STOCKDALE, Thomas (1593-1653), of Bilton Park, Knaresborough, Yorks.

Stockdale belonged to a minor gentry family that had settled in the North Riding of Yorkshire by the mid-fifteenth century.32CP25/1/281/160/43; Vis. Yorks. 1584-5 ed. J. Foster, 410. His father, William Stockdale, was auditor to Henry Percy, 3rd earl of Northumberland (father of the parliamentarian grandee Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland) and established the family’s main residence at Green Hammerton – about eight miles east of Knaresborough – where he was a tenant of the Percys.33Household Pprs. of Henry 9th earl of Northumb. ed. G. R. Batho (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, xciii), xxv, 162; E134/14Jas1/Mich15. Thomas Stockdale’s cousin Robert Stockdale would continue the family’s tradition of service to the Percys as one of the 4th earl’s auditors and receivers.34Alnwick, X.II.6, box 11, bundle g: Stockdale to Potter, 30 Sept. 1648. William Stockdale does not appear to have prospered greatly under the 3rd earl, however, for in 1614 he was arrested for non-payment of a debt of about £100 and imprisoned in York Castle, where he died.35E134/14Jas1/Mich15.

From this low point, the family’s fortunes were revived by Thomas Stockdale, the future MP, using the profits derived from his offices and connections in Ireland. By 1618 he had entered the service of Sir Oliver St John†, 1st Viscount Grandison of Limerick, who had been appointed lord deputy of Ireland in 1616 through the patronage of the royal favourite George Villiers, the future duke of Buckingham. Like Sir John Hippisley*, Stockdale had probably been recommended to Villiers by the 3rd earl of Northumberland. Having remained in Ireland following Grandison’s recall to England in 1622, Stockdale became Buckingham’s ‘agent in customs, admiralty and exchequer business’, and during the early 1620s he obtained, with the duke’s assistance, lucrative offices in the administration of the Irish customs farm and exchequer and as deputy vice-admiral of Munster. He consolidated his position among Ireland’s New English governors with his marriage in November 1625 to a daughter of Buckingham’s ally, the master of the Irish court of wards Sir William Parsons. By 1628, Stockdale had returned to England, where he served alongside Sir Henry Holcroft† as the duke’s secretary for Irish affairs, and in that capacity he was closely involved in drafting the Graces – the crown’s proposed religious and legal concessions to Ireland’s Catholics.36CSP Ire. 1625-32, pp. 44, 96, 101, 230, 232, 233, 326-7, 341-2, 342-4, 406; 1669-70, pp. 346-7; CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 63; Foedera, viii(2), 27; Lodge, Peerage of Ireland, ii. 275, 343-4; ‘Sir Oliver St John’, HP Commons 1604-1629; Treadwell, Buckingham and Ireland, 49, 55, 60, 95, 99-100, 101, 102, 144, 226, 259, 260, 277, 282-3; ‘Sir William Parsons’, Oxford DNB.

Following the duke’s assassination in August 1628, Stockdale – who was left £300 in his late master’s will – retired as a man-of-business for Irish affairs, although he retained his office in the Irish exchequer until 1636.37PROB11/167, f. 243; Lodge, Peerage of Ireland, ii. 275, 343-4; Treadwell, Buckingham and Ireland, ii. 343-4. In 1631, when he was described as a resident of Preston, he purchased Bilton Park in the parish of Knaresborough for £1,880.38C54/2879/31; W. Yorks. Archives (Leeds), WYL132/16-19. And in 1634, he purchased the rectory and parsonage of Farnham, near Knaresborough, from Peter and Henry Benson*. It was later disputed whether the Bensons had also surrendered – by way of security in case of encumbrances on this property – copyhold lands and 12 burgage tenements in Knaresborough to Stockdale for seven years, while continuing to enjoy these properties for their own use, or had sold them to him outright. Stockdale had certainly taken possession of these properties by 1643.39Coventry Docquets, 657; C33//221, f. 748; C10/72/45. Although he would emerge in the early 1640s as a strong opponent of the lord president of the council of the north Thomas Viscount Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) – who was created 1st earl of Strafford and appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1640 – Stockdale wrote a highly obsequious letter to him in October 1638, insisting that ‘I have ever been one of those that did doth admire and truly honour your lordship’s unequalled wisdom and virtues’, but had

