LITTLETON, Sir Edward, 1st bt. (1599-1657), of Pillaton Hall, Penkridge, Staffs.

Littleton was descended from the fifteenth-century jurist Sir Thomas Littleton, whose second son Richard Littleton† acquired Pillaton Hall (about six miles south of Stafford) by marriage and served as MP for Ludlow in 1491-2.34‘Sir Thomas Littleton’, Oxford DNB; HP Commons 1485-1509, ‘Richard Littleton’; Vis. Staffs. ed. H.S. Grazebrook (Collns. for a Hist. of Staffs. ser. 1, iii. pt. 2), 109-10. Littleton’s great great-grandfather had represented Staffordshire on five occasions between 1529 and 1555; his grandfather had sat for the county in 1604; and his father, Sir Edward Littleton†, had followed his example in 1624.35HP Commons 1509-58, ‘Edward Littleton’; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir Edward Littleton I’, ‘Sir Edward Littleton II’. Littleton senior had almost certainly owed his election to the influence of the county’s lord lieutenant Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.36HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir Edward Littleton II’. The family’s links with the Devereux interest, which went back to the reign of Elizabeth, were strengthened in 1634 following the marriage of Essex Devereux – son of the earl’s kinsman Sir Walter Devereux of Leigh Court – and Littleton’s sister-in-law Anne, daughter of the wealthy Anglo-Dutch merchant Sir William Courteen.37BRL, Ms 3375/434087. Littleton was one of the parties to the marriage settlement. By 1635, the earl had commissioned Littleton as one of his deputy lieutenants for Staffordshire.38SP16/296/10, f. 21.

Littleton’s creation as a baronet in June 1627 – just as the Forced Loan was being collected – and addition to the Staffordshire bench in 1634 suggest that he was well regarded at court.39C231/5, p. 143; CB. However, his experiences with the Caroline authorities during the personal rule were by no means uniformly positive. In 1635, he was indicted before the court of high commission on charges of ‘high inconformity’ – apparently relating to the non-repair of a church chancel – and the following year he was given the onerous task, as county sheriff, of collecting Staffordshire’s £3,000 Ship Money quota for 1636-7.40CSP Dom. 1635-6, pp. 107, 114, 116, 123, 125. He encountered considerable ‘refractoriness’ among the taxpayers – or so he informed the privy council – and fell short of his target by £300.41CSP Dom. 1636-7, pp. 439, 493; 1637, p. 387; 1637-8, p. 90; 1640, p. 250. His successor as sheriff, the future royalist Sir John Skeffington†, was able to collect all but £40 of the county’s quota and implied that Littleton had connived with head constables to defraud the crown.42M.D. Gordon. ‘The collection of ship money in the reign of Charles I’, TRHS ser. 3, iv. 160; CSP Dom. 1637, p. 532. Certainly Littleton’s activities as a Ship Money sheriff do not seem to have alienated the county’s voters, for in the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, he was returned in first place for Staffordshire.43Supra, ‘Staffordshire’. His links with the Devereux family (he had named his second son, born in 1637, Devereux) may well have been a factor in his return.44Penkridge Church Reg. ed. Thomas, 58. However, it is likely that he also enjoyed a strong interest of his own as the proprietor of a substantial estate in the county, comprising at least nine manors.45Staffs. RO, Staffs. RO, D260/M/T/5/113. In the event, he received no committee appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate.

Littleton was returned for Staffordshire in first place again in the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640.46Supra, ‘Staffordshire’. Yet for a senior knight of the shire he made little appreciable impact upon the proceedings of the House. He was named to only one committee before the outbreak of civil war – that set up on 26 March 1641 to prevent dangers arising from popish recusants – and, again, was apparently silent on the floor of the House.47CJ ii. 113b. His poor showing as a Parliament-man did not deter the two Houses from appointing him, in August 1641, a commissioner for disarming recusants in Staffordshire.48CJ ii. 267b; LJ iv. 385a. His only other mention in the Journal for that year occurred on 18 December, when he was granted leave of absence.49CJ ii. 349a.

