OLDISWORTH, Michael (?1591-1664), of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Mdx.

According to Anthony Wood, Oldisworth was the ‘governor’ of Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, and ‘led him by the nose, as he pleased, to serve both their turns’.35Wood, Fasti, i. 357. This view was widely held. The perception that Oldisworth was the brains behind the supposedly illiterate earl, that he wrote the latter’s speeches and that he shaped his opinions, underlay much royalist propaganda.36e.g. Pembrookes passe from Oxford to his grave (1648, 669.f.12.64); T. Hoyle, The rebells warning-piece (1650), 8 (E.593.13). Insofar as exchanges between the two men do not survive, the actual dynamic of their relationship is unknown. While Oldisworth was in the Commons and Pembroke in the Lords, it is uncertain how far the former deferred to his patron or how far he dictated the shifts of the earl’s vacillating course. Likewise, it is difficult to determine whether the decision of both to sit in the Commons after the regicide was attributable simply to changed circumstances, or whether it was in part a logical development of Oldisworth’s longstanding opinions and personal associations.

What is clear, however, is that Oldisworth was indeed a man of intellectual ability, wide experience and robust character. While his network of kin and friends mostly sheltered under the umbrella of Herbert patronage, it was not completely dependent on or subservient to it. Oldisworth’s standing survived the death of the 4th earl in 1650 as it had that of the 3rd earl in 1630. His parliamentary career, which dated from the 1620s, gathered steam only with the outbreak of civil war in 1642. Thereafter, it gained momentum into the Rump and, although he did not sit in protectorate Parliaments, resumed at a significant level when the Rump returned in May 1659.

Early career

A kinsman traced the Oldisworths back to landholders in 1288. While they obtained confirmation of arms only in 1569, intermarriage with gentry families from Gloucestershire, Somerset and south Wales had long buttressed their position among the region’s elite.37Oldisworth, Father of the Faithfull, 1-4; Grantees of Arms (Harl. Soc. lxvi), 186. This remained their heartland; their main estate was established at Bradley, Gloucestershire, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. None the less, they consistently had wider interests. This MP’s grandfather Edward Oldisworth† was elected to Parliament for Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, in 1559, while his father, Arnold Oldisworth† sat first for Tregony, Cornwall, as well as later for the Gloucestershire borough of Cirencester. The latter’s service as ‘greatest agent and solicitor’ to Anne, countess of Warwick, brought business in several western counties, while marriage to the daughter of an Antwerp-born immigrant merchant and acquisition of office as clerk of the hanaper brought him to London, where he resided in St Martin-in-the-Fields and was a notable member of this fashionable parish. There he also became a deputy governor of the Mines Royal, an assistant in the Mineral and Battery Works and engaged in speculative ventures. In 1621, in the wake of financial disaster, he sold up and made ready to emigrate to Virginia, but died before he reached his destination.38HP Commons 1559-1603; HP Commons 1604-1629; Hatfield House, CP80/26.

As Arnold’s second son, Michael apparently inherited little more than the Mineral and Battery Works interest, appearing as an assistant the same year.39BL, Loan 16 pt. 2, f. 1. Although it was he who eventually in 1633 obtained control of his parents’ remaining assets, his brother Edward and then his nephew Robert held on to Bradley.40Oldisworth, Father of the Faithfull, 3-4; Glos. RO, D2078/box 21, box 26/1. But Michael had plenty of useful contacts. Following his graduation in 1611 he had been briefly a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and he maintained close scholarly friendships after he had left academic life.41Al. Ox. Degory Wheare, Camden professor of history, and the Dutch polymath Constantine Huygens were among his correspondents in the 1620s; the language of these exchanges was Latin, a fact of some importance in assessing his subsequent credentials at Oxford.42T. Hearne, Curious Discourses (1720), 280-1; Add. 22953, ff. 129, 131. A career there was precluded by his marriage in April 1617, but this opened up alternative avenues of advancement. His bride, Susan Poyntz, was a ward in expectation of a portion of £1,500, or of more if her common law rights as co-heiress to her grandfather, Sir Gabriel Poyntz, might be asserted. In practice there were longstanding lawsuits and it is doubtful that even the full portion was realised, especially since Susan died without surviving children. For the time being, however, Oldisworth had connected himself to a family prominent both in Essex and in Gloucestershire.43Maclean, Mem. of the Fam. of Poyntz; HP Commons 1559-1603, ‘Poyntz’.

