremacy. Vane II and many other godly MPs, however, saw Anglo-Dutch union as a major step towards a grand Protestant-republican alliance against Catholic universal monarchy.240Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 24-7. This idea is likely to have held little appeal for Chaloner. As he had informed Scot in December 1650, it was mastery of the seas that interested him, which meant neutralising the Dutch (whether by union or war), not a Protestant crusade against international popery.

In contrast to Vane II and other godly Rumpers, Chaloner, Marten and Neville had no qualms about seeking rapprochement with Catholic states – particularly the Iberian kingdoms of Portugal and Spain. Chaloner and his allies were motivated largely, it seems, by the possible commercial benefits of Anglo-Iberian friendship and the need to stiffen the Rump’s defences against Spain’s great enemy – and the continental mainstay of Charles II and the Scottish Covenanters – France. In February 1650, Marten, Chaloner and Neville had each been paid £100 by the Spanish ambassador Alonso de Cárdenas for having headed off attempts by MPs to order his removal from England, ‘as suggested many times in Parliament and the council of state’.241Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 2532. Building on this success, Marten, Chaloner and Ludlowe managed to secure an initially favourable reception by the Rump to overtures from the crowns of Spain and Portugal during the winter of 1650-1. Chaloner was closely involved in the Rump’s dealings with Portugal – although Marten was probably more prominent in this regard – and he and Marten were the leading figures in the pro-Spanish lobby in the Rump’s counsels.242Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; CJ vi. 504b, 516b, 522b; CSP Dom. 1651, p. 69; 1651-2, pp. 406, 421. As with the Portuguese, the emergence of English naval power in the Mediterranean forced Spain to adopt a more friendly posture towards the commonwealth, and in December 1650 it became the first foreign state to recognise the new regime.

But before trying to capitalise on its diplomatic coup in securing Spanish recognition, the Rump was determined to seek redress from Spain for the death of Anthony Ascham, the English resident in Spain, who had been murdered in Madrid by a party of royalists. Chaloner was named second to a committee set up late in December 1650 and chaired by Marten for preparing a letter to the Philip IV concerning Ascham.243CJ vi. 517a. Aside from the demand that justice be done on Ascham’s murderers, this letter was a moderate, even cordially worded, document. Its authors thanked the king for the ‘courteous usage’ that had been shown to Admiral Robert Blake* and the English fleet, ‘as also your Majesty’s good affection towards us which your ambassador [Cárdenas] hath of late with much expression made known to us’. However, until Ascham’s murderers were punished, the letter stated, there could be no hope of a ‘sincere or lasting friendship ... which, notwithstanding to preserve and to further all free commerce, no befitting means or opportunity shall be by us omitted’.244HMC Portland, i. 554-5. Three weeks later, on 21 January 1651, the House resolved that this letter be amended and referred the matter specifically to the care of Chaloner and Marten.245CJ vi. 526a. The next day (22 Jan.), Chaloner was named second to a committee to deliver the letter to Cárdenas, and on 24 January he reported the ambassador’s reply.246CJ vi. 526a, 528a.

Angered by Philip’s failure to punish Ascham’s murderers, many MPs wanted to break off relations with Spain. But with the help of this pensionary interest – or ‘our faction’ as he put it – Cárdenas weathered the storm, and in January 1652 he sent Chaloner, Marten, Neville and Alexander Popham* a £35 barrel of Canary wine each for having defended Spanish interests in Parliament and on the council. Unable to reward the MPs in person, having been banned from seeing any public official, Cárdenas sent the Cistercian abbot Father Patrick Crelly to entertain Chaloner, Marten and their friends ‘in gardens and taverns, as is the custom here’.247Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 2532. The deterioration in the commonwealth’s relations with the Dutch and French during 1652, brought about a corresponding improvement in relations with Spain. Acting at Cárdenas’s behest on 1 September, Chaloner, Neville, Popham and Bond secured an order from the council of state for Admiral Blake to attack a French flotilla attempting to relieve Dunkirk, which was then under siege by the Spanish. Blake captured the French flotilla on 4 September, and the next day Dunkirk surrendered. The four MPs each received £200 in gold from Cárdenas for this signal service to his master’s interests.248Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 2532; Gardiner, Hist. Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii. 130.

