LENTHALL, William (1591-1662), of Burford Priory, Oxon., Lincoln’s Inn, Mdx., and Chancery Lane, London.

In the mid-seventeenth century this MP was ‘Speaker Lenthall’ in popular parlance irrespective of whether or not he currently occupied the chair in the House of Commons. None before him had held it for as long or been called upon so often to preside over monumental debates and decisions or negotiate such challenging times. None before him could potentially dispense so much patronage and influence. As the figurehead of a Parliament at war with and then triumphant over its king he was bound to attract controversy. Writing under the protectorate, one commentator described him as ‘a person of known integrity and ample sufficiency for the dignity of that place, who through all that time of wonderful distraction carried himself with extraordinary wisdom and judgement, without blame’.56W. Sanderson, A compleat history of the life and raigne of King Charles (1658), 26 But from the 1640s to the 1660s there were plenty of allegations of weakness and corruption, cowardice and treachery, and these perceptions tended to predominate. Reviewing his career in the 1890s C. H. Firth conceded that he was ‘capable of behaving with dignity and courage at critical moments’, but concluded that ‘when circumstances thrust upon him the part of a statesman, he had not sufficient strength of character to sustain it with credit’.57‘Lenthall, William’, DNB (1892). Some twentieth century historians painted a greyer picture of a ‘timorous’ ‘time-server’ who was obviously a conformist, not a revolutionary’, although more recently his dignity and day-to-day efficiency and commitment to making Parliament work has been reasserted.58A. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution (Oxford, 2002), 213; G.E. Aylmer, Revolution or Rebellion? (Oxford, 1986), 84; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 227; ‘William Lenthall’, Oxford DNB; S.K. Roberts, ‘The reputation and authority of the Speaker’, Parl. Hist. xxix. 75-89. The verdict on his achievement is more open.

Family background and early career

By 1640 Lenthall had claims to be a successful self-made man. His maternal great-grandfather Sir Richard Southwell† and two great-great-uncles had sat in Parliament, and several members of that family had been crown officeholders or courtiers, partly thanks to connections to the Howards, dukes of Norfolk.59HP Commons 1509-1558; ‘Southwell, Sir Richard Southwell’, ‘Sir Robert Southwell’, Oxford DNB. Somewhat less prominent, the Lenthalls were still ancient gentry, with roots in fourteenth century Herefordshire; a typically advantageous marriage had established them in Oxfordshire in the later fifteenth century. But during the reign of Elizabeth both families were compromised by recusant tendencies, and these were continued well into the seventeenth century by, for example, this MP’s first cousin Sir Edmund Lenthall of Lachford, who married a Stonor.60Berks. RO, D/ELL/F8, F16, F18 (papers of F.K. Lenthall). This should not be overstated, however. Henry Garnett’s assertion that this MP’s grandfather Richard Southwell (d. 1600) had towards the end of his life succumbed to the urgings of his son and Garnett’s fellow Jesuit, the poet and martyr Robert Southwell, and affirmed the Catholic faith, gained credence, but it is not borne out by Richard’s will.61‘Robert Southwell’, Oxford DNB; Berks. RO, D/ELL/F16. The testament of this MP’s other grandfather, William Lenthall (d. 1587), exhibited a curious hybrid – four poor men were to say regular prayers for his soul in a chapel of the parish church, but in the Protestant language of the Old Testament and of predestination – while the MP’s father, another William Lenthall, signed up to a thoroughgoing Calvinist formula in December 1596.62PROB11/71/319; PROB11/89/110.

The MP was the second surviving son of a second son, whose relatively early death threatened the viability of the modest estates he had acquired north west of Oxford. Having attained his majority in 1608 after a 12-year wardship, the heir, John, was obliged to sell several properties over the next two decades, including the manors of Astall Leigh, Bletchingdon and Wolvercote.63Oxon. RO, P133/E/1; VCH Oxon. vi. 57; xii. 313; xv. 49. Although in receipt of a £1,100 marriage portion before 1611, knighted in 1616, and eventually keeper of king’s bench prison, he remained plagued by an indebtedness which he shared with his in-laws, the Temples of Stowe, Buckinghamshire, to whom – especially in the person of his brother-in-law Sir Peter Temple* – he was particularly close.64E.F. Gay, ‘The Temples of Stowe and their Debts’, HLQ ii. 399-438; J.M. French, ‘John Milton, Scrivener, the Temples of Stowe and Sir John Lenthall’, HLQ iv. 303-7. Meanwhile, together with their four sisters, our MP, William, and his two younger brothers each inherited annuities of only £20.65PROB11/89/110. Yet the latter three all became men of means. Apprenticed in London, Thomas Lenthall (d. 1679) rose in the Fishmongers’ Company and adventured in Ireland, while Francis (d. 1658) became a merchant based in St Andrew’s, Holborn.66Berks. RO, D/ELL/F16.

William, born at a family house in Henley-on-Thames, appears also to have inherited from his father a desire to consolidate and extend the Lenthalls’ presence in west Oxfordshire and the adjacent parts of west Berkshire. Having followed his elder brother first to Oxford and then to Lincoln’s Inn, he was called to the bar in October 1616.67LI Black Bks. ii. 188. Within four years he was married to the co-heiress of a Northamptonshire gentleman, was the father of a (sickly) son and was making progress in his career. In writing as an ‘honest and loving son’ to his father-in-law Ambrose Evans in October 1620, he revealed that he was not only looking after Evans family interests in the courts but also involved in business relating to Burford and, more importantly, giving counsel to the royal favourite George Villiers, 1st marquess of Buckingham.68SP14/117, f. 22. The marriage had brought an advantageous connection to Sir Lawrence Tanfield†, the wealthy chief baron of the exchequer, who as a resident lord of the manor was in dispute with the Burford corporation.69SP14/117, f. 22; SP14/137, f. 3; ‘Sir Lawrence Tanfield’, Oxford DNB. In September 1621 Lenthall succeeded Sir James Whitelocke† as recorder of Woodstock, for which Tanfield had served six times as MP.70Woodstock Chamberlains’ Accts. 1609-50, 85, 87. The office usually carried with it election to serve for the borough in Parliament, and Lenthall duly secured this in 1624. He was named to seven committees during the session, mainly relating to legal matters.71HP Commons 1604-1629.

Meanwhile, Lenthall reinforced his links with local gentry. He acted as financial adviser to his elder brother, Sir John, to whom he was evidently close at this time.72Oxon. RO, P133/E/1. His son and eventual heir John Lenthall* was baptized in Sir John’s parish church at Bletchingdon in March 1625, with godparents including Lenthall’s sister-in-law Dame Bridget Lenthall (née Temple) and brother-in-law Dr John Standard, rector and lord of the manor of nearby Tackley and a justice of the peace.73Bletchingdon par. reg.; Berks. RO, D/ELL/F8; Al. Ox. (John Standard). The same month Tanfield named his ‘loving nephew’ Lenthall as an overseer of his will; probably because of continuing service to the executor, Lady Tanfield, from at least the later 1620s Lenthall was regularly resident in Burford.74PROB11/145/620. His son William and daughter Catherine were baptized there respectively in January 1627 and October 1628.75Burford par. reg.

The death of Tanfield in May 1625 may have been partly responsible for a significant setback for Lenthall’s political ambitions. He was not returned for Woodstock to any of Charles I’s three 1620s Parliaments, a disappointment he characterized later (speaking of 1628) as ‘a disgrace’.76Berks. RO, D/ELL/O5/12. The substitution of members of the Fleetwood family, clients of Woodstock’s high steward, Philip Herbert*, 1st earl of Montgomery (later 4th earl of Pembroke), may represent Lenthall’s failure to gain favour from that quarter or simply the superior claims of the earl’s servants. If his professional career also faltered, however, then the problem was probably short-lived. Appointed a commissioner for new buildings in London in 1630, he was placed on the Oxfordshire commission of the peace the following year.77SP16/171, f. 3v; Coventry Docquets, 65. Outside legal terms he regularly went on the western circuit, finding business in Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall; Woodstock and Burford were convenient stopping places en route and, as in 1633, the experience offered opportunities to develop companionable and professionally constructive ties with fellow lawyers such as Bulstrode Whitelocke*, John Glynne* and Sir Edward Littleton*.78Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 7-9, 34, 36, 43; Woodstock Chamberlains’ Accts. 1609-50, 141; Sturge Gretton, Burford Past and Present, 103; Add. 53726, f. 82v; SP16/340, f. 5. It is probably a sign of his personal commitment to the encouragement of godly preaching that in February of that year Lenthall acted as chief counsel for the defendants in the case brought by the crown against the feoffees for impropriations, the group inspired by Lincoln’s Inn preacher John Preston to raise and deploy money to this end. Lenthall’s argument that their activity was not illegal was rejected by the judges of the exchequer court, but although the feoffees were suppressed, no criminal action resulted and Lenthall’s career does not seem to have suffered.79E.W. Kirby, ‘The Lay Feoffees: a study in militant Puritanism’, JMH xiv. 17-21. In May he became a bencher at his inn.80LI Black Bks. ii. 309.

By 1634 Lenthall’s income allowed him to expend £4,500 on securing the manors and advowson of Besselsleigh and Appleton, then in Berkshire but only some ten miles from his childhood home and 16 miles from Burford; he had sufficient spare cash to beautify and repair the church at around the same time.81Berks. RO, D/ELL/T1/1/11; Coventry Docquets, 647; VCH Berks. iv. 397. It was perhaps not the first of what was to be a series of land purchases which contributed to a not undeserved reputation for acquisitiveness. Writing to his mother-in-law in June 1631 on hearing of her husband’s death, Lenthall hastened to assure her ‘on my credit I mean no more harm to you than I do to my own soul’, to chide her for believing ‘any report that had tended so much to condemn me not only for an indiscreet but [also] dishonest man’ and to invite her to make use of ‘your grass and such things as belongs to me’.82SP16/194, f. 60. Some years later, however, he requested that she vacate a house in his possession in order that he might let it and ‘make the benefit thereof the best way I can’; thus far, the property had ‘afforded me so little comfort’ and he was ‘ashamed that I should be so easily worked out of my money’, although he added that ‘the fault lies not in you’.83SP16/408, ff. 196, 198.

In October 1634 Lenthall was granted with ‘Sir John Lenthall’s servant’ a pass to go abroad for six months ‘on some necessary business’.84PC2/44, p. 246. No obvious explanation presents itself, although the presence of Sir John’s servant suggests that the impetus behind the trip might have been from the elder brother. At any rate, it cannot have cost Lenthall any prolonged loss of earnings at the bar. In January 1636 he took out a 21-year lease on two hundreds in Berkshire while the following year he bought from Lucius Cary*, 2nd Viscount Falkland, Tanfield’s grandson and heir, two manors in Burford and other property including Burford Priory.85Coventry Docquets, 357; VCH Berks. iii. 448; iv. 334; Sturge Gretton, Burford Past and Present, 103. In October 1638 he conveyed the latter in trust to local gentleman Edward Twyford, who was to become notorious as his servant.86Berks. RO, D/ELL/T32. The same year he became recorder of Gloucester, while the appreciative corporation of Woodstock sent him a gift of £10 to mark his delivery of the Lent reading at Lincoln’s Inn.87Glos. RO, GBR/B3/2, p. 88; Woodstock Chamberlains’ Accts. 1609-50, 172; LI Black Bks. ii. 344.

Short Parliament 1640

There is some indication that Lenthall had continued to be critical of aspects of royal policy: in 1639 he excused himself from contributing to the king’s expenses in the northern campaign.88Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 912. However, a letter sent to Mr Irons of Woodstock in anticipation of the parliamentary elections of spring 1640 creates an impression that in this contest desire for personal success was even more important than obtaining redress of general grievances. Conscious of those who ‘with a mighty hand and much power laboured against’ his candidature at Gloucester, Lenthall threatened to resign his recordership ‘if they choose me not’; ‘loathe to be frustrate of both places’ and to suffer a repeat of his previous humiliation at Woodstock, he announced he ‘must needs stand’ for a place. Appealing to his long service to the latter borough – reasonably enough, especially since he had sometimes returned fees for reinvestment in local charitable projects – only then did he promise that he would ‘(as God enables me) increase that talent that he shall bestow on me to your good’.89Berks. RO, D/ELL/O5/12; Woodstock Chamberlains’ Accts. 1609-50, 96, 183. He was duly returned at Woodstock on 10 March, along with Sir William Fleetwood*, ‘whose respects I much value’.90C219/42, 1A/3/43; Woodstock Chamberlains’ Accts. 1609-50, 185; Berks. RO, D/ELL/O5/12. A fortnight later he was still in contention at Gloucester, although ‘(they say) he is chosen for Woodstock already’, but the powerful voices eventually prevailed against him.91SP16/448, f. 166.

Once the session was under way, Lenthall emerged as a more prominent critic of the government. In the debate on 20 April in response to the king’s command to adjourn the session, he supported John Pym*’s call ‘not to abridge ourselves’, affirming that Parliament ‘should declare of the matter of fact and not admit of the excuse’. 92Aston’s Diary, 19. Apparently confident of procedure in spite of his relatively slight and distant previous experience, he contributed to a debate on this issue the next day.93Aston’s Diary, 23. He was also named (21 Apr.) to a small committee composed of otherwise seasoned MPs to investigate the records of notable cases of extra-parliamentary taxation, including Ship Money and the judgements against John Bates and Samuel Vassall*.94CJ ii. 8b. In recalling that Lenthall was then chosen to chair important grand committees – on words spoken by George Peard* against Ship Money and on religion (23 Apr.); on the king’s response to Parliament’s refusal to vote him the expected revenues (2, 4 May) – Edward Hyde* dismissed him as being at that juncture ‘a lawyer of no great account’.95CJ ii. 9b, 10a, 19a, 19b; Aston’s Diary, 36; Clarendon, Hist. i. 179. But Hyde’s judgement was almost certainly distorted by subsequent political enmity. It seems highly likely that, on the basis of his professional form through the 1630s, opposition leaders – among them at this stage, perhaps, Falkland – had identified Lenthall at least as an effective and committed defender of Parliament, and probably also as sharing many of their preoccupations. It is noteworthy in this connection that on 27 and 28 April Lenthall appeared as a trustee with the Speaker, Sir John Glanville*, and Sir John Strangways*, in a settlement of land in Westminster made by John Pym’s patron Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford.96LMA, E/BER/CG/T/ADD/001/13.

Having reported that the House had resolved on consultation with the Lords to prevent innovation in religion and assaults on property and liberties, Lenthall was nominated to the resulting committees (23, 24 Apr.).97CJ ii. 10a, 12a. In the context of criticism of attempts by John Cosin, as vice-chancellor of Cambridge, to suppress non-Arminian opinion in degree disputations, Lenthall appeared to argue for freedom of expression: ‘disputes must be in universities’.98Aston’s Diary, 95. Yet in other respects he revealed himself as a cautious man. He was concerned that a case against Ship Money could not be prepared adequately within the time allocated (29 Apr.), saw the difficulty in the fact that a majority of judges had declared in its favour and posed the awkward question as to whether, in pursuing the grievance in the way it had unfolded, ‘we make not a party betwixt the king and the kingdom’, especially since it would have to be admitted that ‘the king must defend the kingdom (30 Apr.).99Aston’s Diary, 97, 101, 107. Comparatively speaking, at the dissolution of Parliament on 5 May Lenthall may therefore have seemed to observers closer to Hyde’s second and more charitable characterisation – ‘a lawyer of competent practice, and no ill reputation for his affection to the government of both church and state’.100Clarendon, Hist. i. 263.

Long Parliament: Speaker, 1640-1

Lenthall’s path to re-election in the autumn was no smoother than in the spring. At Gloucester, as he was to claim in the House on 2 December, he was nominated, or even elected, but thwarted by the mayor’s denial of a poll and the return of rival candidates.101CJ ii. 43b; Procs. LP i. 417, 426; Northcote Diary, 26. At Woodstock on 23 October upwards of 45 burgesses and freemen signed an indenture returning Sir William Fleetwood and a local resident.102C219/43, 4/6/108; Oxon. RO, Woodstock archives Box 4/2/F1/2; VCH Oxon. xii. 352. It took four further days of lobbying, probably among the leading members of the corporation, to produce an indenture announcing the election of Lenthall and of Pembroke’s son William Herbert II*.103C219/43, 4/6/107; Woodstock Chamberlains’ Accts. 1609-50, 186. Herbert subsequently opted to sit for Montgomeryshire and only on 5 January 1641 was Lenthall’s election confirmed, along with that of Herbert’s substitute, Sir Robert Pye I*.104CJ ii. 63a.

It is therefore the more significant that, in the interim, Lenthall’s position in the Commons was regarded as sufficiently secure to permit his election as Speaker. He was not the king’s first choice: Charles would have preferred Thomas Gardiner*, who had been a loyal supporter in his capacity as the recorder of London. But this time the latter definitively failed to find a seat, and out of a rather limited pool of alternatives, Hyde avowed, the king ‘pitched upon’ Lenthall.105Clarendon, Hist. i. 260, 263. Presumably, in the circumstances, he would not have plumped for this option had he not expected Lenthall’s election to stand. Perhaps, as had happened in the recent past (for example with Sir Thomas Crew† in 1624), Charles relied on the honour of office to neutralise any tendency towards opposition to the crown which the new Speaker brought to the role and hoped he would be amenable to pressure. Perhaps the king had to lower his sights and recognise the candidate most likely to command the widest support.106Roberts, ‘The reputation and authority of the Speaker’, 78-9. The expectations of his chief critics are apparently unrecorded, but it is possible that they considered Charles had been duped. Sir Henry Vane I*, who officially nominated Lenthall, may have had a private agenda.107Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 214.

Prospective Speakers traditionally exhibited public reluctance to accept the office. There is some evidence that Lenthall’s attempt to excuse himself on the opening day of Parliament (3 Nov.) went beyond mere politeness and modesty, and his later complaints about the burden of the place give this further credence, but since the text of his speech has not survived his reaction at the time is difficult to gauge precisely.108CJ ii. 20a; Procs. LP i. 5, 7; Clarendon, Hist. i. 264. His oration two days later, when he was called to the Lords to be invested, reiterated his unworthiness according to form; constrained by the solemnity of an occasion which demanded both reverence to the sovereign and assertion of parliamentary liberties, it is hardly to be expected that it would reveal much of Lenthall’s real feelings or agenda. None the less, it is possible to argue that in choosing to refer to potentially contentious issues – and to include what might be read as oblique barbs – he was politely challenging the king to depart from recent policy in these areas. Parliament, he affirmed, ‘dissipates the invaders of the church and commonwealth’ and sanctions taxation:

It is reported of Constantine the great that he accounted his subjects’ purse his exchequer and so it is: subtle inventions may pick it, but nothing can open it but a parliament which lets in the eye of sovereignty upon the public maladies of the state and of vigilancy for the preservation of ancient liberties.109SP16/471, ff. 44-45v; Master Speaker his speech (1640), 6 (E.744.4).

Hearers, from their reading of a popular telling of the story, might detect an implication that Constantine had been oppressive, while a monarch sensitive to previous onslaught on his prerogative might experience some discomfort.110Procs. LP i. 12, 13.

Assessment of Lenthall’s performance once in the chair is likewise affected by the straitjacket of formality, by a sparsity of evidence and by attendant ambiguity. The ever-present Speaker has a shadowy presence in the Journal; there is perforce an over-reliance on one diarist – Sir Simonds D’Ewes* – whose favourite seat in close proximity allowed careful observation but whose attitude was generally critical; reported actions are often open to more than one interpretation.111Procs. LP vi. 41. However, there is still much to be said, especially in relation to the early months of the Parliament. As the sole official voice of the Commons, Lenthall’s role, like that of his predecessors and successors, was multi-faceted. It demanded concentration, quick-wittedness, and sharp vision; background knowledge; facility in distilling information, epitomising intentions and formulating questions; consistent deployment of persuasive and tactful rhetoric; and maintenance of an aura of authority and dignity. It also offered opportunities for influence, manipulation and self-enrichment; perceptions of how these were handled significantly affected the Speaker’s reputation, which was in turn crucial to his ability to do his job effectively.112Roberts, ‘Reputation and authority of the Speaker’, 77, 79.

Considering that in November 1640 Lenthall had relatively limited experience in the chamber, he appears soon to have grasped what was required to despatch business briskly and systematically. Prompted by a motion from Sir Walter Erle requesting observation of a tradition that second readings occur only between 9am and noon, he got the Commons to agree that first readings should also be confined to early morning (5 Nov. 1640).113Procs. LP i. 471. He intervened to desire ‘that we might not run from one business to another but first determine somewhat’ (9 Mar. 1641) and called on Members to keep to the question in the order of the House, ‘for if we entered into several propositions we should in the issue lose all’ (17 June).114Procs. LP ii. 679; v. 204. According to D’Ewes, Lenthall was capable of forgetting his own wise practice in the heat of the moment (2 July), but the diarist regularly recorded instances of his reminding the House of previous intentions for debate, even if it was then sometimes agreed that the appropriate moment for pursuing this had not yet come.115Procs. LP iv. 394; v. 461; vi. 41; D’Ewes (C), 29, 305; CJ ii. 63a. Lenthall himself sometimes altered plans in order to reflect the intervention of unforeseen ‘great business’, or to give urgent hearing to the submission of officers about to be sent to Ireland (19 Nov. 1641), or simply – in the case of a motion he considered of ‘great weight’ (1 Mar.) – to defer debate until the House was full. 116Procs. LP ii. 585; iii. 454; v. 162, 206; vi. 593, 597; D’Ewes (C), 168. Even in these early months, when well over 400 Members might potentially attend, he was more than once prevented from taking his chair and beginning proceedings ‘for want of the convenient number [i.e. quorum] of 40’.117Procs. LP v. 367; vi. 243; D’Ewes (C), 107. Where possible, once proceedings were under way, he was keen to despatch as much business as possible (e.g. 1 May).118Procs. LP iv. 160.

Notwithstanding periodic, almost inevitable, lapses of concentration, Lenthall seems on the whole to have been alert to those around him and vigilant as to rules and precedents. He was probably responsible for occasional confusion about who was permitted to speak (8 Dec. 1640; 17 Aug. 1641), but he spotted gaps in resolutions to action and breaches in orders of the House, and pointed out when a motion was redundant or when bills contained omissions or flaws.119Procs. LP i. 512, 553; ii. 470, 765; v. 344, 383; vi. 458; D’Ewes (C), 263. There are plenty of indications that from an early stage he was usually well briefed and understood what was necessary to make serviceable, watertight legislation. He pronounced on existing law (30 Nov. 1640; 2 Mar. 1641); at the reading of a bill he reminded Members that a similar measure had already passed both Houses in 1624 (14 Jan. 1641); he asserted that a subsidy bill could not be altered by the Commons once it had passed the Lords and that unaltered amendments by the Commons to the triennial acts need not be referred again to committee (13, 15 Feb.); he affirmed that the House could rise while a committee was in session (3 Apr.); moved (successfully) for hearing all who attended committees for public bills, clarified the remit of the committee for customers and showed where the House might vote on particulars without reference made to them from committee (25 May, 23 Aug.).120Procs. LP i. 379; ii. 191, 441, 453, 559, 563, 595; iii. 362; vi. 521. He advised the House against entanglement in time-consuming statute over private property (25 Feb.), identified a flaw in the first article of impeachment against William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury (26 Feb.), and reined in leading Member John Pym when he attempted to return to business already discussed (29 June, 27 Nov.). 121Procs. LP ii. 553, 566; v. 401; D’Ewes (C), 205.

