WARTON, Michael (1593-1645), of Bentley, Rowley, and Beverley, Yorks.

Warton’s family had settled in the Beverley area by the early Tudor period and had prospered sufficiently for his grandfather to be elected MP for the town in 1586.14Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. i. 136; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Michael Wharton’. In addition to their property in and around Beverley (which included the hamlet of Bentley, where Warton resided by the late 1630s), Warton and his father, Sir Michael Warton, acquired further estates in Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire, Middlesex and London – in part through their marriages to coheiresses.15E. Riding Archives, DDCC/111/283; Yorks. Arch. Soc. Lib. DD42A/99; CCC, 956, 957; Yorks. Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. Clay, 55-6; Cases in the High Ct. of Chivalry 1634-40 ed. R.P. Cust, A.J. Hopper (Harl. Soc. n.s. xviii), 233; Cliffe, Yorks. 29; Carroll, ‘Yorks.’, 275. The family’s links with Beverley were strengthened in 1628 by Sir Michael’s purchase from the crown for £3,593 of the lease of the manor of Beverley ‘with the park, borough and water towns thereto belonging’ at a rent of £274 a year. This property was bought in Warton’s name whom his father installed as lessee.16E. Riding Archives, DDBC/19/19; CSP Dom. 1627-8, p. 557. Warton does not appear to have been active in local government. The Michael Warton ‘esq’ who was appointed custos rotulorum of the Beverley commission of peace in 1628 was evidently his father.17C231/4, f. 258v; C181/3, f. 245. Warton probably occupied his time managing the family estate.18Keeler, Long Parl. 379; Carroll, ‘Yorks.’, 275.

Warton’s father and his first and second wives’ families were either Catholic sympathisers or recusants, and his second wife (Everilda Maltby née Creyke) and Warton’s own wife were cited in visitation returns during the 1630s as non-communicants.19Borthwick, HC.AB.18, f. 91; H. Aveling, Post Reformation Catholicism in East Yorks. 1558-1790 (E. Yorks. Loc. Hist. Soc. xi.), 39, 61, 62, 63; Yorks. Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. Clay, 93. Warton himself would be included on a list published in about 1660 of prominent Catholic royalists killed during the civil war.20A Catalogue of the Lords, Knights and Gentlemen, of the Catholick Religion, that were Slain in the Late Warr (c.1660). But despite his family’s – and possibly his own – Catholic leanings, he was willing to send his heir to Beverley free school, which had a puritan master before the civil war.21Cliffe, Yorks. 183. The efforts of the northern recusants commission to secure Sir Michael’s conviction during the 1630s may help to explain his belligerency when it came to Ship Money, for he was the only Yorkshire gentleman who refused to pay the levy before 1638.22Aveling, Catholicism in East Yorks. 39; CSP Dom. 1635, pp. 290, 479; Cliffe, Yorks. 305-6.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Warton and his kinsman Sir John Hotham, the leader of the East Riding’s ‘disaffected’ gentry, were returned for Beverley – Warton taking the junior place.23Supra, ‘Beverley’; Carroll, ‘Yorks.’, 264-5. Warton received no appointments in this Parliament and made only one recorded contribution to debate – a motion to have a law suit against him suspended as a breach of parliamentary privilege.24Aston’s Diary, 98. The two men were returned for Beverley again in the elections to the Long Parliament, this time fending off a challenge from Sir Thomas Metham, who was a nominee of the president of the council of the north, Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†).25Supra, ‘Beverley’. Granted leave of absence, ‘by reason of his wife’s sickness’, in December 1640, and again in April 1641 in order that he might attend the Yorkshire assizes ‘upon occasion of a trial ... which concerns him very much in his estate’, Warton received only one appointment in the House before the spring of 1642, when he was added on 10 February 1641 to a committee for remedying abuses in the postal service.26CJ ii. 52a, 99b, 82a; Procs. LP ii. 407. His first and only known contribution to debate was a motion on 16 November 1640 that Yorkshire be exempted from assessment for supply of the royal and Scottish armies in northern England ‘in respect that it was the seat of this war [the second bishops’ war]’. But the House resolved instead to exempt County Durham and Northumberland.27D’Ewes (N), 537; Procs. LP i. 160. It is difficult to credit the claim that the elector palatine was referring to Warton when he informed his mother, the queen of Bohemia, in May 1641 that the son of ‘Lady Wharton’ was ‘very much your servant and an honest, gallant young man’.28The Corresp. of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia ed. N. Akkerman (Oxford, 2011), ii. 953. Warton was in his late forties by this date and could by no means be described as a gallant young man.

Warton was named to a seven man committee that the Houses established in May 1642 to assist Sir John Hotham as governor of Hull.29CJ ii. 577b, 592; LJ v. 82b; PJ ii. 341. The membership of this committee was determined by John Pym* and his allies, who had well-founded doubts as to Hotham’s staunchness in the parliamentary cause.30Supra, ‘Sir John Hotham’; CJ ii. 584b-585a; Clarendon, Hist. i. 523-4. On 20 May the Commons ordered Warton and John Alured* to repair to Hull immediately to assist Hotham, while Pym and Nathaniel Fiennes I* considered whether the instructions for the committee at Hull required augmenting.31CJ ii. 581b-582a.

In contrast to his father, who was named to the Yorkshire commission of array and reportedly lent the king £20,000 in August 1642, Warton sided with Parliament at the outbreak of civil war.32Northants. RO, FH133; A True Relation of the Proceedings from York and Beverley (1642), 6 (E.108.35). Thus in the autumn of autumn of 1642, he and Sir Hugh Cholmeley* were at Hull advising Sir John Hotham and supported his decision to ‘sequester’ Peregrine Pelham* to prevent him stirring up dissention in the town.33Hotham Pprs. 63, 64; HMC Portland, i. 67. But at some point between late 1642 and early 1644 he abandoned the parliamentarian camp, and early in 1644 he attended the Oxford Parliament, although he arrived too late to sign its letter to the earl of Essex urging him to compose a peace.34Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 575. On 22 January 1644 the Commons disabled Warton from sitting ‘for being in the king’s quarters and adhering to that party’.35CJ iii. 374a. Having joined Cholmeley in the royalist garrison at Scarborough Castle by early 1645, he was killed by parliamentarian artillery fire at some point in the late spring of that year.36SP28/354, pt. 1, unfol.; Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. i. 138; Binns, Yorks. in the Civil Wars, 118. His place of burial is not known. No will is recorded.

Warton’s eldest son and namesake, who was in arms against Parliament, was fined £1,600 in October 1646 ‘in regard of his father’s delinquency’.37Yorks. Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. Clay, 93. He represented Beverley in every Parliament between 1660 and 1685, and his son (Warton’s grandson) was returned for Boroughbridge in 1675, Hull in October 1679 and in 1681 and for Beverley on ten occasions between 1689 and 1715.38HP Commons, 1660-90, ‘Michael Warton’; ‘Sir Michael Warton’.