WHITE, Francis (1621-57), of Westminster and Cheshunt, Herts.

Unusually, perhaps even uniquely among MPs of this period, Francis White worked his way up through the ranks of three parliamentarian armies, from private foot soldier to lieutenant-colonel. Almost inevitably, this raises problems in identifying his origins, which are compounded by the commonness of his surname. A number of disparate pieces of evidence suggest he came from Reading in Berkshire. John White of that town, a yeoman, petitioned Parliament in 1650 for a consideration in return for information against royalists. White claimed to have three sons serving in the army in Scotland at that time, and he was supported by a testimonial from Oliver Cromwell.*15Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 360; CJ vi. 502b. Francis White was serving in Scotland at the time, there was a Richard White in the army there in 1652, and William White was Francis White’s ensign.16CJ vii. 38b; E121/2/9/41. Furthermore, when White visited Reading in December 1655, it was not only to visit William Goffe, with whom he was closely associated, but also ‘some friends’, and his appointment as a commissioner for Berkshire to the major-general suggests that White’s visit was not an excursion to a strange place.17TSP iv. 284-5. The clinching evidence would appear to be the record of a baptism of one of his name at St Lawrence, Reading. There seems no doubt, taking into account only the fact of his enlistment as a private soldier, that he was of yeoman stock or even from a lower social rank than that; a gentry or mercantile background would have secured him a commission.

It is probable that White enlisted in the foot regiment of Philip Skippon when the major-general was in the Berkshire/Wiltshire area late in 1642, or at the latest by April 1643, when Skippon participated in the siege of Reading.18Mercurius Aulicus [no. 1] (1-7 Jan. 1643), 4 (E.244.30); Good and True News from Reading (1643, E.99.2); White, Copies of Severall Letters, 1. White tells us himself that he ‘was sensible of the oppression and injustice that was exercised by the king and his ministers upon the people, the exalting himself to act beyond all laws’.19White, Copies of Several Letters, 1. He soon left Skippon, to promotion in the regiment of the earl of Manchester, a move which suggests that like others, he sought what radicals considered the more godly climate of the Eastern Association.20Holmes, Eastern Association, 171-2. He moved steadily upwards through the ranks of non-commissioned soldiers, his company commanders, Holmes and Johnston, being Scottish professional military men.21Holmes, Eastern Association, 146, 235. It seems unlikely that he was the Francis White who complained to Essex about Colonel Edward Massie*.22CSP Dom. 1644, p. 344. Soon after the formation of the New Model, White was recorded as a captain in Sir Thomas Fairfax’s own foot regiment.23Wanklyn, New Model Army, i. 55. On 15 and 16 May 1647, amid discontent in the army over arrears of pay, disbandment and the unpopular alternative of service in Ireland, there was a meeting at Saffron Walden church, Essex, of the New Model’s council of officers. White presented to a meeting on the 16th a summary of views in Fairfax’s foot regiment. There were evidently differences of opinion among the officers, and White did not claim to speak for the private soldiers. He went on to complain how his superior officer, Lieutenant-colonel Thomas Jackson, had misrepresented to the army grandees White’s report on opinion in the regiment. White had come close to being court-martialled, and demanded either to be vindicated or charged. There were evidently conflicting documents purporting to reflect regimental opinion, and White claimed that his has support from seven companies of the regiment. Jackson tried to convince the council that differences between White and himself had been settled, but Saffron Walden did nothing to pacify White.24Clarke Pprs. i. 48, 53, 57, 70, 81. It seems that the root of his discontent was the threat of being shipped for service in Ireland.25Worcester Coll. Oxf. MS 41, f. 127.