Chaloner was equally prominent in the commonwealth’s dealings with the Italian states, particularly the duchy of Tuscany. Chaloner had visited Florence at some point on his foreign travels, possibly as early as 1612, when one of Sir Thomas Chaloner’s sons was said to have been much fêted by the Florentines, ‘for they build upon his father for a chief foundation of this match [between Prince Henry and a sister of the duke of Tuscany]’.249T. Birch, The Life of Henry, Prince of Wales (1760), 322. Whether Chaloner was keen to strengthen English ties with Tuscany for commercial reasons, because it was a shrine of Machiavellianism and classical republicanism, or simply because of his familiarity with the Tuscan court, is unclear. During 1651-3, he featured regularly on, and sometimes chaired, Rump and council committees for drafting letters to the duke or giving audience to Florentine diplomats.250CJ vii. 74b, 246b; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 218, 235; 1651-2, pp. 55, 85, 117; 1652-3, p. 41. The duchy of Tuscany was not the only Italian state with which the commonwealth developed links. In September and October 1652, the council ordered the familiar trio of Chaloner, Marten and Neville to confer with the ‘Italian secretary’ and with a representative from the Venetian republic, and in January 1653, Chaloner reported to the Rump a letter to be sent to the Doge of Venice. Later that month, Chaloner, Scot and Mildmay were appointed a committee to meet with an envoy from the Venetian senate ‘and receive what he has to propose for the advantage of this commonwealth’.251CJ vii. 243b; CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 406, 428; 1652-3, pp. 45, 117; CSP Ven. 1647-52, p. 290.

Chaloner also managed and helped to shape the Rump’s transactions with Denmark, the Hanseatic towns, the count of Oldenburg and the various factions in France.252CJ vii. 99a, 195a, 195b; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 163; 1651-2, pp. 85, 233-4, 249, 321, 332, 349, 454. The count of Oldenburg’s envoy to the Rump referred to Chaloner and Neville in terms that suggest they were a familiar duo in foreign affairs matters. As an experienced hand in international relations, Chaloner would certainly have worked closely with John Milton – the council of state’s Latin secretary and one of its principal penmen in communications with the Danish and Spanish crowns and the duke of Tuscany.253The Life Recs. of John Milton ed. J. M. French (New Brunswick, 1954), iii. 135, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 170; Fallon, Milton in Government, 33, 64, 88-100, 108-10, 111-12.

