WALLEY, Charles (c.1581-1663), of Foregate Street, St John, Chester, Cheshire.

Very little is known about Walley’s lineage and family background. Although men of his surname had served as mayor and sheriff of Chester during the 1530s and 1540s, Walley himself was not born in the city and does not appear to have belonged to an established civic family.23SP23/180, p. 789. When he was admitted a freeman in 1619, it was on petition and through the recommendation of the Cheshire gentleman Sir Richard Wilbraham.24Cheshire RO, ZAB/1, f. 76v; ZSB/5j; ZSB/7b, f. 30; ZSB/7d; Cal. Chester City Mins. ed. Groombridge, 94. There is evidence to suggest that he may have belonged to the Walley family of the parish of Davenham, near Northwich.25Cheshire RO, WS 1598, Will of Ralph Walley. The William Whittingham referred to in the Chester corporation records in 1658 as a ‘near kinsman’ of Walley was possibly the brother of the Katherine Whittingham who had married one Ralph Walley of Stanthorne, in the parish of Davenham, in 1625.26Davenham par. reg.; Cheshire RO, ZAB/2, f. 119v. Unfortunately, Charles Walley does not appear anywhere in the Davenham parish registers. When he joined the Chester Innholders Company in 1619 he was described simply as ‘Charles Walley of the Red Lion [a Chester inn], gent.’.27Cheshire RO, ZG 13/1; Cal. Chester City Mins. ed. Groombridge, 94, 185; Rolls of the Freemen of Chester ed. J.H.E. Bennett (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. li), 119. His rapid progress up the municipal hierarchy – which saw him elected an alderman within five years of becoming a freeman – suggests that he was among the city’s wealthiest inhabitants.

Walley signed both the February and December 1641 Cheshire petitions to Parliament in support of episcopacy and against introducing innovations in liturgy or doctrine.28PA, Main Pprs. 27 Feb., 20 Dec. 1641. Although he was often described as a temporiser and neutral, he evidently leaned more strongly to the king than to Parliament, for during the second half of 1642 he was named to the Chester commission of array; he reportedly helped to foil an attempt by Sir William Brereton* and Alderman William Edwardes* to execute the Militia Ordinance in the city; and he was one of only three aldermen authorised by the king to search the houses of Chester parliamentarians for arms.29SP23/180, pp. 786, 806; Cheshire RO, ZP/Cowper/2, ff. 4, 15; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 82; VCH Cheshire ii. 114. Walley remained at Chester after it became a royalist garrison that autumn, and in July 1643, the corporation dispatched him to Oxford to solicit the king concerning the city’s affairs.30Cheshire RO, ZAB/2, f. 63.

In the 1644 mayoral elections at Chester, Walley tried to raise a party for one of his fellow aldermen in opposition to either Sir Thomas Smithe* or Francis Gamul*, who had the backing of the senior officeholders.31Harl. 2125, f. 147. In the event, however, the majority of the citizens chose him instead, ‘contrary to his mind and will’. This election was regarded by some at the time – and most commentators since – as a contest between the committed royalists in the corporation, headed by Gamul, and the increasingly ‘refractory’ citizens and their reluctant champion, the ‘moderate’ Walley.32Luke Letter Bks. 360; A.M. Johnson, ‘Politics in Chester during the civil wars and Interregnum 1640-62’, in Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700 ed. P. Clark, P. Slack (1972), 212-14; VCH Cheshire ii. 114. Walley was certainly a popular figure in the city, and when the man chosen the following autumn to succeed him as mayor refused to serve, ‘the whole city desired Mr Walley to take the government and rule of the city into his hands, and ... at last he consented to it and took the staff [of office] again’.33Harl. 2158, f. 8. Yet for all his supposed moderation, Walley cooperated closely with Chester’s governor John Byron†, 1st Baron Byron in fortifying the city and in bidding defiance to the besieging parliamentarian forces; while several reports on civic affairs during the winter of 1645-6 claimed that were it not for Walley, Byron, Gamul and a few other ‘prime men’, the citizens would already have given up the fight.34Cheshire RO, ZAB/2, ff. 71v, 72; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 87-8, 260-1, 408, 492. Until the last few weeks of the siege, Byron (who was noted for his jaundiced view of the citizens’ loyalty) found Walley ‘very cordial and zealous in the service’.35‘John Byron’s acct. of the siege of Chester 1645-6’ ed. M. H. Ridgway, E. K. Berry, Cheshire Sheaf, vi. 15, 21. On the other hand, one of the officers conducting the siege later claimed that Walley had sent ‘continual intelligence’ out of the city to the besiegers – which Byron, for one, regarded less as an act of betrayal than one of pragmatic self-interest; Walley being eager ‘to curry favour with the party likely to prevail’.36CCC 1176; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 82, 190-1, 480; ‘John Byron’s acct.’ ed Ridgway, Berry, 21.