White’s sympathies lay with the common soldiers of his regiment, and after attending a meeting of the council of officers at Bury St Edmunds on 29 May, he put himself at the head of disaffected elements of the regiment, at a rendezvous at Rayne.26A Declaration of the Engagements, Remonstrances, Representations (1647), 15 (E.409.25). On 31 May, three senior officers were sent to parley with the soldiers, who were on the brink of open mutiny. The soldiers cried out that the officers were their enemies, rebuffed an attempt to remind them of Parliament’s votes and orders, and continued in their outrageous behaviour towards the property of local people. The emissaries reported White to be ‘the most active man in this business’; he gave out orders ‘as if he were the lieutenant-colonel’.27Clarke Pprs. i. p. xxii. Rivalry between White and the real lieutenant-colonel, Jackson, may have been an element in this episode, but White’s insubordination did him no harm. He was promoted to major in time for him to be present with this rank at the council of officers’ meeting at Reading on 16 July. 28Clarke Pprs. i. 176. If his advancement was arranged with the intention of mollifying him, the strategy was unsuccessful. He was elected an agitator for the officers of his regiment, and with other agitators pleaded on behalf of soldiers imprisoned for speaking against the king.29Clarke Pprs. i. 436. On 9 September, White was expelled from the officers’ council for the same offence, declaring that there was ‘now no visible authority in the kingdom but the power and force of the sword’. This was a questioning of the legitimacy of Parliament, which had not expelled those who had continued to sit while the Speakers of both Houses were with the army that summer for their own protection.30A Declaration, 149-50 (E.409.25); A Declaration from his Excellency (1647) (E.413.17); C. Walker, The Complete History of Independency (1661), pt. ii. 61. These were the views of John Lilburne, and White’s espousing them marked the high water point of his radicalism. When he appeared at the Putney debates of the general council of the army in October, therefore, it was as a marked man who had suffered for his outspokenness. On 29 October, he spoke in favour of the army’s dedication to the public good, and was questioned keenly but not aggressively by Cromwell on the differences between personal and collective ‘engagements’ or commitments. Like other agitators, White thought that the army’s declarations of that summer continued to bind them.31Clarke Pprs. i. 293.

White was never suspended from his commission as a result of his forthright speaking, and evidently maintained some sway over the soldiery in his regiment. On 11 November, at a regimental rendezvous, White told the troops that the country was to be under another form of government, apparently to gauge their reaction

Whereupon the whole regiment unanimously threw up their hats and cried ‘A king, a king’. And that acclamation being over, with the like vehemency [they] cried, ‘This king, this king’. And thereupon White got to his horse, and made some haste out of the field.32Clarendon SP, ii. appx. p. xli.

White must have been acting as the agent of the highest-ranking army officers, and was trusted by them. It is unsurprising therefore that he made his peace with the council of officers. On 21 December, at Windsor, he ‘desired he might be looked on as one who desired the good of the army’, and promised that if readmitted to the council, he would subject himself to the usual codes of military discipline. This was enough to secure unanimous approval for his reinstatement.33Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 943. Although he had been suspended in September, before the Putney debates, it has been suggested that White’s real offence was to have been the joint author of The Case of the Armie, a publication that forged a link between the soldiers’ grievances and the constitutional ideas of the civilian Levellers. A major had been summoned to explain himself on 21 October after papers were presented to the council, and it could well have been White.34Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 210; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 849.

White was posted to Yorkshire in 1648.35White, Copies of Severall Letters, 6. Writing to Cromwell from Knaresborough in April, he developed his views on the compromised legitimacy of Parliament. When the Members fled to the army, the proper authority of both Houses remained in Westminster, but there were mitigating circumstances to justify their flight. The Presbyterians had intended the army’s ruin and to perpetuate the Long Parliament indefinitely, and the electoral system was unfair: Parliament did not represent the people’s will. The only solution was for Cromwell and the army to adopt The Agreement of the People or some equivalent.36White, Copies of Severall Letters, 14-17. The Levellers echoed White’s own sense of grievance that he acted as lieutenant-colonel in his regiment, as well as major, but was denied a permanent promotion ‘because a constant man to his promises and principles’. It may thus have been Francis White whose name as ‘Colonel’ White was used by the assassins of Thomas Rainborowe* as a false authority to pass through army lines to reach their target, in October. If this was so, it was in the closing weeks of his tour of duty in the north, as he attended at least one army council meeting in December 1648.37White, Copies of Severall Letters, 6; ‘The second part of England’s new chaines discovered’, in Leveller Tracts ed. W. Haller and G. Davies (Columbia, 1944), 182; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 575; Clarke Pprs. ii. 280.

