HEBLETHWAYTE, Thomas (d. 1647), of Norton, Yorks.

Heblethwayte belonged to a junior branch of a family that had settled at Sedbergh, in the Pennines, by the early sixteenth century.25Vis. Yorks. ed. Foster, 240. He was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, the third son of a ‘gentleman’ of that town, but much of his family background, including the identity of his mother, remains obscure.26Borthwick, Wills in the York Registry, May 1647, Buckrose Deanery; MTR i. 385. He was educated at St John’s College, Cambridge – under the tutelage of the future dean of Bristol, Simon Robson – where his kinsman Henry Hebblethwaite, a London draper, had endowed two scholarships for poor pupils of Sedbergh school.27St John’s Coll. Archives, D. 94.462; Borthwick, Wills in the York Registry, May 1647, Buckrose Deanery; PROB11/71, f. 21v. It was possibly while at St John’s that Heblethwayte acquired the puritanical moral sensibilities that are evident from his will. In 1617, he would write to the master of the college, Owen Gwyn, commending a fellow alumnus, the godly minister Valentine Marshall.28St John’s Coll. Archives, D. 94.462; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 582; VCH Glos. ii. 35; Oxford DNB, ‘Richard Capel’.

Like many younger sons, especially of minor gentry, Heblethwayte chose – or was pushed into – a career in the law, and in 1608 he was called to the bar at the Middle Temple. Although he retained a chamber at the Temple until at least that year, he appears to have been living with his cousin, James Heblethwayte, at Norton, near Malton, by 1605.29MTR ii. 456, 493; ‘Paver’s marr. lics.’, 213. By 1611, he had given up his chamber at the Temple, and the following year he began purchasing lands and messuages in the Malton area with his cousin.30MTR ii. 532; Yorks. Stuart Fines ed. Brigg (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. liii), 187, 192-3, 197. These and numerous other additions to his estate during the period 1612-23 suggest that he was a man of considerable means – wealth that may be evidence of a thriving legal practice either in London or in Yorkshire, although his first and, probably, his second wives’ marriage portions provided him with at least some of the necessary capital. But his largest acquisition was by inheritance in 1616, when his cousin and ‘worthy patron’ James died, leaving him his entire estate, which included property in Yorkshire, Westmorland, Lancashire and ‘divers tenements’ in the parish of St Mary, Abchurch in London.31Borthwick, Prob. Reg. 34, f. 108; Borthwick, Wills in the York Registry, May 1647, Buckrose Deanery; C54/2892/7; C54/2967/7.

The zeal that Heblethwayte devoted to his personal affairs also extended to his duties in local office. He served diligently on the North Riding bench during the 1620s and 1630s and was one of a relatively small number of Yorkshire gentlemen who were named to the 1627 and 1628 commissions for compounding with recusants in the northern counties.32N. Yorks. RO, ZAG 282, Bell of Thirsk mss, Lord Fauconberg’s ‘book for the business of the country’, 1636 (mic. 1704); N. Riding QS Recs. ed. J.C. Atkinson (N. Riding Rec. Soc. ii), 179, 242; (N. Riding Rec. Soc. iii), 121, 364; (N. Riding Rec. Soc. iv), 15, 228; Rymer, Foedera, viii. pt. 2, p. 184; CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 205. His career in local government was one of diligent, if unremarkable, service until early 1639, when he began to show signs of discontent with the king’s Scottish policy, at least in so far as it affected Yorkshire. In January 1639, during the preparations for the first bishops’ war, Heblethwayte, Sir Hugh Cholmeley* and several other North Riding magistrates, blocked an order from the council of the north for levying £300 within the Riding ‘towards the charge of his majesty’s carriages of ship timber’. The magistrates claimed that they were unable to reach any decision on the matter until they held a ‘united sessions’ at Easter, although Sir Edward Osborne*, vice-president of the council, was convinced that they were deliberately flouting his authority: ‘the business being of such a nature as lies not within my power, or this council ... to effect, and so much the justices well understand’.33Add. 64918, ff. 5, 35; HMC Cowper, ii. 208. During the second bishops’ war, in 1640, Heblethwayte joined the ‘disaffected’ Yorkshire gentry in their petitions to the king of July, August and September, complaining about illegal billeting, pleading poverty in the face of royal commands to mobilise the militia against the Scots and – in the case of the September petition – requesting that Charles summon a new Parliament.34Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1215, 1231; Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland Ms vol. 1608-1700, N38 Car. I.