Chaloner, perhaps more than most Rumpers, saw the strengthening of English naval power and the improvement of the nation’s domestic and international trade as interlinked and mutually reinforcing. By the time of his addition to the Committee of Navy and Customs* on 6 January 1649, he had already emerged as one of the Rump’s leading spokesman on naval issues, and he would receive numerous appointments in the House relating to maritime affairs.254CJ vi. 112b, 116a, 147a, 185a, 224b, 270a, 274a, 290a, 379b, 534a; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 39, sig. Eee2. But his powerbase in naval administration was at Whitehall and, more especially, the successive conciliar admiralty committees to which he was named.255CJ vi. 379b; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 18, 26; 1651, p. 66; 1651-2, p. 46; 1652-3, p. 2. The admiralty committee oversaw naval strategy and fleet operations and was influential in the formulation of foreign policy; the council of state and the Rump rarely ignored its recommendations.256W.B. Cogar, ‘The Politics of Naval Administration, 1649-60’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1983), 26. As the admiralty committee’s order books and the navy commissioners’ papers reveal, Chaloner was one of its most diligent members. He attended the committee on a regular basis between February 1650 and December 1652 – only Vane II, Bond and Valentine Wauton were more assiduous – and signed numerous committee orders, usually with several or all of Vane II, Bond, Wauton, Scot and William Purefoy I.257SP18/12, f. 30 and passim; SP18/17, ff. 106, 111; SP18/27, f. 1; SP25/123, f. 124v and passim; Bodl. Rawl. A.226, passim; Add. 63788B, f. 109; V. A. Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger (1970), 166, 271-4. He also a stalwart of the Committee of Navy and Customs, which was primarily responsible for naval finances, although his attendance record, at least during 1649, did not match that of Wauton, Miles Corbett, George Thomson or Rowland Wilson, among others.258Supra, ‘Committee of Navy and Customs’; Bodl. Rawl. A.224, f. 2v and passim; Add. 22546, ff. 19, 65; Add. 63788B, ff. 55-58, 109-110v. His commitment to enhancing the Rump’s naval power probably explains the interest he took in the excise – a large proportion of which went towards maintaining the navy. An active member of the standing committee for excise – to which he was added on 1 May 1649 – he also named to numerous ad hoc committees in the House relating to the management of the excise.259Bodl. Rawl. C.386, unfol.; CJ vi. 199a, 207b, 290b, 325a. In addition, several of his tellerships were in divisions concerning the excise.260CJ vi. 438b; vii. 50b.

It has been argued that Chaloner, Marten, Neville, Harbert Morley ‘and their assorted allies’ gained control of the council’s committees for the admiralty and foreign affairs during the first half of 1652, and that from this powerbase they accelerated the commonwealth’s slide towards war with the Dutch.261Worden, Rump Parl. 281, 301; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 630; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 101-3. But whereas Morley and Neville attended the admiralty committee regularly during the spring and summer of 1652, Chaloner and Marten were present at less than a third of its 70 or so meetings and certainly put in fewer appearances than did Vane II, who was undoubtedly opposed to the war.262SP18/27-8; SP25/131; Bodl. Rawl. A.226; Rowe, Vane, 273. The halting progress of the Rump’s talks with Cárdenas during the spring and summer of 1652 also sits uneasily with the idea that Chaloner and his Hispanophile friends were the dominant force in foreign affairs during this period.263Fallon, Milton in Government, 93-6.

As an advocate of an aggressive commercial policy, Chaloner was probably not unduly dismayed at the prospect of war with the Dutch – England’s main trading rivals. But to claim that he was one of those ‘directly responsible for the moves towards war’, may be overstating the case.264Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 630. In any event, a series of English defeats in the early months of the war effectively put paid to his career in naval administration. Although he was re-elected in the elections to the new council of state on 24-5 November 1652, the advocates of the war generally fared badly, with Marten, Neville, Popham and their likely allies Anthony Stapley I and William Hay all losing their places. Vane, Whitelocke and other anti-war figures were convincingly re-elected. At a stroke, the Chaloner-Marten group’s influence on the admiralty and foreign affairs committees was undermined – and was then all but destroyed by the Dutch naval victory at Dungeness on 30 November.265CJ vii. 220a-221a; Worden, Rump Parl. 313-14; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 112-13. The Rump now acceded to pressure from Vane II and his circle for a radical overhaul of naval administration, and on 10 December a bill was passed for putting the powers of the admiralty committee in commission. The bill ensured that the management of the navy was entrusted to a small group of commissioners dominated by Vane and his allies.266Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Rowe, Vane, 173-4; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 109-112, 116-19. The appointment of Chaloner, Morley and Wauton on 2 December as commissioners to the fleet, had probably been orchestrated by the Vane group to remove them from the scene and thus to weaken opposition to the abolition of the admiralty committee. The three commissioners, who were all members of the committee, had been ordered to attend the fleet and to advise with Admiral Blake as to its ‘best disposal’ against the Dutch.267Add. 18986, f. 27; CJ vii. 226a; CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 1, 3.

