IRBY, Sir Anthony (1605-82), of Boston, Lincs., and Great Almonry, St Margaret, Westminster.

Background and early career

Irby’s family, a younger branch of the Cumberland Irebys, had settled in Lincolnshire by the early fourteenth century.61Irby, Irbys of Lincs. i. pp. xvii, 1. His kinsman, Leonard Irby†, had represented Stamford and Boston on numerous occasions between 1545 and 1571, and his grandfather, Anthony Irby† senior, had sat for Boston in seven Parliaments between 1589 and 1621.62HP Commons 1509-58; HP Commons 1558-1603. A distinguished lawyer and a firm Calvinist, Irby senior became Irby’s guardian upon the death of his father in 1610.63WARD7/36/160; C142/417/53; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Anthony Irby’. Irby senior secured his grandson’s admission at Lincoln’s Inn – and the patronage of the future parliamentarian grandee Oliver St John* as one of Irby junior’s manucaptors – and then at one of Cambridge’s most godly colleges, Emmanuel.64L. Inn Lib. Admiss. Bk. 5, f. 43v; J. T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry (1984), 92-4.

Irby’s grandfather died without surviving children in 1625 – just a year after his appointment as recorder of Boston – leaving Irby an estate in and around the town reputedly worth more than £4,000 a year (although its true value was probably less than half that amount).65Irby, Irbys of Lincs. i. 25, 37; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Anthony Irby’; Boston Corporation Mins. ed. Bailey, ii. 444, 451. Not only did Irby thus become one of Lincolnshire’s wealthiest gentlemen, with enough surplus cash to invest in the Virginia Company and the Society of the Fishery of Great Britain, he also inherited his grandfather’s puritan sympathies.66SP16/231/15, f. 21; T. K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 321. Indeed, Irby was a noted patron of godly ministers and employed as his domestic chaplain the strongly millenarian Benjamin Stoneham.67The Life and Death of That Holy and Reverend Man of God Mr Thomas Cawton (1662), epistle dedicatory; Cliffe, Puritan Gentry, 207. His godly convictions notwithstanding, he was among the more diligent of Lincolnshire’s commissioners for collecting contributions in the mid-1630s towards the re-edification of St Paul’s Cathedral – a project much favoured by the king and Archbishop William Laud but denounced by the puritan physician John Bastwick as ‘making a seat for a priest’s arse’.68LMA, CLC/313/I/B/004/MS25474/002, pp. 48, 49; K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992), 322-6.

Like several other leading Lincolnshire puritans, Irby emerged in the vanguard of the county’s resistance to unparliamentary taxation in 1627 by refusing to pay the Forced Loan. Summoned before the privy council to answer for his defiance, he apparently agreed to make his submission, for he was not imprisoned like his brother-in-law Sir John Wray* and several other Lincolnshire loan refusers but ordered to remain in attendance.69SP16/56/39, f. 53v; APC 1627, p. 142; R. Cust, The Forced Loan (Oxford, 1987), 172, 226; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir Anthony Irby’. He stood for Boston in 1628, and by dint of petitioning the Commons against the corporation’s return of a rival candidate he succeeded in securing an order for extending the franchise to the freemen as a whole.70HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Boston’. Despite allegations that he had spearheaded resistance to Ship Money in the Boston area in 1635, he was chosen as sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1637 and apparently made a determined effort to collect the levy in the face of widespread resistance in the county and incompetence on the part of the privy council.71CSP Dom. 1637, pp. 526-7; 1637-8, pp. 28, 138, 211-12, 220, 267, 307, 589; 1638-9, pp. 29-30, 188, 318-19, 503; 1639, pp. 20, 49, 195, 371, 466, 510-11; The Compleat Justice (1661), 382; Holmes, Lincs. 131-3. The contemporaneous preparations for the first bishops’ war imposed an additional burden, for as one of Lincolnshire’s deputy lieutenants he was involved in mobilising the county’s trained bands.72PC2/50, f. 188v; CSP Dom. 1637, p. 176. His slowness in paying in the county’s arrears of Ship Money was interpreted as disaffection, prompting the king to declare that he was ‘much displeased’ with Irby’s ‘ill carriage’. Irby certainly seems to have been less eager to proceed against defaulters than his predecessor – the future royalist Sir Edward Hussey* – and by early 1640, he was being threatened with prosecution in star chamber and was required to attend the council daily until he had satisfied the full sum.73PC2/49, ff. 175v, 192v; PC2/50, ff. 30, 63v, 92v-93, 117v, 188v; PC2/51, ff. 87v,107v, 151v; CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 300, 470; Holmes, Lincs. 131, 133.