Heblethwayte was elected for Malton on 8 January 1641 after the town’s franchise, which had existed only briefly in the thirteenth century, had been restored by the Long Parliament on 11 December 1640.35Supra, ‘Malton’; CJ ii. 49b. His own interest as one of the Malton area’s leading inhabitants probably sufficed to secure his return. However, the moving spirits behind the borough’s re-enfranchisement may well have been, among others, Sir John Hotham* and Sir Hugh Cholmeley; and the second place at Malton was taken by Cholmeley’s brother Sir Henry Cholmley. It is likely that Heblethwayte himself was part of Hotham’s and Sir Hugh Cholmeley’s political network in the East Riding and that once at Westminster he generally aligned with them and other ‘northern gentlemen’ – a contemporary term for the more active and reform-minded northern Members.

Several of Heblethwayte’s committee nominations in the Long Parliament suggest a concern on his part to remedy the perceived ills of the Caroline state. His first appointment in the House was to a committee set up on 29 January 1641, and which he may well have chaired, on a bill for reforming the office of clerk of the market – the crown officer responsible for the regulation of weights and measures. He reported from this committee on 28 May and again on 2 June.36CJ ii. 75a, 160a, 165a; Procs. LP iv. 624, 630, 690-1. On 19 June, he was named to a committee on a bill for declaring the crown’s proceedings concerning Ship Money unlawful and void.37CJ ii. 181b. However, he barely figured in the House’s proceedings against the architects of the personal rule of Charles I. During a debate on 19 April 1641 concerning the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†), he joined other Members in declaring the earl’s perceived efforts to ‘subvert the fundamental laws’ as high treason.38Procs. LP iv. 14. But he received no appointments in connection with Strafford’s prosecution and played no part in his trial. He may have been more enthusiastic about the House’s assault on Laudian prelacy. Thus on 12 May and 4 June, he was added to the committees to hear complaints and to draw up charges against the bishop of Ely (Matthew Wren) and the bishop of Bath and Wells (William Piers).39CJ ii. 143b, 166b. Most of the Members added on these two occasions were Erastians and supporters of further reformation in religion. He was named to four committees that summer which addressed a more pressing set of issues for many of the northern gentlemen than godly reform – namely, the payment of the king’s and the Scottish armies that had been quartered in north-eastern England since the summer of 1640 and the relief of their hard-pressed civilian hosts.40CJ ii. 180a, 196a, 228a, 239a. He was granted leave early in August on the motion of Sir John Hotham, and in his absence the Commons nominated him a commissioner for disarming recusants in Yorkshire, along with three of the county’s most godly MPs: the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*), Sir William Strickland and John Alured.41CJ ii. 233b, 267b; Proc. LP vi. 184. The Lords confirmed this appointment on 30 August, although they made him a commissioner for the North Riding, along with three more Members noted for their Protestant zeal: Sir Henry Anderson, Sir Henry Slingesby and John Wastell.42LJ iv. 385a.

Heblethwayte’s association with some of the more godly Members continued after the 1641 autumn recess with his addition on 1 November to a committee for securing a petition from both Houses, requesting that Charles defer the creation of five new bishops until Parliament had given the matter further consideration. Three other Commons-men, all puritans, were added to this committee with Heblethwayte – Denis Bond, Francis Rous and Laurence Whitaker.43CJ ii. 300a. Heblethwayte was handed another godly brief on 18 December, when he and his fellow lawyer Sir Sampson Eure were ordered to prepare a bill for establishing a contribution towards the relief of the distressed Protestants who had fled from Ireland.44CJ ii. 349a. And on 20 and 21 December, he and other House lawyers were tasked with inserting a clause concerning the relief of Ireland’s Protestants into a bill for disarming recusants.45CJ ii. 349b, 350a, 352a. His appointment of 21 December would be last for almost ten months, and it seems likely that having gone to Yorkshire for Christmas he decided to remain there. It is possibly no coincidence that he left Westminster not long before Sir John Hotham was appointed parliamentary governor of Hull in January 1642.