White was in a position to observe the trial of the king, and did not shrink from making his views known to his lord general: ‘I doubt not but the sword may do it; but how righteous judgment that may be, that God and future generations will judge’.38White, Copies of Severall Letters, 2. He thought that Charles and the royal family should simply be relieved of their public duties. On this occasion, his scepticism and sense of foreboding chimed with the feelings of Fairfax himself, and did nothing to damage his standing in the army. In May 1649, and not for the first time, White was despatched by Fairfax as an intermediary between the army authorities and disaffected soldiers, on this occasion from the regiments of Henry Ireton* and Adrian Scrope*. On 13 May, White and Scrope intercepted the mutineers at Blagrave, Berkshire, but failed to persuade them to accept Fairfax’s offers of pardon.39‘A Narrative’, in A Full Narrative of all the Proceedings (1649), 7-8 (E.555.27). When they moved to Burford, with Cromwell and Fairfax in hot pursuit, White helped them draft a declaration which he thought might represent the soldiers’ views fairly to the commanders. All they claimed to seek was a general council of the army at which their grievances, essentially those of 1647, might be discussed. White promised to ‘stand between the bullets’ and the soldiers, but they were betrayed by a quartermaster who brought Cromwell’s men to the town.40The Levellers (falsly so called) vindicated (1649), 5-7 (E.571.11).

On Fairfax’s resignation of his command, offered because he would not fight the Scots, White found himself on active service in Scotland under the colonelcy and generalship of Cromwell. This reorganisation saw the start of the collaboration between White and William Goffe. The regiment confronted the Scots at Dunbar (3 Sept. 1650), and White was in the thick of the action, joining the battle when the first line of English foot was driven back. White’s men fought at push of pike, and attracted Cromwell’s notice for their bravery. Immediately after the battle, Goffe was granted command of Cromwell’s regiment, and White was commissioned lieutenant-colonel, the rank he was to hold until his death.41Wanklyn, New Model Army, i. 97; Newsbooks: Mercurius Politicus, i. 304. He was also rewarded with the task of bringing the news to Parliament, bringing 160 captured colours to illustrate his narrative; the Rump bestowed £300 upon him for the good news.42Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 324; CJ vi. 464b, 465a; Newsbooks: Mercurius Politicus, i. 304; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 333, 590. He quickly returned to Scotland, however, where he was chosen by Cromwell to work with George Monck* to negotiate the surrender of Edinburgh castle.43Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 372-3. At the end of January 1651, he was the joint-commander in an unsuccessful raid on Burntisland in Fife.44Milton State Papers, 57. In June 1651 he was in Edinburgh, where, in a sign of how far his allegiances had changed, he joined John Lambert*, Monck and other officers at the court martial of the Leveller, Edward Sexby.45Clarke Pprs. v. 28, 31.

Goffe commanded a regiment at the battle of Worcester (3 Sept. 1651), so it is reasonable to suppose that White accompanied him in the journey south. It was as an associate of Goffe that White lent his support to John Owen’s* proposals of 1652 for propagating the gospel, which adumbrated the scheme for trying and ejecting the clergy during the protectorate.46Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 520; CJ vii. 258a-9a: Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii. 98. White did not give the Rump Parliament long to implement these plans, however, and supported Cromwell’s expulsion of it (20 Apr. 1653). On 11 May, White and Goffe signed a letter to Fleetwood’s officers in Ireland, recommending the changes in government.47The Fifth Monarchy, or Kingdom of Christ (1659), 21-4 (E.993.31). White served on a number of committees of the interim council of state, including those on taking accounts, and on army welfare matters. By August he was installed in a house at Westminster, and must have had the highest expectations of the Nominated Assembly which opened in July.48CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 299, 320, 363, 412, 618; 1653-4, p. 88. The greater the expectations, of course, the more profound the sense of disappointment at the shortcomings of the Nominated Assembly, and in December it was White and Goffe who ‘did as good as force’ out the 27 Members who did not surrender their authority to Cromwell.49TSP i. 637; An Exact Relation (1654), 26 (E.729.6).