D’Ewes periodically thought Lenthall’s memory faulty, his grasp of due procedure shaky, or his judgement questionable. He noted, for instance, that the Speaker told the House that he had received information from one Member, when in fact he had heard it from another (10 Nov. 1640); that he had forgotten the name of a Member involved in a current case of privilege (3 Apr. 1641); that he was mistaken about a decision taken the previous day in relation to the treaty with the Scots (21 May); that he had initially miscalculated a division (19 June); and that he faltered in framing questions related to the case of Peter Smart against John Cosin, the Arminian dean of Durham (4 Mar.).122Procs. LP i. 104; ii. 264; iii. 362; iv. 531; v. 239. Having had its third reading, an act for the regulation of recusants’ confiscated lands was ‘laid aside’ unpassed, ‘which the Speaker averred might stand with the orders of the House, but I believe it is the first example of this kind’ (4 Aug. 1641).123Procs. LP vi. 195, 200. There is sometimes an implication of weakness in D’Ewes’s depiction of occasions when Lenthall sought a second opinion as to precedent or correct form or how to act, although elsewhere, and in others’ accounts, his readiness to refer tendentious, complex or simply uncertain questions to ‘the ancientist parliament man’ appears as a strength.124Procs. LP ii. 68, 598, 664; iii. 363; iv. 420. Whether it was the result of deference, guile, recognition of ignorance, an instinct for collaboration, fear of going out on a limb, or some other cause, Lenthall regularly consulted constructively with respected Members like John Selden* or indeed with D’Ewes himself .125Procs. LP i. 623-4; ii. 421, 478; iii. 582; iv. 609, 617; v. 603; D’Ewes (C), 200.

An essential part of the Speaker’s role was to keep order in the chamber and to resolve differences between Members.126Procs. LP i. 93. Lenthall also sought to control behaviour in committees, requesting that those who disturbed their workings ‘should be complained of to the House’ (18 Feb.).127Procs. LP ii. 479. For the most part, he seems to have exhibited calm good sense in the area of discipline. D’Ewes noted approvingly that the Speaker ‘was fain to admonish’ those who spoke to a decision already made (thereby wasting time) and that (in contrast) in response to a mass exodus before debate was finished, he had said ‘they were unworthy to sit in a parliament that would so run forth for their dinners leaving businesses of such great weight’ (27 Apr.).128Procs. LP iv. 111, 113. He appreciated the need to impose penalties for non-attendance at important debates (13 Aug.) and when Members failed to take the Protestation at the required time, brought to the attention of the House the fact that some of the offenders had been ‘in town a month’ (5 May).129Procs. LP iv. 214; vi. 400.

Ironically, in premises that were significantly too small to accommodate comfortably a full complement of Members, overcrowding was a constant hazard. In response to a complaint from John Cosin that, after examination before Parliament, ‘he was in danger to be killed as he went down the stairs’, Lenthall moved that they be cleared (24 Nov. 1640).130Procs. LP i. 268. When on 19 May 1641, amidst alarm over the recently-revealed ‘army plot’, lathes in the window under the gallery suddenly snapped, a number of Members fled the chamber in panic, causing injury to some, but Lenthall, standing up to get a better view, realised what had happened and with the help of sober men like D’Ewes (self-described) ‘in a short time reduced [the House] to order and silence’.131Procs. LP iv. 460. During a nerve-wracking summer of demonstrations outside the palace of Westminster this task became difficult. As he commented subsequently, on the evening of 8 June, Lenthall ‘did not think he should come away alive ... out of the House’; ‘divers talking at the lower end of the House in the west corner under the gallery’ on the 9th did not respond to his calls to desist, prompting him to name Sir William Carnabye*.132Procs. LP v. 63-4, 69-71. When the following day the Commons were debating the surreptitious printing of a speech of Lord George Digby* relating to the plot, Lenthall reproved Digby’s younger brother John Digby* for sitting on the ladder used to access otherwise inaccessible seats ‘as if he were going to a hanging’ or ‘an execution’, provoking laughter. Some said forcefully that Lenthall had ‘transgressed his duty’ in so addressing a young man of such status, but a majority decided that the chief complainant should himself ‘acknowledge his error in having used such language to the Speaker’.133Procs. LP v. 78-9, 814.

It was of course part of Lenthall’s function to maintain the honour of the House in its dealings with outsiders. This was especially important at a time when, with unprecedented frequency and intensity, the Commons asserted through the Speaker its right to examine and deliver judgements upon offenders. Called in to answer on 21 December 1640 for his role in the judgement against John Hampden* in the Ship Money trial, the lord keeper, John Finch†, 1st Baron Finch (himself a former Speaker), was greeted by Lenthall ‘sitting in his chair with his hat on’. This was an intimation of the gravity of the charge, given that Finch was a social superior, although D’Ewes and other traditionally-minded observers doubtless approved Lenthall’s courteous invitation to Finch to sit too. Finch, who declined, was that day resolved guilty of high treason.134Procs. LP ii. 5-7. On subsequent occasions Lenthall appears more often than not to have conducted himself with appropriate decorum, but several times D’Ewes noted that he exhibited impatience or alternatively kept the examinee kneeling ‘a good while’ before his chair, as if to emphasise the authority of his office – or, on another reading, his own vanity.135CJ ii. 65b; Procs. LP i. 417, 421; ii. 151, 153; iv. 347, 378, 643, 648; v. 7, 105, 113, 136, 149, 641; vi. 124; D’Ewes (C), 175, 234, 235.

In increasingly tense political circumstances, and surrounded by opinionated parliamentary veterans, Lenthall walked a fine line in combining his functions as both the mouthpiece of others and the figurehead and official arbiter of proceedings. On the one hand, he needed sanction from MPs to obey summons to the Lords when the king wished to communicate his will to the Commons (e.g. 5 July); they might instruct him to be silent, as when he went to the witness the royal assent to the Triennial Act (16 Feb.), and they otherwise agreed the text of what he was to say.136Procs. LP ii. 45; v. 500. The themes of his speeches on 13 May and on 22 June (described by one historian as ‘a somewhat barbed exchange’) to accompany presentation of money-raising and other bills, subsequently published, were presumably entirely dictated.137Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 349. It is unclear to what extent he crafted their emphases (for example, on ‘public tribute’ and ‘the preservation of public union’), their turns of phrase (‘compulsory obedience, advanced by the transcendent power of prerogative, is too weak to support the right of government’), or their metaphors (‘the even poising of the beam’ when royal prerogative and the property of the subject were weighed ‘in the same scales’; ‘as a ship cast upon a rough sea, we have been cast upon the rock of fear and danger, and tossed upon the billows of distraction and distrust of church and commonwealth’).138Master Speakers speech on Thursday the thirteenth of May (1641, E.198.12); Mr Speakers speech with his Majesties speech (1641, E.198.23). Was it he who, in his speech of 3 July at the passing of bills concerning poll tax and the prerogative courts, decided to open with an assertion of government resting on the rules of order or to apply to the king the unusual simile of ‘a nursing father’?139Master Speakers speech before the king. July the third (1641, E.198.29). Official letters were ‘drawn’ for him to send (as in Pym’s draft on 22 Oct., destined for the governor of Berwick); he might propose such a letter and its contents, just as he could suggest points for discussion with the Lords, but could not expect these to gain acceptance.140Procs. LP ii. 420, 490; D’Ewes (C), 28, 236. On at least one occasion (9 Mar.) there was a perception that ‘the Speaker spoke too much’ and that, ‘against the order of the House’ he had pleaded a cause, although ‘at length’, according to John Moore*, ‘the House was fully satisfied of the Speaker’s worth’.141Procs. LP ii. 680, 685.

On the other hand, quite apart from the potential to exercise a casting vote in case of deadlock, there was scope for Lenthall to influence business. By summer 1641 his correspondence contained almost daily messages to relay to the House or private petitions to be promoted in the chamber.142Bodl. Tanner 66, passim. One Bridget Porter may have flattered when she asked Lenthall, ‘whilst you have command and power, I may say, of the whole kingdom in your hands, forget not to please my husband’ (20 Aug.) but the perception on which her appeal was premised cannot have been entirely misplaced.143Bodl. Tanner 66, f. 150. Lenthall surely had some discretion in sifting requests and information (written or spoken), and in the urgency and conviction with which he introduced them in the Commons, or exercised choice as to how he presented intelligence of papists (12 Apr., 14 May) or the ‘Army Plot’ (8 June), or described a meeting with the Dutch ambassador (11 Aug.).144Procs. LP i. 351, 566; ii. 636, 640; iii. 510; vi. 182, 185, 353, 416, 533, 568, 611; D’Ewes (C), 29, 87, 103, 118, 141, 163.

Lenthall’s amplifications and contextualisations sometimes seem calculated to drive discussion in a particular direction. This is particularly noticeable in diary entries for August 1641, when he appeared – perhaps in close association with Pym and certainly on the basis of detailed knowledge of the finances – to be promoting parliamentary control of the army and its funding. Having early on 24 August outlined intelligence received from the north and initiated a report on disbanded army officers, he then related how the reformadoes, gathering to lobby for their pay ‘did so environ him coming and going to the Parliament as he thought in time it would prove of dangerous consequence ... and therefore he desired that we would take some order for their satisfaction’.145Procs. LP vi. 533, 539. The next day he presented a letter from Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland from York about pay and disbandment, and took the opportunity to show ‘it was easy now to compute what monies would be further necessary to discharge the rest of the army’.146Procs. LP vi. 551. When on the 28th some MPs expressed the hope that the £28,000 due to the garrisons of Berwick and Carlisle was already earmarked in the treasurer of the army’s accounts for disbandment, Lenthall was quick to disillusion them: ‘but the Speaker showed it could not be so for it did appear in particular that £89, 624 4s 10d which he had estimated would suffice to pay all the remainder of the army for 8 months’ in fact ‘did only mention payment of horse and foot and discharge of train of ordnance’ and ‘whatsoever was needful to discharge garrisons was due besides’.147Procs. LP vi. 593.

Such instances raise questions over potential for manipulation on other occasions. When Lenthall explained the background to a bill or encapsulated its content for the benefit of fellow MPs, it was one thing to clarify the bare fact that a bill was privately-sponsored (19 Dec. 1640), or to summarise readings or reports already heard by all, but in other instances a perspective might be slanted, or discussion deflected to a committee, or time rationed – or at least, such control might be attempted.148Procs. LP i. 166; ii. 52, 431; iv. 176, 272, 363. Following the reading of an act for the continuance of various statutes on 1 May, Lenthall appeared to short-circuit usual practice, and ‘showed only what the title promised and then told us that this was but a beginning or foundation of the work, to bring it to a committee, where many might contribute their helping hands’. This time his motive was probably to expedite other business: shortly afterwards he was ‘very desirous to have sent up [to the Lords] other bills with’ that restraining the clergy from meddling in secular affairs, but ‘at last it was overruled that this bill only and another’ relating to pirates be despatched.149Procs. LP iv. 160. The framing of questions for division did not necessarily arise organically and without mediation from the preceding debate; they were themselves subject to direction and interpretation, by Lenthall and by others. D’Ewes successfully challenged Lenthall’s wording of a question relating to the condemnation of the Canons of 1640 (16 Dec.) and the Speaker had to accept the ‘dislike’ of the House for his question on a subsidy bill and see it ‘laid aside’ (24 May 1641), although he himself managed ‘to divert the question’ when it came to the contentious issue of episcopacy (9 Feb.) and sometimes the impression is given that he also had some room for manoeuvre in selecting tellers.150Procs. LP i. 623-4; ii. 400-1; iv. 24, 549, 550; vi. 596; D’Ewes (C), 105, 195; cf. i. 487; ii. 68, 321-2; vi. 83, 106, 333.

Glimpses of Lenthall’s priorities and preoccupations are supplied by his periodic motions, (although some could be seen as purely procedural151E.g. Procs. LP v. 366, 476, 516.) and by occasional contributions to debate when the Commons sat in grand committee under the chairmanship of someone else and he could act as an ordinary Member. By virtue of his office he probably took some initiative in raising cases of breach of privilege, as on 6 February, when he asked whether an official should have a peer’s protection when the latter disclaimed him and whether ‘we did not think fit to have the printer severely punished’ who had issued an erroneous and unauthorised version of the speech of Oliver St John* on the illegality of Ship Money.152Procs. LP ii. 381-2.

As implied above, Lenthall’s interest in parliamentary taxation was carried over from the Short Parliament, as it was in religious matters. It was part of his office to compose the prayers which inaugurated each day’s proceedings, but his engagement went beyond formality.153D’Ewes (C), 147. He made a proposal related to the redefinition of clerical power (22 Mar.); took an opposite position to the solicitor-general over a case involving tithes of Romney Marsh (29 June); expressed the view that the celebration of fasts and thanksgivings should be kept separate (26 Aug.); deferred other discussion to address grievances related to deans and chapters (18 May); advanced the order for the removal of altar rails and the placing of communion tables (30 Aug.); and seconded, on the ground, according to D’Ewes, that ‘the matter was of very great weight and deserved our consideration’, a motion from the latter that an intention to debate the order against religious innovations should be fulfilled (4 Nov.).154Procs. LP iii. 53; iv. 440; v. 407; vi. 571, 615; D’Ewes (C), 78. By themselves, these interventions might be inconsequential, but cumulatively they point to something more substantial. When complaints were made that the parish clerk of St Martin’s in the Fields had ‘hindered a minister that preached there’, Lenthall deflected requests to have the clerk summoned as a delinquent and ‘living in that parish, said he would speak with the minister there about it and take order it should be no more’ (23 Feb.).155Procs. LP ii. 518. Faced on 30 June with the prospect of an imminent recess, he

wished the House to apply themselves to a settling of religion in the first place and the abolishing of monopolies in the second; which he thought would be all we could do at this time (viz by August 10 ensuing). And that in doing the same we should fully satisfy the country.156Procs. LP v. 421.

While it is likely that the priorities expressed here were not his alone, and indeed probable that the agenda was proposed by Pym or others, it is plausible that he genuinely concurred. One indication that his allegiance may have been at least partly to Pym and to those in the upper chamber who sought to prolong the life of the Parliament without selling out to the Scots may be supplied early in 1641 (22 Jan.), when from the floor of the House he spoke against D’Ewes’s endorsement of an imminent Anglo-Scottish treaty, moving that ‘we might not engage ourselves, but that we should first send to the Lords to know their opinions’.157Procs. LP ii. 250. He displayed a similar caution about conceding too much to northern neighbours ‘sitting amongst us at the committee’ on 21 May, ‘showing that many inconveniences would follow if Englishmen should be sent into Scotland for matter of debt to be tried there’.158Procs. LP iv. 510. Deference to the upper chamber, as well as procedural rectitude, was perhaps apparent in his handling (20 May) of a motion by Sir Benjamin Rudyerd* proposing an order for the re-admission of William Prynne*, victim of prerogative court prosecution in the 1630s, to Lincoln’s Inn: the Speaker

said there was some difficulty in doing of it, for the vote about Prynne was not passed the Lords’ House and Prynne being put out by sentence of star chamber, our vote here without a like vote and judgement in the Lords can be no reversal of sentence.159Procs. LP iv. 491.

Observing due form later that day he doubtless obliged Pym and others when he steered MPs away from discussing the Army Plot. He ‘showed this business of the conspiracy yet rested with the secret committee of seven, and until they brought in their report we could conclude nothing about it’.160Procs. LP iv. 487. Whether they had previously engaged his co-operation is unknown.

Speaker under pressure 1641-2

By summer 1641 the relentless succession of hours in the chair was taking its toll. The diaries reveal day after day a winter timetable starting between 8 and 10 o’clock and a summer timetable of early mornings and late afternoons. Proceedings could not start without Lenthall and he had no deputy. On 10 August, the day once earmarked for the beginning of the recess, Lenthall ‘came in between 6 and 7 in the morning’, having not risen until between 9 and 10 the previous night because of the need to despatch business before the king’s departure for the north.161Procs. LP vi. 332. Later in the morning the House agreed that he should go to the Lords to present the bill for the securing of arrears of brotherly assistance to the Scots, but this was not a means of escape: it was then decided that a committee of the whole House would ‘sit in the afternoon upon the bill of tonnage and poundage and’ (notwithstanding the customary alternative occupant of the chair) ‘the Speaker is to be here’.162Procs. LP iv. 333, 338. When 11 days later Denzil Holles* moved for an afternoon sitting to consider the safeguarding of the Tower of London (manifested as an important issue in the aftermath of the Army Plot), Lenthall ‘protested that he was ill at present and could not with safety of his health sit in the afternoon’.163Procs. LP vi. 515. His excuse was accepted, but he had to wait until 5 September for an adjournment.

During the recess Lenthall, in company with unspecified ‘lords’ (perhaps including Pembroke in his capacity as steward), took the opportunity to visit Woodstock and to cultivate his constituents by presenting them with a buck.164Woodstock Chamberlains’ Accts. 1609-50, 195-7. On 10 October he was probably in Burford for the marriage of his daughter Frances to a west Oxfordshire gentleman.165Burford par. reg. Unfortunately, no other evidence has come to light of his political, social or legal contacts during this potentially significant interlude, although it is conceivable that he maintained cordial relations with the Pym/Bedford nexus still sitting on the Recess Committee in London. Back at Westminster for the opening of the session on 20 October, Lenthall was among MPs who ‘did openly declare our sorrow for the loss of so worthy and useful’ a colleague as the recently-deceased John Upton I*, Providence Island Company member and nephew of Pym and Francis Rous*.166D’Ewes (C), 16.

Re-immersion in business was immediate. Later in the day Lenthall presented to the Commons a backlog of correspondence.167D’Ewes (C), 17-18. On the 30th the morning session lasted until 3 in the afternoon and Lenthall, unwilling to await the formal signal to rise which could come only when the close committee returned to the House, ‘desired liberty to go up to the committee chamber, having not stirred from his chair before since the morning’.168D’Ewes (C), 58. He must have been relieved when on 4 November, ‘it now being past 4 o’clock’, the Commons decided to postpone consideration of the depositions he presented to them relating to the conspiracy against Parliament’s commissioners in Edinburgh, and to stay only for the arrival of a candle by which he could see to seal them up until the next day.169D’Ewes (C), 87. As the evenings drew in he complained again on the 20th that ‘he had sitten very late yesterday night and that it was now past four, and that he could not hold out to sit daily seven or eight hours’. This time Pym took pity and proposed the rising of the House and a grand committee from which Lenthall was excused, but the respite was temporary.170D’Ewes (C), 172-3.

By 2 December, in the aftermath of the apprentice riots round Westminster and the presentation of the Grand Remonstrance, he showed signs of stress. When Black Rod came to the Commons that day to deliver the king’s request for their presence in the Lords to mark his return from Scotland and his assent to the tonnage and poundage act, D’Ewes noted that ‘The Speaker had so far forgotten matter of form as he asked if we should not call him in again and give him an answer’. D’Ewes also depicted his nervous impatience later in the day as the Commons discussed the Londoners’ petition against the 4th earl of Dorset (Sir Edward Sackville†), who had ordered the militia to open fire on demonstrators.171D’Ewes (C), 224. None the less, once in the Lords Lenthall (or his speech-writer) rose to the occasion. Disclaiming ‘flattery’, he marshalled the requisite rhetoric to praise ‘the glorious instrument’ of peace who had achieved a ‘happy conjuncture’ of nations, while audaciously comparing the ‘fidelity’ of one brother (clearly the English) with the Cain-like ‘disloyalty’ of the other (unmistakeably the Scots) and also asserting the pre-eminent importance of religion. Introducing a personal touch, he even dared to reference his own perspective, based on ‘eleven months observation without intermission (scarce) of a day, nay an hour in that day to the hazard of life and fortune’.172The Speech of Master Speaker before his Majesty on Thursday the 2 of December (1641) (E.199.36).

The phrase was clearly on his mind the next day as he penned two letters to Secretary of State Edward Nicholas† seeking intercession with the king for permission to ask the Commons ‘to be quit of this employment’ in which he had ‘spent almost 13 [altered to 11] months’. His language of craving ‘royal leave’ to ‘use my best endeavour’ to persuade Parliament to release him and of inclining Charles ‘to recommend me to the consideration of the House’ reads a little oddly in the context, even if it followed due form. It might suggest that Lenthall was feeling isolated from his colleagues or bereft of essential patronage (if true, an indication that he was, after all, relatively above faction); it might betoken a subtle attempt to manoeuvre himself into a better bargaining position (on his own initiative or following advice). The motive he adduced was financial as much as physical: his tenure of office had ‘exhausted the labour of 25 years’; he was ‘enforced by an unavoidable necessity’ and faced ‘ruin’ and ‘extreme poverty’. There were hints that the ‘satisfaction’ for which he would settle would be a sinecure or other source of income.173SP16/486, ff. 40-2. In time to come he was to estimate how much he had forfeited from inability to pursue his legal practice, although this was not spelled out here. As early as May, when complaints had surfaced regarding the fees taken by the Commons’ serjeant-at-arms, Lenthall had told the House that he received £5 for every person naturalized or for whom a bill was passed and that he was willing to have all his fees investigated, but according to D’Ewes, ‘many of us told him there was no intention to examine them’ – grateful, perhaps, for someone who would serve them for the lesser evil of fees rather than the greater evil of a salary or the distraction or complication of royal office.174Procs. LP iv. 378-9. In any case, too close questioning of fees had the potential to undermine the probity of many Members. Correspondence from 1645 reveals that Lenthall had throughout his time as Speaker expected (albeit not necessarily received) ‘Hull ale’ and a douceur of £5 a year from its corporation, but also that ‘he was just one of a queue of Parliament-men keen to sample the town’s largesse’.175D. Scott, ‘”Particular Businesses” in the Long Parliament: the Hull Letters’, in Parliament, Politics and Elections ed. C. Kyle (Cam. Soc. 5th ser. xvii), 279-80, 291-2, 305.

Meanwhile, the appeal to Nicholas had no more discernible result. Instead, Lenthall was left to face without the salve of financial gain what must have been the most alarming months of his life thus far. As time went on, in addition to admonishing those called before the House to answer for their related misdemeanours (including plotter Daniel O’Neil, who disconcertingly defied convention ‘and did not kneel at all’), handling further petitions from restive citizens and reporting rumours of sedition, he had to contain others’ panic and direct the shutting of doors to stop MPs fleeing the chamber.176D’Ewes (C), 234-5, 248, 263-4, 272-3, 275, 310, 338. On 23 December, on a motion by Sir John Clotworthy*, he was given power to sign warrants to stay suspicious persons or seize letters; his taking responsibility the next day for bail for a preacher in custody for a seditious and scandalous sermon at Charing Cross indicates that when given authority, he used it.177D’Ewes (C), 341, 346.