never met with any fortunate occasion to make me personally known to your lordship. And I had many years since passed away the profits of my office in Ireland to supply other necessities and, by that means, deprived myself of that fair pretence of access unto your lordship which that employment might have given me. And for my present fortune and estate in England, it is so poor and despicable as I thought it lay below the level of your lordship’s observation.

Stockdale concluded this letter by claiming that his ‘affection’ to Wentworth was ‘such as may well become your most endeared servants’.40Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P18/136.

By the autumn of 1640, Stockdale had joined Yorkshire’s ‘disaffected’ gentry in resisting the crown’s – and, more particularly, Strafford’s – efforts to mobilise the trained bands for service against the Scottish Covenanters during the second bishops’ war. On 12 September, he signed the county’s petition to the king, in which, after complaining about Ship Money, illegal billeting and various other ills, the petitioners reiterated the demand made by a group of dissident English peers, late in August, that Charles should summon a Parliament.41Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland Ms vol. 1608-1700, N38 Car. I. On 5 October, Stockdale signed the Yorkshire county indenture returning two of the summer’s leading petitioners, the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*) and Henry Belasyse to the Long Parliament.42C219/43/3/89. In the first of his many surviving letters to Fairfax, late in January 1641, Stockdale referred to ‘your special favours bestowed on me and mine’ and assured him ‘that I shall, both with diligence and cheerfulness, attend whatsoever you shall be pleased to give me charge’.43Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 225-6. His correspondence with Fairfax reveals that his political and religious sympathies by the early 1640s were very much in tune with the ‘patriot’ opposition that had defied his former master Buckingham and his looked-for patron (in 1638) Strafford. Despite his devoted service to Buckingham, he had no qualms in including himself among the ‘well-affected’ who had been ‘grieved’ by princes governing ‘according to their own fancies, or their flattering favourites’ malevolent affections’.44Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 107-8, 202.

High on his list of desiderata during 1641-2 were the execution of Strafford for his ‘oppression and tyranny’ and of the Ship-Money judges, the ‘favourers and furtherers of these violations of law and liberty’; the tendering of the Protestation to the general public, ‘so the strength of the adverse faction might appear’; the abolition of episcopacy and the sale of ecclesiastical and capitular lands; parliamentary legislation for expropriating two-thirds of recusants’ estates for strengthening the kingdom’s military defences and suppressing the Irish rebellion; the public naming of those Commons-men who had voted for publishing the Grand Remonstrance and of those of the ‘anti-parliamentarian faction’ who had voted against it, ‘that the country may take notice of their friends and know how to elect better patriots hereafter’; the sending of Scottish troops to fight the Irish rebels, ‘for it is visible that our English succours are like to move slowly, such power have the popish party in the counsels and designs of this state’; and the publication of reports of Catholic atrocities in Ireland in order to ‘animate the people here against the popish party’.45Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 104-5, 106-7, 202, 207, 208-9, 226, 230, 283-6, 289-90, 295, 299; Cliffe, Yorks. 328. Writing to Fairfax early in January 1642, he expressed the hope that Charles would ‘hearken to the advice of his Commons, which is the major and most infallible part of his great councils, especially in those things wherein a considerable number of his nobles do join with the Commons’.46Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 294. The king’s attempted arrest of the Five Members he thought ‘a mere plot and stratagem of the Jesuit party to set a jealousy between the king and the Parliament ... to hinder their conjunction to repress the popish rebellion in Ireland’ and thereby ‘make it impossible ever to plant the Reformed religion [i.e. Calvinism] there again’.47Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 297.

