ASTON, Sir Thomas, 1st bt. (1600-46), of Aston, Cheshire.

The Astons had been lords of the town of Aston – in the parish of Runcorn until 1635, when it was created a separate parish – since at least the twelfth century.26Ormerod, Cheshire, iii. pt. 2, p. 720. They had supplied the place of sheriff of Cheshire on several occasions under the Plantagenets and Tudors, but had otherwise made relatively little impact on county affairs and have been described as a ‘declining family’ by the early seventeenth century.27Wanklyn, ‘Landed Society’, 95. Their principal route to preferment, certainly under the early Stuarts, was not through the channels of local government but via service at court – particularly in the case of Sir Roger Aston†, an illegitimate son of Aston’s great-great grandfather, who rose to become a gentleman of the bedchamber and master huntsman to James I and VI and, largely on that basis, was elected for Cheshire to the 1604 Parliament.28HP Commons 1604-29. It was very probably Sir Roger who secured a place for Aston’s father as a sewer to Queen Anne, James’s wife.29Ormerod, Cheshire, iii. pt. 2, p. 724. Aston’s younger brother John seems to have been employed in some capacity by Charles I during the early years of his reign and by 1641 was a gentleman usher in the household of the prince of Wales.30Bodl. Nalson XIII/I, f. 74v; CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 161. Thomas himself was no exception to this pattern of court service, for in 1637 (not 1635 as is generally stated) he was appointed a gentleman of the privy chamber, extraordinary.31LC5/134, p. 170; J. Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998), 132; ‘Sir Thomas Aston’, Oxford DNB. One of his court contacts was the groom of the bedchamber Endymion Porter*, who in about 1632 sold him, ‘for a valuable consideration’, his farm of the customs on the import of French wines into Chester.32Add. 36918, f. 84; JRL, RYCH/2039, 2087.

Aston’s court connections may account for his appointment in 1634 as Cheshire’s first ship-money sheriff. He was zealous in the performance of his duties as sheriff, collecting the full amount of Ship Money assessed upon Cheshire and yet at the same time earning the good opinion of the county for his defence of its interests in a rating dispute with Chester corporation. Indeed, not only did he earn the plaudits of Cheshire’s leading gentry for his stance against the city, but also the praise of the king himself for his ‘more than ordinary frowardness and effectual performance’. When the Chester authorities retaliated by assessing Aston on his farm of customs in the city, he exploited the situation to strengthen his credentials as a champion of the county’s liberties vis-à-vis the city. And although the council eventually ruled against him and in favour of the city, it is clear that he enjoyed considerable support among the councillors. He also learnt an important lesson from this dispute – ‘that successful lobbying on behalf of the shire at the centre would enhance his prestige and status locally; and conversely that delivering the co-operation of the shire would advance his reputation at court’.33SP16/370/67, f. 144; SP16/390/10, f. 12; P. Lake, ‘The collection of ship money in Cheshire during the sixteen-thirties’, NH xvii. 45-54; R. Cust, P. Lake, Gentry Culture, and the Politics of Religion: Cheshire on the Eve of the Civil War (Manchester, 2020), 168.