Walley played a leading role in the negotiations that led to Chester’s surrender in February 1646.37Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 507, 524, 525; Sir William Breretons Letter (1646), 8, 11, 12, 13 (E.325.20). Indeed, he himself claimed that he was ‘a principal means for surrendering up the city into the Parliament’s hands’.38SP23/180, p. 789; CCC 1176. The often repeated assertion that he was one of six aldermen who refused to sign the articles of surrender is perhaps apocryphal, given that one of those also included in this group, Sir Robert Brerewood*, was in Oxford at the time.39Morris, Siege of Chester ed. Lawson, 10, 192. Exactly where Walley’s primary allegiance lay during the war – to the city, the king, or to himself – is impossible to say, although the evidence suggests that he put more effort into holding Chester for the royalists than into yielding it to the parliamentarians.

A few months after Chester’s surrender, Walley petitioned to compound, claiming that he had remained in Chester against his will, had acted ‘very little’ against Parliament and had suffered losses to his estate to the tune of £1,764.40SP23/180, pp. 789, 796; CCC 1176. There can be no doubt that his estate suffered severe damage as a result of the fighting around Chester. His inn, The Red Lion, his dwelling house in Foregate Street and his house in Boughton, near Chester, were almost entirely destroyed.41SP23/180, pp. 787, 796. To many parliamentarians, however, his attempts to excuse his wartime conduct were merely those of a particularly unscrupulous royalist. The Cheshire sequestration commissioners commented upon his ‘obstinacy’ during the siege, when ‘he might, if he had been so minded, have contrived or ordered a course ... [for] delivery of the said city into the Parliament’s hands long before .... it was, it standing out to the very utmost period of time’.42SP23/180, p. 806. In June 1646, the Staffordshire recruiter John Swynfen* informed the Cheshire parliamentarian John Crewe II* that

Here [at Westminster] have been continued endeavours to clear Alderman Walley from any disaffection ... and so great progress hath been made therein that I think his friends will effect it except somebody appear against him in the House that can give information upon knowledge. If you furnish me with the proofs of his actions there [at Chester] I will make use of them as I shall receive directions from you and Sir William Brereton* [the commander of Parliament’s forces in Cheshire].43Cheshire RO, DAR/F/28: Swynfen to Crewe, 6 June 1646.

Evidently Walley’s ‘friends’ were no match for the formidable combination of Swynfen and Brereton, for in July 1646, the Commons set his composition fine at one sixth – calculated at £537 – and in October, he was removed by parliamentary ordinance from his office as a Chester alderman.44CJ iv. 605b; LJ viii. 506.