Chaloner was no doubt bitterly opposed to the army’s forcible dissolution of the Rump on 20 April 1653. Cromwell, for his part, evidently shared Vane’s view that Chaloner was a dissolute. According to the account by the Genoese envoy Francesco Bernardi of Cromwell’s proceedings that day, the lord general denounced Marten as an ‘atheist and adulterer’ and Chaloner as a ‘drunkard’.268Corrispondenza dei Rappresentanti Genovesi a Londra ed. C. Prayer (Atti Della Società Ligure di Storia Patria xvi), 86. Undaunted, Chaloner remained active on various parliamentary and council committees up to and beyond the Rump’s dissolution. He continued to attend the council committee for trade and foreign affairs until its very last meeting on 20 April – the day on which the Rump was dissolved – and he signed his last warrant from the Army Committee on 6 May.269SP25/133, p. 34; SP28/92, f. 266. The fall of the Rump was lamented by Cárdenas, recounted Bernardi, because it deprived him of his ‘pensioners’ Vane II, Marten and Chaloner (although if Cárdenas did indeed have Vane on the payroll as well as Marten and Chaloner, he made no reference to the fact in his accounts).270Corrispondenza dei Rappresentanti Genovesi a Londra ed. Prayer, 88.

Chaloner withdrew from public life after 6 May 1653, probably spending most of his time on his Buckinghamshire and Yorkshire estates. In July 1655, he was named to the protectoral council’s committee for trade, but it is doubtful whether he attended any of its meetings.271CSP Dom. 1655, p. 240. Although he seems to have steered clear of republican plotting against the protectorate, his attendance at meetings of the governors of Westminster school during the mid-1650s ensured that he kept in touch with many of his colleagues in the Rump, among them Ludlowe, Scot and John Bradshawe.272SP28/292, unfol. In 1656-7, he funded the building of a school-house at Steeple Claydon with an endowment of £12 a year.273C91/21/16; D. Lysons, Magna Britannia (1813), i. pt. 3, p. 544; J. Broad, ‘Contesting the Restoration land settlement?’, Recs. of Bucks. xlvii. 156.

Chaloner in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, 1659

Chaloner resumed his parliamentary career early in 1659, when he returned for the Yorkshire borough of Scarborough to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament – probably on the interest of the admiralty commissioners, who wielded considerable influence in Scarborough, as in most of the smaller borough ports.274Supra, ‘Scarborough’. Although occasionally outspoken in debate, he was named to only four, minor, committees in this Parliament and was clearly not the political force that he had been in the Rump.275CJ vii. 622b, 627b, 634b, 639a. He remained firm in his republican principles, however, and on 1 February he joined other commonwealthsmen in moving that the status of the Scottish and Irish MPs be decided before the House could move on to debate the bill of recognition (the bill confirming Richard Cromwell as protector). The commonwealthsmen contested the presence of the Scottish and Irish MPs partly because they saw them as Cromwellian placemen, but also as a filibustering tactic to impede the bill’s passage. Chaloner declared that he found no law that the Scottish or Irish MPs should sit, but insisted that he had no ‘disaffection’ towards them and that ‘if they have not power [to sit], let us give them power’ (in a long speech on 18 March he was adamant that ‘no law allows them to sit’ and that they should withdraw until such legislation had been passed). When he then moved that the bill of recognition should be given its second reading in a week’s time, he was immediately opposed by Hesilrige, one of the leaders of the commonwealth party, who reiterated that the matter needed much further debate.276Burton’s Diary, iii. 30; iv. 174; W.A.H. Schilling, ‘The Parliamentary Diary of Sir John Gell, 5 Feb.-21 Mar. 1659’ (Vanderbilt Univ. MA thesis, 1961), 233-4. Whether Chaloner and Hesilrige had simply got their wires crossed or were genuinely at odds over this issue is not clear. On 8 February, Chaloner argued that before the bill of recognition could be passed, the protector needed to be recognised by the people and that the people’s voice could only be heard

in their representative [i.e. the Commons]. I am sure there hath been no recognition yet, by you, who are here the representative body ... Let no man say, that his Highness is not lord protector. I never thought the contrary. I believe he is and that it may be made out; but it is not yet made out to us, and it is not fit for the representatives of the people to contest they know not what. Besides, the bill is not well penned, not in a parliamentary state ... Let all these things be examined in a committee.277Burton’s Diary, iii. 128-30; Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, pp. 103-4; Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 38.