This is one of several indications that, as a counterbalance to his woes, the Speaker enjoyed at least the confidence of most MPs. On 24 December Sir Henry Vane II* (or less likely, Vane I) objected that in including a caveat to a message which made it subject to the Lords’ concurrence, Lenthall had ‘declared what was not the sense of the House’, but when a vote was taken all but ‘two or three’ supported the Speaker.178D’Ewes (C), 342. There was backing for him too when on 3 January 1642 he revealed that a servant of the keeper of king’s bench prison (Sir William Middleton),

had on Saturday last served a subpoena on him out of the chancery and told him that he knew well enough that he was Speaker of the House of Commons and that [the servant] was commanded by his master to do it, who would justify him. All agreed that the servant should be sent for as a delinquent,

although many fewer thought Middleton similarly culpable.179PJ i. 1, 5. On one occasion D’Ewes implied suspicion that Lenthall was also party to Pym’s covert management of the House. On 30 December, as it discussed the possibility of impeaching the bishops who had protested against the exclusion of the episcopate from the Lords, Pym moved that the doors might be shut to prevent anyone leaving. A proposal that access to the committee chamber should also be restricted was agreed to be ‘too great a restraint’, but when ‘the Speaker declared that nobody who went up into the said ... chamber should speak to anybody out at the window or throw any writing to them’, D’Ewes, who had ‘expected some strange motion upon this secret and close restraining ourselves’ noted that it ‘followed accordingly’.180D’Ewes (C), 365-6.

No collusion with Pym, if such there was, could have prepared adequately for the uninvited arrival of Charles I in the chamber on 4 January with the intent to arrest the Five Members who had most irked him. Doubtless instinct prompted Lenthall to kneel ‘surprised, but with much prudence’, just as it had made all MPs uncover their heads, but not even hasty advice (if any) from colleagues could wholly supply the lack of precedent for a Speaker’s subsequent conduct.181Whitelocke, Mems. (1732), 52. Accounts of the iconic moment differ slightly: while D’Ewes and Whitelocke indicate that Charles politely displaced Lenthall from his chair, Sir Thomas Peyton* recorded that the king stood ‘before the chair (for he sat not down all the while)’. But even so, the drama of the moment was clearly real, and the respect D’Ewes evinced for the demeanour of a Speaker he did not automatically endorse indicates that something impressed him. When asked by Charles whether Pym or Holles were present – primed or not, in the exact words or not – Lenthall declined to answer directly, offering the explanation that he ‘could neither see nor speak but by command of the House’.182PJ i. 9-13; Whitelocke, Mems. 52; Ludlow, Voyce, 221; OPH xxiii. 366; e.g. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 213, citing Gardiner, Hist. of England, x. 140. This prevarication was both technically accurate and previously manifested on his many appearances on behalf of the Commons in the Lords; it was patently the only safe response.

Lenthall emerged unscathed from what might have been a dangerous confrontation, but the royal family’s departure from Whitehall on 10 January and the Five Members’ return to the Commons the next day hardly alleviated the tensions under which he operated. On the 11th he had the delicate tasks of conveying to the captains of trained bands in the City and Westminster the thanks of the Commons for their invaluable assistance in the late riots without encouraging their independent pretensions and of presenting to the Commons the grievances, commended to them by the king, of reformadoes of the earl of Crawford’s regiment, ‘who daily called upon him to move the House’.183PJ i. 32-3, 35, 38. Entrusted with power to issue warrants for apprehending delinquents (14 Jan.), he also had the ultimate responsibility to formulate emollient, pacifying words, as when Philip Skippon*, as commander of the City militia, sought guidance on how to respond to the crowds still threatening Parliament on 1 February.184PJ i. 73,101, 249; CJ ii. 380. It seems too that he had actively promoted the letter sent out in his name on 29 January to corporations and local officials inviting those who had not already done so to take the Protestation, so as to affirm their loyalty to Parliament; among others more specifically directed, he despatched a parallel letter to Oxford University on 8 February.185PJ i. 207; A Copie of a Letter sent by Mr Speaker to all the Corporations (1642, E.133.2); A Copy of the Speakers Letter to the Vice-Chancellor (1642); To his very loving friends, the high sherife and justices of peace of Surrey (1642, 669.f.3.40).

Some business in the early months of 1642 was less fraught. Diaries suggest that Lenthall took some initiative in promoting relief for Protestant refugees from Ireland and in sending supplies and commissioners to the kingdom, and made some constructive procedural suggestions in relation to money bills.186PJ i. 77, 145-6, 159, 178, 192, 227-8, 291; ii. 151, 169, 184, 233. As before, he received foreign envoys, in the shape of the Dutch ambassador lending support to Dutch merchants, although he had to make an effort not to be drawn into quarrels between the States General and the prince of Orange (28, 31 Mar.; 5 Apr.).187PJ ii. 96-7, 113, 131. He appears to have been conscientious in reporting on papist prisoners, to have supported the process to make Covent Garden into a new parish and to have shared the keenness of James Fiennes* and Nathaniel Fiennes I* to suppress the Oxfordshire petition in favour of episcopacy (8, 26 Mar.) – another rare display of engagement with what was going on in his native county.188PJ i. 478; ii. 9, 69, 84, 91, 113. He also drew attention to the Jacobean statute by which no gentleman whose wife was a recusant might be a deputy lieutenant (17 Mar.).189PJ ii. 54.

Otherwise, however, Lenthall faced a succession of delicate examinations and potentially unpopular judgements as he sought to uphold the honour of the House and deal with offending MPs. Sometimes he handled these with greater tact and general approbation than at other times. As D’Ewes delivered a typically lengthy condemnation of Sir Edward Dering* for publication of his speeches in Parliament and a book which revealed reservations about measures against episcopacy, the former heard Lenthall voice, as an aside, what seems like an imprudent mockery of his prolixity (2 Feb.).190PJ i. 254. If Lenthall was really caught out and realised it, then he fought back a few days later when Oliver Cromwell* nominated D’Ewes to refute Dering in print. D’Ewes, by his own account, tried to decline, replying he had other things for publication ‘of more public use and benefit. The Speaker then wished that I would print that that [sic] were for the public good’.191PJ i. 293. Lenthall, it seems, was at first among those inclined to be less hard on Dering. When on the 15th the Commons received Dering’s petition for release from imprisonment in the Tower, the Speaker reminded the House that there was no need to call the prisoner in to the House to receive his discharge – thereby suggesting that he might be saved a second humiliating submission.192PJ i. 354; cf. ii. 203. He unsuccessfully attempted to extend similar indulgence to Robert Trelawny* when he was disabled from sitting for speaking against the placing of a guard around the Palace of Westminster (9 Mar.) but in censuring and punishing Sir Ralph Hopton* for objecting to Parliament’s criticism of the king, he appears to have followed a middle course, strictly adhering to the rules (4, 15 Mar.).193PJ i. 505; ii. 28, 39.

Lenthall soon had to defend his own reputation. On 19 February he informed the Commons that a letter purported to be addressed from him to the king, published three days earlier, was spurious – an overture ‘which he never had in his thoughts to write’.194PJ i. 416. The letter in question, heavy with Old Testament imagery and replete with both respect for the monarch and assurances of MPs’ good intentions, was damaging less for its content than for what it represented if genuine.195Mr Speakers letter to the Kings most excellent Majestie (1641). Any unsanctioned approach to Charles from the Speaker would constitute breach of privilege of the gravest kind. However, accepting Lenthall’s denial, MPs simply resolved to revive the printing committee to investigate its provenance.196PJ i. 416. Colleagues were also supportive of a motion from Gloucester MP Thomas Pury I* to release one of his servants from detention by officials of the court of king’s bench (11 Feb.), and when on 19 March Sir Gilbert Gerard* moved that Lenthall should be recommended to William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, the lord lieutenant, as a deputy lieutenant for Oxfordshire, ‘there was a general affirmative, without one negative’.197PJ i. 349; ii. 62.

At other times Lenthall faced criticism. Henry Marten accused him of prematurely putting the question for rising on 9 February in the midst of an important debate on naming the lords lieutenant for each county, although D’Ewes told him he ‘did well perform [his duty]’.198PJ i. 338. D’Ewes himself was not entirely happy with an adjournment on 22 February, although in ‘desiring to be gone’ without waiting the return of a select committee when it was already past 7 o’clock and Members remaining in the chamber declining, Lenthall was evidently taking the sensible course.199PJ i. 444. Complaint from several quarters about the Speaker’s conduct of proceedings was ‘laid aside’ on 14 February after he ‘spake in defence of himself’, while on 26 February there was what looks like a heated exchange between Lenthall and the choleric Sir Arthur Hesilrige* on the subject of legitimate interruption of other Members; the Speaker prevailed, but D’Ewes admired Hesilrige’s ‘integrity’.200PJ i. 368-9, 473-4.

It is difficult to gauge whether challenges to Lenthall derived simply from irritation at procedural mistakes or frustration when intentions were thwarted, or whether they were rooted in deeper factional or even ideological animosity. One issue on which the Speaker may have seemed partisan was that of the militia. During proceedings on 8 February, he retired to the committee chamber for about half an hour: probably this was for a much-needed break, although it could have provided space for a consultation. On his return William Pierrepont* reported from the committee considering the Lords’ additions to Parliament’s declaration on control of forts and armed forces. ‘Some moved that it were dangerous to this pass as an act of Parliament’ (doubtless on the grounds of unprecedented assertion of a right to interfere in what had hitherto been part of the royal prerogative), but Lenthall appeared to squash this wider discussion in favour of a narrower consideration of the bill, to hurry it on its way: ‘but the Speaker interrupted them and said there was nothing now to be spoken unto but the alterations of the Lords with our additions to them’. The move failed: D’Ewes, and almost certainly others, asserted that since it was ‘of so great moment’, ‘everyone [should] have free liberty to speak to it’. However, when Henry Vane II wanted to bargain with the Lords for a mutual acceptance of amendments, D’Ewes and Lenthall were united, and successful, in heading him off.201PJ i. 311-12. Lenthall then continued to promote the passage of the bill and the preparation for its implementation. It was on his motion that Members were ordered to nominate suitable officers to the committee for the militia (18 Feb.), while after both Houses had voted for putting the kingdom in a ‘posture of defence’ and the Lords had given their final assent to the resulting Militia Ordinance, Lenthall again tried to block any re-reading in the Commons (5 Mar.).202PJ i. 411, 513. When, on the other hand, fissures did subsequently open up between the two Houses, Lenthall proposed a motion to pursue and resolve the matter (18 Mar.).203PJ ii. 56. Overall, these seem like the actions of a man committed to the independent arming of Parliament, alarming those of a more traditionalist cast by paying insufficient attention to the possible consequences, and differing from those of a more radical or warlike disposition by accepting the compromises of the Lords without fighting the corner.

Whatever his precise political stance, Lenthall still felt insufficiently rewarded for his effort. On 4 April the Commons agreed a small committee to consider his petition relating to ‘the great decay in his body and estate occasioned by his daily and continual employment here’; a selection of leading MPs were nominated, including both Vanes, Pym, Holles and fellow Woodstock Member Pye I.204CJ ii. 511a. Five days later the House accepted their recommendation that £6,000 ‘be bestowed as a voluntary gift’ on the Speaker, £2,000 as soon as could be arranged and the rest in the Michaelmas term, and noted ‘their sense ... that this recompense was too little’. It was unprecedentedly realistic in its assessment of what the position entailed and Lenthall expressed himself suitably grateful.205CJ ii. 518b, 519a. However, as was acknowledged two and a half years later, money was hard to come by and even then it had not been fully paid.206CJ iii. 702b.

In the meantime Lenthall’s position as figurehead of the Commons continued to be uncomfortable and on occasions he gave vent to ill temper. On 18 April a letter he had received enclosing a prophecy was deemed too unsettling to be read in the chamber.207PJ ii. 184. On the 20th, by accident or design, he was 45 minutes late, breaching an order made the previous day that the sitting should begin at 8 o’clock and that those arriving after the opening prayers should be fined. In a full House, Sir Henry Mildmay* made a pointed dig at the Speaker, expressing the hope that he would be punctual in future, provoking Lenthall (according to D’Ewes) into ‘throw[ing] down 12d upon the table’. D’Ewes offered Lenthall a way out – being present at prayers he was excused the fine – but the Speaker let the coins lay, and took advantage of the moral high ground to pursue other transgressors the next day, ‘sharply reprov[ing]’ John Hotham* when he tried to wriggle out of payment.208PJ ii. 190, 194. For the most part, however, Lenthall probably held his frustrations in check. In August D’Ewes recorded as something of an exception an outburst in which, ‘unworthy of himself and contrary to the duty of his place’, he ‘fell upon ... with very sharp language’ the elderly William Jesson*, ‘harassed by hot spirits’ into a vote Lenthall thought ill-considered.209PJ iii. 295.

Through the early summer there is evidence that Lenthall tried to ensure that business proceeded as smoothly as possible in the circumstances. He used emollient language in delivering judgement on Kentish petitioners to Parliament, describing them as ‘young’ and ‘misled’ (30 Apr.), and admonished the intemperate Sir Henry Ludlowe* that he should use respectful language when speaking of the king (7 May).210PJ ii. 256, 292; CJ ii. 550. Interrupting leading Members like Hesilrige and St John, he insisted on following the orders of the day, although he was prepared to be flexible when urgent business required attention (10, 11, 13, 17 May).211PJ ii. 300, 304, 312, 330. He continued to clarify and to facilitate the passage of money and other bills, and reported on ‘strange sermons’ delivered in London (13 June) and on subversive printing (15 June).212PJ ii. 360, 364, 368, 378; iii. 37, 72, 79, 84, 105.

Once again, the extent to which he was moulding business to fit a particular agenda is difficult to determine. When on 11 June he proposed that the peers who had written from the king’s court at York rejecting a summons back to Parliament had offered it an affront, and might justly be suspected to further a civil war, he encountered some objections. The proposal may have represented his own conviction, the overwhelming sense of the debate or the importuning of Holles and Oliver Cromwell*, whom he appointed tellers for the ayes in the ensuing division.213PJ iii. 61. A somewhat more moderate or pragmatic position is evident in D’Ewes’s notes on his contribution from the floor to the grand committee considering the king’s answer to Parliament’s Nineteen Propositions. If they wished to be taken seriously as ‘good advisers’ to their monarch, Lords and Commons needed to ‘insist upon the inconvenience of evil counsels’ and to urge the necessity of an oath to observe Magna Carta and the Petition of Right. But ultimately they could not absolutely hold out for it in case the king resolved not to grant it; rather, they should ‘leave his majesty to consider it’ and thus avoid an immediate ‘breach betwixt us and his majesty’.214PJ iii. 93, 123-4, 129. Although on occasion he seemed susceptible to pressure from the ‘fiery spirits’ (e.g. 23 July), he was probably more often a voice for conciliation.215PJ iii. 258-60. As alignments were formed in late August in the days surrounding the king’s raising his standard at Nottingham, Lenthall resisted calls from Marten, William Strode I* and others of their ilk for the automatic expulsion from the House of absent Members, defending D’Ewes from those ‘snarling spirits’ who thought the latter’s stance on the matter too equivocal.216PJ iii. 310-11, 320-3.

Speaker under Parliament, 1642-4

Such moderation was complicated by the coming of war. Not only did Lenthall become more vulnerable, along with the Speaker of the Lords, as the public face of an institution engaged in armed conflict against the crown, but, like other Members who had estates in Oxfordshire and the Thames valley, he saw his property fall into enemy hands, with the attendant possibility of plunder and destruction. During a grand committee on 21 November he spoke in support of sending peace propositions to the king, but thereafter his position appeared to shift according to circumstance.217Add. 18777, f. 65v. On 1 December, in the context of discussion of the royal proclamation against those who had adhered to Parliament and of destruction of their property (which mentioned the Speakers specifically),

he related that his house had been plundered ... and that all his writings had been rent in pieces and defaced, and that his loss in the whole did amount to near £5,000 ... so as now he said he had nothing to show for his estate.

This may have been an exaggeration – D’Ewes, whose estates were safe in East Anglia and who could afford to be sanguine, ‘heard from others afterwards for certain that his loss could not be above the third part in value of that sum’ – but even at a more modest assessment Lenthall had paid heavily for his allegiance.218CJ ii. 870b; Harl. 164, f. 175v. Some significant time previously he had borrowed £1,000 from Henry Danvers, 1st earl of Danby, on security of Burford priory; he may well have foreseen that it would be a loan which he would not be able to repay to the now royalist peer when it became due in 1643.219CCAM 697; Staffs. RO, D(W)1778/I/i/33. This may explain the harsh treatment which, according to D’Ewes, he meted out on 3 December to the latter’s friend Sir Sidney Montagu* when he was summoned to account for his failure to back the parliamentarian war effort in Huntingdonshire. When pressed to declare for Parliament’s commander, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, Montagu proffered the same royal proclamation, provoking Lenthall to ‘insolency’ in chivvying him and calling him back to make his forgotten bow to the chair. He ‘not only prolonged the declaration of his censure by many unnecessary circumstances but did likewise act it with often shaking his head and sometimes fleering [scoffing]’.220Harl. 164, ff. 177v, 178v. Here D’Ewes may have been the one to exaggerate, but his perception of how the Speaker had behaved mattered almost as much as the reality.

A recognition of the impossibility of gaining recompense from anywhere but Parliament itself and an anxiety as to what his fate would be in the event of any treaty almost certainly weighed heavily with Lenthall in what followed. If D’Ewes is to be believed, immediately news reached the Commons on 7 December of the death of Sir Charles Caesar, master of the rolls, Lenthall ‘said to some near about the chair. “I would you would name me” [for the office], which they did accordingly’.221Harl. 164, f. 244. The appointment resolved by the Commons that day allocated to him not only the office, but also the house in Chancery Lane and all the associated records and profits.222CJ ii. 880b. Although he secured an order that it be written in to propositions to be presented to the king, with a request for the granting of letters patent (30 Dec.), it was to be a long time before Lenthall gained possession of his prize, and in the meantime he was a prisoner of the expectation.223CJ ii. 907b, 908a. In debate over the punishment of soldiers who had stayed in London instead of joining Essex (9 Dec.), he breached form to move that they be sent to the earl ‘to have marshal law executed upon them (which was to hang them all up)’, doubtless with the intention of setting an example to those inclined to be dilatory in their service and arguably also to please hard-liners. ‘The House dislik[ed] this bloody counsel’, according to D’Ewes, but they ordered him to write to Essex enjoining the general to ‘cashier or otherwise punish them’.224Harl. 164, f. 245; CJ ii. 882a.

By early 1643 Lenthall was habitually sitting ‘all day without rising to dinner’ and D’Ewes seemed ready to forgive him for being ‘very willing’ in late afternoon to respond to calls for the House to adjourn.225Harl. 164, f. 281. He was much less sympathetic to the Speaker when the latter told MPs on 6 February of information from Sir Robert Rich* that Sir John Culpeper*, the king’s nominee for the mastership of the rolls, had asked him to demand the key of the Chancery Lane house and take possession on Culpeper’s behalf. In what D’Ewes saw as a ploy by Lenthall to secure confirmation of his own, contrary grant, the latter ‘with notable hypocrisy delivered in the key’ (which evidently he already had) ‘and desired the house to dispose of it’. Wisely dissatisfied with merely verbal encouragement to keep it himself, Lenthall then employed war party member John Moore* to propose a formal order to that effect, which the latter did so ineptly, said D’Ewes, that everyone realised ‘that it was put to him from the Speaker’.226Harl. 164, f. 289. It is impossible to verify all the detail of this, but Lenthall did manage to secure some action to his advantage; it is also telling that the manager of a conference with the Lords to discuss once again the mastership of the rolls was the Thames valley war-monger Henry Marten.227CJ ii. 957b. Yet within two weeks, as a majority of MPs voted for a cessation of all acts of hostility in pursuance of a treaty, Lenthall appeared to veer back towards the peacemakers, whether because he considered the talks viable after all and likely to forward his ambitions or because he cynically thought that a minority war party could not help him, and as a result D’Ewes viewed him more charitably.228CJ ii. 959a, 970b; Harl. 164, ff. 292v, 302; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 442.

Once news from Oxford suggested that the treaty might fail, there was ostensibly another reversal. In D’Ewes’s opinion it was the fact that Lenthall was ‘for the most part cunningly prepared to ancillate [i.e subordinate himself] to the fiery spirits who had drawn the House to give him £6,000 and to nominate him master of the rolls’ that lay behind his bringing to the attention of the House on 5 April a complaint from several activists in Kent that some MPs had been backward in assisting them.229Harl. 164, ff. 156v-357. But it is not clear, from D’Ewes’s account of the ensuing examination of Sir Edward Hales* that the Speaker was unreasonably partisan in this. D’Ewes’s relation of confusion surrounding the granting of passes to French dignitaries (20 Mar.) depicts MPs (including himself) prepared to laugh heartily and unhelpfully at Lenthall’s periodic and probably inevitable mistakes.230Harl. 164, f. 336v. However justified in terms of hours of service and extent of income forfeited from inability to practise at the bar, the vote of £6,000 (some of which was still outstanding) and the regular modest payments that he was now receiving from delinquents’ compositions raised expectations of his conduct in the role and invited more ridicule and accusations of taking financial advantage whenever he did not meet them.231e.g. SP46/80, ff. 254, 263, 269 (15, 18 Apr.; 24 June; 19 Aug. 1643).

As a summer of military reversals unfolded, prompting several high-profile parliamentarians to defect to the king, or to consider defecting, it would be surprising if Lenthall did not review his position. As the recipient of a flood of letters to Parliament from beleaguered commanders and garrisons, including Gloucester, he knew the worst soonest and then had the dismal task of communicating it.232e.g. Bodl. Tanner 62, passim. A draft of his letter to the Hertfordshire county committee on 31 July illustrates, in its many erasures, the difficulties of expressing effectively the mind of Parliament to local supporters during a military crisis.233Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 435. It was natural to cultivate other Members with similar concerns. Bulstrode Whitelocke*, who had parallel anxieties over his Thames valley estates and who negotiated his own delicate if different path between peace-makers and war-mongers, obtained leave of absence in mid-June and recorded that the Speaker considerately gave him the official pass to go into the country, ‘with a blank to insert what place he pleased, such confidence he had in Whitelocke’s friendship and faithfulness’.234Whitelocke, Diary, 147; Add. 37343, f. 271v.

There is scanty evidence surrounding the process by which in November Lenthall finally secured the mastership of the rolls. On 1 September in the debate surrounding the Covenant proposed by the Westminster Assembly of divines, he seemed to range himself with those who wished to allow room for dissent from its strict discipline, but this was also the position of D’Ewes and Whitelocke, and thus hardly placed him among the anti-Essex party.235Harl. 165, f. 163v. More indicative in this regard, if accurate, was D’Ewes’s account of the Speaker ‘contrary to the duty of his place’ hounding Holles’s ally Sir John Holland* when the latter was called to explain inadequacy in implementing local measures to supply the army of Essex’s rival commander Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester (13 Sept.). On this occasion D’Ewes depicted Lenthall as actually inspiring ‘the violent spirits’ in the Manchester camp.236Harl. 165, f. 190. But this does not amount to proof that he owed his place entirely to them. In any case, the ordinance putting Lenthall in possession of the mastership of the rolls was brought in on 8 November by John Selden*, another Oxfordshire MP of complex allegiance, and was taken to the Lords by Holles.237Harl. 165, f. 224v; Add. 31116, p. 180; CJ iii. 305a-306a.