Irby and the reformist cause, 1640-1

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Irby was returned again for Boston.74Supra, ‘Boston’. He received only four committee appointments in this Parliament and made only two recorded contributions in debate – the first, criticising the bishop of Norwich’s injunction that the communion table be placed ‘altar-wise’; and the second, complaining about the lack of sermons in Lincolnshire’s churches.75CJ ii. 4a, 9a, 17b, 18b; Aston’s Diary, 90, 95. In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn, he retained his seat and soon emerged as one of the most active members of the Commons.76Supra, ‘Boston’. Between November 1640 and May 1642, when he went into Lincolnshire to secure the county for Parliament, he was named to almost 80 committees, helped to manage or report from four conferences, served as a messenger to the Lords on five occasions and was a teller in two divisions.77CJ ii. 97a, 110b, 205a, 281a, 307b, 379b, 448a, 469b, 485a, 506a, 575a; LJ iv. 602a, 633a, 685b; v. 68a.

Irby was apparently an enthusiastic participant in the Long Parliament’s campaign to reform the perceived abuses of the personal rule.78Procs. LP iii. 468. Certainly a high proportion of his early appointments were to committees for investigating the prerogative courts, Ship Money and military charges and for addressing perceived instances of Caroline injustice.79CJ ii. 43a, 44b, 50b, 53b, 58a, 75a, 87a, 91a, 114a, 123b, 157a, 178b, 181b, 200a, 201a. But aside from nomination to two committees concerning the prosecution of the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†), he apparently played no part in the Commons’ attack on the king’s ‘evil counsellors’.80CJ ii. 79b, 98a. He was more concerned, it seems, with the local impact of crown policies. One of his first actions in the House was to present a petition of grievances from the townspeople of Boston (7 Nov. 1640).81Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 21. Several of his appointments, including three as a conference reporter, concerned the disbandment of the king’s army, part of which was quartered in Lincolnshire awaiting arrears of pay.82CJ ii. 69b, 110b, 205a, 281a. His concern to raise money to pay off the royal and Scottish armies and thus lighten the burden of quartering in the northern counties probably explains his addition to the committee on the poll tax bill and his willingness in March 1641, and possibly again in August, to stand bond for securing a loan from the City.83CJ ii. 180a, 238b; Procs. LP ii. 628. With the armies disbanded by early 1642, Irby and Sir Edward Ayscoghe were ordered to prepare an order for paying the billet money due to the inhabitants of Lincolnshire.84CJ ii. 441b.

Another local issue on which Irby posed as the champion of the commoners’ interests was the drainage of the Lincolnshire fens. This was doubtless familiar political territory for him as a sewers commissioner and having served on several improvement commissions in the 1630s for treating with the commoners of Lincolnshire’s North and West Fens.85The Title...to Certain Improved Lands in the West and North Fenns in the County of Lincoln (1654, 669 f.19.56); The Earle of Lindsey His Title (1654). At several points in the May, June and July 1641, he denied that the county’s fenlanders had acted ‘riotously’ in resisting crown-sponsored drainage schemes and argued that orders made by the Lords in favour of Robert Bertie, 1st earl of Lindsey and his fellow undertakers in the project to drain the Holland fen represented a breach of the Commons’ privileges.86CJ ii. 147b, 192a, 205b; Procs. LP iv. 393-4; v. 425, 587, 589; vi. 123. In so doing, he was implicitly endorsing the fenlanders’ destruction of Lindsey’s drainage works that spring.87Lindley, Fenland Riots, 112-13. On 11 December, he presented a petition from the Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire gentry protesting that ‘the new dam made by Sir Cornelius Vermuyden did endanger the drowning of divers thousands of inhabitants in Wisbech and in part of Lincolnshire’.88D’Ewes (C), 267. Nevertheless, he was named to a committee set up on 4 May 1642 for confirming Vermuyden’s patent to drain Hatfield Chase and the Isle of Axholme.89CJ ii. 557b. And when the commoners endangered his own drainage works, as they did in 1641 and again in 1646, he petitioned both Houses requesting that the ‘rioters’ be apprehended. He and his fellow investors, who included Philip Lord Herbert* (the future 5th earl of Pembroke) and Francis Russell*, claimed to have sunk more than £150,000 in improving Hatfield Level and insisted that the rioters had ‘no just cause of complaint’.90Eg. 3518, f. 86; PA, Main Pprs. 11 Aug. 1646; JRL, R.45817, 73/32; HMC 6th Rep. 130; PJ ii. 315, 378; Lindley, Fenland Riots, 152.