Two days later (10 Feb.), he opposed calls to have the question of whether to recognise the protector put to a vote, arguing that if the question was put, there would be nothing left for a committee to determine.278Burton’s Diary, iii. 195. He delivered his most forthright objection to the bill on 14 February, demanding that the liberties of the people be confirmed before the House vote on whether to recognise Richard.

Where two questions come before you, you ought to take that first that concerns the liberty of the people, before placing any single person or making a protector and leaving the liberties of the people in the wilderness ... The single person is but the means, the prop; liberties are the end... The practice of other nations is to provide for the people and then go to election [of a chief magistrate], as in Bohemia.279Burton’s Diary, iii. 263; Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 71-2.

During the second half of February 1659, the focus of contention shifted to the question of the constitutional status of the Cromwellian Other House, and on 28 February, Chaloner came out firmly against the proposal to call to the Other House those hereditary peers who had been loyal to Parliament in the wars: ‘If you tie us to the old foundation, then why not bring in archbishops, bishops, priors and abbots?’ Taking a distinctly Harringtonian line, he claimed that

if the Lords owned all the lands of the nation, as now the Commons almost do, I believe they would not suffer this House to sit here to give laws to them. But that constitution, though it was very ancient and then [i.e. at one time] good, yet time hath defaced it, and it is now impossible to attain any good by it... I would have no one sort of men to be hereditary judges of the nation, to them and their heirs forever. I would have you make these [the existing members of the Other House] to stand, and then debate whether you will add any to them.280Burton’s Diary, iii. 538-40; Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, p. 155; Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 136.

On 7 March, Chaloner again objected to the idea of admitting the loyal hereditary peers, but on this occasion he all but denounced the Other House.

I doubt this House [the Other House] has some infirmity that they dare not show themselves. I fear they are troubled with [the] king’s evil. They have all the legal [and] military power there... How shall the subject have justice?... If we should go about to lessen the army, we cannot do it without their [the Other House’s] consent... You agree not where you will meet [the Other House] and whether your five hundred persons of estate here shall go up and stand bare[headed] before those that receive pensions and salaries from you. This is dishonourable. If they commit treason, felony etc., who shall try them?... The old Lords had no office, not so much as a justice of peace’s place. Those [members of the Other House] are otherwise. They act in all offices in the country and come here to have the highest legislative. I cannot agree to transact with these persons as Lords.281Burton’s Diary, iv. 47-8; Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 175-6.

Not all of Chaloner’s time in this Parliament was taken up with attacking the protectoral constitution. On 21 February 1659, he spoke in support of a petition to the House from his kinsman, Thomas, 3rd Baron Fairfax*, requesting the release of the duke of Buckingham (Fairfax’s son-in-law), who had been imprisoned on suspicion of treasonous dealings Charles II.282Burton’s Diary, iii. 372-3. The Commons ordered the duke’s release that same day.283CJ vii. 606a. Later that year, on 29 July, Chaloner would report to the restored Rump (from the council of state) a letter from Fairfax concerning Buckingham, along with a petition from the duke.284CJ vii. 738b. On 24 February 1659, during a debate on whether to send a fleet to preserve English trading interests in the Baltic, Chaloner had a chance to ride his old hobby horse – foreign affairs. Here too, however, constitutional issues obtruded, for the commonwealthsmen were anxious to have control of the armed forces vested firmly in the hands of the Commons. Somewhat surprisingly, Chaloner came out against an aggressive foreign policy against the Dutch, although he was possibly playing devil’s advocate – hoping that by prolonging and extending the debate the Commons would wrest more of the initiative in foreign policy-making from the protector.