Lenthall was definitively sworn in on 16 December in the Lords.238LJ vi. 341; Harl. 165, ff. 220v, 245. During the final illness of Pym the royalist newspaper Mercurius Aulicus had ironically suggested that ‘the wisest man alive Master William Lenthall’ might as well also take on the other’s newly-acquired office as master of the ordnance, ‘in regard he is as fit for the one as the other’.239Mercurius Aulicus, no. 45 (5-11 Nov. 1643), 644 (E.75.28); no. 46 (12-19 Nov. 1643), 661 (E.77.18). But this emanated from Oxford, where Culpeper was still the king’s master of the rolls. Taking together his past experience and present position, Lenthall was hardly an implausible candidate. The second highest law office in the kingdom, which carried control of the court of chancery and lucrative associated fees, and which had once been occupied by Thomas Cromwell†, might be thought appropriate to a chief representative of an independently-functioning Parliament, and was a convenient way of paying for his services.

It is difficult to determine whether it was simply by virtue of his office or whether it was as a result of closeness to the anti-Essex faction that in January 1644 Lenthall was made party by Sir Henry Vane II to communications he had received from John Lovelace, 2nd Baron Lovelace, one of the defectors of the previous summer. As a Berkshire landowner, Lovelace was well known to Lenthall on local commissions; Vane and the others he called to confer – St John, Hesilrige, and Samuel Browne* – doubtless sought to cover themselves. But by keeping related documents ‘from public view’, Lenthall also risked compromising himself. However, when Essex and his friends in the Commons Sir Philip Stapilton* and John Glynne* learned of it and sought to make political capital by presenting it as a case of consorting with the enemy, they over-played their hand. Both Houses were perceived to ‘extremely resent’ the earl’s unheralded accusations against Members and his seeming, as lord general, to exert the army’s power over Parliament; suspecting a royalist plot to sow dissension or hostile to their ineffectual but authoritarian commander, they did not pursue the matter.240LJ vi. 381b, 391a; CJ iii. 369b, 376a; Juxon Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 42-3.

Meanwhile, Lenthall had encountered what were to be rather longer-running problems over establishing the dignity of his office – and through it the authority of the Parliament – in the eyes of the foreign ambassadors who sought to mediate between London and Oxford. In December 1643 Vane had objected to his motion that Henri de Lorraine, usually known in England as the Prince d’Harcourt, might have a pass to go to the king.241Add. 31116, p. 206; CJ iii. 330b, 349a, 352a, 352b. Vane’s fears that the mission would be prejudicial to Parliament were manifested more widely in January in a decision to break open Harcourt’s correspondence and then on 22 January 1644 (in the context of deteriorating relations perhaps not unconnected with the Lovelace case) not to read his latest letter from Oxford because it addressed the Speakers of the Lords and Commons merely as Messieurs Grey de Wark and Lenthall, without reference to their office. Harcourt’s embassy was effectively terminated.242Add. 31116, p. 219; Whitelocke, Mems. 80; Juxon Journal, 45-6; CJ iii. 362a, 364a, 373a.

As the year went on a combination of lack of protocol and (perhaps) over-ambitious assertion of Parliament’s status complicated talks with envoys from the United Provinces. On the arrival of Johan van Reede van Renswoude, Willem Boreel and Albert Joachim in mid-March, the Speaker received them at his house. Misunderstandings on their part over exactly what authority he had to treat were compounded by a request that the ambassadors’ papers be delivered in English as well as French and Latin, a detail that D’Ewes blamed (as he did other unproductive aspects of the meetings) on Lenthall’s ‘weakness’ and ‘folly’ but which Whitaker recorded as a decision of the House, possibly aimed at transparency.243Add. 31116, pp. 247-9; Harl. 166, f. 34; CJ iii. 431a. That factionalism was at work here, with Lenthall inclined towards those who had no enthusiasm for the Dutch initiative, was indicated on 30 March. Following a discussion resulting in an order curbing Essex’s grants of passes for ladies to go to and from Oxford, in which D’Ewes implied Lenthall had played too active a part, the Commons turned to the question of whether they should nominate a committee to consider Dutch proposals – a committee which would short-circuit the CBK’s authority to deal directly with the king.244J.R. MacCormack, Revolutionary Politics in the Long Parliament (Camb. Mass. 1973), 24. D’Ewes joined Holles and Stapilton for the ayes, while Strode and Vane told for the noes. When equal numbers on each side required a casting vote, D’Ewes said, the Speaker ‘ut violentis ancillaret his No and would have given his reasons why’, probably meaning that he bowed to the pressure of violence; thus, ‘the Speaker’s casting voice decided the question’.245Harl. 166, f. 41; Add. 31116, p. 256; CJ iii. 443a. Despite this setback, the States’ ambassadors continued their peace-making efforts into the summer and autumn. While a small victory was won – the Dutch seem at least sometimes to have supplied text in English – Whitaker continued to portray Lenthall’s encounters with them as cordial and D’Ewes continued to imply that the Speaker was dragging his feet.246Harl. 166, ff. 59, 60, 108; Add. 31116, pp. 267, 270, 297, 300, 357; CJ iii. 554a, 599a, 618b; Whitelocke, Mems. 94-5, 98, 118.

One motive for the belligerence depicted by D’Ewes may have been a perception on Lenthall’s part that his own position would be well-nigh irretrievable. Regular mockery in the Oxford press may have strengthened his determination to keep the war going until water-tight terms might be secured.247E.g. Spie Communicating Intelligence from Oxford no. 8 (12-19 Mar. 1644), 65 (E.38.2); no. 12 (11-19 Apr. 1644), 93 (E.43.13). Giving sentence (31 May) on John Belasyse*, captured at Selby as he put up stiff resistance to resurgent parliamentarian forces, Lenthall explained to him the 'horror and grievousness' of the offence for which he was to be sent as a traitor to the Tower, 'which was no less than, at one blow, to endeavour the ruin of religion, liberty, the privileges, and very being of Parliaments, and the introducing of popery and slavery'.248CJ iii. 512b; HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 385; Add. 31116, p. 282. According to D’Ewes, this was not just a formal enunciation of a verdict: the Speaker, ‘with much insolency and arrogancy insulted over him’.249Harl. 166, f. 68. Desperation born of a perception that the military situation hung in the balance may have informed his joining with Whitelocke on 12 June to argue that, in the alarming absence of parliamentary generals in the west, Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire would still ‘join as one man’ to drive the royalists from around Oxford.250Harl. 166, f. 72. A fortnight later he was named to the newly-constituted committee for the three counties.251A. and O.

The parliamentarian victory at Marston Moor then provided the opportunity to press forward the advantage. When on 1 August the House debated new propositions to be presented to the king, some advised against too many exceptions from the general pardon, ‘in respect this might make all men desperate’. Notwithstanding this, William Strode I proposed disqualifying all delinquents in the legal profession ‘ever to practise’ and the ‘Speaker, contrary to [the] order of the House and the nature of his place ... moved that officers might be added ... to make his rolls and [subordinate] six clerks sure’.252Harl. 166, f. 104. Yet on issues not directly connected to the conduct of the war in England or to his own advantage, Lenthall was not always on the side of the war party. When the Committee of Both Kingdoms relayed to the House accusations from the Adventurers for Ireland against Robert Reynolds*, hitherto an adherent of Essex, Lenthall used his casting vote against Hesilrige and for Reynolds’s supporters, marshalled by Stapilton (20 Aug.).253Harl. 166, f. 108v; CJ iii. 599a. A further victory at Newbury in September ushered in more peace talks, but they proved abortive and Lenthall lost nothing. On 21 November the Commons formally noted that part of the £6,000 awarded to him in 1642 was still owing, but instalments were still coming his way from the committee for delinquents at Haberdashers’ Hall.254CJ iii. 702b.

Speaker and faction, 1645-6

Lack of evidence makes it difficult to discern precisely what part Lenthall took in the passage of the Self-Denying Ordinance. On 22 November 1644 Lenthall may have ‘paved the way’ for commanders Oliver Cromwell* and Sir William Waller* to present themselves in a good light by his motion to ‘know what our armies have done and how they should move’.255MacCormack, Revolutionary Politics, 56; citing Harl. 166, f. 166; Add. 31116, p. 350. On 21 December Whitaker recorded that the whole House of Commons went up to the Lords with the ordinance, but that the Speaker stayed behind; the Journal noted that he left the chair when Pierrepont took it up.256Add. 31116, p. 361; CJ iii. 730b. The extent to which Lenthall faced a real prospect of losing the mastership of the rolls under its provisions is unclear, although it, and his financial needs generally, may have been under discussion by the committee then mentioned as sitting on the matter. The Speaker was unwell on 31 December, leading to the House rising early, and he failed to attend church on 28 January 1645, but his general health was relatively robust and there is no observable diminution in his other activity on the Commons’ behalf.257Add. 31116, pp. 365, 378. The temporary occupation that month of his house at Besselsleigh by a company of horse from Oxford, soon ousted by a contingent sent by parliamentarian commander Major-general Browne, perhaps underlined for him the advantage of supporting the army, although since Browne could not spare a garrison to hold it, he then rendered it defenceless.258Whitelocke, Mems. 122; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 204; VCH Berks. iv 494. On the other hand, it might be significant that when Sir Thomas Fairfax* came to the House on 19 February to receive his commission as commander of the New Model army, D’Ewes did not use the occasion to accuse him of any wheeler-dealing in order to secure exemption from the ordinance or other favour from the army.259Harl. 166, f. 178v. Whitelocke noted that the Speaker ‘told [Fairfax] somewhat of Agamemnon and of the old Romans, which I have forgotten’, suggesting that his assurances of trust and expressions of thankfulness were serviceable but lacked flair.260Whitelocke, Mems. 132.

One thing that can be said with confidence is that Lenthall was busy, a state of affairs he recognised in appointing his son John as deputy recorder of Gloucester.261Glos. Archives, GBR/H/2/3, p. 37. The ending of the first civil war did not stem the flow of correspondence reaching him; indeed, it probably swelled the tide of delinquents seeking passes to come to London to compound or to justify themselves to Parliament.262E.g. Bodl. Tanner 60, f. 134 and passim; CCC 898; Whitelocke, Mems. 135. The award to Lenthall of half the value of delinquents’ estates discovered by or through him doubtless encouraged him to give attention to informers.263CCAM 45, 50, 57, 727, 842. The letters of Sir Samuel Luke reveal the perceived difficulties of securing his attention and persuading him to raise matters in the House; the right moment had to be chosen or all might be undone; his power of discretion was considerable.264Lttr. Bks. of Sir Samuel Luke, 147, 181, 186, 258, 282, 400, 549, 577. There was money to be elicited and administered on behalf of others and Members to be disciplined.265e.g. SP16/539/3, f. 14; Add. 31116, p. 414; Whitelocke, Mems. 144.

Into the spring and summer of 1645, Essex re-asserted his claims to military and political prominence and factionalism was intensified. That Lenthall eventually emerged unscathed suggests that he was perceived as in thrall to neither Independents nor Presbyterians, or at least that he was considered less so than any conceivable substitute by all except the radical fringe. On 19 July the Commons was deep in consideration of the long-running case of James Cranford, the London Presbyterian minister who had made spread rumours of treacherous collusion between Lord Saye’s subcommittee of the CBK and Lord Digby, and the counter-allegations which had surfaced more recently via Saye and Thomas Savile, Viscount Savile (1st earl of Sussex), that Holles and Whitelocke had come to a secret agreement when they were in Oxford as parliamentary commissioners. It seems to have been on the basis of a ‘tip-off’ from the inveterate troublemaker Colonel John Lilburne, his old associate Dr John Bastwick and Colonel Edward King that Alexander Rigby*, a Member out on a limb of the Independents, introduced a further complication by alerting the House to a ‘new discovery’. This was the revelation of depositions that the Speaker had covertly sent a large sum – variously recorded as £6,000, £30,000 or £60,000 – to the enemy, all the more dangerous perhaps for being ‘not intrinsically improbable’.266Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, ii. 332. It is difficult to reconstruct the cut and thrust of complex debate on a day in which Lenthall temporarily absented himself from the chamber, but late in the evening he denied the charges and named Lilburne as the chief instigator; he also objected to the fact that they had been aired before various committees (probably the committee for Surrey, the committee at Salters’ Hall, and even the CBK) without notice to Parliament, which he construed as breach of privilege. Accepting his story, the House ordered the arrest of Lilburne and referred the matter to the committee investigating ‘the Savile affair’.267Harl. 166, ff. 245, 245v; CJ iv. 213b. Two days later, when that committee was effectively dissolved by the decision ‘not to meddle further’ in the case against Holles and Whitelocke, the Commons referred Lilburne and all the information against the Speaker and his brother, Sir John Lenthall, to the Committee for Examinations*.268Harl. 166, f. 243v; CJ iv. 274a.

It is likely in this context that a majority in the House had no appetite for a hasty, ill-considered vendetta against Lenthall. Temporary anxiety may have underlain his desire ‘to go out of town’, which according to Whitelocke led to an adjournment of the House on 7 August.269Whitelocke, Mems. 165. Soon, however, reports of Lilburne’s demeanour at the Committee for Examinations and revelations of his subversive publications must have reassured Lenthall that he would be regarded as an unreliable witness, while the decision of 26 August to entrust him and the Speaker of the Lords with the seal of the duchy of Lancaster was another fillip.270CJ iv. 235a-b; LJ 554b; Whitelocke, Mems. 168. When on 15 September Whitaker finally reported from the Committee what he described as ‘the great and clamorous accusation’, he announced that members had found the Lenthall brothers ‘clear of all’, that previous investigation of the charges without alerting the Commons had indeed been a breach of privilege, and that ‘the whole complaint and prosecution [was] false, malicious and scandalous, and the chief instigators and prosecutors ... worthy of severe and exemplary punishment’.271Add. 31116, p. 463. D’Ewes considered it ‘a long and frivolous report’, but the Commons agreed with the Committee on all counts: there was ‘no colour of proof’ that the brothers had ‘held correspondency’ or ‘sent any money at all’ to Oxford; ‘the complaint [had] been raised and prosecuted without any ground at all’; the four men and one woman at the root of it were to receive an exemplary punishment to be decided by a reliable committee of lawyers including Selden and Whitelocke.272Harl. 166, f. 264v; CJ iv. 274a; Whitelocke, Mems. 172. It may, all the same, have been a release of pent-up tension that three days later led Lenthall to fall ‘suddenly ill’ and leave the chair, eventually necessitating an adjournment.273Add. 31116, p. 464; Whitelocke, Mems. 173; CJ iv. 278b.

In the wake of what was in effect a vote of confidence, late 1645 and 1646 was plausibly a time of relative calm for Lenthall as the situation in his native county improved dramatically. A new grant of the mastership of the rolls ‘during his life’ was ordered in late October, as D’Ewes noted sourly, ‘contrary to the ordinance of both Houses’.274CJ iv. 324b; LJ vii. 640; Harl. 166, f. 271v. Over the autumn and winter Lenthall seems to have enjoyed cordial relations with Whitelocke, as well as with a range of colleagues.275Whitelocke, Diary, 182; Whitelocke, Mems. 179. On 17 January 1646 the Speaker joined with other Oxfordshire parliamentarians, including Saye, John D’Oyly* and Sir Robert Pye I for the kind of collective executive action that had long been impossible as they appointed Whitelocke as steward of the manor of Henley.276Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. ix, f. 77. In May he communicated to Whitelocke, with a glowing testimony of Fairfax’s regard, the general’s desire that Whitelocke join the commissioners negotiating the surrender of Oxford.277Whitelocke, Mems. 204.

The Speaker and the army, 1646-7

Subject as he was to a daily barrage of missives from local commanders and committees, as well as petitions from victims and prisoners, Lenthall was well informed about both military and civilian matters. He had ample opportunity, should he wish to take it, of cultivating Fairfax and his secretary, John Rushworth*.278e.g. Bodl. Tanner 58-60, passim. Occasionally, as he revealed on 18 September 1646 when he asked permission of the House to communicate it to a committee, he was party to secret intelligence too sensitive to be aired in the chamber.279Whitelocke, Mems. 222; CJ iv. 672a. None the less, at least one of his correspondents thought him unaware of how support for Parliament had declined (16 Jan. 1647).280Bodl. Tanner 59, f. 667.

At the end of October 1646 Whitelocke brought into the Commons ordinances for appointing the Speakers of both Houses ‘commissioners of the great seal, to all intents and purposes’, ‘to be the persons unto whom bills in chancery should be directed and to seal all writs, pardons and other things of course’, and for empowering Lenthall as master of the rolls to hear causes with his subordinates in the absence of his fellow commissioner.281CJ iv. 710a; Add. 31116, pp. 574, 575; LJ viii. 683. The measures extended Lenthall’s opportunities for profit and influence, which in turn affected his status as Speaker. The records of Lincoln’s Inn suggest that there his word had immediate effect.282LI Black Bks. ii. 363-70.

Lenthall’s initial view on the disbandment of the army and on the agitation within its ranks in spring 1647 is unknown. Some communication and co-operation with Fairfax clearly underpinned the joint compilation of names and certificates in favour of compositions based on surrender articles, such as that submitted to the Committee for Compounding on 29 April.283CCC 64. There is some suggestion that the general wrote more promptly and more frankly to Lenthall than circumstance dictated.284Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 191, 230. On 4 June, when the Commons received a petition from soldiers ‘in and about the City of London’ who were not part of the New Model, Lenthall was among several MPs who related ‘how they had been affronted and in a manner assaulted and had insolent language given them by divers soldiers in Westminster Hall, pretending to be reformadoes’ [disbanded].285Add. 31116, p. 622; CJ v. 197b. This was probably an early indication that the balance of his sympathies was with the army encamped at some distance from Westminster rather than with those who demonstrated on his doorstep for a militia under City and Presbyterian control.

In a month of ‘transactions’ between Parliament and the army, Lenthall forwarded to Fairfax on 22 June, as instructed by the House, correspondence directed to himself relating to the suppression of insurrection in Wales. A rough copy of the covering note, signed ‘your affectionate and humble servant’, remarked that, ‘upon perusal of them, you will easily judge the consequence of their not having more in command’.286Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 228; CJ v. 220b. If, as is by no means certain, the comment was Lenthall’s own, it reinforces the impression given above. It may be significant that a letter sent the next day communicating the Commons’ displeasure at the seizure by Fairfax’s troops of Colonel John Birch* and consequent delay in the latter’s departure to Ireland with recruits from the New Model, which was drafted by Presbyterians William Ashhurst* and Richard Knightley*, exhibited a much stiffer tone.287Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 237; CJ v. 220b, 221a. Four weeks later, when the Presbyterians were in retreat at Westminster, a letter sent by Lenthall reiterated the importance of speeding Birch’s expedition, but provided rather different justification (20 July). As it pointed out, the Derby House Committee, a body dominated by Independents, had ‘often pressed’ the House ‘to hasten their despatch for the relief of that bleeding country’: perhaps Lenthall was thus persuaded.288Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 389. He might also have been alarmed by a report from Fairfax on the 16th which warned him that soldiers disturbing the peace in Bristol were 30 weeks in arrears of pay.289Clarke Pprs. i. 162.

On Monday 26 July Parliament was invaded by ‘a tumultuous multitude’ of demonstrators in favour of peace with the king and the disbandment of the army. Confronted by such violence, the Commons voted to rescind previous decisions and return control of the London militia to the Presbyterians. According to his own declaration, issued on the 30th or 31st and acquired by collector George Thomason on the 31st, at the time Lenthall ‘did then openly declare in the House’ that the votes were ‘all void and null, being extorted by force and violence’ from Members sitting ‘in continual fear of their lives’.290A Declaration of William Lenthall (1647), 4 (E.400.32); cf. CJ v. 258b, 259a. Whether he was in fact so brave or foolhardy is beyond the record; he was indisputably both outraged and intimidated. Elaborating, he depicted a noisy and determined mob

When a company of apprentices, reformadoes and others, shall call the ordinances of both Houses of Parliament pretended ordinances, shall lock the doors of the Houses upon them, shall swear not to let them out till they have passed what they pleased ... shall knock, hoot, and hollow at the Parliament’s doors, that Members could not be heard to speak or debate.

Even in such circumstances, when the Commons voted on the militia, Lenthall ‘had judged the major part to be for the negative’, but the crowd ‘would not suffer’ a formal division, ‘but in a threatening way require[d] those that gave their votes against them to come out to them if they would’. When the sitting was finally ended, they attempted to ‘thrust back the Speaker into the House’ to force through further measures and then to ‘iustle [jostle], pull and hale [?haul] the Speaker, all the way he went down to his coach’; ‘to avoid the violence’ he had to take another ‘for refuge’.291A Declaration of William Lenthall, 6-7; Juxon Journal, 162. At some point, according to a report sent to Venice, apprentices put him on the spot by asking him if he were a good servant of the king; considering his positive response too quiet, they then humiliated him by making him shout loudly ‘God save the king’ for all to hear.292CSP Ven. 1647-52, p. 10.

Having perhaps taken counsel with his counterpart in the Lords, on Tuesday 27th Lenthall seems not to have appeared in Parliament at all, although slightly differing accounts do not allow certainty on this: some imply that there was debate before, following the example of the Lords, the Commons was adjourned until Friday 30th.293Juxon Journal, 163; A Diarie, or an Exact Iournall no. 2 (22-29 July 1647), 14 (E.400.22); A Continuation of Certain Special and Remarkable Passages (23-30 July 1647), D3v (E.400.25); Perfect Occurrences no. 30 (23-31 July 1647), 199 (E.518.10); A Perfect Summary no. 2 (26 July-2 Aug. 1647), 13 (E.518.13); CJ v. 259a; LJ ix. 358a. Presbyterian activist William Prynne*, who claimed Sir Ralph Ashton* as his informant, later recounted that the Speaker did attend the previously-scheduled fast day at St Margaret’s on Wednesday 28th – testament, perhaps, to the importance he attached to such occasions. ‘Discoursing with ... Ashton, Sir Benjamin Rudyerd* [a prominent moderate] and four more Members sitting with him, between the two sermons’, Lenthall was alleged to have:

told them of his own accord, that there was a scandalous report raised in town that he meant to leave the House and run away to the army, but for his own part, he had not any such thought or intention, but resolved to continue in town, to live and die with the other Members of the House, if there were cause.294W. Prynne, A Brief and Necessary Vindication (1659), 7 (E.772.2); also in C. Walker, Hist. of Independency (1661), 40.

If this was the case, or if Lenthall was speaking truthfully, then he rapidly reconsidered his position. When the Commons reassembled on Friday, he was absent. The four Members (including Pye) who were despatched to Chancery Lane to summon him reported ‘about an hour after’, ‘that Mr Speaker was not to be heard of; that he had not lodged at his house that night, but was gone out of town yesterday morning’. A depleted House, recognising that they could not continue without a Speaker and overcoming any uncertainty about their power to elect a replacement, ‘by general approbation’ chose Henry Pelham*.295CJ v. 259b; Juxon Journal, 163; cf. Clarendon, Hist. iv. 243.