Heblethwayte’s absence for much of 1642 suggests that he was not entirely comfortable with Parliament’s defiance of the king and preparations for war against him. On the other hand, there is no evidence that he attended the king at York or was named to the Yorkshire commission of array. Indeed, on 12 May he joined Lord Fairfax and many of the county’s future parliamentarians in a letter to Charles, asking him to put his trust in the two Houses and to forbear raising any ‘extraordinary’ guard.46A Letter from the...Committees of the Commons...at Yorke (1642), 7-9 (E.148.4). This was the only such petition he signed, however, and on 16 June he was declared absent at the call of the House amid a group of MPs that consisted predominantly of committed royalists.47CJ ii. 626.

Foremost among Heblethwayte’s motives in returning to Westminster in the autumn of 1642 was apparently a desire to vindicate Sir John Hotham’s proceedings in Yorkshire and to denounce those of Hotham’s principal parliamentary rivals, the Fairfaxes. Having been allowed to resume his seat on 1 October – after the House a report on him from the committee for absent Members – he spoke in a debate on the Yorkshire treaty of pacification, which had recently been negotiated between the Fairfaxes and the royalist commander in the county, the earl of Cumberland.48CJ ii. 789b. Heblethwayte vehemently defended the conduct of Sir John Hotham and his son, Captain John Hotham*, who were both strongly opposed to the treaty: ‘Sir John Hotham keeps in Hull’, Heblethwayte was reported to have declared, ‘and plunders no man. The like also does Mr [John] Hotham’ – although, in fact, the Hothams were the leaders of what was, at this stage, the more belligerent and militarily active wing of the parliamentarian party in Yorkshire. Heblethwayte then launched at attack on the earl of Cumberland and, by implication, the Fairfaxes. Yorkshire was ‘much distracted’ he told the Commons – presumably, he meant as a result of the treaty – and urged the House to have Cumberland summoned as a delinquent. By securing Cumberland’s removal, Heblethwayte and the Hothams were probably hoping that the treaty, and with it the Fairfaxes’ authority in the county, would collapse. After this speech, Sir Henry Vane II, Sir John Hotham’s fellow MP for Hull, moved that Parliament order the Fairfaxes to ‘forbear to conclude anything’ without the Commons’ advice.49Add. 18777, f. 20.

The Hothams’ belligerence in the months before the battle of Edgehill may partly explain Heblethwayte’s willingness to lend support to the parliamentarian war effort that autumn. Early in October 1642, he pledged £40 on the propositions for advancing horse, money and plate for the earl of Essex’s parliamentary army – a sum that the House directed him to pay to Sir John Hotham at Hull.50CJ ii. 792b, 797b. And on 10 October, he and three other northern MPs were ordered to devise means of raising troops and money in County Durham, Newcastle and Northumberland out of the revenues of papists and ‘ill-affected clergy’ in the region.51CJ ii. 802a. He received two further appointments that month, both to minor committees, before being granted leave of absence on 25 November, with a pass from the Speaker for his safe passage into Yorkshire.52CJ ii. 811a, 826b, 863b.

After the autumn of 1642, Heblethwayte abandoned his seat at Westminster altogether. His decision to quit Parliament’s service may have been influenced, once again, by the Hothams, who, by the late autumn of 1642, had become highly discontented with the parliamentary cause, fearing that prolonged fighting would destroy the established social order.53Infra, ‘John Hotham’; ‘Sir John Hotham’. Moreover, Heblethwayte’s only son by his second marriage was killed in the king’s service at some point during the second half of 1642 – Heblethwayte, in his will, describing him as ‘God’s true servant and the king’s true subject’.54Borthwick, Wills in the York Registry, May 1647, Buckrose Deanery; Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. i. 267. Summoned to attend the service of the House on 17 June 1643 and again on 28 September, Heblethwayte ignored both orders, and it was not until late 1644, when Parliament had regained control of Yorkshire, that any action was taken against him.55CJ iii. 133b, 256b. At some point that autumn, he was examined by the committee for absent Members and admitted that he had responded to the king’s proclamation of 20 June 1643 – requiring all loyal MPs to present themselves to his headquarters at Oxford – by requesting permission from the commander of the king’s northern army, the earl of Newcastle, to be excused from attendance at Oxford by reason of his ‘infirmness’ (he was at least 60 years old). Newcastle had apparently granted Heblethwayte’s request on the advice of Sir Hugh Cholmeley, Hotham’s friend and fellow turncoat, who had argued that Heblethwayte might do ‘good service in the country and could not well be spared...’. Heblethwayte also admitted that he had been ‘assisting to the commissioners of array and did them good service as a justice of the peace, and that he [had] paid £300 to my Lord Newcastle’. This was apparently twice the amount he had given to Parliament.56CJ iii. 708b; Add. 31116, p. 352.