Littleton had returned to the Commons by mid-May 1642, but again he seems to have been a peripheral figure at Westminster for most of that year.50PJ ii. 319; CJ ii. 621a. As the country slid towards civil war, his sympathies seem to have lain with Parliament. On 6 June, he wrote to the Staffordshire royalist Sir Richard Leveson*, complaining of ‘those affronts offered [by the king’s partisans] which never Parliament had, which is no small trouble to all honest men’.51HMC 5th Rep. 141. Tellingly, he added that ‘the Scotch stand very right, and I could wish the English did so’. This kind of language was consistent with that of a committed parliamentarian. Yet just 12 days later (18 June), he was appointed to the Staffordshire commission of array; and on 20 August, he was attending a meeting of the commissioners at Stafford.52Northants. RO, FH133; Staffs. RO, D948/4/6/2. Although he refused to contribute anything towards the royalist war effort at this meeting, the mere fact that he attended it is evidence that he was far from being resolute in the parliamentarian cause. He probably conveyed a similar impression at Westminster – having resumed his seat by late December – when he questioned the wisdom of a military association of Staffordshire and Warwickshire and declined to contribute any money towards the maintenance of the earl of Essex’s army.53Add. 18777, ff. 106, 109v.

Despite Littleton’s apparently lukewarm commitment to the parliamentarian war-effort, he was involved early in 1643 in raising money to help strengthen Parliament’s tenuous foothold in Staffordshire.54SP28/176, pt. 2, piece 13, ff. 3, 4; Staffs. Co. Cttee. p. xxxiv. The Commons also employed him on several occasions that spring and summer to convey its thanks as well as money and resources to its supporters in the county.55CJ ii. 1003b; iii. 9a, 18a, 184b. Having appointed him in February to desire the godly Staffordshire divine John Lightfoot to preach on the next fast day, the House subsequently ordered Littleton to request that Lightfoot have his sermon printed.56CJ ii. 975b; iii. 23a. Here perhaps is a clue to Littleton’s continued allegiance to Parliament, for these appointments suggest that he shared at least some of Lightfoot’s enthusiasm for further reformation in religion.57‘John Lightfoot’, Oxford DNB. On 6 June, Littleton took the vow and covenant that John Pym and his allies introduced in the wake of Edmund Waller’s* plot to seize London for the king.58CJ iii. 118b. And on 28 August, Littleton was named to one of the most hard-line committees set up that summer – to sequester the estates of those MPs who were deemed to have neglected the service of the House: a group swelled by the failure a few weeks earlier of the peace party’s attempt to secure a negotiated settlement before the Scots’ entry into the war.59CJ iii. 220a.

As it turned out, Littleton’s nomination to the 28 August 1643 committee would be his last appointment at Westminster. On 5 September, he was granted leave of absence, and at some point over the next four months he abandoned Parliament and threw in his lot with the king’s party.60CJ iii. 229a. The salient details of his defection can be traced in the Commons’ futile attempts in November and December to summon him back to Westminster and in depositions made in 1645 and 1649 against Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh – the commander-in-chief of Parliament’s west midlands association during the mid-1640s.61CJ iii. 311a, 326b; PA, Main Pprs. 2 May 1645, ff. 8-11v; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 445-7. Like his political ally the earl of Essex, Denbigh had deep misgivings about the war party’s policy of forging a military alliance with the Scots in preference to seeking a negotiated and exclusively English settlement. If the 1645 and 1649 allegations can be credited, Denbigh went into the west midlands late in August 1643 with the intention of raising a ‘third party’ in the region, presumably to pressure one or both sides into making peace.62CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 446. When Denbigh reached Coventry he summoned local parliamentarian units and, it seems, his gentry supporters, among whom was Littleton. In response, Littleton informed the earl that the way to Coventry was blocked and that he intended to make for Stafford (which was garrisoned for Parliament) ‘to settle peace amongst them’, although he expected little success without Denbigh’s assistance.63PA, Main Pprs. 29 Aug. 1643, f. 195. The controversial nature of this mission can be inferred from his admission that ‘having leaned (as I conceive) to the honester part, I have gained the ill will of many of them [in Stafford] and am confident, unless your lordship please to favour me with a few lines to the House, they may prejudice me with false suggestions’. Denbigh’s enemies would later claim that Littleton

came to Stafford with Mr Skrymsher [a royalist] and said he was come to raise forces for the earl of Denbigh and that Mr Skrymsher should command them. This caused fears in Mr [John] Swynfen* and others that there was a design to betray the county, the [Staffordshire county] committee having received intelligence before that Sir Edward Littleton had made his peace at Oxford.64PA, Main Pprs. 2 May 1645, f. 10; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 446.