Aston is sometimes portrayed as a ‘newcomer’ who levered himself into electoral contention in Cheshire through his defence of the county’s rights over Ship Money.34Lake, ‘Collection of ship money’, 67-8. Certainly his estate was small compared with those of the county’s grandees and had been ‘greatly impaired’ by his father’s sale of lands and perhaps also by his own wardship, which had been granted to his mother and two prominent Cheshire gentlemen in 1615.35SP16/20/41, f. 127; WARD9/162, f. 213v; WARD9/204, f. 178v; Wanklyn, ‘Landed Society’, 95, 390. On the other hand, Aston’s profits as collector of customs on French wines at Chester amounted to perhaps as much as £1,500 a year, which was more than the annual rental income of a majority of the Cheshire gentry; with this kind of money at his disposal, he was able to lavish £504 in the mid-1630s on refurbishing Aston chapel.36Add. 36918, f. 84; JRL, RYCH/2087; Procs. LP v. 366; PJ ii. 26; Maltby, Prayer Book, 137-41; R. Richards, ‘The lesser chapels of Cheshire’, Trans. Historic Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, cii. 119. Moreover, he was not without connections among the county’s governing elite. His mother was the daughter of Robert Needham of Shavington Hall (often rendered as ‘Shenton’ or, wrongly, ‘Sherton’) in the Shropshire parish of Adderley, which lies on the border with Cheshire a few miles south of Nantwich (it should not be confused with the Cheshire township of Shavington to the east of Nantwich).37‘Sir Robert Needham’, HP Commons 1604-29. Aston was thus a cousin of Robert Needham†, 2nd Viscount Kilmorey, and it was perhaps partly through this connection that he was drawn into a loose political grouping among Cheshire’s governing elite known as the ‘barons’. Centred upon Kilmorey and John Savage†, 2nd Viscount Savage, this embryonic faction ‘tended to be strongly anti-puritan ... relatively indulgent towards Catholicism and Laudianism, ready to identify with the interests of king and court and willing to take an authoritarian line when it came enforcing the crown’s demands’.38‘Robert Needham’, HP Commons 1604-29; Cust, Lake, Gentry Culture, 173.

With the calling of a new Parliament, late in 1639, Aston put himself forward as a candidate for one of the county places, having, as he claimed, been encouraged to do so by Viscount Savage (a recusant and future royalist who succeeded as 2nd Earl Rivers in 1640) and his younger brother Thomas. Aston’s candidacy was also supported by the county’s leading men, namely the Catholic peer John Talbot, 10th earl of Shrewsbury, Cheshire’s lord lieutenant James Stanley†, Lord Strange (the future 7th earl of Derby), Robert Cholmondeley†, 1st viscount of Kells, and Viscounts Kilmorey and Savage. All of these noblemen were to side with the king in the civil war. In the course of canvassing for support, Aston revealed a marked hostility towards the kingdom’s ‘puritan faction’, which suggests that was a considerable amount of pragmatism in the electoral partnership that he formed at some point over the winter of 1639-40 with another prominent defender of the county’s rights over Ship Money, the strongly puritanical Sir William Brereton*. Standing against Aston and Brereton were two candidates put forward by Sir George Booth, Sir Richard Wilbraham and their circle – probably either Booth’s younger son John or his grandson George Boothe*, and Wilbraham’s eldest son Thomas. On election day, 6 April 1640, Brereton and Aston were returned for the county – apparently without a contest – Aston taking the junior place.39Supra, ‘Cheshire’; infra, ‘Sir William Brereton’; UCNW, Mostyn ms 9082, nos. 17-19; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 591; Morrill, Cheshire, 32-3; ‘John Savage’, HP Commons 1604-29.

That Aston was named to only one committee in the Short Parliament – the committee of privileges on 16 April – was probably because he spent most of his time in the Commons recording the debates on the floor of the House.40CJ ii. 4a. His parliamentary diary has survived and runs to almost 47,000 words and reveals that Aston was ‘an assiduous attender of debates’.41Aston’s Diary, pp. xiii-xiv. Unfortunately, unlike most other parliamentary diaries of the time, it is largely devoid of editorial judgements and personal asides and therefore tells us little about Aston’s own take on proceedings. His aim was to record what he heard, and his probable motive in doing so was to provide his lordly patrons with an accurate account of what everyone anticipated would be as important a Parliament as ‘any that was ever in our age’ (to use Brereton’s words).42UCNW, Mostyn ms 9082, no. 21.

According to the diary, Aston himself made two substantial speeches in the House – the first of which, on 27 April, apparently attempted to strike a conciliatory note concerning the Lords’ vote of 24 April to grant the king supply before he had redressed the kingdom’s grievances.43Aston’s Diary, 75-6. Supply matters were traditionally debated in the Commons first, and, unlike Aston, most MPs seem to have regarded the Lords’ vote as a clear-cut breach of the Lower House’s privileges.44Aston’s Diary, 67-76; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 113. Aston’s second speech, delivered on 4 May, was among the last made in the Commons before the king peremptorily dissolved Parliament the next day. Again, it represented an attempt to build bridges, only this time not between the two Houses but between Charles and the Commons. Amidst what he termed the ‘distraction’ arising from the heated debate over whether to accept the king’s offer to relinquish Ship Money in return for a vote of 12 subsidies, Aston moved that the House ask Charles for a