As might have been predicted from his involvement in the dismissal of the Nominated Assembly, White supported the protectorate, natural in one who since Dunbar at the latest had become a Cromwellian loyalist. He was entrusted with transporting nearly £240,000 for naval service in August 1654, and continued to live in Westminster as an important military establishment figure.50CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 336. When he was elected to the second protectorate Parliament in August 1656 after Tewkesbury corporation failed in its plan to return John Disbrowe’s* son, White was probably seen by the government as a reliable stand-in supporter of the major-generals. He made an immediate impact on the House, being voted to the important committees of privileges, Irish affairs, and for a bill to provide for the security of the protector.51CJ vii. 424a, 427a, 428b. He was evidently given charge of security arrangements in and around St Stephen’s, responsible for clearing the chamber of strangers when the lord protector came to receive bills, and on the day when the session was prorogued.52CJ vii. 459b, 576b. In the early months of this Parliament, White combined attendance in the House with short excursions in southern England on military business, as in October, when he brought back from Portsmouth cargoes captured from enemy shipping during the war with Spain.53TSP vi. 542.

White was asked to bring in a bill to prevent the making of malt at inappropriate times (14 Oct.) but beyond this uncontentious topic, there is no obvious pattern discernible in White’s 35 committee appointments during this session.54CJ vii. 438b. Some of his committees were on augmenting the state-sponsored ministry, such as on bills to improve provision of ministers in Northamptonshire (17 Dec.) and for better observation of the Lord’s Day (18 Feb. 1657).55CJ vii. 469a, 493b. A dozen were on the cases of individual petitioners, such as the countess of Worcester and the 2nd earl of Salisbury (William Cecil*).56CJ vii. 457b, 466a, 466b, 468a, 484a, 488a, 493a, 503b, 507a, 528b, 529b, 549a. As a Gloucestershire MP, he was named to the committee which sought to allocate lands in Ireland in lieu of losses suffered by the Gloucester Adventurers, and spoke in the House to ameliorate the tax burden on English settlers there.57CJ vii. 494a; Burton’s Diary, i. 202; ii. 212. This involvement in the unspectacular but constructive legislative work of the House suggests that White was a reliable supporter of the government, an impression reinforced by his activity as a teller. In the eight divisions in which White told votes, the substance of each was a technical point. In January 1657 was clearly a supporter of the militia bill to extend the major-generals’ scheme, introduced by Disbrowe on 25 December, but his personal views on other matters subject to divisions are hard to discern. He demurred from the view of the committee processing the claims of Henry Peck, was unhappy with the penalty clauses in the catechism bill, and supported the wording in a bill to confirm the tenure of ministers in sequestered livings.58CJ vii. 466b, 483b, 489a, 503b, 504b, 526b, 549a, 560a.