It is likely that Lenthall indeed left the capital on Thursday morning. An undated letter sent by him to Fairfax was most plausibly written later that day. He supposed that ‘it will be strange to your Excellency to hear of my being in Windsor, where I intend to stay until I find the Parliament in a better condition’ and expressed the wish that the general might ‘be, under God, the saviour of Parliament and the people’s liberty’.296Clarke Pprs. i. 218-19. The bearer of the message seems to have been Sir Arthur Hesilrige, a fact which lends some slight support to the contention of Presbyterian leader Holles that there had been an army ‘contrivance’, ‘designed and laid principally’ by Oliver St John* but delivered via a letter from John Rushworth, ‘advising [Lenthall] not to appear at the House on Friday morning’ and to ‘take counsel’ of St John, which would assure him of army protection.297Holles, Memoirs, 144; Clarke Pprs. 219n. Perhaps some in the army or among Independents at Westminster did manoeuvre the Speaker into convenient action, although given their previous clashes, Hesilrige was a somewhat unlikely instrument unless he had up his sleeve some threat to expose corruption, as some commentators alleged.298Holles, Memoirs, 144; Ludlowe, Mems. i. 207; Walker, Hist. of Independency, 41; W. Prynne, The Case of the Impeached Lords (1648), 9 (E.423.16). Perhaps Fairfax was less surprised than anticipated. Perhaps Lenthall was being honest when he later claimed to have been ‘deceived’: ‘I knew the Presbyterians would never restore the king to his just rights; those men [i.e. Cromwell and his agents] swore that they would’.299OPH xxiii. 372.

But the potentially distorting lens of the Restoration compromises this assertion. Lenthall’s declaration leaves the question open.

It was generally voiced in the town that there would be a far greater confluence of apprentices, reformadoes and others by Friday at the Parliament doors; and particular notice was given to me, that after they had made the House vote what they pleased they would destroy me.

As if that were not sufficient deterrent

I had likewise information given me that there would be a greater number ... of a contrary opinion and affection ... which I foresaw must of necessity cause a great combustion, and probability of much bloodshed.300A Declaration of William Lenthall, 4-5.

The prospect of general disorder and personal injury – including ‘bloody threats’ that he would receive ‘far worse’ treatment than on Monday – combined with more lofty constitutional considerations.301A Declaration of William Lenthall, 7. He was determined not ‘to be an instrument in passing [the recent] votes and to give any colour of parliamentary authority’ to the mob or the Presbyterians; he refused to ‘be made a servant to such a rude and tumultuous multitude’ and to betray the trust conferred on him by ‘transfer[ing] upon them’ the wherewithal ‘to abuse and deceive the minds, and to destroy the lives, liberties and estates of the people of this kingdom’.302A Declaration of William Lenthall, 4, 5. Which factor weighed the heaviest is impossible to determine.

The declaration, framed expressly to justify his absence from Parliament on 30 July, was brought to London by an unknown hand. The next day Francis Drake* informed the Commons ‘that he had heard that there is a declaration a printing of the last Speaker’s, at one Symond’s house in Aldersgate Street, which, as he hears, will be very dangerous to the Parliament and City’. A copy was produced and read.303CJ v. 261a. A rumour was also circulating that Lenthall had ‘carried the great seal away to the army’, but an order to put it in the custody of Pelham and Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham, the new Speaker of the Lords, implies that Lenthall had left it behind to avoid burning his boats further.304A Perfect Diurnall no. 209 (26 July-2 Aug. 1647), 1683 (E.518.12); CJ v. 261b. The Commons was thus enabled to set in train an ordinance for making the new Speakers replacement commissioners.305CJ v. 262b. In the meantime, it was not until Tuesday 3 August that Lenthall’s presence with the army was confirmed when he was seen, with the earl of Manchester, former Speaker of the Lords, and many MPs at the army’s muster on Hounslow Heath.306Perfect Occurences no. 31 (30 July-6 Aug. 1647), n.p. (E.518.14); A Perfect Summary no. 3 (2-9 Aug. 1647), 22 (E.518.15); A Perfect Diurnall no. 210 (2-9 Aug. 1647), 1648 (E.518.16); cf. Clarendon, Hist. iv. 244, 246. His name headed the list of Commons who the next day subscribed to the ‘Engagement’ of those who went to the army to adhere to it until such time as there was a free Parliament.307Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 731-800; SP16/515, f. 49. On the 5th, when the army entered London, Lenthall was in the procession; the mace, also left behind, was reportedly sent to meet him, and like Manchester he was then duly re-installed in Parliament.308Clarke Pprs. i. 220; A Perfect Diurnall no. 210, 1652; A Continuation of Certain Speciall and Remarkable Passages (30 July-6 Aug. 1647), n.p. (E.401.8); CJ v. 263a.

Insofar as Lenthall was concerned, the Journal recorded a seamless reversion to the status quo ante on 6 August. Following the opening of proceedings in which Vane II reported from the commissioners to the army, a gratuity was voted to the soldiery and a resolution taken to entrust the safeguarding of Parliament to Fairfax, the general arrived, at which point ‘Mr Speaker’ Lenthall ‘upon the command of the House’ invited him to sit. ‘After some preamble’, Lenthall conveyed the ‘hearty thanks’ of those present. An ordinance to void all proceedings since 26 July (and thereby, amongst other things, formally to re-instate the Speaker) was introduced later; it was despatched to the Lords, but failed to pass that day.309CJ v. 268a-269b. Only after debate in a grand committee on 9 August was the resolution adopted.310CJ v. 270a.

Speaker under fire 1647-8

Although the Presbyterian coup had been quashed, the narrowness of votes in succeeding days, the varied composition of committees which reviewed the summer’s events and the unresolved issues surrounding the settlement of peace probably continued to present difficulties for Lenthall. The fact of his having abandoned Westminster for the army may have removed for many who occupied the middle ground any pretence of the Speaker’s neutrality. Among Presbyterians it seems to have signalled an intensification of accusations of corruption.

That there was a widespread perception that not only Lenthall but also his family could be bribed is illustrated from the Verney papers. In November 1647 Dr Alexander Denton, who was promoting his nephew Sir Ralph Verney*’s interests before the Committee for Compounding, informed the latter that ‘I do think to make my way to the Speaker by feeling his sister-in-law my cousin and I am told it is the best way I can take’. His intention was ‘to offer her £50 if within such time she will get the prayer of my petition granted’. The petition was indeed successful, and while this clearly does not prove that it did so because Lady Lenthall persuaded her brother-in-law to influence the Committee in Denton’s favour, it is likely to have reinforced the original impression.311Gardiner, Great Civil War, iv. 76-7. It must also have been clear that Lenthall was no longer in difficult financial circumstances. In October the Committee for Advance of Money ordered the mortgage deed for Burford to be returned to him, since it was evident that he had paid off the loan.312CCAM 697.

When on 3 January 1648 the Commons registered a Vote of No Addresses to the king, at least one newsletter blamed the Speaker, whose gain from this turn of events it saw plainly. He ‘was so much overjoyed that he could scarce return the thanks of the House’. He had engineered proceedings: ‘this ... was the procurement of Lenthall: a man who enjoys more places than ever the poor received acts of charity from him since he crawled into the world’. Despite the Self-Denying Ordinance he had garnered the offices of master of the rolls, ‘principal keeper’ of the great seal and judge in chancery ‘estimated to be worth to him no less than £20,000 per annum’, yet he was both a miser and an extortioner. He

hath as effectual a way to starve his servants as ever the Lady Waller had; he keeps up his collars of brawn, till they stink, as his memory will to posterity; and locks up the very chippings of his bread, to save charges, and allows not his servants one penny wages, but what they grasp (under him) out of poor men’s purses.313Mercurius Elencticus no. 8 (12-19 Jan. 1648), 54-5 (E.423.10).

Following the disablement of the Presbyterian leaders at the end of January, their partisans broadened the attack. William Prynne predicted that Lenthall would ‘have a monopoly and plurality of all kinds of officers for the maintenance of his state and dignity, and recompense of his infidelity in deserting the true House of Commons’; he would ‘be our perpetual Speaker, and eternally take five pounds for every ordinance that passeth the Commons House, with all other incident (new exacted) fees and gratuities’.314W. Prynne, A New Magna Charta (1648), 6 (E.427.15). Bracketing Lenthall as a ‘confederate’ of Cromwell and Henry Ireton*, others complained of the injustice and the irony they had perpetrated in punishing Presbyterians as ‘the obstructions of justice and perverters of our laws’.315J. Harris, The Royall Quarrell (1648), 5 (E.426.11); J. Lilburne, A Whip for the Present House of Lords (1648), 2, 19 (E.431.1); Fruitfull England like to become a barren Wilderness (1648), 14 (E.467.36).

The barrage continued through the spring and summer of pro-royalist unrest and fluctuating prospects of an Anglo-Scottish war. Mercurius Elencticus had already claimed that the Scottish Parliament intended to impeach the Westminster ‘rebels’, including Lenthall and St John ‘the two corrupt lawyers’.316Mercurius Elencticus no. 15 (1-8 Mar. 1648), 1014 (E.431.15). Now Lenthall was depicted with radicals Marten and Sir Henry Mildmay* as travelling abroad to seek support for renewed conflict.317A Fraction in the Assembly (1648), 12 (E.447.17). Alternatively he was seen preparing to flee: a parody of his longstanding role in issuing passports instructed the recipient ‘to suffer William Lenthall ... quietly to embark himself for Holland or New England’ with ‘his servant Adoniram [i.e. Edward] Twyford ... without any your let or molestation, provided they carry nothing prejudicial to the Parliament of Scotland’.318Mercurius Elencticus no. 24 (3-10 May. 1648), 188 (E.441.24). He had prepared an escape route should the royalists or the Scots prevail, being ‘the richest saint among us, who hath ... made himself great friends of the unrighteous Mammon, that so when the Parliament shall be no more, he may be received into the favour of foreign nations’.319M. Nedham, Reverend Alderman Atkins his Speech (1648), 1 (E.447.12); The Out-Crie of the Kings at Westminster (1648), 5; E. Symmons, A Vindication of King Charles (1648), 137, 177. He was with the earl of Manchester a ‘familiar’ of the witch disguised in ‘Parliament robes’, attended by the ‘those evil spirits’ Mildmay, Vane and Marten, and the ‘devil [Thomas] Chalenor*’.320Mistress Parliament her Gossipping (1648), 7 (E.443.28). A ‘cannibal’, delighting like ‘your Independents’ in the flesh of Presbyterians, he was also an ‘atheist, and lastly a principal contriver with those grandees, Beelzebub and Cromwell, about the king’s enchantment’.321Rombus the Moderator: or, the King Restored (1648), 2 (E.446.26). Scorn was poured on any notion that he might genuinely support a treaty. Alongside ‘regicides’ in the Upper House were ‘a nest of as evil birds as ever hatched at Tyburn’ headed by Lenthall, Mildmay and the usual suspects.322A Cuckoo’s Nest at Westminster (1648), 6 (E.447.19).

Yet for all the plausibility of some of their assertions, the hostile press had not quite captured their man. Moreover, their view was not necessarily in all respects the predominant one. Clarendon observed retrospectively in relation to Lenthall’s going to the army that he ‘was generally believed to have no malice towards the king’.323Clarendon, Hist. iv. 245. In this he was, perhaps, influenced by Lenthall’s deathbed account, but he was not usually given to credulity and his experience of talk at court, about the inns and in Oxfordshire put him in a position to know. On 28 July 1648 the Commons divided on whether to continue with a treaty with the king according to the propositions presented to him only at Hampton Court ‘and not elsewhere’. Called upon for his casting vote, Lenthall rejected the limiting clause, paving the way for progress.324CJ v. 650a. Mercurius Pragmaticus observed that this ‘mightily startled the Saints’ vote-drivers’ and attributed this unforeseen decision to a change in the wind direction on ‘this weather-cock which sits up the highest pinnacle of state’, caused by the ‘loadstone’ of bad news from the north.325Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 18 (25 July-1 Aug. 1648), [84] (E.456.7). But it was clearly in the Presbyterians’ interest to play down their own miscalculation and Lenthall was hardly the only MP who had once put their trust in the army to now put his trust in the Isle of Wight treaty. Even if Lenthall had, as alleged, ‘paused a while’ before making his intervention, it is possible that his commitment was genuine. The newsletter-writer still could not bring himself to believe this, reporting on 15 August that Lenthall thanked the treaty commissioners ‘against his conscience, or rather the grain of his faction’ – an assertion that was, of course, impossible to test.326Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 21 (15-22 Aug. 1648, [sig. A2a v] (E.460.21); CJ v. 671b. He got his own back, however, when three days later Edward Ashe* launched an attack on his publication. Ashe accused one of Lenthall’s own clerks – ‘a drunken, whoring, debauched fellow with a red face’ – of being the mole who leaked parliamentary proceedings. He moved to have the clerk examined by a committee, and ‘the Speaker being in his dumps, and the whole House in a laughter, it was easily carried’.327Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 21, sig. A2ba.

It was conceivably as part of a strategy to win Lenthall back again to the war party that on 1 September Miles Corbett*, not known for his peace-making views, was ordered to prepare an ordinance to convey to the Speaker and his heirs land in Burford.328CJ v. 696a. The next month Mercurius Elencticus again poured scorn on the notion that Lenthall might welcome the treaty and an end to ‘many fair and fat employments’

Ten thousand pounds per annum’s no small sum:

He’d rather have it then the king to come.329Mercurius Elencticus no. 47 (11-18 Oct. 1648), 386 (E.468.14).

The fact that he had used his casting vote on 9 October on an unrelated matter in favour of refusing Sir Thomas Peyton leave to compound, might be adduced as evidence of hard-line thinking.330CJ vi. 47a. On the other hand, his letters to his nephew Edmund Warcup, an assistant to the commissioners on the Isle of Wight, may be interpreted otherwise. Warcup might have been placed there with an eye to providing intelligence to those hostile to the treaty, but the correspondence he received from various family members in late September and early October evince cordiality between Lenthall and the commissioners, especially his nephew John Crew*.331Bodl. Rawlinson letters 47, ff. 5, 9, 17, 25. The Speaker was also anxious to know (27 Sept.) ‘whether our affections be so joined as that we and the king do communicate in our churches, whether our preachers preach to the king’, suggesting a mind not yet made up and an inclination to use religion as a yardstick by which to form a judgement.332Bodl. Rawlinson letters 47, f. 5.

On Tuesday 17 October the Commons’ first resolution was to adjourn at its rising until the following Monday, although the grand committee and standing committees were to function in the meantime.333CJ vi. 53b. Mercurius Pragmaticus detected ‘a neat project to spoil any further proceeding in the treaty’ in which ‘Mr Speaker himself was the prime actor’. In a ‘thin’ House he explained that he had ‘certain infirmities growing upon me, for prevention whereof I desire to have some time for the taking of physic’ and therefore requested six days’ grace. The ‘confederacy’ which ‘had been at the brewing of it ... all with once voice, out of tenderness to their Speaker’ backed his motion, although a minority of those in the chamber at that point were sceptical of his incapacity.334Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 30 (17-24 Oct. 1648), sig. Tt v (E.468.37). Several items of business were then raised and deferred, but among other items considered, letters from Cromwell in Scotland and from the peace commissioners in the Isle of Wight were read and debated, the latter being referred to the Derby House Committee until after the adjournment. Finally, towards the end of the day, the Commons gave in to representations from the Lords that an adjournment would ‘obstruct the kingdom and the treaty’ and overturned its previous decision.335CJ vi. 54a, b. For Mercurius Pragmaticus all this was proof of a failed stratagem. Lenthall’s illness was feigned and good news from Cromwell rapidly revived him; as the House filled, MPs came forward to concur with the Lords and object to the adjournment; Lenthall made ‘a very handsome retreat, and saved his trick and his credit both together’.336Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 30, sig. Tt2-Tt2v. Insofar as nothing more was heard of ill-health in succeeding days, Lenthall’s conduct does look suspicious. Underhand tactics to buy time for the Derby House Committee to consider the next move in negotiations independently of Parliament cannot be ruled out. Yet even if he were complicit in a plot, his motives might have been more complex than the newsletter allowed. Despite the Lords’ assertion to the contrary, delay might serve settlement as much as the reverse.

There is a hint of distraction in Lenthall’s demeanour at this time. On 12 October ‘he and all his house’ had been reported ‘very sad’ at the death of his grandson four days earlier.337Bodl. Rawlinson letters 47, f. 17. On the 30th he told Warcup he was busy, but he almost certainly maintained close contact with the treaty negotiators over and above his official correspondence.338Bodl. Rawlinson letters 47, ff. 37, 49, 64; Tanner 57, ff. 433, 435. It is even possible, given his rather similar touchstone of religion, that on 1 December he shared the view expressed by Nathaniel Fiennes that the king had ‘done enough’ for the treaty to proceed.339Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 37 (5-12 Dec 1648), sig. Ccc2 (E.476.2). If this were the case, however, he was soon deflected from such a course. On the 4th, following a three-hour commendatory speech from Prynne so exhausting that he needed to retire for a break, Lenthall ‘warned MPs that voting for the Treaty of Newport would mean their own destruction’.340Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 139; ‘Lenthall, William’, Oxford DNB; CJ vi. 93a, b. Whether this was because he had become aware that the army planned to step in and remould Parliament in order to prevent it, or because he was by now personally convinced that the treaty itself was insufficient to guarantee what Parliament had thus far achieved, or both, is unknown. The absence of recorded protest at what then transpired might point to the first, as might his post-Restoration claim to have signalled that ‘his Majesty should make no reliance on the army, for they would deceive him’.341W. Lenthall, Reasons Humbly Offered (1660).

Speaker of the Rump 1648-53

In his deathbed confession Lenthall protested that he had ‘never consented’ to the king’s death, but conceded that he ‘held their clothes whilst they murdered him’. In this he ‘was not so criminal as Saul’, to whose role as a bystander at the martyrdom of Stephen he alluded; the man who later became the apostle Paul had actively pursued Christians in order to persecute them, but Lenthall ‘every prayed and endeavoured what I could against’ the execution of Charles I.342OPH xxiii. 371; Acts, vii. 58. On 6 December 1648, as some MPs were prevented from entering the House, Lenthall appears to have done nothing beyond convey official messages to the armed force outside.343CJ vi. 93b, 94a. On the 7th he was the mouthpiece of the Commons in thanking Cromwell and Philip Skippon* for their part in the purge.344CJ vi. 94a-95a. He was credited also with the motion for a day of humiliation: a sign of hypocrisy or of recognition of the gravity of the turn of events, depending upon the eye of the beholder.345Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 37, sig. Ccc3v.

It is probable that, along with Bulstrode Whitelocke and Sir Thomas Widdrington, the current commissioners of the great seal, Lenthall belonged to that category of lawyer officeholders whose co-operation was well-nigh indispensable to the army. Keeping Lenthall as Speaker maintained continuity and avoided the awkward task of finding a viable successor, while Lenthall may, as his confession implies, have shared the conclusion of Whitelocke and Robert Reynolds* that they should use their access to the Commons in the public interest to moderate the actions of the radicals.346Whitelocke, Mems. 360. Similar reasoning seems likely to have prompted his participation in talks on 18, 21 and 24 December (twice at his residence) between Whitelocke, Widdrington, Cromwell and others, ‘probably connected with the last overtures made by the army leaders to the king’.347Whitelocke, Mems. 363-4; ‘Lenthall, William’, DNB (1892); Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 169-70. On the last occasion Lenthall is reported to have observed ‘that if the king came not off roundly now in point of concession, he would be utterly lost’, more probably a recognition of how others would react than a threat that he himself had abandoned negotiation.348Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 170, citing Bodl. Clarendon 34, f. 17. He later acknowledged that he had, following Marten’s report from the committee deliberating the way forward on 1 January 1649, ‘proposed the bloody question for trying the king’. For this Lenthall admitted ‘no excuse can be made’, although he insisted, not entirely implausibly, that ‘even then, when I put the question, I hoped the very putting the question would have cleared him, because I believed there were four to one against it’.349OPH xxiii. 372; CJ vi. 107b. He must have been very relieved when he was not asked to take the dissent from the vote of 4 December and when, by virtue of the time-consuming responsibilities of his office, if not also by virtue of parallel reservations to those expressed by Whitelocke, he escaped nomination as a judge at Charles’s trial.350cf. Whitelocke, Mems. 366.

None the less, unlike Whitelocke and Widdrington, with whom he seems to have maintained a certain intimacy through January 1649 not least because of their mutual involvement in chancery business, an uneasy Lenthall could not escape physical proximity to or association with events at Westminster. He continued to preside over the Commons as usual, although there were several adjournments and several days of truncated business.351CJ vi. 107b-125b; CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 339. The committee working on the ordinance for the high court of justice was scheduled to meet in his chamber (3 Jan.), as was that bringing in an act for the trial of imprisoned delinquents (31 Jan.).352CJ vi. 110b, 126b. On 10 January Whitelocke, Lenthall and others conferred about, and agreed to grant, a habeas corpus to the imprisoned William Prynne – an apparent sign of softening on Lenthall’s part towards an erstwhile antagonist.353Whitelocke, Mems. 368; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 194. Calling on the Speaker four days later, Whitelocke found him ‘much unsatisfied with the proceedings of the army, especially with an apprehension, that they design to put him out of his place, and claim all by conquest’.354Whitelocke, Mems. 368. The fear may have arisen from self-interest, but Lenthall might be forgiven if he thought that an inexperienced replacement would be subject to military control or even that Parliament might be dispensed with altogether. That he chose to co-operate under that apprehension he later explained as ‘my own baseness, cowardice and unworthy fear, to submit my life and estate to the mercy of those men that murdered the king, that hurried me on against my own conscience to act with them’. But like Whitelocke and Reynolds, he had ultimately persuaded himself that he ‘might do some good and hinder some ill’.355OPH xxiii. 372.

Following the execution of the king and the abolition of the House of Lords, the Speaker of the Commons was by default head of state, surpassing by the antiquity of his office the dignity of the president of the council, who was in any case subject to annual election. As C. H. Firth noted, orders were put in place for him to be ‘received with quasi-regal ceremony’ when he went on official business to the City of London (6 June 1649).356‘Lenthall, William’, DNB; CJ vi. 226a. If not quite a pharaoh, he was at least a primus inter pares to the Bedfordshire man who, Moses-like, threatened him with all the plagues of Egypt for the government’s hardness of heart against the poor: ‘it is to you that are the states and magistrates of this nation that I am commanded to write’ (5 May).357Bodl. Tanner 56, f. 32. The never-ending stream of correspondence now targeted him as the unrivalled key to favour, while authors dedicated their works to him.358E.g. Bodl. Tanner 53, 55-7, passim; B. Gerbier, The First Lecture (1649), sig. A3 (E.584.6); H. Walker, Bereshit (1649). In symbolic testament to the transference of sovereignty from monarch to Parliament, hangings and furniture were to be supplied by the trustees for the sale of royal goods for both the court of wards and the Speaker’s chamber (7 June 1650).359CJ vi. 421a.