Stockdale approved of the Militia Ordinance, ‘though peradventure it hath not been thought convenient to give it the formality of a law’ – his rule being that ‘where sudden insurrections are to be prevented ... salus populi suprema lex [the safety of the people is the supreme law] and the large compass of the order of Parliament’ should not be constrained by ‘a narrow limitation of form’.48Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 348, 381. A busy man in local affairs, notably as a subsidy commissioner and magistrate, he was concerned to recompense the inhabitants of the West Riding for the free quarter and plundering they had endured at the hands of the soldiery (the king’s army was quartered on the northern counties for most of 1641) and to preserve the region against the perceived machinations of the ‘recusant party’. He was particularly keen to promote the general subscription of the Protestation in the West Riding.49Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 100-4, 109-12, 113-15, 203-4, 205-7, 210-14, 215-16, 228-30, 269-70, 282, 286, 287-8, 290, 297-9, 321-2, 343-5, 347-8, 349, 362-3, 364-6, 373-6, 377-8, 381-2, 389-90, 393-5; W. Riding Sessions Recs. ed. J. Lister (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. liv), 313, 339, 363, 373; Cliffe, Yorks. 330. In November 1641, he acted as electoral manager for Fairfax’s puritan ally Sir William Constable* in the by-election at Knaresborough that saw the return of William Dearlove – the step-son of the Fairfaxes’ local opponent Henry Benson*, whose adherents Stockdale deemed popish sympathisers. The success of Fairfax and his friends at Westminster in having Dearlove’s election overturned in 1642 and Constable seated in his place owed much to Stockdale’s zeal in supplying incriminating information concerning the Benson family’s electoral malpractices and Catholic connections.50Supra, ‘Knaresborough’; ‘Henry Benson’; ‘Sir William Constable’; ‘William Dearlove’; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 107-8, 112-13, 216-17, 227-8, 260-9, 288, 290-1, 292, 295-6, 299, 323, 345-6, 348-9, 363, 366, 376-7, 378-9, 382-3, 392, 394-5. Besides Lord Fairfax, Sir Thomas Fairfax* and Constable, Stockdale’s friends and close colleagues among the ‘well-affected’ Yorkshire gentry included George Marwood*, Sir Thomas Mauleverer* and Brian Stapylton*.51Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 99, 106, 111, 205, 207, 210, 286, 321, 348.

Stockdale put the abilities as a secretary and man-of-business that he had acquired in Buckingham’s employ at the service of Yorkshire’s nascent parliamentarian interest as one of principal organisers and draftsmen of at least two of the county’s petitions to the king and Parliament during 1642.52Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 349, 362, 364-5, 367-72, 373-4, 375-6, 395-6. He himself was a signatory to at least seven of these petitions – the first, in January, to the king, protesting at the attempted arrest of the Five Members and expressing support for a ‘perfect reformation in matters of religion’;53Eg. 2546, ff. 23-4. the second (which he had a hand in drafting), in February, to the Commons, requesting, among other things, that the votes of the papist peers be abolished and that ‘ceremonial burdens’ in religion be removed;54Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 349, 362, 364-5, 367-72. the third, also in February, to the Lords, asking the peers to work more closely with the Commons for the relief of Ireland’s Protestants;55PA, Main Pprs. 15 Feb. 1642, f. 55; LJ iv. 587a. the fourth (which, again, he helped to frame), in April, to the king, pleading that he hearken to the counsels of Parliament;56Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 613; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 395-6. the fifth, in May, asking Charles to put his trust in the two Houses and to forbear raising any troops in the county;57A Letter from the...Committees of the Commons...at Yorke (1642), 9 (E.148.4). the sixth, in June, complaining about Charles’s abandoning Parliament and drawing together the county’s trained bands – illegally, as the petitioners conceived it;58PA, Main Pprs. 6 June 1642, ff. 84-5. and the seventh, in August, protesting to the Commons against the issuing of the commission of array at the York assizes.59Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 649. Perhaps not surprisingly, Stockdale was regarded as one of the most forward of the king’s opponents in Yorkshire and was thus one of only a handful of men whom Charles had removed from the county bench in June 1642.60News from Yorke (1642), 669 f. 6/44. The others included Sir Thomas Fairfax and George Marwood. Their principal offence, or so it was reported, was that of refusing to put the commission of array in execution.61Exceeding Good News from Nottingham and Yorkshire (1642), 3 (E.115.18).