Why Heblethwayte decided to abandon Parliament for the king is not entirely clear. Like the Hothams (who attempted to defect to the king in June 1643), his disenchantment with Parliament may have derived from a conviction that there were those at Westminster, particularly among the more zealous puritans, who desired peace only on their own terms, with no thought (as the Hothams put it) for ‘the king’s honour and the public security’.57Infra, ‘John Hotham’; ‘Sir John Hotham’. On 29 November 1644, the House disabled Heblethwayte from sitting and ordered Henry Darley to write to the relevant committee in Yorkshire to continue the sequestration of his estate until he had compounded for his delinquency.58CJ iii. 708b. The Committee for Compounding set his fine at £500, a figure which the Commons approved on 23 December.59CJ iii. 732b.

Heblethwayte died at Hull in the spring of 1647 and was buried at Norton on 27 March.60Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. i. 266-7. His will, dated March 1643, reveals him to have been a man of fervent piety – a devout Protestant who combined a puritan sensibility towards the sins of the flesh with an Arminian soteriology. Heblethwayte’s godly sensibilities are evident in his request that his body be ‘decently interred without any celebrity [sic]’ and that a sermon be given ‘by some learned preacher’, who was to avoid all ‘encomiastics or matter of praise ... but to put others, the auditory [hearers], in mind of their mortality’. Yet at the same time he disclaimed the minimalist burial service of the more extreme puritans: ‘I dissent from these times not to have Christian burial, or in regardless manner to be tumbled into a hole’. He decried the worldly pleasures of drinking and smoking, ‘the leprosy of these present times’, reserving his harshest criticism for the ‘sin of ebriety [drunkenness]’: ‘let drunkards use what ... defence for the same they will, to say it is but the sin of excess etc., I dare boldly say that this one sin, unrepented of, will bring them, and hath already brought them into, the calendar of the damned’. His belief in the possibility of attaining salvation largely through individuals’ own striving is also apparent from his will, particularly in his request to ‘our honest curate’ (of Norton), William Americke, to

take pains for the catechising young folks in the elementary learning the church hath appointed and that the same may be frequently used, for I hold that form of teaching most necessary both for communicants and non-communicants and that grounded learning infused, joined with virtuous and good life, may sufficiently conduce to salvation.

This emphasis on the importance of a virtuous life in the attainment of salvation (which ran contrary to Calvinist predestinarianism), and the role of catechising in producing such a life, was shared by the Laudians. However, unlike most Laudians, he also attached considerable importance to preaching, which he regarded as the ‘ordinary means of [i.e. the efficient cause of] our salvation’. Thus he ordered that some of the profits from his rectory of Norton (worth £80 a year) be employed to provide four sermons a year in Norton parish church. As for his worldly estate, he bequeathed the bulk of the property that had been left to him by his cousin James and the lands that he had acquired himself – which he reckoned were worth about £100 a year – either directly or in reversion to his grandson Thomas. In so doing, Heblethwayte largely disinherited his only surviving son James – principally, it seems, because of the latter’s addiction to the pleasures of ‘pipe and pot’. He claimed to have relatively little personal estate to dispose of, having been ‘drained more than any other man in these ugly riots, distractions and distempers between king and Parliament (a war, I cannot call it)’. He referred to the ‘plunderings and horrible rapines’ visited upon his property and implied that these had been committed by parliamentarian forces, for he went on to state that he was ‘now charged again by the Parliament with new payments, far above my reach’. The nature of these ‘new payments’ is not evident either from his will or from parliamentary sources. He charged his estate with legacies in excess of £250 and also mentioned a ‘great bond of £800’, although apparently this had been ‘wrongfully detained’ from him (possibly by Parliament as a result of his royalism).61C94/3, f. 64; Borthwick, Wills in the York Registry, May 1647, Buckrose Deanery; Hull Hist. Cent. U DDSY/70/12. His grandson and namesake was knighted at the Restoration and represented Malton in the 1660 Convention and the Cavalier Parliament.62HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Thomas Hebblethwaite’.