But the trappings of authority did not automatically translate into reality. Satire depicted Lenthall as a ‘brave tool’ of the Independents, as at most a serviceable ‘front-man’ putting a decent face on unpalatable policies; ‘he’ll invent all; direct but his tongue ... and he’ll patch up the rent of our disguise’.360Carmina Collquia (1649), 2 (E.559.6). Firth considered Lenthall ‘practically ... had very little power’.361‘Lenthall, William’, DNB. Yet in a situation where arguably no-one was really in control and where successive attempts at reform and settlement foundered on clashes of vested interests, the man who was both Speaker and Master of the Rolls had more opportunities than most for making a difference, especially in those prolonged periods when Cromwell was away campaigning.

According to John Milton, in a shrunken Commons MPs became ‘familiar with one another’: ‘design and faction’ informally determined outcomes at ‘ ordinaries’[dinners in taverns] and by ‘conference in the Speaker’s chamber before the sitting of the House’; ‘private business ... was commonly pre-disposed’ there.362J. Milton, A Letter Written to a Gentleman (1653), 4, 6 (E.697.2). This view is difficult to test, but, as has already been noted, this space was used for discussion at critical moments in January 1649. As is well known, when he wished to sound out views on a political settlement following his victory at Worcester, Cromwell called a meeting of MPs and leading army officers at Lenthall’s house in Chancery Lane (10 Dec. 1650). As reported by Whitelocke, Lenthall was clearly under no inhibition as to speaking in this milieu, opening proceedings by remarking that if ‘this company ... do not improve these mercies’ obtained by Cromwell’s hand ‘to some settlement, such as will be to God’s honour and the good of this commonwealth, we shall be very blameworthy’.363Whitelocke, Mems. 516; Worden, Rump Parliament, 276. It is plausible, therefore, that he also participated in, rather than merely hosted, other discussions.

Notable in this connection is the very marked rise in parliamentary committees scheduled to meet in his chamber at the Palace, taking off in mid-1650 and reaching a peak in 1652. This was to become a regular occurrence after 1660, but was relatively rarely before 1649. Some double-bookings – including of committees likely to meet more than once – hint at subsequent adjustment and relocation; the committee on the marriages act, directed to meet there every Thursday (19 Mar. 1652) was specifically permitted to adjourn elsewhere.364CJ vi. 437b, 438a, 618b; vii. 23a, 23b, 107b, 121b, 127a, 127b, 182a, 182b. However, the likelihood is that the majority met where intended. Following on from the abolition of monarchy (7 Mar. 1649), business to be discussed included sensitive matters like declarations and justifications in answer to victories and plots (9 July, 31 Dec. 1650; 19 Sept. 1651), policy toward Scotland and Spain (31 Dec 1650; 7 Jan., 24 Dec. 1651; 13 Apr., 7 Oct 1652), pensions from foreign powers (7 Aug. 1651; 8 Jan. 1652) and the life of the Parliament (1 Oct. 1651).365CJ vi. 158a, 438a, 517a, 517b, 618b; vii. 23a, 56a, 65a, 189a. Committees on land sales, delinquents and raising money also met there, as did long-running committees like those for the propagation of the gospel and law reform.366E.g. CJ vi. 409b, 420a, 421a, 422a, 464a, 556a; vii. 26b, 58b, 75n, 104a, 121b, 127b, 1130a, 131a, 159a, 162a, 182a, 182b, 212a, 226a, 227b, 244b, 260b. Prior to 1649 the Speaker himself was patently too busy to attend even those open to all comers, but during the Rump, with the Commons often meeting only in the morning and with committees mostly sitting in the afternoons, there was potentially no such hindrance. Moreover, the fact that Lenthall was engaged with Whitelocke and others on the regulation of chancery points to a context in which official and unofficial meetings shaded into each other, while irrespective of how far he was actually present at Commons committees, a perception that he was involved probably increased approaches for patronage and assistance.367Whitelocke, Mems. 418; A Collection of such of the Orders heretofore used in Chauncery (1649, E.1377.4).

Insights into the way Lenthall used such influence as he had are supplied by the occasions when he deployed his casting vote. On several occasions he declared himself for mercy towards delinquents. Endorsing (8 Mar. 1649) a respite of execution for George Goring†, the earl of Norwich, he cited an obligation of gratitude for former ‘civilities’. Reflecting upon it, Hyde was uncertain as to whether ‘the ground of it were true or no, or whether he made it only as an excuse for saving any man’s life who was put to ask in that place’.368CJ vi. 160a; Clarendon, Hist. iv. 505; Whitelocke, Mems. 386. Whitelocke saw it differently. Remembering erroneously that a vote on respite for his great friend Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland, had also tied that day, Whitelocke complained bitterly that the Speaker had not extended a parallel indulgence to one who had done much more for the cause of religion.369Whitelocke, Mems. 386. According to the Journal, the vote carried by one without the Speaker’s intervention, a fact that may explain the lack of visible breach between Whitelocke and Lenthall at this time.370CJ vi. 159b. Later Lenthall also rejected the proposed trial of Sir William Davenant (3 July 1650) and the inclusion of Henry Lord Morley and Mounteagle in a bill for the sale of estates (3 Aug. 1652), and supported setting a quorum in a committee for the same purpose.371CJ vi. 436b, 574a; vii. 160b. Meanwhile he continued to make recommendations to the Committee for Compounding and was alleged to have assisted in liberating from prison his erstwhile nemesis the journalist Marchamont Nedham in return for a promise to serve the commonwealth .372CCC 200, 302, 1761; CCAM 1117, 1317, 1318; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 33.

Although Lenthall might appear in satirical publications as an ‘atheist’, his Restoration claim that he had done ‘something’ for the church had some justification.373Monarchia Transformata (1649, 669.f.14.7); OPH xxiii. 372 . In a division on 7 August 1649 he gave his casting vote against including in the proposed declaration on religion a clause endorsing Presbyterian government and the use of the Directory for Public Worship.374CJ vi. 275b; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 274; Worden, Rump Parliament, 207. Although probably prepared to accept a tolerant Independent agenda, his personal preferences appear to have been traditionalist. Like Whitelocke and Reynolds, he was among the political moderates who in 1651 defended the astrologer William Lilley from attacks by Presbyterians and radicals in the Committee for Plundered Ministers*.375Worden, Rump Parliament, 133. In 1649 he characterized Dr Thomas Wyatt, sequestered from the Oxfordshire rectory of Nuneham Courtenay for plurality, as ‘an honest and grave divine’, while he presented to Burford and Witney Ralph Brideoak, an alleged royalist, a former chaplain to James Stanley, 7th earl of Derby, and the recipient of his deathbed confession.376Bodl. Top. Oxon. c.378; Walker Revised, 229, 301; VCH Oxon. xiv. 57. In a petition for restitution in 1660 the late rector of Bladon with Woodstock, Francis James, claimed that Lenthall had illegally ejected him 11 years earlier, but if the responsibility was the Speaker’s, it is by no means clear that his ecclesiological views were the cause.377Walker Revised, 298.

In other respects, Lenthall occasionally revealed himself on the side of army grandees. On 28 March 1650 he used his casting vote against leading civilians Hesilrige and Sir James Harington* on a question relating to the implementation of the articles for the surrender of Pendennis Castle, Cornwall.378CJ vi. 388a. On 15 July 1652 he deployed it in favour of Alderman John Fowke, a protégé of Cromwell.379CJ vii. 154b; Worden, Rump Parliament, 311. But he probably betrayed his true conservative colours, as well as his own interests, in voting against radicals Sir Peter Wentworth* and Thomas Scot I* and a move to vest further powers in the council of state.380CJ vi. 408b. His relations with that body are hard to gauge. It was probably gratifying to receive letters addressed to him from foreign powers and perhaps frustrating when they were redirected to the council, as with a missive from the Portuguese (28 Sept. 1652).381CJ vii. 185b; Clarke Pprs. v. 62-3. Once, when an adjournment (8–12 Aug. 1651) allowed Lenthall to travel ‘some distance’ from his post, the council ventured to open what seemed an urgent letter addressed to him from Cromwell in Scotland; having read it, they ‘thought fit’ to forward it.382CJ vi. 618b; SP25/96, f. 341.

On the whole, Lenthall appears to have retained the confidence of a significant majority of MPs. Thanks partly to Augustine Garland*, the reforming activist who promoted rewards for leaders in the commonwealth, further land at Burford, including the rectory, was settled on him in the summer of 1649.383CJ vi. 158a, 196a, 201a, 202b, 226b. In July the allegations that he had conveyed money to Oxford and had correspondence with the king resurfaced, along with others that ‘the evil Member’ had released priests and prisoners of war from prison, corrupted fellow MPs to ‘conceal and smother the foregoing treacheries’ and ‘endeavour[ed] to take away the lives of several of the prosecutors and witnesses’.384E. Jenkes, Ten Articles already proved upon Oath (1649, 669.f.14.57). The army lodged them with Judge-advocate John Mylles*, but although the complainant asserted that the spirit of God demanded ‘the speedy execution of justice’ upon Lenthall, no further action was taken.385Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 262. At the same period, he was alleged to have co-operated with Whitelocke, Reynolds and others to block the passage of the bill to relieve poor prisoners, at least partly in an attempt to squash serious accusations against the conduct of his brother Sir John as marshal of king’s bench prison; the fact that these erupted once he was no longer Speaker testifies to a certain immunity while he was still in post.386The Prisoners Remonstrance (1649), 4 (E.572.8); A Tuesdaies Journal (31 Jul.-7 Aug. 1649), 19 (E.532.11); Worden, Rump Parliament, 204; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 268. In similar vein, when in 1651 councillor of state Sir Henry Mildmay claimed that 21 Rumpers, including Whitelocke and Lenthall, were implicated in the Presbyterian conspiracy of minister Christopher Love, his accusations were ‘soon recognised as specious’.387Worden, Rump Parliament, 245.

It seems plausible that by spring 1653 Lenthall shared Reynolds’s perception that the Rump was failing to justify itself by constructive legislation and that it should be replaced by a new Parliament.388Burton, Diary, iii. 209-10; ‘William Lenthall’, Oxford DNB. A reminder of discontents about the regime and of his personal vulnerability was issued on 4 November 1652 at the hands of one Samuel or Solomon Arnold, who ‘threw a brick which hit the Sergeant’s man’ and ‘another stone which hit Master Speaker in the face’.389Clarke Pprs. v. 69; CJ vii. 209a-b. Nevertheless, when Parliament was forcibly dissolved on 20 April 1653, Lenthall displayed reluctance to leave the chair, whether through disinclination to relinquish his exalted position or dismay that it be brought about in such a manner. The centre of a piece of drama as he had been 11 years earlier, following calls from Cromwell, Major-general Thomas Harrison* and (perhaps) others to depart, he appears at first to have sat tight in the chair, this time taking refuge in silence. Only when Harrison moved to pull him out did he beat a dignified retreat. Cromwell was left to take possession of the mace and oversee the shutting up of the chamber.390Worden, Rump Parliament, 335-6, citing Algernon Sydney*; The Moderate Publisher no. 94 (15-22 Apr. 1653), 813 (E.211.11); The Weekly Intelligencer no. 115 (19-26 Apr. 1653), 818 (E.691.17); Whitelocke, Mems. 554; Clarke Pprs. iii. 1. Some days later a newsletter reported that Lenthall was still signing himself ‘Speaker’.391Clarke Pprs. iii. 3. A manuscript acrostic verse collected by George Thomason had him lamenting his humiliation

Who would have thought my ruin was so near,
I being made so fast unto my chair.
Long have I been the mouthpiece of this nation:

Like Balaam’s Ass, my tongue’s now out of fashion.392‘Lenthalls Lamentation’, MS composition (E.694.11).

Speaker Revived: First Protectorate Parliament 1654-5

Like other conservatives, Lenthall was not nominated to the parliament called in 1653. He could hardly be expected to be in sympathy either with its unprecedented nature or its radical agenda. As indicated earlier, his brother was a target of its reforming zeal.393The Prisoners Remonstrance, 4; A Tuesdaies Journal (31 July-7 Aug. 1649), 19. During the year he was able to give attention to his profession and to wield some influence as master of the rolls, but he was clearly alarmed at the turn politics had taken.394E.g. Notts. Archives, 157 DD/P/21/5, 7; CCC 660, 854.

When Lenthall wrote on 23 December to Whitelocke, absent on embassy in Sweden, it was with palpable relief, confidence and approbation that he described the inauguration of the protectorate. It had been

with as much applause of the people, as I think hath been known. I was (I confess), doubtful of other governments, but herein I cannot but believe, as I desire, that it will be the occasion of much happiness and safety to all, (being upon the brink, in my judgement, of confusion and desolation), and that it will bring as much settlement to our laws and liberties, and to every particular person, as I am certain the public will be advantaged by it.395Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. xiv, f. 236.

More than three months later, his enthusiasm was undimmed. The new government, he told Whitelocke, ‘is (as far as I am able to judge) very acceptable, and the spirits of men much revived in the expectation of a greater ease than could be imagined’ when the ambassador had left England the previous autumn. He shared with Whitelocke, whose outlook so nearly resembled his own, the criteria for this judgement: ‘our laws have their freedom and countenance, and property challenges her own without interruptions ... We can with boldness profess our ancient and true ways of God’s worship’. Whereas previously he had been ‘perplexed and troubled with the party then prevalent’, he could ‘the better judge of their condition, that now perchance would be glad of my friendship’. He even had ‘the happiness sometimes (for often a courtier I never was) to kiss his highness’ hand, and with good encouragement and reception’.396Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. xv, f. 76. Doubtless a declaration from the exiled Charles II in Paris on 3 May, offering pardon to all except Lenthall, Hesilrige and former president of the council of state, John Bradshawe*, made his reception seem the sweeter.397TSP ii. 249.

When a new Parliament was called for the autumn of 1654, Woodstock was not allocated a seat. On 12 July Lenthall was elected as one of four Members for Oxfordshire along with Nathaniel Fiennes I, Charles Fleetwood*, and Robert Jenkinson*, all from families with claims to the loyalty of county voters.398s.v. ‘Oxfordshire’. Lenthall was also returned at Gloucester. Writing to the corporation on 20 July, he claimed that his ‘intentions were not bent to so public an employment, having been thoroughly wearied with what I have already undergone’, but he was clearly flattered by the endorsement of his previous service and probably not so reluctant as he liked it to appear.399Berks. RO, D/ELL/F18/6; Glos. Archives, GBR/H/2/3, pp. 157, 163, 165.

When Parliament met on 3 September Cromwell invited the Commons to ‘exercise their own liberty in choosing their Speaker’, adding, perhaps as a hint that they should select according to experience, ‘that they might lose no time from their great business’.400CJ vii. 365b. According to diarist Guybon Goddard*, ‘the first man named was Mr Lenthall’. While ‘something was said to excuse him, by reason of his former services, as if he had served so long, that he had been outworn’, in the end, ‘in regard of his great experience and knowledge of the order of that House, and dexterity in the guidance of it’, he was ‘unanimously called to the chair’.401Burton’s Diary, i. p. xx. Although he too registered unanimity from his informants, Hyde sourly attributed this to a combination of Cromwell’s conclusion that Lenthall would be pliable and the perception of ‘other persons, who meant nothing that Cromwell did’ and who hoped ‘that the same man’s being in the chair might facilitate the renewing and reviving [of] the former House’.402Clarendon, Hist. v. 300. Plausibly, a mixture of all these considerations was in play. Be that as it may, a momentary awkwardness initially attended Lenthall’s occupancy of the chair when it was pointed out that he had been chosen in the absence of a clerk to enter the fact formally.403CJ vii. 365b.

Once that moment had passed, it might indeed have seemed that the chamber was set for a return to the status quo ante. In the months to come there were occasional signs of that: the Speaker’s chamber again became the scene of important committees.404CJ vii. 370b, 392b, 394b, 403b, 407b, 415a, 415b, 419a. However, with four or five times as many MPs attending, there were no tied votes, and the nature of business gave the Speaker very much less to do than in the past. On 7, 8, 9 and 11 September the House’s recorded proceedings consisted largely of a grand committee, chaired by Nathaniel Bacon*.405CJ vii. 367a, 367b. On the morning of the 12th Goddard heard news that ‘the Parliament house was dissolved’. Having learnt en route that ‘the Parliament doors were locked up and guarded with soldiers, he arrived at Westminster to find that ‘the mace was taken away’ and ‘the Speaker and all the Members were walking up and down the Hall, the court of requests, and the Painted Chamber, expecting the protector's coming’. Once Cromwell arrived and had delivered a lengthy speech exhorting – and warning – MPs to work ‘for better fruit and effect’ than they had done the last time, the latter were required to subscribe an oath of loyalty to the government. Lenthall, who for reasons unspecified appears to have departed in the interim, had to be sent for, and thus, Goddard implies, took the oath after many of his colleagues.406Burton’s Diary, i. pp. xxxii–xxxv.

This hiatus was temporary but the pattern of very frequent grand committees, usually called to discuss the settlement of the government, and often seemingly taking place to the exclusion of all else, was not. To this end, Bennet Hoskins* occupied the chair on at least 35 occasions between 12 September and early November, and regularly thereafter he was called to it again or to make lengthy reports on the subject from select committee. He must have seemed to some like a rival Speaker. Meanwhile, Lenthall’s contribution to the debate as an ordinary Member has escaped the record. On 3 November he signified his (unsurprising) decision to sit for Oxfordshire rather than Gloucester, but a series of orders indicate how far he and normal proceedings were being squeezed out by the all-consuming arguments about political settlement.407CJ vii. 381b. On 4 October a motion that the ‘the Speaker take the chair two days in every week, upon other business’ never came to question, although it was resolved that a grand committee for trade should sit every Tuesday afternoon.408CJ vii. 372b, 376a. A resolution on 22 November that ‘no private business be taken into account in the House for a month’ curtailed Lenthall’s opportunities to promote profitable petitions.409CJ vii. 387b. Even though the second half of the Parliament seems to have contained more routine debate than the first half, by the time it was dissolved on 22 January Lenthall, who had come to it with such high expectations, must have felt his contribution and his standing much diminished.

Law reform and the second protectorate Parliament, 1655-7

One casualty of what had been an abortive Parliament was reform of legal procedures. In particular, the session ended without a resolution to the parliamentary suspension of the chancery ordinance.410Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 172-4. When that suspension lapsed, Cromwell expected that the ordinance would once again pertain, and on 23 April summoned Lenthall, along with the three commissioners of the great seal – currently Whitelocke, Widdrington and John Lisle* – to instruct them to enforce it. All except Lisle promptly refused, explaining to the lord president of the council that they considered themselves unable to proceed owing to the absence of parliamentary ratification for the ordinance.411Whitelocke, Diary, 405-6; Mems. 192–201; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 175. Summoned to Whitehall on 12 May, Lenthall declined again, and it was rumoured that he would lose his place as master of the rolls, but when Whitelocke and Widdrington lost theirs, he capitulated, to Whitelocke’s fury.412Clarke Pprs. iii. 39. Despite having ‘seemed most earnest against the ordinance and [having] protested that he would be hanged at the rolls gate before he would execute it’, following the dismissal of his confederates he ‘wheeled about and was as forward as any to act in the execution of it, deserted those to whom he had engaged to adhere ... and restored himself to favour’.413Whitelocke, Diary, 409. He was reappointed master of the rolls on 16 June.414Clarke Pprs. iii. 44.

Such a craven surrender probably harmed Lenthall’s reputation more widely, giving credence to the belief that he had been a ‘yes-man’ on earlier occasions. In time he repaired his relationship with Whitelocke. The evasive excuses of summer 1655 were in time replaced by letters ‘full of respect’.415Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. xv, f. 116; Whitelocke, Diary, 438. Perhaps the rule of the major-generals persuaded him of the need in future to stand up more forcefully for legal rectitude. A newsletter at the opening of the second protectorate Parliament in September 1656 hinted at some kind of breach with the government sufficiently serious to disable him from sitting had it not been for the help of ‘a good friend’.416Clarke Pprs. iii. 73. In an undated letter plausibly attributable to July that year, Lenthall told Whitelocke that ‘the elections are much agitated among several persons’; ‘all the declaration I have made as yet is that if I be chosen I will serve’. Since he warned Whitelocke that ‘there is no reliance without a stiff solicitation’, he must have been more active than he admitted: Lenthall was again returned for Oxfordshire, while Whitelocke was disappointed in that direction.417Whitelocke Pprs. xix, f. 92; Whitelocke, Diary, 442.

Whether from government dissatisfaction at the outcome of the previous Parliament or from lack of confidence from fellow Members or his own refusal to serve, this time Lenthall was not chosen Speaker. As far as can be discerned from the diary of Thomas Burton*, after such extended experience in the chair he appears to have made the transition to an ordinary Member relatively smoothly, usually resisting the temptation to speak with excessive length and frequency, and making a constructive and substantial contribution to business. His memory of legislation in the Long Parliament was useful and his (seemingly) tactfully worded suggestion that its acts were ‘certainly of equal authority with a vote of the Little [i.e. Nominated] Parliament’ was probably considered reasonable.418Burton’s Diary, i. 226, 266; ii. 68. His grasp of procedure was deployed in questioning whether a committee could sit during an adjournment and in opining that a bill could not be referred to grand committee on first reading, but that a debate could.419Burton’s Diary, i. 297, 320. He reminded MPs of the rule that they ought not to speak more than once to a particular point and apparently earned the gratitude of the Speaker by assuring him that he had no obligation to repeat for the benefit of all in the chamber the remarks of Members who did not ‘speak so high as others may hear’.420Burton’s Diary, ii. 263, 282. His response to calls to punish absent Members emerges as moderate and pragmatic: he ‘never knew of any success of these votes in other Parliaments’ and indeed there might actually be ‘an ill consequence’, for in the case of ‘those whose conscience will not tie them to their duty, your orders will not’ [either]: ‘they will be here for a day, and be gone’.421Burton’s Diary, i. 193 On this issue he even permitted himself what appears to have been an attempt at a joke, observing à propos the proffered excuse of Nicholas Lechmere* that ‘there is a difference between an ill wife and a sick wife: it seems his wife is sick’ (31 Dec.).422Burton’s Diary, i. 288.

In his opening speech to the Parliament Cromwell had identified shortcomings in the legal system as a universal grievance of the nation. Prompted by the protector and his legal adviser William Shepherd, several bills for the reform of the law were introduced in the early weeks of the session. Support came from various councillors, while the leading legal officers have generally been seen as resistant to change.423Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 177-9. Like Whitelocke, however, Lenthall seems on the whole to have been cautious rather than unco-operatively hostile – anxious to ensure that new measures were workable and well founded. He also appears conciliatory rather than confrontational.