As a loyal ally of the Fairfaxes, Stockdale supported their attempt that autumn to reach an accommodation with the West Riding royalists, joining Sir Thomas Fairfax, Mauleverer, William Lister (the son of Sir William Lister*) and William White* on the parliamentarian side in signing the short-lived ‘treaty of pacification’ at Rothwell, near Leeds, on 29 September. This initiative to keep Yorkshire neutral in anticipation of a decisive battle in the south was immediately condemned by Parliament and quickly collapsed.62CJ ii. 794a; A. Woolrych, ‘Yorkshire’s treaty of neutrality’, Hist. Today vi. 701. At some point that autumn, Stockdale became secretary and military adviser to Lord Fairfax as commander of Parliament’s northern army, and, on occasion, he seems to have exercised command over units of near regimental strength. But though he was styled ‘Colonel Stockdale’ by the clerk of the Commons and was able to provide Parliament with eye-witness accounts of the battles of Adwalton Moor in 1643 and Marston Moor in 1644, there is no evidence that he was in actual combat.63CJ iv. 368b; Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer no. 26 (11-18 July 1643), 206 (E.61.1); HMC Portland, i. 717-19; C.H. Firth, ‘Marston Moor’, TRHS xii. 73-6; Jones, ‘War in north’, 404. He should not be confused with the Captain Thomas Stockdale (probably a relation) who also appears to have served in Lord Fairfax’s army.64Regs. of St. Michael le Belfrey, York ed. F. Collins (Yorks. Par. Reg. Soc. i), 216.

Stockdale’s influence with Lord Fairfax was deeply resented by the latter’s military rivals in east Yorkshire, Sir John Hotham* and Captain John Hotham*. During the winter of 1642-3, Sir John wrote a ‘sharp letter’ to the Commons, complaining that Stockdale ‘usurped more authority than either his estate or his understanding in war could challenge’.65Hotham Pprs. 75, 122. But both Fairfax and the House continued to repose great trust in Stockdale, particularly as a point of contact between the northern army and its Westminster paymasters.66CJ iii. 107a, 155b, 178b, 203b, 223a, 236b, 279b; A Miraculous Victory Obtained by the Right Honorable, Ferdinando Lord Fairfax (1643), 11 (E.104.13); Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer (11-18 July 1643), 206; HMC Portland, i. 717-19. Indeed, on 2 August 1643, he and his old colleague Sir Henry Holcroft were named to a ‘council of war’ that John Pym* and his war-party allies had designed primarily to help further the recruitment of a new cavalry force under the earl of Manchester.67Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’; CJ iii. 171a-b, 177b, 191b; LJ vi. 148b-150b

The following month (September), Stockdale petitioned the Commons, requesting recompense for losses and damage to his estate as a result of royalist plundering and was duly granted £200 by order of the Committee for Advance of Money*.68CJ iii. 232; CCAM 239. He petitioned the Commons again in the autumn of 1644, whereupon the House ordered Sir Thomas Widdrington to bring in an ordinance for compensating him out of the estate of the Yorkshire royalist Sir John Goodricke†, who had allegedly seized Stockdale’s house and goods. Goodricke strenuously denied this charge; nevertheless in March 1646 the Commons ordered that Stockdale receive Goodricke’s composition fine of £1,200 towards losses that he put in excess of £5,000.69CJ iii. 649b, 679b; iv. 382b, 487a; SP23/3, p. 50; CCC 1059.

