CLIFTON, Sir Gervase, 1st bt. (1587-1666), of Clifton-on-Trent, Notts.

The Cliftons were among Nottinghamshire’s oldest gentry houses, having held property at Clifton, near Nottingham, since the twelfth century.1A. C. Wood, ‘Notes on the early history of the Clifton fam.’, Trans. Thoroton Soc. xxxvii. 26. Members of the family had represented the county in Parliament on numerous occasions, although Clifton was the first to do so since his grandfather Gervase Clifton’s† election in 1539 (and possibly in 1542).2HP Commons 1386-1421; HP Commons 1509-58; Wood, ‘Clifton fam.’, 28, 31, 32; Clifton’s father and grandfather died when he was an infant, and his wardship was purchased by a group of family friends and relations, including the Derbyshire gentleman (Sir) John Harpur†. Harpur’s aristocratic patron, Gilbert Talbot, 7th earl of Shrewsbury, described the teenage Clifton as ‘of a rare and excellent wit’, which he attributed in part to the tuition of the Calvinist divine and scholar John Rawlinson.3HMC Hatfield, xii. 276. In later life, ‘gentle’ Gervase would also be noted for his hospitality and charity, which reportedly ‘extended from the king to the poorest beggar ... and exceeded very many of the nobility’.4T. Shipman, Carolina, or Loyal Poems (1662), 101; Thoroton, Notts. i. 108.

But what most distinguished Clifton from his contemporaries was his extraordinary matrimonial record.5Shipman, Carolina, 79-80; Mems. of the Holles Fam. ed. A.C. Wood (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, iv), 181. His first and second marriages were to daughters of two of England’s leading noble houses and were made primarily to produce children. His choice of wives three and four was apparently influenced by financial considerations – both were rich widows and were probably older than himself. His fifth and sixth marriages, by contrast, were to women of child-bearing age and may well have reflected his hope of siring more boys – the eldest of his two sons having proved a spendthrift and ne’er-do-well and, to Clifton’s mind, unfit to inherit the family estate. His final marriage was to a wealthy, middle-aged spinster – ‘a pretty tough hen for this Lent, without eggs’ as one of his friends uncharitably quipped – whose dowry helped Clifton pay off the swingeing composition fine that he had incurred through supporting the king in the civil war.6CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 279; Seddon, ‘Marriage and inheritance’, 33-8. These seven marriages brought Clifton large sums in terms of dowries, but in his attention to hospitality rather than estate-building he was in some ways as improvident as his eldest son.7Seddon, ‘Marriage and inheritance’, 39-40. Nevertheless, his estate was worth about £3,000 a year by the 1630s, and his palatial residence, Clifton Hall, had gardens and interiors that rivalled those of most of his aristocratic neighbours.8CSP Dom. 1635-6, p. 11; Mems. of the Holles Fam. ed. Wood, 165. His marriages also added considerably to his wide circle of friends, who included the future royalist general William Cavendish†, 1st earl of Newcastle (who appointed Clifton one of his deputy lieutenants for Nottinghamshire in 1626), his brother-in-law Sir Thomas Wentworth† (the future Viscount Wentworth and earl of Strafford) and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who for several years was tutor to his sons.9Nottingham Univ. Lib. CL C 486, 718-23; Pw 1/98; HMC Var. vii. 395, 399-400, 402, 419-20, 421-2; Wentworth Pprs. ed. J.P. Cooper (Cam. Soc. ser. 4, xii), 101-2, 280-1.

Clifton was returned for Nottinghamshire or Nottingham to every Parliament between 1614 and 1628. His zeal in collecting the privy seal loan and Forced Loan in 1626-7 apparently did no lasting damage to his credit and influence among the county’s voters.10SP16/55/1, ff. 1-2, 4v; CSP Dom. 1625-6, p. 231; Notts. Co. Recs. 110, 111; R. Cust, Forced Loan, 290, 314. Nor was his popularity weakened by his apparent lack of interest in distinguishing himself as a Parliament-man.11HP Commons 1604-29. In 1616, he was appointed steward of East Retford, where he was one of the leading local landowners, and he used his interest in the borough to secure the election of friends and relatives during the 1620s.12HMC Var. vii. 390, 424; P.R. Seddon, ‘A parliamentary election at East Retford 1624’, Trans. Thoroton Soc. lxxvi. 28-33. His connections with Newcastle and at court apparently strengthened during the personal rule, for he and the earl were among those appointed to attend Charles I on his visit to Scotland in 1633 – though Newcastle (and probably Clifton, too) confined himself to entertaining the king in Nottinghamshire during his progress north.13Nottingham Univ. Lib. CL D 1634; HMC Portland, ii. 122-3; ‘William Cavendish, 1st earl of Newcastle’, Oxford DNB,. Clifton was active on the Nottinghamshire bench during the 1630s and commented approvingly on the county sheriff’s collection of Ship Money.14Notts. RO, C/QSM/1/2-8; Nottingham Univ. Lib. PWV/684. At least two of his correspondents – Viscount Wentworth and Robert Pierrepont, 1st earl of Kingston (father of William* and Francis Pierrepont*) – assumed without question that he shared their view of the Covenanter rebellion as an affront to royal authority and English honour.15HMC Var. vii. 419-21. In the first bishops’ war in 1639, Clifton sent six cuirassiers and attendants to serve under Newcastle in the royal army and would have joined the earl himself but for domestic problems.16Nottingham Univ. Lib. CL C 343; HMC Var. vii. 421-2.