Whatever Littleton and his friends were attempting it failed, and, in the aftermath, he fled (or so it was claimed) to Oxford – he had certainly joined the king’s party by early 1644.

The timing of Littleton’s defection suggests that he was dismayed at Parliament’s military alliance with the Covenanters, for all his praise of the Scots back in June 1642. In January 1644, he attended the Oxford Parliament and signed its letter of 27 January to the earl of Essex, urging him to compose a peace, in what was probably a last-ditch attempt to force an English settlement before the Scots entered the war.65Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 573. At Oxford, Littleton was apparently more forthright in his opposition to the swordsmen than he had been at Westminster, criticising Henry Hastings, 1st Baron Loughborough (colonel-general of the royalist forces in the midlands) in the House ‘for sending illegally for money to his Majesty’s subjects’.66HMC Hastings, ii. 121. In April 1644, his friend Sir Walter Wrottesley advised him to petition Prince Rupert and, if that failed, the Oxford Parliament against the exactions of another royalist officer, Colonel Thomas Leveson.67Wm Salt. Lib. S.MS.454/3. In spite of Littleton’s defection, the Commons at Westminster had decided on 22 January 1644 to respite disabling him from sitting.68CJ iii. 374b. But on 4 March, the case against him having been ‘earnestly pressed’, it was voted to disable him ‘before he was either summoned or heard’.69Harl. 166, f. 24; CJ iii. 415a. Littleton’s civilian bias in the Oxford Parliament did not stop him taking up arms for the king himself during the last years of the war, and he was among the defenders of the royalist garrison at Worcester on its surrender in July 1646.70CCC 2080; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 456. Similarly, his eldest son Edward became a lieutenant-colonel in one of the king’s regiments.71P.R. Newman, Royalist Officers in England and Wales (New York, 1981), 236.

Littleton was evidently willing to compound after the surrender of Worcester, but was unable to do so, being outlawed as surety for debts of £50,000 owed by his in-laws the Courteens and £3,000 in debts of his own.72CCC 2080-1; Carew, Title and Interest of Jeremy Elwes Esq, 4; Fraud and Violence Discovered and Detected (1662), 3, 7. When he did finally petition Goldsmiths’ Hall, in June 1649, it was merely to confirm his ‘utmost readiness to comply with the resolutions of Parliament’, for his indebtedness left him ‘totally disenabled to observe the rules for compositions’.73SP23/100, p. 545; CCC 2080-1. The Committee for Sequestration* reckoned his estate in Staffordshire was worth about £500 a year, which was almost certainly much less than its pre-war value.74CCC 2082. His fine was set at a relatively modest £1,134. In November 1652, the Rump voted to include Littleton’s lands in the bill for the sale of forfeited estates, but fortunately for the family the bulk of his property was purchased in trust by his brother-in-law Richard Knightley* and his cousin, the prominent Rumper Richard Salwey.75CJ vii. 205b; SP23/100, pp. 555, 557-9; CCC 2082; Staffs. RO, D260/M/T/5/104.

Having re-married in the early 1650s to a woman from north Wales, Littleton ‘settled his habitation there’.76Carew, Title and Interest of Jeremy Elwes Esq, 4. Although it is certain that he did not live to see the Restoration, there is some confusion surrounding his death and testamentary provisions. According to one account, he died a ruined man in exile during the 1650s; another source claims that he died in about February 1658 and that he left a will making his second wife Catherine his executrix.77C6/43/194; CSP Dom. 1660-1, 342. Both accounts, in their varying ways, are difficult to reconcile with the fact that he had died by 18 August 1657, when an inventory of his goods and chattels was taken, or that the administration of his estate was granted to his widow on 5 February 1658.78PROB6/34, f. 31v; Staffs. RO, D260/M/E/429/22. In both the inventory and the grant of administration he is described as Sir Edward Littleton, bt. of Ffinant, in the parish of Trefeglwys, Montgomeryshire. His identification as the ‘Sir Edward Littleton, knt’ who was buried at St Edward’s, Romford on 3 August 1657 would certainly tally with the date of the inventory, but is otherwise problematic, not least because contemporaries were not given to mistaking knights for baronets.79CB. Littleton’s heir, Sir Edward Littleton†, represented Staffordshire in the Cavalier Parliament.80HP Commons 1660-1690.