Stockdale was a leading member of the Yorkshire committee of the Northern Association, signing several of its letters to Parliament in the autumn of 1645, complaining about the abuses committed by the Scottish army in the northern counties and requesting that it be removed from the region.70Bodl. Nalson IV, ff. 49, 90, 213, 244, 309; LJ vii. 640b. He also served as the committee’s treasurer at war.71SC6/CHASI/1190. On 9 October 1645, he was returned for Knaresborough as a ‘recruiter’ in place of the royalist Sir Henry Slingesby, who had been disabled from sitting. Stockdale was named to only 18 committees between November 1645 and Pride’s Purge three years later – and he received all but three of these appointments before March 1647, when he was granted his first leave of absence from the House.72CJ iv. 347b, 351b, 368b, 376a, 428a, 481b, 522a, 570b, 632a, 662a, 666b, 701b, 708a, 710b, 714b; v. 119a, 417a, 457b, 460b. But although his parliamentary career was not particularly impressive, it is clear from several of his appointments in the House, particularly in 1645-6, and his work as a committeeman, that he was closely aligned with the Independents at Westminster and supported their attempts to discredit the Scots and prevent a personal treaty with the king. On 18 November 1645, for example, Stockdale was named to a seven-man committee composed almost exclusively of Independents for drawing up an account of the money that the Scottish army had received in the north.73CJ iv. 347b. He was named to another Independent-dominated committee on 3 February 1646 – on this occasion to prepare an open letter to the king ‘for the undeceiving of the people’ – in response to his request for a personal treaty – highlighting his bad faith and failure to give ‘satisfaction in point of religion’.74CJ iv. 428a. The particular care of a committee set up on 20 March to prepare a declaration on a report made by Sir Arthur Hesilrige that day concerning the abuses of the Scottish army in northern England was assigned to Stockdale and his fellow Knaresborough MP Sir William Constable.75CJ iv. 481b. Stockdale assumed the chair of this committee, which became the Commons’ principal clearing house for evidence of the Scots’ oppressions in northern England and thus a useful instrument for the Independents in their struggle to regain the political initiative they had lost in May 1646 as a result of the king’s flight to the Scottish army.

Between 29 May and 9 June, first the Independent grandees William Pierrepont and Hesilrige from the Committee of Both Kingdoms*, and then Stockdale from his so-called ‘northern committee’, delivered a series of reports to the House narrating the kingdom’s manifold grievances against the Scots. In his report on 6 June, Stockdale recommended that Parliament issue a declaration rebutting a letter printed in the name of the Scottish commander Lieutenant-general Alexander Leslie ‘wherein he endeavours to possess the people ... that these complaints are all base calumnies and lies’. Stockdale’s marginal notes as chairman of the northern committee reveal that he relied on Thomas Chaloner and other Yorkshire MPs to furnish him with examples of Scottish brutality.76CJ iv. 559a, 560a, 563b, 567b, 568b, 569b; Bodl. Nalson XIX, ff. 396, 396v, 409-10v; HMC Portland, i. 366-7; D. Scott, ‘The ‘northern gentlemen’’, HJ xlii. 363-4. As a result of its deliberations on his report, the Commons set up a committee on 9 June – to which Stockdale was named – for preparing a declaration to the Scots, stating ‘what cause this House has of complaint and jealousies’ against them.77CJ iv. 570b. The northern committee was also employed, with the Committee for the Army*, ‘to confute or bear down’ the Scots’ estimate of the arrears their forces were owed by Parliament.78CJ iv. 605a, 650b; Harington’s Diary, 33. According to the northern committee’s ‘general estimate’ of the Scottish army’s accounts, which Stockdale reported to the House on 25 and 27 August, the Scots had received money and property totalling almost 1.5 million pounds, besides what they had ‘taken from the people of England by plunder or merchandize’. Immediately after Stockdale’s report on 27 August, the House voted to pay the Scots only a further £100,000 in full of their demands – or half the sum desired by the Presbyterian grandees.79CJ iv. 652b, 654a-655b. Yet in terms of his religious sympathies he was probably much closer to the Presbyterianism of the Fairfaxes than to the Congregationalism of Sir William Constable. Stockdale’s final appointment of 1646 was to a Presbyterian-dominated committee for repairing churches and enforcing the payment of tithes and other church duties.80CJ iv. 714b.