However opaque his committee activity, however, White’s social outlook remained interventionist and sympathetic to the plight of the common people. He was in favour of regulating Wyggeston’s Hospital, Leicester, and spoke in support of the relatives of a deceased army officer, who could not afford a funeral for him. In a debt case, he criticised the judges, and supported the bill to sell forests in order to meet the claims of soldiers for arrears of pay. When the case of the will of the late 4th earl of Pembroke (Philip Herbert*) came before the House in April 1657, White spoke up for the interests of orphans who would be beneficiaries. 59CJ vii. 466a, 528a, 528b; Burton’s Diary, i. 83, 196, 300-1; ii. 78, 84. His views on the Quaker, James Naylor, were, at the outset, deeply hostile. He thought his offence ‘horrid blasphemy’, and sought the death penalty (5 Dec. 1656). Three days later, however, he advised proceeding against Naylor as a disturber of the public peace, and thought a lesser penalty might be more effective in discouraging others. By the 12th, he was all for wrapping up the case – one suspects he was speaking for the government in this – and on the 16th called for the Quaker’s tongue to be bored through. His later interventions were to support the ordinary course of justice against demands that Naylor should be treated as an extraordinary case.60Burton’s Diary, i. 27, 28, 35, 60, 118, 152, 153, 339-40; ii. 132; CJ vii. 497b. Unlike many former army radicals, White was evidently not attracted to the Quakers, but he displayed more humanity towards them than many of his parliamentary colleagues. While supporting various initiatives to relieve poverty, he was in favour of the traditional distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, and thought rogues should be brought back to their home parishes if they were found ten miles away.61Burton’s Diary, i. 21.

White was critical of large financial rewards for those who served the public. He thought that judges should only enjoy their fees for legal work, and have no salaries. He only reluctantly conceded that Charles Fleetwood* should receive £1,500 in Irish lands. On the other hand, perhaps mindful of his own bounty after Dunbar, he proposed that £200 be given the captain who brought the news of the sea victory of Santa Cruz, off Teneriffe.62Burton’s Diary, ii. 60, 144, 198. He supported the proposed legislation on marriage only so long as it could co-exist with current law, lest it ‘bastardise’ families and enrich lawyers. In the debate on the marriage bill, White refused to give way and insisted on making his point on behalf of the common people when William Lenthall*, master of the rolls, stood up to speak at the same time (29 Apr. 1657).63Burton’s Diary, ii. 69. White was uneasy about the Humble Petition and Advice and the offer of the crown to Cromwell. He was not listed among those who voted for kingship on 25 March, and on 23 April he challenged the Speaker and Bulstrode Whitelocke on the clarity of a report from a meeting with the lord protector, underlining the importance of continuity in constitutional change and calling the legislative corpus of the Long Parliament ‘the foundation of the cause and quarrel and the foot upon which we all stand’.64Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 22 (E.935.5); Burton’s Diary, ii. 9, 86-7 Once Cromwell had accepted the new constitution, shorn of its monarchical clauses, White was prepared to support it, albeit without great enthusiasm, arguing that the details of parliamentary representation and ecclesiastical discipline should be finalised before the Humble Petition was published. This fits with his view, as the session drew to a close, that the assessment bill should take priority over the Additional Petition and Advice.65Burton’s Diary, ii. 136, 171.

In the months after the closure of the first session of this Parliament, White was appointed governor of Mardyck, a fort associated with Dunkirk, taken from the Spanish.66CSP Dom. 1657-8, pp. 122-3. Mardyck had only recently been captured (23 Sept.), and White was evidently intended as successor to Sir John Reynolds*. On the night of 5 December 1657, in somewhat confused circumstances, White and Reynolds both left Mardyck with a military entourage to take ship home. They were supposed to join the Half Moon, which waited for them in the Channel, but decided instead to make the whole journey in a hundred-ton ‘pink’, because the seas were too rough to allow a safe landing on the waiting vessel. White was reported to be particularly keen to continue in the smaller ship, whose lights disappeared from view of Half Moon around 9.30 pm. The pink was lost with all passengers and hands on the Goodwin Sands, and two days later the discovery of a floating trunk containing White’s letters from his wife confirmed the extent of the tragedy.67Newsbooks: Mercurius Politicus, xvi. 277; CSP Dom. 1657-8, pp. 202, 213, 210, 211, 219, 355. It was rumoured that White had been keen to return to London to tell the lord protector of a meeting that Reynolds had held with James, duke of York, although this meeting seems not to have been in any way consequential.68Abbott, Writings and Speeches, iv. 690; supra, ‘John Reynolds’. White’s wife, Mary, daughter of William Goffe, was awarded £36 as a pension, with £600 in trust for his three daughters.69TSP vii. 735. What became of Mary White and her children subsequently is not known.