few days respite that we may prepare an act wherein to pass his supply together with out [i.e. ‘our’] grievances, and we would leave a blank [in the act] that if we presented such [grievances] to him [as] might draw more from his Majesty [i.e. request more from him] than he expected to part with, we might fill up the blank [i.e. the amount of money to be specified in the act] proportionable to the grace and favour the commonwealth should receive by his Majesty’s grant. This could give no offence, and it would undoubtedly gain us relief in our greatest grievance, which was strait of time. And could no way prejudice the affairs of the House.45Aston’s Diary, 144.

This compromise, besides being unworkable, suggests that Aston had under-estimated the intransigence of John Pym* and his allies, for whom there certainly were greater grievances than shortage of time. Needless to say, Aston’s motion was ignored, prompting his sad reflection that

quos deus vult perdere hos dementat prius [whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad]. No motion that was not either for a peremptory ‘I [aye]’ or ‘no’ would please the one side, nor the other were pleas’d with any that might imply consent till first their grievances were voted.46Aston’s Diary, 144.

There were three principal candidates for the shire places in Cheshire’s elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640 – Aston, Brereton and Viscount Cholmondeley’s brother-in-law Peter Venables*. The contest that developed on this occasion may have been a three-way struggle between the men, or it is possible that Venables and Brereton stood together as the preferred candidates of the Booth-Wilbraham group.47Supra, ‘Cheshire’; Harl. 2125, f. 133; Cust, Lake, Gentry Culture, 181-2. Brereton had forfeited the support of the barons by the autumn – probably because of his increasingly close identification with what Aston had termed the national ‘puritan faction’. Equally, Aston’s support-base in the county had hemorrhaged in the months after the dissolution of the Short Parliament. On 6 October, he put in his first ever appearance at a meeting of the Cheshire quarter sessions (having been added to the bench back in 1637), where he felt obliged to take ‘elaborate steps’ to clear himself over allegations of extortion and malfeasance during his time as sheriff.48Cheshire RO, QJB 1/6, ff. 9, 15-17; QJF 69/3, nos. 11-14; Lake, ‘Collection of ship money’, 67. Eager, perhaps, to re-burnish his reputation as a champion of the county’s interests, he accepted appointment by the bench to collect and collate the grievances (including those arising from Ship Money) within his local hundred.49Cheshire RO, QJB 1/6, f. 13v; CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 146-7. The next day (7 Oct.), he attended Earl Rivers at his country residence and together they drew up warrants to the local chief constables requiring them to investigate the financial cost to the locality of the second bishops’ war, ‘so that the great charge lying on the country [i.e. county] may be truly manifested to the House of Parliament and relief sought’.50CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 146-7.

On election day, 19 October 1640, there was reportedly ‘much feuding and faction between Sir Thomas Aston and Sir William Brereton and Peter Venables’ – a form of wording that does not suggest a well publicised electoral partnership between any of the candidates – ‘but at last’, presumably after a ‘shout’, Venables and Brereton were returned in that order (and not vice versa as one account has stated).51Supra, ‘Cheshire’; Harl. 2125, f. 133; C219/43/1/77-8; Morrill, Cheshire, 34. Aston’s defeat invites speculation as to what had happened between the Short and Long Parliament elections to undermine his local hero status. The most plausible explanation is that doubts had been raised about his commitment to wholesale political reform, as opposed to simply defending the county from the excesses of the personal rule.52Lake, ‘Collection of ship money’, 68; ‘Puritans, popularity and petitions’, in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain ed. T. Cogswell, R. Cust, P. Lake (Cambridge, 2002), 261. The political and military disasters the king and country had suffered since the spring of 1640 may have encouraged the Cheshire voters to see their grievances in more national terms and thus sensitized them to Aston’s court connections, his friendship with Catholics like Earl Rivers and perhaps also to the conciliatory tone he had struck in the Short Parliament over redress of grievances. The large sum of money that Aston and his Catholic cousin, the professional soldier and future royalist Sir Arthur Aston, had lent to the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) by 1641 was very probably connected to the prosecution of the king’s unpopular war against the Scottish Covenanters.53LJ iv. 176b. Moreover, Aston’s younger brother John had acted as the king’s agent in Scotland during the bishops’ wars – which heightens the suspicion that Aston and his immediate circle stood on the wrong side of public opinion in Cheshire by the autumn of 1640.54‘Sir Thomas Aston’, Oxford DNB.