They [the Dutch] have been your friends. Your men go under their flags and in their ships [i.e. to trade with Spain]. They have not done you that harm. I would have the grounds of the war examined before you send any fleet... Make it your debate, whether for the interest of England and preservation of your trade in those parts, you should send a fleet into those seas. If you merely assert the right of the militia and then refer this matter back to the protector, what account can you give of it [to your constituents]? I would not have any begin or hazard a war, without your privity.285Burton’s Diary, iii. 463-4; Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 115.

But the debate ended as Chaloner had feared it would, with the Commons referring the planning and execution of foreign policy to the protector and reserving to themselves only the ‘interest of this House in the militia and in making of peace and war’.286CJ vii. 607b.

As their influence in Parliament waned during the spring of 1659, the commonwealthsmen worked hard to curry favour with the army – and Chaloner, like most of the republicans, could be relied upon to defend the soldiers’ interests in the House. On 24 March, he was among those who spoke in favour of re-committing the case of the godly republican officer Major-general William Packer* to the committee of privileges, which had voted that his return for Hertford was invalid. The majority of Members voted to uphold the committee’s decision, however, and Packer was duly unseated – much to the army’s resentment.287Infra, ‘William Packer’; CJ vii. 619b; Burton’s Diary, iv. 253; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 58. In the fraught debate on 18 April in response to the perceived threat of army intervention against Parliament, Chaloner dismissed the entire notion: ‘We have heard nothing of it... There is no such danger’.288Burton’s Diary, iv. 454. That same day (18 Apr.), he was a minority teller with Neville against a deliberately provocative motion to prevent general councils of the army meeting while Parliament was in session without the consent of the protector and both Houses.289CJ vii. 641b. The House further resolved that every officer should subscribe an oath abjuring the use of force against Parliament – although if Chaloner had had his way, the vote would also have included a proviso against Richard using military force (a third of the army was thought to be loyal to the protector).290Burton’s Diary, iv. 461; R. Hutton, The Restoration (Oxford, 1985), 38. These two votes did much to persuade the army that Richard could not be trusted, and on 22 April it forced him to dissolve Parliament. It is not known whether Chaloner joined Hesilrige, Vane II and other leading commonwealthsmen in declaring against the army’s proceedings and demanding admittance to the House.291Infra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’. But once it became clear that nothing but the recall of the Rump would satisfy the army, he was among the 20 or so Rumpers who, on 6 May, solicited William Lenthall to resume his old post as Speaker.292[A. Annesley*], England’s Confusion, or a True and Impartial Relation of the Late Traverses of State in England (1659), 9 (E.985.1).

Chaloner in the restored Rump, 1659-60

Chaloner did not figure as prominently in the restored Rump as he had in the early years of the commonwealth – a consequence, perhaps, of the relatively insignificant role he had played in the commonwealthsmen’s resistance to Cromwell and the protectorate.293Mayers, 1659, 118. His reputation for ‘debauchery’ may also have worked against him, although his particular vice was apparently alcohol, not women.294CCSP iv. 249. In contrast to Hesilrige, Scot and Vane II, he was not appointed to the Rump’s interim executive, the committee of safety, in May 1659. Nevertheless, he retained sufficient standing at Westminster to secure election to the council of state on 14 May, and he would attend its meetings on a regular basis. He also made at least six reports from Whitehall to the House during the summer.295Bodl. Rawl. C.179, passim; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. xxiii; CJ vii. 654a, 673a, 721a, 736b, 738b, 757b, 761b. All but one of the 12 conciliar committees to which he was appointed were concerned with the management of foreign and colonial affairs and to receive and treat with diplomats from the Dutch republic, Denmark and other continental states.296Bodl. Rawl. C.179, pp. 21, 30, 32, 54, 76, 92, 105, 158, 164, 274, 284; TSP vii. 677. But although it was reported that the restored Rump was ‘altogether disposed to peace with Spain’, there is no evidence that he was an important figure in the commonwealth’s dealings with the Spanish crown as he had been in the early 1650s.297M. Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell and the Restoration of Charles I (1856), i. 401; Mayers, 1659, 118.