There can be no doubt, however, as to Irby’s sincerity in supporting the House’s initiatives for reforming religion and suppressing popery. He attended at least three meetings of the sub-committee of the Commons’ standing committee for religion – set up on 23 November 1640 ‘to discover the many sufferings of ministers by ecclesiastical proceedings’.91Procs. in Kent 1640 ed. Larking, 80, 81, 98. In addition, he was named to a series of ad hoc committees relating to godly reform during the first 18 months of the Long Parliament, including those to remove altars and superstitious images from churches, to abolish idolatry and superstition and to expedite the calling of the Westminster Assembly (25 Apr. 1642).92CJ ii. 72a, 84b, 91a, 99a, 113b, 119a, 165b, 184b, 437b, 448b, 541b. His ecclesiological preferences were probably a factor in his selection by the House on 10 March 1642 to request the godly divines Cornelius Burges and Simeon Ashe to preach the next fast sermon.93CJ ii. 473b. Both Burges and Ashe were committed to the idea of ‘disciplined national church’, and they would subsequently emerge as leaders of the London Presbyterian ministry.94‘Simeon Ashe’, ‘Cornelius Burges’, Oxford DNB. Similarly, his first tellership, on 5 March 1641, revealed a willingness to support the parliamentary leadership in conciliating the Covenanters – evidence, perhaps, that he may have sympathised with some aspects of the Scots’ political and religious programme.95CJ ii. 97a; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 200. True to his Calvinist principles, he also seems to have had a special regard for the welfare of Charles Lewis, elector palatine and his family.96Harl. 165, f. 115; CJ iii. 674b; iv. 58a; v. 346a; vi. 32b; LJ x. 119a, 511a. Irby aligned with the ‘governing party’ at Westminster again on 8 November 1641 – a week after news of the Irish Rebellion had reached London – when he was a teller with Sir Thomas Barrington in support of John Pym’s veiled threat to the king that unless he removed his evil counsellors, Parliament would ‘take such a course for the securing of Ireland as might likewise secure our selves’.97CJ ii. 307b; D’Ewes (C), 104-5; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 423-4; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 427. Thereafter, Irby featured regularly in Commons’ initiatives for securing control of the kingdom’s military resources and for justifying its proceedings to the king and the public.98CJ ii. 343b, 379b, 381a, 448a, 461a, 482a, 484a, 485a, 486a, 574a, 575a; PJ ii. 331. On 22 March 1642, he and two peers were appointed to present the king with a parliamentary declaration, warning him that there could be no progress towards a reconciliation until he gave his assent to the Militia Ordinance.99CJ ii. 491b; PJ ii. 71, 73; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 483. Having presented this declaration to the king at York, ‘where they found no cheerful entertainment of their negotiation’, the parliamentary trio hurried back to Westminster, bearing with them Charles’s stinging reply to Parliament’s previous declaration.100The Petition of Both Houses of Parliament…to His Majestie at York (1642), 1-6 (E.141.23); CJ ii. 505b; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 392-3; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 483-4.

Fighting for Parliament, 1642-3

Irby figured prominently in Parliament’s efforts to secure Lincolnshire against the royalists during the spring and summer of 1642. On 21 April, he successfully moved that the county be supplied with arms from the magazine at Hull, and in May the Commons sent him, Sir Edward Ayscoghe, Sir John Wray and several other Lincolnshire MPs into the county to execute the Militia Ordinance.101CJ ii. 585b; LJ v. 87a-88b; PJ ii. 198. It was with these appointments that the Lincolnshire county committee was established. Irby spent most of the next two months in Lincolnshire assisting its parliamentary lord lieutenant, Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham, in his efforts to wrest control of the county’s trained bands from the king’s party.102CJ ii. 812b; LJ v. 104, 131b-132a; PJ iii. 12, 13-14; HMC Portland, i. 40. He had returned to Westminster by 18 July, when he and Ayscoghe denounced a petition to the Commons from the Lincolnshire royalists.103PJ iii. 227. The next day (19 July), he was paired with the MP who would be his most common partner as teller, the godly Sir Walter Erle, against approving one of the king’s amendments to the treaty with the Scots for suppressing the Irish rebellion.104CJ ii. 680b. On 19 September, Irby and the other Lincolnshire county committeemen declared for Parliament and brought in money and horses for the army of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.105CJ ii. 772b. Irby’s decision to side with Parliament was consistent with his godly religious convictions and history of opposition to Charles’s policies.

Commissioned by the earl of Essex in August to raise a troop of 100 dragoons in Lincolnshire, Irby had assembled a strong enough force by early October to seize the county’s royalist sheriff and his party.106CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 369; CJ ii. 801a; A Vindication from Colonell Sands (1642), sig. A4v (E.122.9). In November, it was reported that Irby was raising dragoons to send to the assistance of the Yorkshire parliamentarians. But like his kinsman Sir Christopher Wray*, he was apparently reluctant to put his men under the command of Lord Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*).107CJ ii. 858b, 873b, 891a; LJ v. 473a, 494b, 527b; Add. 18777, ff. 66, 97, 100v. Assuming Irby commanded his regiment in person between late 1642 and April 1643, he was stationed for most of that period at Hull, Selby and Wakefield (in Yorkshire) and in parts of north Lincolnshire.108SP28/298, ff. 326-7. It is unlikely that he was at the head of his regiment when it was deployed by Oliver Cromwell* at the siege of Crowland on 25 April, for he resigned his commission just a week or so later, on 2 May – the very day on which the Commons ordered him and several other Lincolnshire MPs to return to Lincolnshire to assist Cromwell in defending the county.109SP28/31, f. 575; CJ iii. 67b; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 226. However, there is no indication that Irby left London until late July, when he and several other MPs were sent to the Eastern Association committee at Cambridge in order to supervise the sending of forces to Lord Willoughby at Gainsborough.110CJ iii. 188b; Harl. 165, ff. 132, 136v; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 249; SP28/265, f. 549.