Aston is chiefly remembered to posterity for his campaign of 1641-2 in defence of the ceremonies, liturgy and episcopal government of the Church of England.55Maltby, Prayer Book, 130, 142. In response to a petition that a group of Cheshire puritans organised over the winter of 1640-1 calling for root-and-branch reform of the church – and which Brereton presented to the Commons on 19 February 1641 – Aston gathered support in the county for a counter-petition that would represent what he saw as the county’s overwhelming preference for episcopacy as it existed under Elizabeth and James.56CJ ii. 89a, 123a; T. Aston, A Remonstrance Against Presbytery (1641), 1-8 (E.163.1); Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 261-2. In contrast to the puritan petitioners, Aston made a concerted effort to win the support of the gentry community, and to this end he sought the backing not only of the barons (which he received), but also the Booth-Wilbraham group (which he did not).57Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 262. The future royalist peer Henry Bourchier, 5th earl of Bath, presented Aston’s petition – or ‘remonstrance’, as Aston termed it – complete with an annexed schedule containing about 6,600 signatures, to the Lords on 27 February 1641.58Aston, Remonstrance Against Presbytery, sigs. A2, a2; Add. 36913, f. 64; PA, Main Pprs. 27 Feb. 1641, f. 2; Maltby, Prayer Book, 143.

The prefatory text to the remonstrance, of which Aston was almost certainly the main author – although William Prynne* claimed it was the work of certain (unnamed) ‘divines and lawyers’ – began by briefly praising Parliament for addressing ‘the common grievances of the kingdom’, before launching into a lengthy defence of episcopacy and a denunciation of puritan schemes for further reformation.59PA, Main Pprs. 27 Feb. 1641, f. 2; W. Prynne, The Antipathie of the English Lordly Prelacie (1641), epistle dedicatory; Maltby, Prayer Book, 93, 146. The studiedly moderate and ‘un-Laudian’ tone of the arguments Aston rehearsed in favour of episcopacy contrast with his treatment of puritanism, which assimilated all forms of puritan activity into one vast Presbyterian monolith that threatened to overtop Parliament, monarchy and ‘produce an extermination of nobility, gentry and order, if not of religion’. The result, as has recently been noted, was ‘a remarkably political ... defence of the ecclesiastical status quo, conducted more in terms of the likely political and social consequences of further reformation than of any very developed positive account of the spiritual benefits likely to be conferred on the nation by episcopacy’.60Maltby, Prayer Book, 143-6; Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 263-4.

The signatories to Aston’s remonstrance’s were headed by the lord lieutenant of Cheshire (an office he shared with his son Lord Strange), William Stanley, 6th earl of Derby, and included Robert Brerewood*, Henry Brooke* and Charles Walley*.61PA, Main Pprs. 27 Feb. 1641. Of the barons, Cholmondeley, Kilmorey and William Lord Brereton signed, as also, it was reported, did Rivers, although his signature is not on the original schedule.62Add. 36913, f. 122. Claims by Brereton and the Cheshire puritans that many of the signatures belonged to dead men, papists, or had been fraudulently obtained were probably exaggerated but not entirely groundless – although the Commons’ committee that investigated these charges was content to let the matter drop.63Add. 33936, f. 232; Procs. LP iv. 6-7, 321-2; An Humble Remonstrance to...the Lords (1641), sigs. A2-A2v (E.178.4); Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 264-5, 266, 274-6; Maltby, Prayer Book, 154-5. The remonstrance can be seen partly as an attempt by Aston to challenge Brereton for the mantle of Cheshire’s true representative on the national stage.64Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 262, 272. Nevertheless, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Aston’s attachment to a Church of England in which ‘the place of Prayer Book, episcopal government and the Reformation inheritance were secure’. Whether he was as strongly wedded to Laudian ceremonies and sacerdotalism is less clear. His refurbishment of Aston chapel reveals no profound enthusiasm on his part for the decorative and liturgical arrangements associated with the ‘new divinity’. Furthermore, his favoured style of worship may have been more sermon-based than that of most Laudians, for the pastor of his local church (Aston by Sutton chapel), of whom he was a patron, was a diligent preacher.65Maltby, Prayer Book, 24, 137-42; Richards, ‘Chapels of Cheshire’, 131-2.