Chaloner’s commitment to the restored Rump was recognised on 28 June 1659, when he and Scot were ordered to prepare a parliamentary seal for use by the Speaker.298CJ vii. 695a. Chaloner reported the design of this seal – which was inscribed, rather unimaginatively, with the words ‘The seal of the Parliament of the commonwealth of England’ – to the council and, on 22 August, to the House.299CJ vii. 765b; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 134. He was named to 23 committees in the Rump between mid-May and mid-October – an exact figure, given his brother James’s absence from the House – which, again, was a relatively modest number for a man of his importance in the period 1648-53. Moreover, he was a teller in just one, minor, division (27 Sept.).300Supra, ‘James Chaloner’; CJ vii. 787a. A significant proportion of his committee appointments related to settling the militia, the improvement of state revenues, the relief of wounded and maimed soldiers, and the reception of foreign dignitaries, including diplomatic representatives from Venice and Tuscany.301CJ vii. 664a, 682a, 685a, 691a, 694b, 726a, 769a, 782a, 786b, 793b, 795b. On 28 September, he was ordered to prepare a letter to the doge of Venice, requesting that the Venetian authorities secure Thomas Howard, 23rd earl of Arundel pending his summons home by Parliament.302CJ vii. 788b.

The fallout from Sir George Boothe’s* rebellion in August 1659 exacerbated tensions among the Rump’s leading politicians, prompting the establishment of a committee on 6 September – to which Chaloner was named – to consider the introduction of a new engagement ‘against any king, single person, and House of Peers and every of them’. However, he failed to secure nomination to a related committee, set up on 8 September, ‘to prepare something to be offered to the House in order to the settlement of the government of this commonwealth’.303CJ vii. 774b, 775b. On 11 October, the House ordered Chaloner and Edmund West to ensure that its votes for the pay and provision of serving and wounded soldiers were included in its answer to a petition it had received from the army a week or so earlier for redress of military grievances.304CJ vii. 795b. But this and similar conciliatory initiatives proved insufficient to prevent the army forcibly dissolving the House on 13 October. Chaloner was among those Rumpers who were subsequently listed by General Charles Fleetwood* as having defied the army in the days prior to the House’s dissolution.305C. Fleetwood, The Lord General Fleetwoods Answer to the Humble Representation of Collonel Morley (1659), 11 (E.1010.6). Like Neville, Scot and other leading members of Hesilrige’s civilian republican faction, he would continue to attend the council of state until it was replaced late in October by a new military-dominated executive, the committee of safety.306Infra, ‘Henry Neville’; ‘Thomas Scot I’; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. xxiv.

At some point during the last two months of 1659, Fleetwood had Chaloner imprisoned, almost certainly for trying to stir up opposition to the committee of safety. He was released on 27 December – the day after the Rump re-assembled for a third (and final) time – and on 29 December, Chaloner, Scot, Neville and several more of Hesilrige’s allies were returned the thanks of the House for having ‘acted in the service of Parliament during the time of its late interruption’.307CJ vii. 799a; Whitelocke, Diary, 554. Exactly what Chaloner had done to merit this mark of the Rump’s favour is not clear.