Alignment with the war-party, 1643-5

Apart from this mission into the Eastern Association and half a dozen or so relatively short leaves of absence, Irby seems to have attended the Commons on a regular basis from mid-1643 through to November 1648.111CJ iii. 373b, 502a; iv. 158a, 259a; v. 132b, 281a, 330a, 400b; vi. 41b. During that period he was named to almost 200 committees – five of which he reported from and may well have chaired112CJ iii. 120a, 138b, 345b, 370b, 591b, 600b; iv. 75a, 89a, 235a, 235b. – and was appointed a messenger to the Lords on 27 occasions.113CJ iii. 91a, 113b, 280a, 674b; iv. 6b, 39a, 89a, 105b, 107a, 237b, 253b, 363a, 460a, 560a, 638a; v. 84b, 85b, 390b, 412b, 414a, 477b, 493b, 515b, 518a; vi. 32b, 80b, 82b; LJ vi. 51b, 79a, 261a; vii. 119a, 166a, 314b, 532a, 551a; viii. 195a, 341b, 454a; ix. 14a, 579b, 622a; x. 88b, 111a, 161b, 511a. In addition, he served as a teller in 33 divisions.114CJ iii. 97a, 177b, 647a, 705b; iv. 95a, 123a, 153b, 336a, 436a, 442b; v. 28a, 34b, 46a, 50a, 76a, 132b, 187b, 233b, 236a, 253b, 350a, 467a, 468b, 472b, 485b, 501a, 559b, 574a, 674a, 696b; vi. 6b, 24a. A sizeable proportion of his appointments, certainly during the early years of the war, concerned the supply and management of Parliament’s forces.115CJ iii. 89a, 132a, 140a, 183a, 298b, 309b, 322b, 333a, 345b, 431b, 435a, 454a, 477b, 482a, 498b, 607a, 617a, 635b, 679b, 681b; iv. 28b, 115b As might be expected, he played a prominent role in the affairs of the Eastern Association, and he seems to have attended the Eastern Association Committee* at Westminster on a regular basis.116CJ iii. 159a, 260b, 307a, 655b, 688b; iv. 75a, 89a, 114b, 120a, 225a, 235a, 235b, 237b, 327b, 427a, 638a; v. 23b, 475a; LJ viii. 351b; SP28/251, unfol. In contrast to his kinsmen, the Wrays, he apparently avoided becoming embroiled in the quarrel between Lord Willoughby and the commander of the Eastern Association army, Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester.117C. Holmes, ‘Col. King and Lincs. politics, 1642-6’, HJ xvi. 454-8. He worked alongside Willoughby in Lincolnshire during August 1643, and on 18 October he was a messenger to desire the Lords to join with the Commons in urging the earl of Essex to bestow ‘some employment of honour’ upon Willoughby.118SP28/265, f. 549; CJ iii. 280a. On 6 November, however, Irby and the ‘fiery spirit’ Sir Peter Wentworth were appointed to present Manchester with the thanks of the Commons for his ‘great service to the commonwealth’.119CJ iii. 302b. Irby’s apparent enthusiasm for the vigorous prosecution of the war probably explains why the Commons sought his services in administering the excise – the proceeds of which were swallowed up in military expenditure.120CJ iii. 489a, 551b; iv. 107a; A. and O i. 691. But his support for the war effort was tempered, it seems, by a desire for financial retrenchment and the stamping out of corruption and maladministration at local and national level.121CJ iii. 181a, 429a, 473b, 601a; iv. 123b, 477a; v. 70a.

Irby’s zeal in the parliamentarian cause was rooted in his commitment to the advancement of godly religion. He was named to a series of committees throughout the period 1643-8 for maintaining the ministry (including two committees for the ‘true payment’ of tithes), eradicating superstition and popery and for suppressing ‘adultery, whoredom, drunkenness, swearing and blaspheming’.122CJ iii. 144a, 340b, 566b, 579b; iv. 35b, 97b, 595b, 632a; v. 460b, 471a. In October 1643, he was added to the Committee for Plundered Ministers* – of which he was an active member – and was appointed to the 1646 and 1648 commissions for excluding ‘scandalous’ persons from communion.123CJ iii. 283b; A. and O i. 853, 1208; R. Heblethwaite, To the Honourable House of Commons Assembled in Parliament (1647), 11. When the Commons proposed sending two preaching ministers to Lincoln in the autumn of 1644, it relied upon Irby and Sir Christopher Wray to confer with the Westminster Assembly about finding suitable candidates.124CJ iii. 644a. The ministers whom Irby was appointed by the Commons either to request or thank for sermons were invariably ‘orthodox’ Presbyterian divines, among them John Arrowsmith, Thomas Jaggard, Herbert Palmer and Anthony Tuckney.125CJ iv. 63a, 653a; v. 66a, 265b, 471b; vi. 12a; R.S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord (Edinburgh, 1985), 119; T. Liu, Puritan London (Newark, DE, 1986), 65, 69. Although Irby rarely spoke on the floor of the House, he felt moved to complain to the Commons on 29 November 1643 about the poor quality of sermons in St Margaret’s, Westminster, on the sabbath and was seconded by the equally pious Sir Simonds D’Ewes.126Harl. 165, f. 221. Irby also took parliamentary fast days very seriously, alleging on 27 December 1643 that some MPs had ‘dined at a tavern in Westminster the last fast day’ and desiring that they might be punished.127Harl. 165, f. 258.