Aston’s remonstrance was presented to the Lords on precisely the day (27 Feb. 1641) of a vital debate in the Commons on the settlement of religion in which Edward Hyde and his confederates were defending episcopacy in an attempt to drive a wedge between the parliamentary leadership and its Scottish allies. If nothing else, Aston’s remonstrance would offer evidence that the king ‘had a body of public opinion to appeal to’ on the issue of church reform. The significance of the Cheshire remonstrance was certainly not lost on the ‘junto’ peers in the Lords, who tried (unsuccessfully) to prevent or at least delay it being read.66Infra, ‘Edward Hyde’; Add. 36914, f. 224; Harl. 6424, f. 43; Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 279; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 270; Cust, Lake, Gentry Culture, 253-4. The timing of the remonstrance’s introduction in the Lords strongly suggests that Aston was in contact with the court and tailoring his political activities in Cheshire to the needs of royal strategy at Westminster. Indeed, Aston later claimed that the king had been ‘pleased so graciously to approve of the mere text or abstract’ of the remonstrance.67Aston, Remonstrance Against Presbytery, sig. A2. Aston’s eagerness to manipulate his local support-base in order to rebuild and strengthen his position at court would explain why he remained in London during the early months of 1641 rather than returning to Cheshire to take charge of the petitioning campaign in person.68Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 280-1.

Brereton and his local confederates have been held responsible for the next salvo in this battle of petitions – a long diatribe against ‘lordly prelates’ and the ‘diabolical’ institution of episcopacy that was printed in March 1641 and which its author claimed had been signed by what was an improbably large number of Cheshire gentry and freeholders.69The Humble Petition of … the County Palatine of Chester (1641); Procs. LP iv. 14-18; Maltby, Prayer Book, 148; Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 265. In fact, the evidence suggests that this new petition was primarily the work of the London-based anti-episcopal polemicist Henry Walker.70LJ iv. 204b-205a; J.R. Mawdesley, ‘Clerical Politics in Lancs. and Cheshire during the Reign of Charles I, 1625-49 (Sheffield Univ. PhD thesis, 2014), 173-4. But this did not stop Aston seizing upon what he called this ‘spurious issue of some brain-sick Anabaptist’ to discredit Brereton’s February petition and to harass its puritan supporters.71Aston, Remonstrance Against Presbytery, sig. a2; Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 265-6, 271. However, in his eagerness to do the king another service and not to ‘let the bastard [the March petition] disinherit the right issue [the remonstrance] of very many considerable persons’, he over-reached himself.72Add. 36913, f. 64; Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 270-1. Lacking the patience to garner support for his actions from the county, he simply consulted with Venables and the two Chester MPs Sir Thomas Smithe and Francis Gamul before presenting another petition to the Lords – which was read on 2 April – ‘in the behalf of the county palatine of Chester’, requesting the House to begin proceedings against the ‘seditious persons’ that he claimed were responsible for publishing the puritan counter-petition.73Add. 36913, ff. 62, 64; Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 271-2; Maltby, Prayer Book, 148; LJ iv. 204b-205a. Aston’s customarily intemperate language did not go down well in the Lords, which upbraided him for using ‘unfit and indiscreet expressions and such as were not allowable to be presented to so high and honourable a House’. However, when the ‘zealous party’ among the peers, led by Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, demanded that Aston be ‘brought upon his knees before the House for wronging the honour of it’, they were outvoted, and Aston was allowed to stand at the bar to explain himself, after which the Lords were ‘pleased to pass by the offence’.74Sloane 1467, f. 26v; LJ iv. 205a.