Chaloner was named to five committees between 30 December 1659 and 15 February 1660, including several for drafting an oath to be taken by MPs and councillors for renouncing the ‘pretended title of Charles Stewart and the whole line of the late King James and of every other person, as a single person, pretending ... to the crown of these nations’.308CJ vii. 800a, 805b, 806b, 807a, 844a. This ‘oath of abjuration’ was regarded as the strictest such oath that had ever been imposed and was ‘disliked by many’.309Baker, Chronicle, 678; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 163. Elected to a new council of state on 31 December, he was one its most dedicated members – only Neville and Sir James Harington attended more frequently during its brief, two-month existence.310CJ vii. 800b; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. xxv, 359, 362; TSP vii. 809, 812; Add. 4197, ff. 122, 132. And on 28 January, he was elected to a commission for managing the admiralty and navy, of which, again, he was an active member.311CJ vii. 825b; ADM2/1731, ff. 128v, 146. In what was probably part of Hesilrige’s belated attempt to extend an olive branch to Vane II and his allies, Chaloner and Harbert Morley were majority tellers on 17 January against putting the question that Richard Salwey be discharged from the House, whereupon it was voted that he be suspended instead.312Infra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; CJ vii. 813b.

Chaloner’s first, and only, recorded appearance in the House after the re-admission of the secluded Members on 21 February 1660 was on 9 March, when he partnered Edward Leigh – a Presbyterian and former secluded Member – as a teller in a division on the qualifications for parliamentary membership to be added to the bill for dissolving the Rump and summoning a Convention Parliament. This unlikely pairing evidently wanted the bill referred to a committee of the whole House, which they clearly felt would be more likely to add suitable qualifications. In the event, they lost the division to the ‘Presbyterian’ grandees Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire and Sir Anthony Irby, and the bill was referred to a select committee that included leading commonwealthsmen as well as Presbyterians.313CJ vii. 868b. Chaloner’s parliamentary career came to an end with the dissolution of the Long Parliament a week later (16 Mar.), although he continued to sign orders and letters of the admiralty commission until 27 April.314ADM2/1731, f. 146. Wood was almost certainly mistaken in claiming that Chaloner published a pamphlet shortly before the Restoration entitled A Speech Containing a Plea for Monarchy. No pamphlet with that title was ever published, it seems, at least in print, and Wood may have been thinking of a work that appeared in mid-February 1660, A Plea for Limited Monarchy, which has plausibly been attributed to the royalist polemicist Roger L’Estrange.315[R. L’Estrange], A Plea for Limited Monarchy (1660, E.765.3); Ath. Ox. iii. 533.

Flight abroad and death, 1660

With the Restoration imminent, Chaloner visited Steeple Claydon in mid-May 1660 and allegedly forced his tenants there to renegotiate their copyhold leases in return for cash sums, in what may have been preparations on his part to flee abroad.316Broad, ‘Contesting the Restoration land settlement?’, 156. Yet according to Ludlowe, Chaloner complied with the royal proclamation of 6 June 1660, requiring the regicides to surrender themselves on pain of exemption from pardon or indemnity.317Ludlow, Voyce, 180. But then finding himself excepted from the Act of Oblivion as to life and estate, he fled to the continent, and by late June he was lodging (under an assumed name) in a tavern on the high street of Middleburg, in the Dutch republic, where he died in mid-August. In accordance with a promise by his landlady to give him a ‘Christian burial’, and having ‘left money enough to bury him in a decent manner’, he was interred in the Old Church at Middleburg on 20 August, although the minister of the town’s British congregation, knowing the deceased’s true identity, refused to perform the burial service. He was remembered by his Dutch hosts, apparently not without affection, as ‘an old man, full of gray hairs; a thick, square man’.318E134/20CHAS2/MICH38. No will is recorded.

Chaloner’s property, like that of other regicides, was forfeit to the crown, which granted the Chaloners’ estate at Steeple Claydon to the royalist Sir Richard Lane, who seems to have sold it to Chaloner’s nephew Edward Chaloner (the Chaloners being apparently secure in their possession of the manor by 1665).319Add. 71448, f. 60; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 497; VCH Bucks. iv. 227; Broad, ‘Contesting the Restoration land settlement?’, 160. Chaloner died childless, and none of his immediate family sat in Parliament.