Clifton and the earls of Newcastle and Kingston emerged as Nottinghamshire’s most powerful electoral brokers following the summoning of a new Parliament late in 1639.17Supra, ‘Nottinghamshire’; Seddon, ‘The Notts. elections for the Short Parliament’, Trans. Thoroton Soc. lxxx. 65. Among those who lobbied for Clifton’s support in securing a seat in or for the county were Kingston (for his son Francis), Sir John Byron†, Sir Thomas Hutchinson* and Robert Sutton*.18Supra, ‘Nottinghamshire’; Nottingham Univ. Lib. CL C 237, 294-6, 344, 429/1-2, 620-1, 684, 687, 715; Seddon, ‘Notts. elections for the Short Parliament’, 65-7. Clifton himself was returned to the Short Parliament for East Retford late in March 1640, having voluntarily surrendered his place as senior knight of the shire to Hutchinson.19Supra, ‘East Retford’; ‘Nottinghamshire’; Nottingham Univ. Lib. CL C 684. He received no appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate. He and Sutton were among the Nottinghamshire deputy lieutenants who conscripted 300 men in the county that summer for service in the second bishops’ war.20SP16/462, ff. 35-6.

Clifton was returned for East Retford again in the elections to the Long Parliament that autumn and, in keeping with his previous showings at Westminster, made very little impression on the House’s proceedings.21Notts. RO, DD/HO/18/1. He was named to just four committees in the Long Parliament – including those for reforming the lord lieutenancy (14 December 1640) and the church courts (27 April 1641) – and contributed little if anything on the floor of the House.22CJ ii. 50b, 102b, 113a, 128b. He was apparently freer with his money than with his words, however, for he agreed to stand bond for £1,000 towards securing a City loan in November 1640 for the maintenance of the English and Scottish armies in the north; and on 3 March 1641, he pledged £500 as security on a City loan for paying off the Scots.23Procs LP i. 231, 235; ii. 620, 654.

Despite his low parliamentary profile, Clifton was thrust into the limelight on 21 April 1641, when he voted against the attainder of his old friend the earl of Strafford.24Verney, Notes, 58. His only Commons appointment after Strafford’s execution was as a reporter of a conference on 17 August concerning the defence of the kingdom.25CJ ii. 261a. His name then disappears from the Journal for almost ten months. In the spring of 1642, Clifton, Hutchinson and Sutton persuaded Parliament’s newly-appointed lord lieutenant for Nottinghamshire, John Holles, 2nd earl of Clare, not to nominate them to the Commons as his deputies – which suggests that they did not approve of the Militia Ordinance.26HMC Cowper, ii. 309. And although there is no evidence that Clifton joined the king at York, he had apparently abandoned his seat on or before 4 June, when he was granted leave of absence to take the waters at Bath for the recovery of his health.27CJ ii. 605b. If he was indeed ill – rather than pleading illness as a pretext to quit the House without reproach – it did not prevent him executing the commission of array in Nottinghamshire at some point that summer or autumn.28Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 61. By mid-September, the Commons was evidently suspicious of his absence, summoning him to attend its service; and in December, it received a report that he had requested the earl of Newcastle, commander of the king’s northern army, to send 500 dragoons to Nottingham.29CJ ii. 772a; Add. 18777, f. 97v.