Viscounts Kilmorey and Cholmondeley and some of their gentry allies wrote to Aston, acknowledging his ‘good service’ to the county in presenting his counter-petition.75Add. 36914, ff. 222, 224; Aston, Remonstrance Against Presbytery, 1-3; Maltby, Prayer Book, 149-50; Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 270. But the Booth-Wilbraham gentry took a very different line, insisting that in claiming to speak for the county without consulting them Aston was guilty of high presumption. In the so-called ‘Attestation’, which Venables presented to the Commons on 22 May 1641, they repudiated not only the March petition but also Aston’s counter-petition: ‘we ... do utterly mislike that any one man should take so much power upon himself, without public trust and appointment, to use the name of the county ... when none of us were held worthy by him to be consulted withal nor to be made acquainted with his intent’.76CJ ii. 154a; Procs. LP iv. 525; Add. 36913, ff. 63v-64; Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 266-8.

By this stage, however, Aston had received an open acknowledgement of support from the king himself. Charles had written to Viscount Cholmondeley in March 1641 expressing his approval of the Cheshire remonstrance and with implicit permission to use this royal imprimatur to further the good work.77Add. 36914, f. 201; Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 282-3. Aston took the hint and dedicated his May 1641 tract, A Remonstrance Against Presbytery, to the king and included excepts from ‘that pledge of free grace given under your Majesty’s hand and seal’ to the Cheshire remonstrance.78Aston, Remonstrance Against Presbytery, sig. A3. The Remonstrance Against Presbytery was arguably the most impressive piece of royalist propaganda to emerge before the ‘paper skirmishes’ of 1642. Using a wide range of patristic and Protestant authorities (including a number of Reformed theologians), interspersed with quotations from Tacitus and other classical sources, Aston pleaded the case for iure divino episcopacy, as well as arguing that the introduction of Presbyterianism would subordinate church and state ‘to the arbitrary jurisdiction of a new corporation of apron-elders, mechanic artisans’.79Aston, Remonstrance Against Presbytery, sigs. Kv-K2, N2; Maltby, Prayer Book, 156-64, 166-70. Politically, the Remonstrance served three principal objectives – to establish that the episcopate was central to the ‘ancient constitution’ and ‘the operations of English monarchical state’; to equate the cause of godly reformation with populist puritan subversion of the entire social and political order, thereby frustrating bi-partisan initiatives for a compromise church settlement centred around a ‘moderated’ or ‘reduced’ episcopacy; and ‘to build a party for the king against a parliamentarian cause now definitively identified with the worst extremes of puritan radicalism’.80Cust, Lake, Gentry Culture, 284.

Encouraged by his return to favour at court, Aston set about organising a new Cheshire petitioning campaign in the spring of 1641, but with more forethought and attention to coalition-building than on previous occasions. As presented to the Lords on 20 December 1641, his third petition denounced the activities of ‘separatists’ and iconoclasts but made no reference to mainstream puritanism; and rather than defend the bishops (who were not mentioned at all) it merely requested that there be ‘no innovation of doctrine and liturgy...unless by the advice and consent of some national synod’. The petition also stressed the congruity between the doctrine and liturgy of the Church of England and those of the ‘Reformed churches’ on the continent. On this occasion, Aston was careful to circulate the petition in Cheshire – accompanied by the king’s letter of approval – before presenting it to Parliament.81Add. 36914, ff. 210, 216-17, 220-1; PA, Main Pprs. 20 Dec. 1641; T. Aston, A Collection of Sundry Petitions (1642), 21-2 (E.150.28); Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 282-3; Cust, Lake, Gentry Culture, 306-12.