With Whitelocke he was one of a quintet of lawyers who prepared a bill to finalise the abolition of the court of wards and of knight service tenures (23 Sept.) and he chaired grand committees on the bill for tightening up registration of births, deaths and marriages (11, 15 Oct.), reporting the (to him no doubt satisfactory) conclusion that it should not be retrospective.424CJ vii. 427a, 437b, 439a; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 180. Six months later, he supported a motion from Alexander Thistlethwayte* that the ‘act for marriages’ might apply for six months only, displaying an apparent concern for the confusion consequent to the fact that ‘now people marry three ways’ (29 Apr. 1657).425Burton’s Diary, ii. 68. He was appointed to committees to revise forest law so as to increase the supply of timber and to clarify the respective rights of proprietors and commoners (27 Sept. 1656; 29 Apr. 1657), to help minor creditors recover their debts (31 Oct. 1656) and to consider the petition of civil lawyers, whose profession was threatened by the abolition of the ecclesiastical courts (22 Nov.).426CJ vii. 429b, 449a, 457a, 528a. While some of his chief colleagues spoke against the bill for the probate of wills, Lenthall apparently confined himself to the differing efficacy of seals of probate in relation to goods and to lands (24 Dec.).427Burton’s Diary, i. 226. On the other hand, when a petition to Parliament in November in the case of George and Sarah Rodney versus John Cole exposed flaws in the conduct in chancery of the commissioners of the great seal, and gave rise to recurrent and sometimes acrimonious debate, Lenthall ‘laboured to excuse’ the commissioners and ‘laboured to smooth ... over’ the recriminations between Whitelocke and Lisle (10, 13 Dec.).428CJ vii. 457b; Burton’s Diary, i. 93, 136. Somewhat surprisingly, when the examination of Cole’s solicitor was contradicted ‘to his face’ by Benjamin Mason*, a novice in the House, Lenthall ‘directed that a Member of Parliament ought in evidence to be preferred, for he is under oath to speak truth’ – implying that outsiders called for interrogation were to be regarded as under a lesser obligation to be reliable, a report which, if accurate, casts an unsettling slant on his experience in the chair in the early 1640s.429Burton’s Diary, i. 136. But he did not want the case to detain the House unnecessarily, announcing on 5 January 1657 that he would have Members inquire no further into the business; the petitioner was satisfied and ‘I believe, desires no man’s punishment’.430Burton’s Diary, i. 303.

As debate on the law continued into the spring, Lenthall again revealed himself rather less obdurate than other lawyers. Pronouncing himself especially qualified to speak on remuneration of judges because ‘I never had salary in all my life’, he affirmed that ‘by the ancient law, the judges were paid out of customs’, and exhibited no desire to change this (28 Apr.).431Burton’s Diary, ii. 60. However, he went further than Whitelocke in contemplating reform. While the latter agreed only that proceedings at law should be scrutinised, Lenthall conceded a ‘need of regulation in the laws, as well as in the proceedings’: there were defects in particular pieces of legislation (24 Apr.). None the less, this was still insufficient for some present: Walter Strickland* ‘grew a little angry’ at the lack of progress and was probably among those sceptical that the inclusion of the master of the rolls on the committee for the regulation of chancery (30 Apr.) would advance the cause.432Burton’s Diary, ii. 36; CJ vii. 528a.

One external factor adversely affecting law reform was the preoccupation of the House from late October 1656 with the case of James Naylor, in custody as a result of his entry to Bristol riding on a donkey. Nominated to the investigative committee on 31 October, Lenthall pronounced it ‘a business of high consequence’ and advised MPs that ‘you ought to take time fully to hear the whole matter’ (6, 17 Dec.).433CJ vii. 448a; Burton’s Diary, i. 45, 162. Having heard the case ‘in my opinion very learnedly debated’, he identified with those keenest to see Naylor denounced for blasphemy, idolatry and ‘likewise’ other crimes: ‘I never heard of such a horrid sin, as this, in all my life’. Calling upon his fellow Members to ‘consider how you stand in the opinion of the world’, he challenged them with the likely reaction of Parliament’s enemies. ‘What an ill construction is upon us from the malignant party: they will say you have had one before you for calling himself Christ and done nothing in it.’434Burton’s Diary, i. 66-7, 79. In contrast to some other lawyers, who doubted Parliament’s competence to judge such a matter, and to others still, troubled at the wisdom of anyone imposing punishment, Lenthall (fortified, perhaps, by memories of delivering the will of the House to miscreants 15 years earlier) ‘would have you add to your votes ... that Parliament doth adjudge this sentence, and so you tie up the hands of the inferior courts’ (17 Dec.).435Burton’s Diary, i. 162. As he explained in the context of a broader pronouncement on the standing of Parliament: ‘it is clear that you have power to judge any thing, though there be not a law for it in present being’; MPs were ‘the lawgivers to apply remedies as occasions offer themselves’ (30 Dec.).436Burton’s Diary, i. 279. Logically, such a position could not utterly deny the right to reform law; ideologically, it put Lenthall at variance with those who advocated tolerance.

Perhaps religious radicalism of this kind struck a particularly raw nerve. In other areas Lenthall continued to reveal himself as a moderate reformer with a soft spot for some traditional forms. He was appointed to committees entrusted with rationalising churches and parishes (Gloucester cathedral 22 Nov.; Preston, Suffolk, 3 Feb. 1657; St Andrew’s, Holborn, 4 Mar.) and with purchasing impropriations for the maintenance of ministers (31 Mar.).437CJ vii. 457a, 485b, 498b, 515b. When Nathaniel Fiennes presented a petition from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, over their rights in two parishes in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, Lenthall sought to provide for the interests both of the college and of the benefactor who had ‘built a fair church’ in the latter (30 Dec. 1656).438Burton’s Diary, i. 268; CJ vii. 477a. He was critical of the commissioners who regulated the ministry, the ‘triers and ejectors’ (28 Apr. 1657), and made a rather confused comment on the bill on tithes (1 June), which at least one later writer remembered as (‘to his honour’) a vote ‘cast ... for the church’.439Burton’s Diary, ii. 58, 166, 261; T. Bradley, Appello Caesarem (1661), 15. When the Commons discussed a bill ‘for the better observation of the Lord’s Day’ (20 June), Lenthall appealed to previous parliamentary wisdom that it had ‘not been found convenient’ to overly restrict people’s leisure opportunities on Sundays. ‘In some parts of this city’, Burton reported him as saying, ‘unless people have liberty to sit at doors, you deprive them of most of the air they have all the week, and destroy their children’.440Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 209; Burton’s Diary, ii. 265. Lenthall also seems to have objected to, or tried to obstruct (29 May), that part of the act for ‘repressing popish recusants’ which imposed on them an oath of abjuration to be taken before magistrates.441Burton’s Diary, ii. 150. Later he claimed to have done ‘something for the king when I broke the oath of abjuration, as Sir O[rlando] B[ridgman]’ and Ralph Brideoak could testify.442OPH xxiii. 272.

A crowded parliamentary agenda led some to call for the suspension of all discussion of private bills. Although Lenthall conceded the point that there was too much to do and was prepared to dismiss petitions for which ‘there is enough relief at law’ (22 Dec.), he argued that private business ‘should not be wholly laid aside; we must relieve those that cannot be relieved elsewhere’.443Burton’s Diary, ii. 198, 291-2. He sat on committees related to, and talked to, a variety of petitions, including those relating to dispute between the heirs of the stranger merchant Sir Peter Vanlore and to the settlement of Worcester House in the Strand on the dowager countess of Worcester.444CJ vii. 433a, 434b, 472b, 473a, 485a, 490b, 492b, 505b, 529b, 561a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 61, 67. He presented a petition from the Soapboilers’ Company against patentees (30 Dec.), ‘affirm[ing] it to be a great grievance and oppression’ and steered a proposal for compensation to the city of Gloucester for its sufferings in the siege of the mid-1640s (22 Dec.) to the Committee for Irish Affairs.445Burton’s Diary, i. 203, 266.

As a member of this committee (23 Sept.), on several occasions he seems to have delicately balanced a desire to use Irish land to reward those who had served the cause with an appreciation of competing claims and realities on the ground.446CJ vii. 427a, 463b, 477a, 494a, 515b, 526a; Burton’s Diary, i. 2-3. Moving for a reading of the Gloucester bill (5 May 1657) he explained that ‘the poor people, out of their zeal for your cause, pulled down their houses without regard to their goods’; the bill did not intend ‘to entrench upon the rights of others, of any of the soldiery’. Encountering objections from grandee Roger Boyle*, 1st Baron Broghill, who promoted the soldiers’ claims, he pressed the issue with some force and persistence.447Burton’s Diary, ii. 106-11. In return, a month later he pressed Broghill’s own claims to land: ‘it is not a thing of recompense or gratuity, but a duty to him ... he stuck to us when we were in great distress; all our party had no-one but he and a colonel’.448Burton’s Diary, ii. 176-7.

Both just reward for services rendered and the safeguarding of existing rights were clearly matters of great importance to Lenthall. He supported several petitions for arrears or confirmation of grants to the deserving.449Burton’s Diary, i. 266; ii. 67, 80, 190; CJ vii. 485a. He chaired a grand committee on the excise (17 Oct.) and as a tenement holder in the City of London, he thought assessments should be paid (23 Dec.).450CJ vii. 440a; Burton’s Diary, i. 214. But he opposed the farming of customs and excise (23 June 1657) and ‘never liked any bill that touched upon property’, explaining as the House discussed a bill on dividing common land that ‘time was when I durst hardly have trusted the justice of the peace with determining of a cow grass’ (19 Dec. 1656).451Burton’s Diary, i. 175; ii. 272. Plotters against the public peace must ‘suffer severely’, but great care was needed in formulating a decimation tax (25 Dec.); other taxes must be time-limited for ‘it is a dangerous thing for us to give an arbitrary power over men’s persons, and goods, and liberties’.452Burton’s Diary, i. 233, 293. In particular, Lenthall regarded himself as a guarantor and guardian of those who had supplied men or money ‘on the public faith’ in the time of the Long Parliament.453Burton’s Diary, i. 93, 179; ii. 83, 179, 237; CJ vii. 528b, 563a.

Lenthall’s record, along with his office as master of the rolls, probably ensured that, despite any initial coolness in relations with the government, he would be party to high politics in Parliament. Having participated in drafting a declaration justifying war against Spain (17 Oct.), on six days in October and November he chaired grand committees on the campaign.454CJ vii. 440a, 443a, 443b, 444b, 445b, 452b. From the beginning of the session he was placed on key committees related to clarifying the basis of the government, including that which drafted a declaration that the protector’s assent to bills currently before him should not lead to a dissolution (27 Nov.).455CJ vii. 429a, 441b, 459b. As already seen, the Naylor debate gave Lenthall the occasion to expatiate on the nature of Parliament, on which, unsurprisingly, he had an elevated view. For him, nothing had changed with the advent of the protectorate: ‘I take us to be upon the same foundation and bottom that we were before: Parliaments, for all these alterations, are to be understood as the same in essence’. ‘First abbots, then bishops, then the House of Lords were taken away, but the Parliament remains still.’ Summoned ‘by writ of the supreme magistrate’, elected ‘by the people’ and coming ‘together in a body’, Members had a ‘threefold authority’: ‘to inform’ or declare; to judge; to legislate. Parliament’s privilege had ‘been asserted and sealed with the blood of many thousands’ (30 Dec.).456Burton’s Diary, i. 279-80. The principle of continuity meant that no legislation should lightly be overturned: with reference to breaching acts of oblivion granting pardon to delinquents, it was ‘not for the honour of a Parliament to break the faith of Parliaments’ (25 Dec.).457Burton’s Diary, i. 233. Like others, Lenthall also seized the opportunity provided by the failure of an assassination plot against Cromwell for a public demonstration of Parliament’s secure and constructive place at the heart of government: ‘it will be a very good expedient to let the world see that there is a right understanding between his Highness and us, and that we are cemented’ (19 Jan. 1657).458Burton’s Diary, i. 360; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 223.

It is impossible to judge Lenthall’s contribution to the large committees which then worked on a ‘Remonstrance’ calling upon Cromwell to restore ‘the ancient constitution’ (12, 16, 26, 27 Mar.), although he was named second of those delegated to discuss the related bill for indemnifying those who had engaged in public service under previous regimes (31 Mar.).459CJ vii. 502a, 505a, 511b, 514a, 516a. However, he was listed among those who voted for the kingship on 25 March and as he emerged among the group which presented to the protector the successor document, the ‘Humble Petition and Advice’, it is clear that he had persuaded himself that there could be no permanent settlement without a return to tradition.460The Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 22 (E.935.5); CJ vii. 520b-521b. A prospect that there might be more ‘cantonising of the nation into provinces under the major-generals’, a move he was reported to have strongly opposed in the House in January, may have helped to focus his thinking.461CCSP iii. 239. To the arguments offered on 7 and 16 April to persuade Cromwell to accept the office of king, Lenthall offered a lawyer’s perspective. ‘The whole body of the law is carried upon’ the ‘wheel’ of monarchy: ‘it is not a thing that stands on the top merely, but runs through the whole life and veins of the law’. It was indispensable: ‘you cannot almost make anything or do anything’ without it.462N. Fiennes et al. Monarchy Asserted (1660), 11. Meanwhile, the law itself was a guarantor: ‘by the laws I can say in all generations, this is mine, and this is my prince’s, and the prince cannot do me wrong, nor the council do me wrong’.463Monarchy Asserted, 14. While ‘it is certain that all governments in themselves may be good’, experience revealed that ‘the most necessary and prudent course to govern a nation must be taken from that proportion which is most suitable to the nature and disposition of the people’.464Monarchy Asserted, 45. Alteration of a system rooted and embedded in monarchy was dangerous. The office of protector, as under the Instrument of Government, had ‘no limit by it and rule of law that I understand’. Parliament had considered changing its name to ‘the representative of the people’ only to reject it because ‘we did not know how it might change the very course, ground and reason of Parliaments’, just as James VI and I had relinquished his desire to alter his title from king of England to king of Great Britain because he saw it would introduce ‘a doubt to the liberties and privileges of Parliament’.465Monarchy Asserted, 12-13. No act of Parliament could successfully set the government upon a new foundation ‘for what is created by an act, cannot have life and authority, but from that act’; innovation ‘takes from the people, the rules and grounds which they have known by experience, and sends them to seek them in a power, which no wit of man can suddenly apprehend the bounds and limits’. In contrast, the monarchy was defined by the precedent of centuries and equally durable: ‘the king never dies’.466Monarchy Asserted, 46-7.

As Cromwell pondered his answer and the House debated refinements to the ‘Petition and Advice’, Lenthall revealed further disquiet about the permanence and the wisdom of what had been achieved in the recent past. If the document were to ‘confirm all the acts of the Long Parliament’, he remarked on 24 April, ‘I doubt some of them may not be to the advantage of some that sit here, as that act which declares it treason to set up a single person’. A committee should decide ‘what is fit to be continued’.467Burton’s Diary, ii. 38; CJ vii. 524a. It was, he agreed, ‘as difficult a point as any that can come before you’. ‘Injurious’ legislation should be dropped, although, as ever, measures taken to secure property and to reward service to the commonwealth should be allowed to stand.468Burton’s Diary, ii. 41, 50.

Lenthall doubtless spoke for many when he admitted that day his dismay that the troubles of the nation had not been settled long ago: ‘I thought when I first came into that chair that we should have been quiet within a year’. But since it now seemed that ‘we cannot hope it, by human reason, that in four or five years’ the nation would be settled, certain measures had to be adopted, with appropriate safeguards. Since there were ‘discontented people abroad’, he ‘would not have the army to be disbanded till we were in probability to be quiet’, and to that end he had voted for, and was prepared to contribute to £600,000 a year for funding the government. But ‘leaving this revenue without a certain time, may be a means to keep off Parliaments’.469Burton’s Diary, ii. 29. He did not advocate complete rigidity – the chief magistrate must have the freedom to reward the faithful – simply a recognition that ‘the best men’ may fall under temptation.470Burton’s Diary, ii. 29, 37.

As he stressed the need for careful deliberation and consideration of consequences by the House, Lenthall took over from an increasingly reluctant Whitelocke the chairmanship of the committee attending the protector.471Burton’s Diary, ii. 103-4; Whitelocke, Diary, 465. He reported on 2, 5 and 7 May, and showed his commitment to the process by speaking ‘with great zeal’.472CJ vii. 529b, 530b, 531a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 105. Cromwell’s refusal of the crown and the consequent revision of the ‘Petition’ must have been a major set-back. Nevertheless, recognising that acceptance of the new constitution was likely to entail the loss of bills then under discussion, Lenthall took the practical step of proposing concentration on the latter (25 May).473Burton’s Diary, ii. 121. He now moved for laying aside all private business. Hoping, as the weather grew hot, not to ‘sit all summer’, he wanted to prioritise ‘public business, as monies and the like, and the clamours for public faith’.474Burton’s Diary, ii. 124. A letter from the protector announcing an intention to prorogue Parliament in a few weeks’ time earned his gratitude and a request that the House ‘apply itself’ to assessments (29 May).475Burton’s Diary, ii.155.

In practice it did not prove so easy to avoid being drawn in to discussion of complicated individual cases, or of constitutional niceties.476Burton’s Diary, ii. 128, 168, 183-4. On 15 June, when he was nominated to a committee addressing the sensitive issue of appointing people to positions of public trust, he counselled against also launching into a discussion of when the next Parliament should be called.477Burton’s Diary, ii. 252; CJ vii. 557b. But all the same he allowed himself to comment (23 June) on the ‘Petition and Advice’ and to admit not only that he thought it rendered its predecessor, the ‘Instrument of Government’ ‘out of doors’, but also that he considered the oath to be taken at the imminent re-inauguration of the protector as ‘but an embryo, very imperfect yet’; were it ‘my own case, I should not take the oath till it were perfect’.478Burton’s Diary, ii. 280. Having gone so far in requesting review in this particular, two days before the prorogation he moved (24 June) for a tightening up of the provisions of the ‘Petition and Advice’ relating to Parliament, so that it might ‘not wittingly do anything to the prejudice of the commonwealth’.479Burton’s Diary, ii. 286, 288.

Other House 1658-9

On 9 December 1657 Lenthall was summoned to sit in the Other House.480HMC 11th Rep. n. s. iv. 504. According to the Memoirs of Edmund Ludlowe II* this was as a consequence of his own complaint at having been overlooked, despite having ‘been for some years the first man of the nation’, but his experience and his standing as master of the rolls probably made it inconsistent to omit him.481Ludlow, Mems. ii. 31. He took the oath with the others at the opening of the new session on 20 January 1658 and was placed on committees for privileges (21 Jan.) and for a bill increasing penalties for profanation of the sabbath (26 Jan.), which his record suggests he would have tried to moderate.482HMC 11th Rep. n. s. iv. 506, 509, 516. During the fortnight in which the House sat, he missed only one day.483HMC 11th Rep. n. s. iv. 504-24.

None the less, in such company his star may have waned. After the dissolution he continued to cultivate Whitelocke, who ranked above him in influence even if he tended to exaggerate his own importance. Following the death of Oliver in September 1658, the latter recorded receiving ‘letters of friendly advice and respect’ from ‘old Speaker Lenthall’.484Whitelocke, Diary, 498.

When Richard Cromwell summoned a Parliament, Lenthall returned to the Other House, evidently with a firm commitment to the regime. On 3 February 1659 he reported from the committee preparing the bill to recognise Richard as lord protector, while on the 15th he was appointed to another for annulling the title of Charles Stuart.485HMC 11th Rep. n. s. iv. 530-1, 537. In the early days of the session he was nominated to committees for petitions, privileges and the sabbath (31 Jan.), although, perhaps significantly, not to that for restraining the use of the Book of Common Prayer (8 Feb.).486HMC 11th Rep. n. s. iv. 527, 529, 534. Eventually he was also named, as befitted his office, to committees relating to records (5, 21 Mar.), as well as reviewing the law on stage plays (15 Feb.), confirming land sales (29 Mar.), establishing a prison for the nation’s enemies (11 Apr.) and (belatedly) indemnity (23 Mar.).487HMC 11th Rep. n. s. iv. 537, 545, 551, 552, 554, 559. As with other Members, Lenthall’s pattern of attendance was inconsistent: it fell off in mid-February and again in early March, but he was present on nine of the last ten days of the session, suggesting a determination to use the institution for influence or to maintain his public profile as the protectorate crumbled under army pressure.488HMC 11th Rep. n. s. iv. 525–67.

Return of the Rump 1659-60

By 6 May Lenthall had become the focus both of a drive to recall the Rump and, it seems, of attempts by Richard or his courtiers to prevent it. That evening Major-general John Lambert* and a delegation from the army council went to his residence with a declaration inviting surviving MPs to present themselves at Westminster and a request that the erstwhile Speaker sign letters which would accompany its publication.489Mercurius Politicus no. 566 (5-12 May 1659), 423 (E.762.11). More than one source depicts Lenthall agonising over whether to comply. In particular, the Memoirs of Edmund Ludlowe II, who was present, claimed that he made ‘many trifling excuses, pleading his age, sickness and inability to sit long’; when pressed, mindful of promises to Richard and ‘unwilling to lose his late acquired peerage’ he was said to have pleaded first concern that the death of Charles I had terminated the Parliament and then, when that was answered, that he was busy preparing himself to take the Lord’s Supper the next day, before finally succumbing to threats that his co-operation would be circumvented.490Ludlow, Mems. ii. 77-9; Nicholas Pprs. iv. 134.

It is difficult to know how much store to set by the edited testimony of a generally unsympathetic observer, although the alleged appeal to a sacramental excuse is arresting, but it is easy to see that Lenthall might wish to be completely convinced that the course of action would be workable and enforceable before committing himself. The same caution was almost certainly characteristic of Whitelocke, who did not mention it, registering merely that ‘divers of the Members of the Long Parliament came thither afterwards to advise with the Speaker, and declared their willingness to meet again’.491Whitelocke, Mems. 678; Diary, 514; Mercurius Politicus no. 566, pp. 423-4. It is indeed possible that that willingness, whether of Lenthall or his colleagues, stemmed from information that the army had pre-empted their decision. That very day Richard Tolson* wrote to Lenthall from Cockermouth declaring that he would attend. He was responding to a local proclamation that Parliament would meet on the 7th – exceedingly short notice to any who were not already forewarned of what was afoot.492Bodl. Tanner 51, f. 48.

It can only have been on the strength of replies from those present at his house on the 6th or received by word of mouth, that on the 7th Lenthall led a party of colleagues to the Commons – or joined them once he was satisfied that a critical mass had gathered.493Whitelocke, Mems. 678; Mercurius Politicus no. 566, p. 424; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 79. Following customary prayers and the temporary election of a serjeant and a clerk, Lenthall, for whom there was no formal re-affirmation as Speaker, recounted what had transpired the previous evening and tendered the declaration of the army officers.494CJ vii. 644b. A form of summons to MPs still absent, reported by Henry Marten, was agreed and sent out by Lenthall the same day.495CJ vii. 645a-b; Berks. RO, D/ELL/O5/31. Inevitably, some Members replied more quickly than others.496E.g. Bodl. Tanner 51, ff. 50, 55, 63, 69, 89, 102.