Granted leave on 20 March 1647 and declared absent, sick and excused at the call of the House on 9 October, Stockdale probably spent most of 1647 away from Westminster.81CJ v. 119a, 329b. He had returned to the House by 4 January 1648, when he was nominated to a large committee, headed by the Independents Alexander Rigby I and Thomas Scot I, to prepare 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’.82CJ v. 417a. On 7 February, Stockdale, Scot and two other Members were added to a committee for preparing a declaration, justifying the vote of no addresses – the parliamentary resolution of mid-January 1648 prohibiting further negotiations with Charles.83CJ v. 457b. Granted further leave of absence on 19 April, ‘for recovery of his health’, he spent that summer in Yorkshire, where he helped to mobilise and maintain the county’s parliamentarian forces during the second civil war.84CJ v. 536a, 568b, 584b; Bodl. Nalson VII, f. 22; Tanner 57, f. 109v; HMC Portland, i. 455. He was declared absent and excused at the call of the House on 26 September; and he was almost certainly still in Yorkshire on 25 November, when the Commons appointed him as one of the county’s commissioners to bring in the assessment for the army.85CJ vi. 34b, 87b.

Although Stockdale was not secluded at Pride’s Purge on 6 December and was among the northern gentlemen entrusted by the Rump later that month to assist Major-general John Lambert* in disbanding the Yorkshire militia, he stayed away from Westminster throughout the winter of 1648-9.86CJ vi. 104b. On 23 February, he wrote to the Speaker, informing him that, having read the ‘weekly prints’, he was not satisfied that the king’s ‘concessions’ at Newport had been consistent with England’s ‘just freedom’. In other words, Stockdale was registering his approval of the Rump’s dissent to the 5 December 1648 vote – that the king’s answer to the Newport propositions were an acceptable basis for settlement.87Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 537. On 28 February, the House ordered that no advantage be taken against him for having failed to enter his dissent before 1 March.88CJ vi. 153a. It was not until 23 July, following a report from the committee for absent Members, that he was re-admitted to the House – in the company of another member of the Fairfaxes’s circle, Henry Arthington.89CJ vi. 268a.

Stockdale was named to only four committees in the Rump, among them the committee for plundered ministers, to which he was added on 4 July 1650.90CJ vi. 270a, This would be his last appointment in the Rump. In a pamphlet published in June 1649, attacking the county committee system, he was described as one of the West Riding’s leading committeemen and as

a person of boundless avarice ... [who] drives on an interest for his own benefit with the committee, for there is profit hoped for without account. He has much enriched himself as treasurer at war [of the Northern Association], yet besides all this he has received repair for his losses to a much greater value than ever he sustained.

It was also alleged that during the civil wars he had ‘sought security by shaking hands with cavaliers and getting his goods by them protected’.91The County Committees laid Open (1649), 1, 4 (E.558.11). Stockdale certainly seems to have profited from his service to Parliament. In 1648 he appears to have bought the manor of Green Hammerton from the earl of Northumberland.92Alnwick, X.II.6, box 11, bundle g: Stockdale to Hugh Potter*, 30 Sept. 1648. In 1651-2, he and three others purchased the manor of Knaresborough for £2,680 and royalties in the forest of Knaresborough for £240.93E121/5/5/19.

Stockdale died late in 1653 and was buried in the chancel of Knaresborough church on 25 December.94Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. i. 277. In his will – which it is not clear was ever entered in probate – he claimed that he was still owed £4,016 by Parliament for the losses he had sustained during the civil war. He made his son-in-law Robert Walter* one of his trustees and stipulated, in true puritan manner, that there should be no mourning at his funeral, no ribbons or gloves exchanged and that the cost of his interment should not exceed £10.95W. Yorks. Archives (Leeds), WYL132/240. His heir, William Stockdale†, represented Knaresborough in every Parliament from 1660 to his death in 1693.96HP Commons, 1660-90.