Walley had managed to pay only about half of his composition fine when the Rump read a petition from him on 30 June 1649 and then ordered that he be ‘absolutely freed and discharged from all imputation of delinquency’, restored to the ‘favour and good opinion of this House’ and discharged from paying the remainder of his fine.45CJ vi. 246b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 112. Walley’s restoration to political favour was almost certainly a reward for his services as Parliament’s shipping and victualling agent at Chester. He had performed this role for the royalists during the civil war and was employed in the same capacity by Parliament from very soon after the fall of Chester in 1646 – and with the Rump gearing up for the invasion of Ireland in mid-1649, Walley’s work at Chester assumed even greater importance.46CSP Dom. 1625-49, pp. 639, 672, 698; 1645-7, p. 485; 1649-50, p. xxxiii; 1655, pp. 294-5; A.M. Johnson, ‘Some Aspects of the Political, Constitutional, Social and Economic History of the City of Chester 1550-1662’ (Oxford Univ. DPhil. thesis, 1971), 342. Between April 1649 and July 1654, he disbursed the massive sum of £110,104 towards maintaining the war-effort in Ireland, reducing the Isle of Man to parliamentary authority and for defraying the costs of the trial and execution of the royalist leader James Stanley†, 7th earl of Derby, in October 1651.47Stowe 185, ff. 100-9; Add. 18986, f. 164. Recognising a trusted and efficient administrator when it saw one, Chester corporation re-elected him an alderman in July 1653.48Cheshire RO, ZAB/2, f. 101v.

Walley was elected in the summer of 1654 as Chester’s lone representative in the first protectoral Parliament. He almost certainly owed his return to the backing of the corporation and to the strength of his contacts at Whitehall. He was appointed to somewhere between one and five committees in this Parliament – the clerk of the House apparently making no effort to distinguish between him and the Northampton MP Alderman Peter Whaley.49CJ vii. 369b, 371b, 373b, 374b, 397b. Given his close involvement in supplying Parliament’s forces in Ireland, Walley was probably the man named to the committee for Irish affairs on 28 September 1654 and added to the committee of privileges on 5 October in order to consider complaints touching elections in Ireland.50CJ vii. 371b, 373b. His one definite appointment in the House came the next day (6 Oct.), when, as ‘Mr Charles Walley’, he was named to a committee for encouraging the transportation of corn and other victuals.51CJ vii. 374b.

Having left Chester for London in July 1654 to have his accounts audited, Walley was still kicking his heels at Whitehall the following June, when no less a person than Henry Cromwell* wrote to Secretary John Thurloe*, requesting that his business be expedited.52TSP iii. 503. Cromwell reminded Thurloe of Walley’s ‘former good services to the public and the great advantages it [the state] hath had by his endeavours ... I might add his willingness still upon all occasions to help forward any public business’. A few days later, Thurloe received an intercepted letter from Walley to the Cheshire royalist Peter Venables* in which Walley derided the newly-appointed governor of Chester, Thomas Croxton.53TSP iii. 523.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Walley was replaced by his fellow Chester alderman Edward Bradshaw. Nevertheless, he seems to have remained a much respected figure among the officeholders and inhabitants.54Cheshire RO, ZAB/2, f. 119v. When Chester’s ‘well-affected’ urged the restored Rump to remodel the corporation in the aftermath of Sir George Boothe’s* royalist-Presbyterian rebellion in the summer of 1659, they recommended that Walley retain his place as an alderman – even though he had apparently acted in concert with Boothe’s leading supporters in the city.55Harl. 1929, ff. 10-11v; SP23/263, f. 114; Johnson, ‘Politics in Chester’, 227-8. Moreover, he continued to act as the state’s victualling and transportation agent in Chester until the autumn of 1659.56CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 179, 193, 587.

Despite Walley’s many services to the Rump and to the protectorate, he seems to have suffered no reprisals at the Restoration; nor did the corporation commissioners find any reason to remove him from office when they visited Chester in August 1662 – Walley duly taking the oath abjuring the Covenant.57Cheshire RO, ZAB/2, f. 135. This proved to be his final act of political survival, however, for he died the following summer and was buried in his home parish of St John, Chester on 7 August 1663.58St John, Chester par. reg. No will is recorded. The prominent Chester citizen Charles Walley junior (whose parentage is also a mystery) was his nephew.59CSP Dom. 1655, p. 494. Walley was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.