Within a few days Lenthall had, in some respects at least, returned to business as usual and re-assumed a place as default head of state. From 10 May committees convened regularly in his chamber; the group preparing a bill for constituting the council of state met there on 17 May; the previous day tellers for the election to the council were ordered to burn voting papers there.497CJ vii. 655a-659b. Until such time as new commissioners of the great seal could be appointed, Lenthall was constituted keeper (19, 23 May), and once they were chosen, he was empowered to administer the oath (4 June).498CJ vii. 658b, 663a, 672a; Whitelocke, Diary, 516. All commissions for officers in the navy and the army were to be signed and delivered by him (6, 7 June).499CJ vii. 673a, 674a, 706b. He himself was confirmed as custos rotulorum of Oxfordshire and Berkshire (25 June).500CJ vii. 693b. But it was with some justification that royalist commentators identified fragility in a system which elevated Lenthall through fear of the alternative – ‘making a general’ who might re-introduce government by a single person.501Clarendon, Hist. vi. 109. ‘Our new statesmen’, having ‘shipped themselves’ in such a way ‘that they cannot securely be under sail or at anchor nor with safety quit’, were jealous not only of their enemies but also of their friends, ‘even the men in the buff that gave them their second birth’. Whereas ‘the army owns Fleetwood for their general, the house of Parliament have voted the Speaker Lenthall, in his politic capacity as head of the Rump, for their constant general’.502Nicholas Pprs. iv. 146.

Through the summer Lenthall was once again the recipient of news of unrest in the provinces; his kinsman Robert Warcupp* wrote of the difficulties of implementing measures for the militia owing to the inaccuracy of names in the ordinance.503Bodl. Tanner 51, f. 110 and ff. 80-151 passim. By September the royalist insurrections had clearly come to nothing, but no progress had been made towards settlement. As Vane and Hesilrige clashed over whether the army should be involved in this process, there is little evidence in the Journal of the Speaker’s activity in a thinning House beyond his issuing further army commissions as agreed.504CJ vii. 782b, 787b. On 22 and 23 September Lenthall once again presided over a chamber where the doors were locked while MPs debated petitions from forces outside.505CJ vii. 784b, 785a. It may have been with a personal inclination that on 7 October he despatched, as ordered by the House and drafted by Whitelocke, a cordial letter to General George Monck* in Scotland, at the head of an alternative military force.506CJ vii. 792a; Clarke Pprs. iv. 59-60. It was his son John Lenthall*, Member for Gloucester, who was nominated to a committee which met in the Speaker’s chamber on 10 October to consider a reply to the latest representation from the army around London, but it may have been an indication that Lenthall himself was lining up to resist.507CJ vii. 794b.

On 13 October troops stationed around Westminster stopped Lenthall’s coach on its way to the chamber and turned him back. There was little he could do except capitulate, but this time it was Whitelocke rather than he who took the fateful decision to co-operate with the powers-that-be.508CJ vii. 797a; Whitelocke, Mems. 685; Mordaunt Letter-Bk. 60; Clarke Pprs. iv. 61; Clarendon, Hist. vi. 146. Monck’s letter to Lenthall of 20 October reassuring him of commitment to the liberty and authority of Parliament appears to rest on intelligence that Lenthall himself had nailed his colours to that mast.509Clarke Pprs. iv. 67n. Ludlowe, who had his own differences with the army and Lambert, waited on Lenthall in early November to offer ‘many things’ to Parliament when the latter returned to the chair of the House.510Ludlow, Mems. ii. 146.

As the ‘interruption’ continued, Lenthall sought allies where he could find them, until in the third week of December plans came to fruition and he became the focus of rallying to Parliament. On the 22nd he joined with a motley group including his old Gloucester friend Thomas Pury I, John Weaver*, a republican recently involved in a failed plot to seize the Tower of London from Lambert’s army group, and the slippery Wiltshire grandee Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper* (also a Tower plotter), to write again to Scotland with news that the forces which had perpetrated the coup were defecting to Parliament and with a request that Monck do nothing without communicating with the letters’ signatories.511Clarke Pprs. iv. 216-17. On the 23rd Lenthall and ‘some of the members of the old council of state’ felt sufficiently confident of their authority to call a rendezvous of revolted soldiers at Lincoln’s Inn fields; they were rewarded by Fleetwood’s letter of submission to the Speaker.512Whitelocke, Mems. 691; Clarke Pprs. iv. 220. On the 24th the forces marched to Lenthall’s house in Chancery Lane. In what was no doubt a carefully staged demonstration, he emerged to receive from the officers, on behalf of the soldiery, regret ‘for the late defection’ and a resolution ‘for the future to adhere to Parliament’.513Whitelocke, Mems. 691; Clarke Pprs. iv. 219. Having from thence, as Hyde put it, ‘recovered his spirit’, Lenthall then went with Cooper, Solicitor-general Reynolds (a councillor of state lately much in the company of Hesilrige), Weaver and Josias Berners (yet another Tower plotter) to secure the good will of the lord mayor and aldermen for the return of Parliament. Emboldened further, they proceeded to take the Tower, invoking the Speaker’s authority to put Cooper in control.514Clarendon, Hist. vi. 160-1; Whitelocke, Mems. 691.

The Commons resumed its proceedings on 26 December without any recorded formal action by the Speaker.515CJ vii. 797a-b. As instructed, the next day he sent letters to express to Monck the gratitude of Parliament for his support from afar and to summon absent MPs.516Clarke Pprs. iv. 222-3. Receiving such a missive from his ‘loving friend’, Whitelocke went privately to voice his fears that some Members would push for his imprisonment, but was told that Lenthall ‘believed no such thing would be moved, but that they would take it as an owning of their authority, if I sat with them’.517Whitelocke, Mems. 692. It is difficult to judge whether this represented Whitelocke’s vanity or Lenthall’s skill in management. It is conceivable that the latter enjoyed being once again at centre stage as he appointed tellers for elections to a new council of state and drew out of a hat the name of the successful candidate in a tie (31 Dec.).518CJ vii. 800b, 801a. Writing in response to Lenthall’s letter of 27 December Monck assured him that ‘I do bless the Lord that he hath restored you to your just and lawful authority and these nations to their rights and freedoms’: while he may have intended the institution rather than the person, the effect was probably the same.519Clarke Pprs. iv. 238.

Elements in the press were less kind, especially when on 13 January 1660, having announced from the chair that he was ‘much indisposed in his health’, Lenthall obtained leave of absence for ten days.520The Rump Roughly but Righteously Handled (1660, 669.f.22.63); CJ vii. 811a; Whitelocke, Mems. 693. He cannot have been entirely incapacitated. Later in the day the great seal was delivered into his custody to keep until further order and he continued to sign commissions and correspondence.521CJ vii. 812b, 813b, 814a; Whitelocke, Mems. 693; Berks. RO, D/ELL/O3. The fact that at the beginning of February he delivered army commissions ‘after the House was up’ and ‘before the sitting of the House’ rather than, as previously, during its assembly, suggests that his office accorded him some independent standing at this juncture.522CJ vii. 830a; The Parliamentary Intelligencer no. 7 (30 Jan.-6 Feb. 1660), 91 (E.182.21); The Publick Intelligencer no. 214 (30 Jan.-6 Feb. 1660), 1065-6 (E.773.53); Mercurius Politicus no. 606 (2-9 Feb. 1660), 1081 (E.775.1). This had both benefits and dangers, as appeared when mutinous soldiers allegedly attempted to seize him – doubtless for bargaining purposes – as he travelled home on evening; they were thwarted by officers including Sir John Lenthall.523The Parliamentary Intelligencer no. 7, p. 94; The Publick Intelligencer no. 214, p. 1067.

On 4 February Lenthall went to meet Monck when he marched with his army into London ‘in all state’. When their parties converged in the Strand, both alighted and in a symbolic display of equality and unity, ‘embraced each other with extraordinary kindness’ and exchanged ‘mutual congratulations’.524Whitelocke, Mems. 694; The Parliamentary Intelligencer no. 7, p. 94; The Publick Intelligencer no. 214, p. 1068. The harmony was prolonged two days later when, in another piece of theatre, Monck came to the Commons. Invited to sit, the general ‘out of his great respects to the Parliament’ opted to stand behind the chair while the Speaker ‘made an eloquent oration, agreeable to his own great prudence, and the authority of the supreme assembly’. Rejoicing at the passing of ‘a black and gloomy cloud’, Lenthall detected the work of God and praised his instrument. 525Mercurius Politicus no. 606, p. 1081; Whitelocke, Mems. 695; Clarendon, Hist. vi. 168. If his claim a few months later is correct – and he was open to contradiction from Monck if it were not – then it was perhaps at this time that Lenthall started to pay his ‘often attendances’ on the general, ‘to give him my humble advice for the speedy bringing in of his Majesty ... when it was not publicly known that there would be any such thing’.526Lenthall, Reasons. It was almost certainly the support of Monck for the return to Parliament of the Members secluded in 1648 that gave Lenthall the courage to voice openly, at some point on 18, 19 or 20 February, his refusal to send out writs for the election of replacements.527CJ vii. 846a-b; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 233; The Publick Intelligencer no. 216 (13-20 Feb. 1660), 1107-8 (E.775.6). His stand was, as he pointed out later, consistent with his previous failure to act on filling any vacancies in the Rump, but it is debateable whether, before this moment, he had ‘absolutely obstructed’ the sending out of writs, as he claimed, or simply quietly overlooked them. However, as he suggested, it was undeniably useful in preventing the weighting of the Commons with hard-liners.528Lenthall, Reasons.

While Lenthall may have faced fleeting fury from such men, he probably felt himself safe.529Ludlow, Mems. ii. 233. The secluded Members reappeared in the House on 21 February and thus the Long Parliament reconvened. In the next few days Lenthall, who at the end of January had been added with a number of conservative figures to the assessment commission for Oxfordshire, was confirmed as keeper of the seal for Lancashire (24 Feb.) and, as the jurisdiction of the counties palatine of the north west was revived, its chamberlain; in a neat exemplification of what Whitelocke dubbed ‘the great change’, William Prynne was one of a trio who prepared the bill.530CJ vii. 821b, 851b, 854a. It was passed on 14 March, two days before MPs enacted the dissolution of Parliament.531CJ vii. 875b. Lenthall may have laid down his office in reasonable expectation that his future was secured. Whitelocke, who was more vulnerable at this juncture, noted that in March Monck stood ‘godfather to Lenthall’s son’, or more accurately, to his grandson.532Whitelocke, Mems. 698.

Restoration and Retribution 1660-2

Yet despite courting Charles II while he was still in the Netherlands – and allegedly presenting him with £3,000 – Lenthall was far from home and dry.533Ludlow, Voyce, 153. On 27 March Monck recommended to its convocation as candidate for an Oxford University seat in the forthcoming Parliament his ‘honourable friend ... the late Speaker’ – ‘a worthy patriot to his country and known friend to learning and the university, and of no less abilities’.534Bodl. Oxford Univ. Archives, NEP/supra/Reg. Ta. p. 10. The following week, having had word of ‘opposition made against me’, Lenthall wrote to the same body to emphasise the general’s support and to profess his own keenness and suitability

That I have been serviceable to you, I know the assurance of it myself, and must expect the testimony of it from many amongst you; and that there was no inconvenience befell you I can (I thank God) give myself the comfort of it.

Election would not only ‘enable me to continue the respects and service I have ever paid the university’ but ‘perhaps put a power in my hands in this juncture of affairs to render myself no less useful in the settlement of this nation’.535Bodl. Oxford Univ. Archives, NEP/supra/Reg. Ta. p. 11. But even a follow-up letter from Monck re-emphasising Lenthall’s particular worthiness failed to ensure that his candidature would ‘take’ in Oxford.536Bodl. Oxford Univ. Archives, NEP/supra/Reg. Ta. pp. 11–12; CCSP iv. 643. On 12 April convocation chose otherwise.537Bodl. Oxford Univ. Archives, NEP/supra/Reg. Ta. p. 12.

Lenthall never sat in Parliament again. Within weeks, he was fighting to preserve his life, and when that was saved, his reputation and his property. His son John, who was elected to the Convention to sit for Abingdon, probably drew unwelcome attention to the former Speaker when, in a debate on the bill for indemnity (12 May), he made the singular claim that ‘he who first drew his sword against the king committed as high an offence as he that cut off the king’s head’.538HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘John Lenthall’. Facing the prospect that he might be included among exemptions from the forthcoming Act of Oblivion, Lenthall senior published a point-by-point justification of his conduct. He had at no time acted in a manner ‘averse to the king’ but had been ‘violently prosecuted’ for sending money and allowing people and intelligence to pass to Charles I at Oxford (a somewhat elliptical comment that leaves open the extent to which he was guilty); he had been accommodating when Henrietta Maria had needed ‘things necessary’ for her lying in; he had been attentive to the needs of her children Henry and Elizabeth when they had been under Parliament’s care, which would ‘be testified by several that attended them’; he had helpfully advised some of the commissioners at the Treaty of Newport, as seen in a letter to the current Speaker; he had used his casting vote to reject violent or irregular proceedings; he had laboured to divide officers from soldiers; he had acted in concert with Monck; he had refused the Oath of Abjuration; he had signed no writs for elections. In sum, ‘there are only two things objected against me’: ‘going to the army’, which he had at the time intended to help effect the return of the king; and ‘sitting in the House’. The latter he acknowledged as ‘a weakness’, but, as appeared in his later confession, he was ‘led to it with a thought that I might do a great deal of good, and prevent all persons’ interest from running into a confusion’. ‘In all this time’, he had ‘countenanced a learned ministry, and always heard such whose opinions were for establishing the king and the church’.539Lenthall, Reasons.

Lenthall not unnaturally failed to mention that he had done all this while a royal proclamation denounced him as a traitor, but his special pleading contained some obvious truth and could potentially be corroborated by well-placed persons; it was also a story at least partly shared by others who could not reasonably be pursued to the death. Furthermore, the fact that Whitelocke cited Lenthall (among others) as a potential witness on his own behalf implies he perceived the former Speaker as relatively safe.540Whitelocke, Diary, 593, 595. Following the reading of a testimonial from Monck dated 17 May, the Commons resolved on 11 June that Lenthall should be among those excepted from the Act, but ‘in respect only of such pains, penalties and forfeitures (not extending to life) as shall be thought fit to be inflicted upon him’.541CJ viii. 61b; Whitelocke, Diary, 605.

Yet there was clearly a determination by some that Lenthall should receive heavy financial punishment, fuelled not least by a perception that he had made extortionate profits from his office – ‘the report of the great gains of ... the late Speaker, so fresh in everyone’s mouth’, as one of his defenders put it.542J. N. An Account of the Gains of the Late Speaker (1660), 1. One commentator estimated his income at £20,000 a year in addition to one-off grants of £2,000 and £6,000, and ‘above £400,000 clear into his pocket’ consisting of the £5 fee from each of the ‘four score thousand persons who compounded’ at Goldsmiths’ Hall.543W. L. King Charles Vindicated (1660), 11 (E.1017.19). There is no denying that, apart from his acquisitions at Burford, already noted, he had consolidated his estates in west Oxfordshire and north Berkshire through buying manors at Witney, Yelford and Longworth, and through other purchases and leases.544VCH Oxon. xiii. 209; xiv. 57, 69; VCH Berks. iii. 448; iv. 334; Berks. RO, D/ELL/F16; HMC Var. i. 60. He had also foreclosed on a mortgage of Newark Castle taken out by the royalist lord lieutenant of Oxfordshire, Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Berkshire.545CCC 1969-70. He did not look like a poor man, and his acquisitions potentially made enemies.

However, nor was he visibly inordinately rich. Theoretical figures were undoubtedly inflated and the practical obstacles to realising potential fees and grants considerable. An anonymous defence of Lenthall dated 19 June and his own version dated 25 June may exaggerate their case and ignore one important factor, but they contain elements that are plausible and, to a degree, verifiable. Even if Lenthall over-estimated his pre-Long Parliament income at £2,500 a year, he was evidently successful in his profession and (except for giving occasional counsel) unable to pursue it properly while Speaker.546W. Lenthall, A True Narrative (1660), 3; Account of the Gains, 2. He was probably right, at least up to a point, that the job required him to keep ‘a great retinue and public table’: so much, as he said, had been acknowledged in the grant of £6,000 in 1642, although it had not been made by the king, as he suggested, but by Parliament.547Lenthall, True Narrative, 4; Account of the Gains, 3; CJ ii. 518b, 519a. As has been seen, it had been accepted in Parliament in 1644 that part of that sum remained unpaid, and there is no reason to suppose that Lenthall’s expenses diminished greatly after 1642, especially during the Rump and in 1659.548CJ iii. 702b. Although Lenthall was surely being disingenuous in claiming that some of the additional offices he acquired had been taken on reluctantly, he was correct in saying that they then carried no salary and that their profits were significantly reduced on account of the political situation (especially the rival courts at Oxford, which he wisely did not mention directly).549Lenthall, True Narrative, 4-5; Account of the Gains, 2-3. The Journals, to which with other publicly-available records he and his champion appealed, bear out his contention that he received no further lump sums or gifts or land and it may be that he ‘never received’, or at least did not consistently receive, the £5 per day allowance customary for all Speakers. 550Lenthall, True Narrative, 6; Account of the Gains, 4. Burford and other purchases were sometimes officially sanctioned in Parliament but they were apparently funded from his own purse.551VCH Oxon. xiii. 209; xiv. 57, 69; VCH Berks. iii. 448; iv. 334; Berks. RO, D/ELL/F16. Perhaps he also paid outright for the pictures he obtained from the royal collection at Windsor.552M. Sturge Gretton, Burford Past and Present (1929), 104. While the £2,220 ‘to the utmost’ that Lenthall and J. N. asserted had accrued from fees according to their perusal of the books was insufficient to cover this, the outlay required nearer £15,000 than £400,000. In the absence of other evidence of large-scale conspicuous consumption, it is difficult to see how he could have spent anything remotely approaching this latter sum; nor does he seem to have lent money widely. Yet one factor in the equation remains unquantifiable: a man supposed to accept gifts was liable to be offered them; gratuities did not necessarily feature in publicly accessible account books.

Suspicions of Lenthall’s ‘vast estate’ and memories of ‘the great thief’ persisted.553E. Gayton, The Religion of a Physician (1663), 94; C. Bonde, Salmasius his Buckler (1662), 285. His presence as a prosecution witness at the trial of regicide Thomas Scot I* probably did him no favours in this regard.554State Trials, v. 1003; ‘Lenthall, William’, DNB (1892). While no great fine was extracted, in reality Lenthall probably paid a significant financial price as his legal career withered. He was discharged as recorder of Gloucester in November 1660 owing to his inclusion in the exception clause of the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion.555Berks. RO, D/ELL/F18/7. There was a new recorder at Woodstock by Michaelmas 1661.556Oxon RO, Woodstock archives BOR4/5/A1/1, f. 1. That May Lenthall had paid £50 for admission to a new chamber at Lincoln’s Inn; he was still a bencher but his influence had clearly contracted and he probably lived mostly in retirement at Burford, where he built a chapel.557LI Black Bks. iii. 9; Sturge Gretton, Burford, 104 The same month some problem (and doubtless an associated request) prompted Monck, now 1st duke of Albemarle, to issue a fresh statement of Lenthall’s valuable services to himself and to the king the previous year: the Restoration ‘could not have been so well effected without his help’.558Clarke Pprs. iv. 272.

Having tendered his confession to Brideoak, Lenthall died on 3 September 1662 and was buried two days later in Burford church.559Burford par. reg; OPH xxiii. 271-3. Unlike the Tanfields and Carys, neither he nor the descendants who followed him as lord of the manor have any memorials there. In the former Speaker’s case, this conformed with the stipulation in his will of 28 July that ‘no monument be made for me’. After a declaration of considerable if entirely mainstream piety, he made one last attempt to ‘manifest to the world how injuriously to my prejudice false rumours and lying lips hath advanced my temporal estate’. The bequests he would make would reveal its limits, and he hoped there was ‘none so uncharitably minded as to believe, that I would dissemble both with God and man, when I am not assured of one moment longer of life than I have to write this’. Leaving aside the settlement of all his lands on his son John and grandson William, the document did indeed reveal a relatively modest personal estate: his granddaughter Elizabeth Lenthall was to receive £1,000, but other legacies were modest. Among them was the discharge of two obligations to royalists: the balance of £200 promised to Colonel William Legge ‘upon conditions ... which he never performed, yet because now I conceive myself free from those dangers which his promise was to discharge, I shall account it a debt to be paid’; and £100 to the earl of Norwich or, if he died, his heir Lord Goring, ‘for he expressed a great willingness to my assistance in my sore and great troubles’. Brideoak was named as overseer.560Wills from Doctors’ Commons ed. J.G. Nichols and J. Bruce (Camden Soc. lxxxiii), 111-18.

Lenthalls continued to be lords of the manor of Burford into the nineteenth century, but they were never again prominent in national political life.561Sturge Gretton, Burford, 81 John was not re-elected to Parliament after the Restoration. His kinsman William Lenthall† of Lachford became a gentleman of the privy chamber and was twice an MP, but a rather undistinguished career ended in ignominious debt.562HP Commons 1660-1690.

Assessment

The representation of an acquisitive and cowardly Speaker Lenthall died hard. Even in the early 21st century there was no blue plaque in Burford. This owes something to reality. To build a reputation at the bar and to acquire property as he had in the 1630s, Lenthall needed to be ruthless as well as hard-working. To remain at the helm of Parliament through the choppy seas of the 1640s and 1650s he needed to shift his weight and adapt to circumstance. Like other lawyers and Parliament men, he was offered, and exacted, gifts and fees designed to influence the outcome of petitions and services. In the absence of a realistic salary to fund an office that required visible dignity and a staff, he doubtless took full advantage of alternatives.

However, this is not the same as saying that ‘cash for questions’ invariably secured the outcome desired by the donor: an element of cynicism or self-righteous detachment is plausible in the recipient. Nor does it prove that Lenthall profited to the extent his critics alleged. He did not attain permanent riches. In his interminable and wearisome hours in the chair – stretching far beyond what he originally envisaged and what his predecessors had endured – he usually seems to have acquitted himself well, despite the proximity of self-important colleagues waiting to pounce on his mistakes. He evidently had some skill in rationalising business and in managing MPs; he devised or regularised procedures which endured. When he was the focus of tense and unprecedented moments of political drama, he rose to the occasion. When fear drove him to desert his post or to cave in to force, that fear was generally well placed. His high-profile identification with Parliament and consequent condemnation by the king gave him a vested interest in winning the war, but it did not turn him into a radical. Like many other conservative lawyers he accommodated himself to the commonwealth and protectorate under a plausible conviction that it might do good to the public as well as to himself. His commitment to persuading Cromwell to accept the crown was born of a desire to define and limit the scope of government and to preserve Parliament and property – qualities widely respected among the political nation at the time. His contention that he used his position in the cause of moderation has some basis in fact and, while not as religiously-motivated as some colleagues, his support for a godly and enlightened but traditional church order seems well attested.

Speaker Lenthall was occasionally prey to error, impatience and unkindness, might once or twice have indulged in questionable correspondence with those technically his enemies, and probably succumbed to greed. There were other MPs more consistently principled, eloquent, godly, charitable, humane or respected. However, it is a moot point whether any such man could have fulfilled his role better – whether they could have combined to a greater degree knowledge of law and precedent, aptitude for devising efficient procedures, reasonable alertness to what was going on around him, sufficient even-handedness to retain credibility most of the time, self-possession at moments of high drama or danger, silence or prudence when it was politic, and sheer stamina. His re-election in Speaker in 1654 testifies to a lack of enthusiasm to replace him.