Several of Irby’s tellerships are also revealing of his religious views. On 1 October 1644, he was a teller with Sir Gilbert Gerard – his near neighbour in St. Margaret’s parish, Westminster – in favour of retaining a clause in the ordinance for ordaining ministers, requiring congregations to ‘obey and submit’ to their ministers ‘as being over them in the Lord’. Irby and Gerard lost the division to two leading members of the Erastian, pro-toleration element in the House: Oliver St John and Sir Henry Vane II.128CJ iii. 647a; SP28/167, pt. 4, unfol. Irby made his clericalist, Presbyterian loyalties clear during a debate on the Directory for Worship on 26 November, when he was a minority teller with Sir Robert Harley in favour of retaining a clause that the sacrament should be administered ‘as in the Church of Scotland’.129CJ iii. 705b. Irby’s reverence for the ministry prompted his tellership with Sir Walter Erle on 31 December 1646 in favour of an order against unordained persons expounding the scriptures in public. On this occasion Irby was on the winning side – the losing tellers being the Independent grandees Oliver Cromwell and Sir Arthur Hesilrige.130CJ v. 34b.

Irby can be numbered among those few MPs who held the Scots and their church in high esteem, and by the summer of 1643 there are signs that he was aligned with John Pym and the ‘fiery spirits’ in seeking Scottish military support. On 3 June and 18 July, he carried messages to the Lords for expediting the sending of commissioners to Scotland to negotiate a treaty.131CJ iii. 113b, 172a; LJ vi. 79a, 135a. He endorsed Pym’s Scottish-style vow and covenant, which was introduced in June in the wake of Edmund Waller’s* plot – and he was named to several committees set up in June and July to emphasise the threat that royalist dealings with the Irish, especially with Randal Macdonnell, 2nd earl of Antrim, posed to the Protestant religion in all three kingdoms.132CJ iii. 118a, 120a, 127b, 138b, 154a. Such was the importance he attached to the Solemn League and Covenant that on 6 November, he startled all ‘sober-minded’ men by proposing that those MPs who scrupled at taking the new oath ought to be expelled from the Commons and suffer imprisonment and confiscation of their estate.133Harl. 165, f. 222. This was further than even the most zealous of the fiery spirits were prepared to go.134Harl. 165, ff. 222-222v. One possible point of contact between Irby and the Covenanter leadership was William Kerr, 3rd earl of Lothian, whose father, Robert Ker, 1st earl of Ancram, was another of Irby’s neighbours in St Margaret’s, Westminster.135WCA, SMW/E/47/1580, unfol.; ‘William Kerr, 3rd earl of Lothian’, Oxford DNB.

Irby played a leading role in the Commons’ efforts during 1644 and 1645 to supply the Scottish forces in England and to encourage their advance southwards.136CJ iii. 602b; iv. 53a, 55a, 66b, 67a, 105a, 111b, 205b, 246b, 362b. He was also named first to a committee set up on 14 March 1645 to maintain the New Scots’ army in Ulster.137CJ iv. 78a. He made his most important contribution to the cause of closer union between the two kingdoms as a member of the Committee for Scottish Affairs, which was set up on 28 September 1643 to liaise with the City authorities about raising money for the Scots’ forces in Ulster and those soon to enter England.138CJ iii. 258a. This committee would evolve in 1644 into the Committee for Compounding.139Supra, ‘Committee for Compounding’; CCC 1. Irby was a leading figure on the Committee for Compounding, attending and chairing its meetings on a regular basis from October 1643 right through until early January 1649.140Supra, ‘Committee for Compounding’; SP23/1A, pp. 1, 103; SP23/2, pp. 54, 135; SP23/3, pp. 1, 388; SP23/4, pp. 16, 216; SP23/5, pp. 1, 42; SP46/106, ff. 272, 273, 277, 280, 299; Add. 36452, f. 123; Eg. 2978, ff. 200, 224; LJ viii. 485a; CCC 14, 16, 19, 20, 129, 790, 879; CCAM 57; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 26 (19-26 Sept. 1648), sig. Llv (E.464.15); J. Stawell, To the Supreme Authority the Parliament of the Common-wealth of England (1653), 59-60 (E.1072.2); J. Ashe*, An Answer to Divers Scandals (1654), 15-17 (E.1072.2); An Answer of the Purchasers of the Lands Late of Sir John Stawel (1655), 53-4 (E.1072.3); The Vindication of Sir John Stawells Remonstrance (1655), 14-16, 19, 49-52, 83-6 (E.1072.4). He made numerous reports from the committee – sometimes on matters relating to the supply of the Scots but more often the cases of individuals wishing to compound for their estates.141CJ iv. 55a, 66b, 67a, 72a, 664a, 674a; v. 52b, 64a, 80a, 81b, 123a, 182a, 184b, 193b, 204a, 412b, 420a, 510a, 515a, 520a, 539b, 683b, 686b, 690a; vi. 3b, 16a, 21a, 24a, 30b, 33a, 35a, 40a. He also received a number of appointments relating to the reform and smooth running of the composition machinery.142CJ v. 8b, 70a, 84b, 85b, 102b; LJ ix. 14a.