Although Aston’s December 1641 petition has been described as ‘one of the most strongly worded’ of its kind, it contained nothing that would have offended those Calvinists – like the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*), for example – who favoured a moderated episcopacy (with preaching presbyters replacing lordly prelates) and the retention of the Prayer Book.82Infra, ‘Sir Ferdinando Fairfax’; Maltby, Prayer Book, 150-1. It was doubtless for this reason that – contrary to one recent account – the petition’s 9,000 or more signatories included the heads of the Booth-Wilbraham group as well as Viscounts Kilmorey and Cholmondeley and their allies.83PA, Main Pprs. 20 Dec. 1641; Morrill, Cheshire, 48. But if the petition’s wording and signatories breathed the spirit of moderation and cross-factional consensus back in Cheshire, the timing of its entry upon the parliamentary stage again indicates that Aston was using his claim to speak for the unbiased majority in his locality in order to further the king’s partisan agenda at Westminster. The petition’s presentation in the Lords has been linked to an initiative by the loyalist peer the 1st earl of Bristol (Sir John Digby†) to turn a Commons’ proposal proscribing the toleration of Catholicism into an ‘anti-puritan’ measure prohibiting any religious opinion except ‘what is or shall be established by the laws of the kingdom’. In fact, the earl seems to have won this particular battle by 20 December when the petition was presented.84CJ ii. 349a; LJ iv. 480b, 482b; Cust, Lake, Gentry Culture, 311-12. Rather than advance Bristol’s initiative, the petition’s introduction was very probably part of a larger campaign – of which the king’s reply to the Grand Remonstrance, published on 23 December, was a central component – to counter moves by the parliamentary leadership to neutralise the episcopal voting bloc in the Lords, where the bishops constituted a final but effective line of defence against the junto’s efforts to wrest power from the king.85Gardiner, Hist. of England, x. 108-9; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 467-70. Whereas the Cheshire petition’s focus on preserving the church’s liturgy and doctrine rather than its form of government can be seen as a subtle way of maximising support in the county, the timing of its presentation would have left few in any doubt that the bishops and the king were intended as its main beneficiaries. Its true political purpose is abundantly clear from the fact that it was delivered to the House by the lord keeper, 1st Baron Lyttleton (Edward Lyttleton II†), and at the king’s command – although to little effect, for the petition was not read.86LJ iv. 482a; Add. 36913, f. 136.

It was not Aston’s petitioning campaigns that finally landed him in serious trouble with the Commons but his role as a farmer of the customs on French wine at Chester. The House and the committee for customers summoned him to Westminster on several occasions in mid-1641 to render his accounts, but he ‘would not attend’.87CJ ii. 179a; Procs. LP v. 366. When Aston’s non-compliance with these summons, and the fact that he had paid a mere £300 for his farm and yet received more than £1,000 a year in profit, was brought to the House’s attention on 26 June, it ordered him to be sent for as a delinquent.88CJ ii. 189b; Procs. LP v. 366. Aston later claimed that as soon as he became aware that his presence was required at Westminster he had attended the committee for customers with his accounts only to be detained by the Commons’ serjeant-at-arms.89Add. 36918, f. 84; Procs. LP vi. 196. On 20 July, his petition requesting his release was referred by the Commons to the committee for customers, along with a petition presented by Sir Thomas Smithe from a group of Chester merchants, complaining about Aston’s ‘ill-usage’ in collecting their customs duties. That same day (20 July), the Commons voted that Aston should be brought to the bar of the House as a delinquent.90CJ ii. 218a; Procs. LP vi. 23, 25, 196. Denzil Holles presented another petition from Aston to the House on 4 August, but again it was referred to the committee for customers and the order that he be brought to the bar at some point was allowed to stand.91Procs. LP vi. 196. Aston was still under some form of restraint on 9 December, when the Commons ordered the serjeant-at-arms to give him notice to attend the committee for customers.92CJ ii. 337a.

Aston drew up yet another petition to the Lords in about mid-January 1642, requesting that the House make time to read and debate his December 1641 petition and also that it punish a curate in Cheshire who had been defaming the Book of Common Prayer.93Add. 36913, f. 136. But there is no sign that he ever presented this petition, or that he put in another appearance at Westminster – indeed, by May he had apparently joined the king at York. On 20 May, the king issued a warrant authorising the publication of Aston’s pamphlet, A Collection of Sundry Petitions – a compilation of 20 petitions from the universities and various counties in defence of episcopacy (‘that apostolic order’ as Aston termed it) and the Book of Common Prayer. Aston’s reputation as a champion of the established church now extended well beyond Cheshire, and in the preface to his pamphlet he expressed the hope that ‘this collection of these many sleeping petitions will show every county that the way is open’.94Aston, Collection of Sundry Petitions, sig. A2v; Maltby, Prayer Book, 176-7. It was perhaps the publication of this ‘scandalous’ work that prompted the Commons’ order of 9 June that he be summoned from York as a delinquent – an order repeated on 5 and 11 July.95CJ ii. 614b, 641b, 653b, 664b; PJ ii. 77.