Clifton’s decision to side with the king probably owed much to his intimacy with Newcastle and to a sense of personal loyalty to Charles, whom he had entertained at Clifton Hall on several occasions before the war. The link between Clifton’s religious sympathies and his war-time allegiance was more complex. He was deemed ‘very conformable and well affected’ to the Church of England and was certainly attached to the Book of Common Prayer, insisting on its use for the marriage of his son Clifford* in 1650.30Harl. 6803, f. 50; Nottingham Univ. Lib. CL C 167. However, there are intimations in his pre-war correspondence with his nephew, the future Presbyterian minister Francis Cheynell, that he remained a firm Calvinist and would have preferred some kind of ‘reduced’ episcopacy to a Laudian prelacy.31Nottingham Univ. Lib. CL C 70-84, 600. Certainly, Cheynell had no qualms in recommending to Clifton the works of the Northamptonshire minister Edward Reynolds (a leading moderate among the county’s godly during the 1630s) or the person of the future parliamentarian John Crewe I* (a non-Laudian episcopalian) as ‘a man sincerely and yet discretely religious, without faction or peevishness’.32Infra, ‘John Crewe I’; Nottingham Univ. Lib. CL C 80, 82.

Although he never bore arms during the civil war, Clifton was thoroughly committed to the royalist war effort. He was a leading figure in the counsels and administration of the royalist garrison at Newark, contributed substantial sums to the king’s cause and attended the Oxford Parliament – although he arrived too late to sign its letter to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, urging him to compose a peace.33Harl. 6852, ff. 16-17v; SO3/12, f. 232v; SP19/125, ff. 268, 294, 296, 298; SP23/195, p. 917; Notts. RO, M/9796; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 313; Mems. of Prince Rupert, iii. 49; CCAM 998, 1000; CTB i. 47; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 575. It was perhaps his failure to sign this letter that explains why he was never specifically disabled from sitting by the Commons. Yet his standing within the king’s party was highlighted early in 1645, when Charles nominated him to a commission that he proposed should command the kingdom’s militia as part of the projected settlement at the treaty of Uxbridge.34Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 217. And even as late as that autumn, when the royalists had clearly lost the war, Clifton continued to support military initiatives against the Nottinghamshire parliamentarians.35HMC 6th Rep. 80. He remained in Newark garrison until its surrender in May 1646, and a month later he petitioned to compound on the Newark articles.36SP23/195, p. 904; CCC 1318. His composition fine was set at two thirds of his estate – estimated at an exorbitant £12,120 – but was eventually reduced to a third, or £7,625.37SP23/75, pp. 244, 249; CCC 1318; CCAM 182; CJ v. 429b; LJ x. 80a, 645a.

Clifton emerged from the civil war in desperate financial straits, having suffered damages to his woods and three of his houses to the tune (or so it was claimed) of £3,000 and with debts that, by 1649, amounted to £10,526. Moreover, his estate remained under sequestration for at least four years during the later 1640s.38LC4/203, f. 86; SP23/75, p. 244; SP23/195, p. 897; Seddon, ‘Marriage and inheritance’, 37. Although he was listed as one of the leaders of a projected royalist uprising in England in 1658, he apparently took no part in cavalier conspiracies during the 1650s.39Bodl. Eng. hist. e.309, p. 8. In the spring of 1660, Clifton joined Sutton and other nobility and gentry ‘now residing in and about the city of London’, in a declaration thanking General George Monck* for his courage in asserting ‘the public liberty’. The signatories also renounced any intention to take revenge upon their parliamentarian enemies and declared their loyalty ‘to the present power, as it now resides in the council of state’.40A Declaration of the Nobility and Gentry that Adhered to the Late King (1660, 669 f.24.69). Shortly after Charles II landed in Dover late in May 1660, Clifton, Sutton, William Pierrepont and other Nottinghamshire grandees signed a congratulatory address to the king ‘for your so happy regaining at once both the affections and obedience of your people’.41SP29/1/42, f. 82. Returned for East Retford to the Cavalier Parliament, Clifton was listed by Philip, 4th Baron Wharton – somewhat optimistically – as a likely supporter of a Presbyterian church settlement.42G.F.T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 353.

Clifton died on 28 June 1666 and was buried with great pomp in Clifton church on 2 August.43Add. 38141, ff. 21-5; J. Raine, Hist. and Antiquities of the Par. of Blyth (1860), 143. In his will, he left £1,000 to cover his funeral arrangements, made bequests totalling well over £3,000 and charged his estate with annuities of £250.44Notts. RO, PR/NW, Will of Sir Gervase Clifton, 1666; Nottingham Univ. Lib., CL D 1503. His second son and heir Clifford* was returned for East Retford in 1659 and 1661.