Irby’s zeal for godly reformation may partly explain his apparent willingness to accept the necessity of seeking outright military victory against the king, and this, in turn, seems to have prevented him becoming closely identified with the more pacific, Presbyterian interest until 1647. Although he was named to committees on 29 August 1644 and on 2 April and 20 May 1645 for thanking and rewarding the earl of Essex, he appears to have backed the policy of new modelling the armies.143CJ iii. 611a; iv. 96b, 148b. On 1 February 1645, he was a messenger to desire the Lords to take the ordinance for establishing the New Model army into immediate consideration, ‘in regard of the important necessity of the speedy passing thereof’, and in March he was named to committees for raising £80,000 for the new army and on the Self-Denying Ordinance.144CJ iv. 39a, 71a, 88a. On 25 April, he was a teller with the war-party MP Valentine Wauton in favour of reducing the regiment of Colonel Thomas Ayloff (a probable opponent of the New Model) into that of Colonel John Pickering – a close colleague of Cromwell and part of the Independent faction in the Eastern Association army. Irby and Wauton won the division from the Presbyterian MPs Denzil Holles and Bulstrode Whitelocke.145CJ iv. 123a; ‘John Pickering’, Oxford DNB. Nevertheless, Irby did not share the war party’s vindictive stance towards its leading opponents, serving as a majority teller on 31 March with Holles against ordering the Essexian peer Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland to remove himself from London.146CJ iv. 95a.

Irby and Anglo-Scottish relations, 1644-6

From the autumn of 1645, it is possible to detect a hardening in Irby’s attitude towards the Scots – probably as a result of the abuses committed by their forces in the northern counties. He was a teller with Erle on 8 November in favour of postponing work indefinitely on a declaration to the Scots, justifying Parliament’s proceedings in relation to settling church government. The majority tellers were the Presbyterian grandees Holles and Sir Philip Stapilton, who succeeded in having the words ‘for the present’ tacked on to this resolution.147CJ iv. 336a. Ten days later (18 Nov.), Irby was named to an Independent-dominated committee for inserting into a reply to the Scots’ complaints about their army’s lack of pay, an enumeration of all the money that the Scottish forces had received from Parliament. The result was a very acerbic document that the Lords refused to join the Commons in publishing.148CJ iv. 347b; D. Scott, ‘The “northern gentlemen”’, HJ xlii. 364.

With Newark, on the Nottinghamshire-Lincolnshire border, the focus of military operations in the north by late 1645, Irby was named with Ayscoghe, Sir Christopher Wray and other Members from the two counties as a commissioner from both Houses to reside with the English and Scottish forces besieging the town.149CJ iv. 366b. The commissioners’ principal role was to supply and police the pay-starved and ill-disciplined Scottish army in order to prevent any ‘plundering, robbing or spoiling’ of the Newark area.150CJ iv. 374b-375a; LJ viii. 43b-44a. Irby’s nomination was contested by the Independents, however, and on 5 December the House divided on whether his name should stand in the commission. The Presbyterian MPs Holles and Sir John Curzon won the division from the Independents, Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire.151CJ iv. 366b. It would appear, on the face of it, that Holles and Curzon supported Irby’s nomination in order to boost Presbyterian numbers on what was a sensitive commission in terms of Anglo-Scottish relations. An alternative scenario, however, is that Hesilrige and Evelyn were keen to keep Irby at Westminster in order to make use of his considerable knowledge of parliamentary expenditure on the Scots. In any event, Irby did not depart for Newark until April 1646, and before doing so he was named to the so-called ‘northern committee’, which was set up to consider and forward Parliament’s various complaints against the Scots.152CJ iv. 417a, 427a, 436a, 442b, 451b, 481b. It was possibly with the backing of the Independents that an order passed the House on 3 April for paying Irby £1,000 out of Lincolnshire’s composition fines in full of his arrears as a parliamentary colonel.153CJ iv. 499a; CCC 792. He joined the rest of the commissioners at Newark in time to sign their letter of 8 May, at the conclusion of the siege, praising the English forces for their ‘fidelity, courage and good discipline’ but remaining pointedly silent about the conduct of the Scottish army.154LJ viii. 306b, 309b, 310a. On 30 May, the commissioners were thanked by the Commons for their ‘great industry, faithfulness and judgement’.155CJ iv. 559a.