The king, on the other hand, seems to have regarded Aston as his ‘chief adviser and point-man for all matters relating to Cheshire’; and it was likely that Aston played a leading role that summer in nominating the county’s commissioners of array and remodelling its commission of the peace.96Hutton, Royalist War Effort, 7; Cust, Lake, Gentry Culture, 333-5. On 20 June 1642, Charles ordered Aston and Earl Rivers to depart York for Cheshire with the commissions of array for the county and for Chester.97Add. 36913, f. 122v. Both men were active as Cheshire commissioners of array during the summer, and Aston also undertook to bring over Sir George Booth and his grandson George Boothe to the king’s party, although without success.98LJ v. 200a; HMC Portland, i. 45, 46; Add. 36913, f. 94; PJ ii. 159, 199; Morrill, Cheshire, 56. During the summer and early autumn, Aston raised a regiment of horse in Cheshire and Lancashire, and he and his own troop attended the king when he visited Chester late in September.99Cheshire Civil War Tracts, 60, 65; Wanklyn, ‘Landed Society’, 229. On 27 September, the Commons voted that Aston, Cholmondeley, Kilmorey and other leading Cheshire royalists be impeached of high treason for plundering the houses of the king’s subjects ‘and raising and being in actual war against the king and his good people’.100CJ ii. 784a. Aston had crossed the Rubicon, having made the unsurprising but still momentous step from defender of episcopacy to royalist militant.

Aston distinguished himself at the battle of Edgehill and thereby earned a commission from Prince Rupert as brigade commander for Cheshire; and in January 1643, he was dispatched from Oxford to secure the county against his old rival Sir William Brereton.101Add. 36913, ff. 84-5, 105, 107, 110; Harl. 164, ff. 290v-291, 339v; Cheshire RO, ZCR 67/12/1; Young, Edgehill, 205-6; Maltby, Prayer Book, 178-9; Hutton, Royalist War Effort, 44. Unfortunately for the king, Aston proved much less effective as a soldier than as a polemicist, losing two small but decisive battles to Brereton in rapid succession – partly through his own incompetence – and consequently ceding much of Cheshire to parliamentary control.102Cheshire RO, ZP/Cowper/2, ff. 28, 33-41; Civil War in Cheshire, 39-41; Hutton, Royalist War Effort, 44-6; Maltby, Prayer Book, 179. Aston was ‘much censured’ for these defeats, and after the second he was ‘put under an arrest’.103Cheshire RO, ZP/Cowper/2, f. 35. His reputation was now in tatters. He and his regiment were recalled to the main field army and never served in Cheshire again.104Hutton, Royalist War Effort, 46, 127; Maltby, Prayer Book, 179. Despite his lacklustre contribution to the royalist war effort, he was included in Parliament’s lists of notorious offenders in the Uxbridge and Newcastle peace propositions.105LJ vii. 55b; CJ iv. 353a.

Aston’s final defeat occurred in November 1645, when he and his troop were routed in a skirmish in Shropshire, and Aston himself, fighting bravely, was wounded and taken prisoner.106HMC Portland, i. 306; The Scottish Dove no. 109 (12-19 Nov. 1645), 861 (E.309.24). Among the papers found upon him were commissions ‘for a regiment in the west’ and to establish a garrison at Kingsbury or Nuneaton in Warwickshire.107HMC Portland, i. 306. He was imprisoned at Stafford, and in attempting to escape he received a blow to the head that, combined with his earlier wounds, proved fatal.108Ormerod, Cheshire, iii. pt. 2, p. 725. He died at Stafford on 24 March 1646 and was buried in the chapel of Aston by Sutton in his native Cheshire on 2 April.109Aston by Sutton par. reg. No will is recorded. Aston’s great-grandson, Sir Thomas Aston† 4th bt., sat for Liverpool from 1729 to 1734 and for St Albans 1734-41.110HP Commons 1715-54.