Back at Westminster, Irby was again complicit in initiatives that struck at the Scots and their English allies. On 1 June 1646, he was a messenger to desire the Lords to expedite an ordinance relating to Philip Sidney, viscount Lisle’s* lieutenancy of Ireland (which both the Scots and the Presbyterians opposed) and to respond to a Commons’ vote that the Scots surrender the king to parliamentary custody.156CJ iv. 560a; LJ viii. 341b. A little over a week later (9 June), he was named to a committee ‘to state what cause this House has of complaints and jealousies’ against the Scottish army in England.157CJ iv. 570b. Early in August, when the Commons gave order for despatching a regiment quartered in the Boston area to Ireland (very probably as part of Lisle’s expedition), it selected Irby and the future Rumpers Miles Corbett and Thomas Toll I to oversee this task.158CJ iv. 633a. In August and September, he was included on committees to ‘confute or bear down’ the Scots’ estimate of the money Parliament owed their army and for raising the first half of the £400,000 that the Scots demanded before they would withdraw their forces from English soil.159CJ iv. 650b, 663a; Harington’s Diary, 33.

Backing the Presbyterians, 1647-8

Only once the withdrawal of the Scottish army was assured, thereby removing any military justification for maintaining the New Model except for service in Ireland, does it appear that Irby moved into close alignment with the Presbyterian faction at Westminster. On 25 December 1646, he was a majority teller with Stapilton in favour of adding the words ‘according to the Covenant’ to a parliamentary declaration that the king should be received from the Scots ‘with respect … to the safety and preservation of his person’.160CJ v. 28a. He partnered another leading Presbyterian, Sir Thomas Dacres, in a division on 12 January 1647 – the two men serving as minority tellers in favour of allowing a Scot, James Maxwell, to attend the king on his journey from Newcastle to Holdenby House.161CJ v. 50a. And on 2 April, he was a teller with the Presbyterian grandee Sir William Lewis against using a committee of the whole House to perfect an ordinance for returning the London militia to civic control, as requested by the City’s ‘Covenant-engaged’ faction. This was a highly sensitive issue, and the Presbyterians preferred it to be discussed behind closed, committee-room doors. Having won the division from the Independent pairing of Hesilrige and Sir William Armyne, Irby was named to the committee to which the ordinance was then referred.162CJ v. 132b. He was also involved in the Presbyterians’ plans for reducing and then re-deploying the army in Ireland. On 12 May, he was appointed to a committee set up to borrow £200,000 from the City in order to pay off and disband the army, and six days later, on 18 May, he was named first to a committee for furnishing the Presbyterian officer and MP Colonel John Birch with money from the Committee for Compounding to ship his regiment to Ireland.163CJ v. 168b, 176b, 188b; I. Gentles, The New Model Army (Oxford, 1992), 153. During July, Irby was a teller for the Presbyterian interest on two divisions in which it struggled to prevent the army and its allies proceeding against the Eleven Members and others they considered politically suspect.164CJ v. 233b, 253b.

Irby remained at Westminster after the Presbyterian ‘riots’ of 26 July 1647 – indeed, when the Commons appointed Henry Pelham to replace William Lenthall on 30 July, it was Irby and Richard Lee who conducted him to the Speaker’s chair.165CJ v. 259b. On 2 August, as the army closed in on London, Irby was added to the joint civic-parliamentary committee for the defence of ‘king, Parliament and City’.166CJ v. 265a. Even after the army’s triumphant march into the capital early in August, Irby remained firm to the Presbyterian cause, voting on 9 August against an ordinance sent from the Lords and backed by the Commons’ Independents for declaring void all the legislation passed between 26 July and the return of the Members who had fled Westminster to the army’s protection.167CJ v. 270a. He continued to resist pressure from the army and the Independents against leading Presbyterians until 21 August, when he obtained leave of absence.168CJ v. 281a.

Declared absent without excuse at the call of the House on 9 October 1647, Irby returned to Westminster a week later (16 Oct.) and had the fine of £20 for his unauthorised absence restored to him.169CJ v. 330a, 335a. During October and November, he was named to committees on the sale of bishops’ lands, to respond to the king’s flight from Hampton Court, to investigate attempts by the London radicals to subvert the New Model army and to examine testimony relating to the Presbyterian coup in July.170CJ v. 344b, 357a, 360a, 367a. Several of his tellerships during the early months of 1648 place him on the Presbyterian side of the debate over satisfying the army’s material and political concerns and giving assurances to the Scots on the issue of England’s church settlement.171CJ v. 468b, 472b, 501a. Irby evidently favoured the idea of imposing preconditions on the king before resuming negotiations with him, serving as teller on 26 May in favour of adding the words ‘and so continued until the king, Lords and Commons shall alter it’ to the stipulation that Presbyterianism be established for three years as part of any treaty.172CJ v. 574a. During the second civil war, he received appointments for strengthening Parliament’s grip on London and the south-east and for bolstering resistance to the Scottish Engagers.173CJ v. 529a, 537b, 538a, 541a, 551a, 556a, 562b, 599b, 628b, 630a, 671b, 678a, 680b, 692a. On 23 September, he and the Independent MP Thomas Lister were entrusted with the task of signing letters from the Army Committee* for quickening the collection of Lincolnshire’s assessment arrears.174CJ vi. 30b. His commitment to a strong Presbyterian church influenced his thinking on the Newport treaty that autumn, for he was reportedly among those MPs who regarded Charles’s answer to Parliament’s terms for religious settlement as unsatisfactory.175Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 385.

Irby was among those Members imprisoned in ‘Master Duke’s alehouse in Hell’ at Pride’s Purge on 6 December 1648.176The Parliament under the Power of the Sword (1648, 669 f.13.52). It is difficult to pinpoint the precise nature of his offence against the army, although if, as seems likely, he had been present in the House on the days immediately preceding the purge, then it is more than probable that he had voted to continue negotiations with the king. The mayor and corporation of Boston, mystified as to why Irby had been targeted by the army, wrote an open letter to him in mid-December, thanking him for his eight years’ service as their MP

to which place we had the more reason to make choice of you, most of us having plentiful experience of your ... fidelity manifested in former Parliaments … Sundry of us well know and thankfully remember your carriage against the loan money [in 1627] and other projects tending to public detriment, though much to your particular hazard in bearing witness against them.

The townsmen described Irby as a ‘diligent attendant as of the House so of the particular committees and one that ever closed with that party of the House that most endeavoured reformation of things amiss both in church and commonwealth’. They recalled Irby ‘rejoicing’ at the successes of the New Model army and bemoaning ‘the sad condition of the kingdom upon the Scots’ invasion this summer’, and they claimed that in his long absences from Lincolnshire ‘your estate here is considerably impaired’.177A Letter Written to an Honourable Member of the House of Commons (1648, 669 f.13.58). Irby was among the first group of imprisoned Members that the army released, on 20 December.178Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 167-8. Thereafter, he attended one more meeting of the Committee for Compounding – on 4 January 1649 – before withdrawing from national politics completely.179SP23/5, p. 42. By January 1650, he had been omitted from the Holland and Lindsey commissions of peace.

Later career and death

Irby seems to have remained aloof from public affairs until the summer of 1656, when he was returned for Boston to the second protectoral Parliament. Once again, however, he was excluded from the Commons – probably, on this occasion, as an opponent of the major-generals.180CJ vii. 425b. Returned for Boston again in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, he was named to only one committee and contributed very little in debate.181CJ vii. 609a; Burton’s Diary, iv. 91, 160. It was in 1659 that Gervase Holles* compiled his list of Lincolnshire gentry who might be ‘serviceable’ to Charles II in the event of a royalist uprising, among whom he named Irby, Ayscoghe, Edward Rosseter* and several other ‘Presbyterians ... who have heretofore disserved his Majesty and pretend now to be better disposed, either out of a sense of what they have done ill or hatred to the now governing faction’.182Eg. 2541, f. 362v; A.C. Wood, ‘A list of Lincs. royalists, 1659’, Lincs. Architectural and Arch. Soc. n.s. i. 217-18. In the event, Irby did not openly defy the ‘governing faction’ until 27 December 1659, the day after the Rump had re-assembled, when he was one of a number of secluded Members who turned up at Westminster and sought to take their seats, only to be turned away by the army.183OPH xxii. 29-33.

Irby resumed his seat on 21 February 1660 – the day that the secluded Members were finally re-admitted to the House – and in the last few weeks of the Long Parliament he was named to 13 committees and acted as teller in two divisions. These appointments included nomination to committees for remodelling the militia, on legislation for dissolving the Long Parliament and summoning the Convention and for appointing General George Monck* commander-in-chief of the army.184CJ vii. 848a, 848b, 849a, 850b, 854a, 855a, 855b, 856a, 860a, 860b, 868b, 872b, 877a.

Irby was returned for Boston to the 1660 Convention, where he supported Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton’s fruitless efforts to secure a Presbyterian church settlement. A highly active member of the Convention, both as a committeeman and on the floor of the House, he twice urged that the king should be desired to purge Catholic peers from the Lords. He took a moderate line against his former colleagues at Westminster, serving as a majority teller in favour of limiting the number of leading parliamentarians liable for penalisation to 20, over and above the regicides.185HP Commons 1660-90.

Irby evidently welcomed the Restoration, signing the loyal address of the Lincolnshire gentry in June 1660 and retaining his place on the Holland and Lindsey benches, to which he had been restored in March.186The Humble Congratulation of the Nobility and Gentry of the County of Lincolne (1660). He was added to the Kesteven and Westminster commissions of peace that autumn. He was the only Lincolnshire parliamentarian to retain his seat in the elections to the Cavalier Parliament and was once again listed by Wharton as a supporter of a godly church settlement.187HP Commons 1660-90; G.F.T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 338, 353. Although he conformed to the Church of England, he employed a number of ejected Presbyterian ministers as domestic chaplains.188Calamy Revised, 82, 106-7, 120; J.T. Cliffe, Puritans in Conflict (1988), 194; Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry Besieged (1993), 125, 218. Classed as ‘double worthy’ by the earl of Shaftesbury (Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*), he was returned to all three Exclusion Parliaments as a whig.189HP Commons 1660-90.

Irby died on 2 January 1682 and was buried at St Margaret’s, Westminster, eight days later.190Irby, Irbys of Lincs. i. 37. In his will, he made bequests amounting to £4,000 – mostly in the form of money he had put out to loan – to his three younger daughters.191PROB11/383, ff. 107v-108. His grandson Edward Irby† sat for Boston under Queen Anne.192HP Commons 1690-1715.