Meanwhile, through the Mineral and Battery Company and possibly through earlier contacts of his father, Oldisworth encountered its governor, William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke. By December 1621 he had entered the earl’s service and was acting for him in the latter’s capacity as lord chamberlain; within a few years he was secretary and principal conduit for petitioners seeking the earl’s lucrative patronage. He was himself able to obtain from James I a lease on the manor of Sundridge, Kent, which required him to find an initial £1,200.44CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 133. Returned for four successive Parliaments from 1624 to sit on Pembroke’s interest for the pocket borough of Old Sarum, he made very little visible contribution to the business of the House, but there is evidence suggesting he may have been more active behind the scenes.45HP Commons 1604-1629.

Following the death of the third earl in April 1630, entrenchment in an English and Welsh circle which included Sir Benjamin Rudyerd*, (Sir) John Thorowgood* and Oldisworth’s distant kinsmen the Morgans, facilitated Michael’s transition into the service of the fourth.46Coventry Docquets, 246; CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 86. It is conceivable that Oldisworth had worked with the latter after he succeeded his brother as chamberlain in 1626 and quite probable that he briefed the new earl as he took up the governorship of the Mineral and Battery Company.47CP; BL Loan 16 pt. 2, f. 49. Described as Pembroke’s secretary in October 1631, he dealt with all manner of business related to the earl’s many offices, from courtly and commercial (notably with regard to the Fishery Company, which involved him in admiralty affairs) to that of land and local government.48CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 398; 1631-3, pp. 67, 88, 160; 1633-4, p. 234; 1636-7, p. 203; 1637, p. 582; 1637-8, p. 48; SP16/237, f. 32; SP16/247, f. 25; SP16/327, f. 209: HMC Cowper, ii. 215. In the process he dispensed significant sums of money (in December 1637, for instance, he was paid £1,400 towards the charges of a masque), claimed influence over members of the privy council and was perceived to control which requests reached Pembroke.49CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 463; 1637-8, p. 1; SP16/201, f. 23; SP16/234, f. 38; SP16/389, f. 171; SP16/400, f. 119. In 1632 Wiltshire gentleman John Nicholas expressed a perhaps common suspicion of how Oldisworth employed his power, warning his son, Secretary-of-state Edward Nicholas†, ‘I think he would insinuate into your love but I doubt not you will be wary enough and trust him as I do’.50SP16/215, f. 5. A few years later the father was more charitable in reporting a rumour of Oldisworth’s seeking a new office elsewhere, wishing him ‘God speed in his desires’, but he found it difficult to contemplate who could possibly replace him: ‘I cannot think he would seek for the place but with my lord’s good liking, and who shall succeed him with my lord I cannot imagine’.51SP16/316, f. 55. Pembroke certainly allowed his servant – whom his very grand wife, Anne Clifford, tellingly addressed as ‘cousin’ – room for initiative. In June 1638 he asked that Oldisworth might be given access to the entire archive of the royal household, with freedom to make use of those documents he deemed ‘conducible’ to Pembroke’s purposes; the earl would answer for their safe return.52CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 515; Nicholson, Burn, Westmld. and Cumb. i. 595.

Oldisworth reaped further rewards as a result of Pembroke’s stewardship of the duchy of Cornwall and wardenship of the stannaries. In 1631 he received a grant of duchy lands at Sutton Marsh in Lincolnshire. As part of a much bigger project being undertaken in the Isle of Ely involving Pembroke’s heir, Philip Herbert*, Lord Herbert, Oldisworth proceeded to drain and improve his lands with a syndicate including William Wise, a Lincoln’s Inn lawyer who was also a Mineral and Battery assistant.53C3/411/12, 13; CCC 1531-4; CSP Dom. 1634-5, p. 357. In July 1636 Oldisworth was awarded goods and chattels forfeited to the king within the stannaries, although he found some difficulty in collecting them.54Coventry Docquets, 229; CSP Dom. 1637, p. 300.

When Charles I took an army north to fight the Scots in the summer of 1639, Oldisworth was secretary to the earl of Pembroke’s regiment of the king’s lifeguard.55SP16/538, f. 159. As ‘the lord chamberlain’s secretary’ he was chosen on 30 March 1640 with Robert Hyde* to serve as a burgess for Salisbury.56Wilts RO, G23/1/3, f. 416. Although Pembroke, who had his main seat at nearby Wilton and who was lord lieutenant of the county, might have been confident of placing his servant, it appears to have been a close call. The council had recently voted narrowly to repeal an order that only residents were eligible for election, and controversy surrounding the whole process reverberated into the summer. Hostility seems to have been directed principally at Hyde, who was more closely identified than Oldisworth with disputes between and among citizens and inhabitants of the cathedral close.57Wilts. RO, G23/1/3, ff. 411v, 416; C219/42, pt. ii, no. 66; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 604; P. Slack, ‘An Election to the Short Parliament’, HR xlvi. 108-14. None the less, the fact that the latter, as often previously, made no visible contribution to the Parliament, probably contributed to the frustrations of citizens who sought urgent redress of grievances.

Long Parliament, 1640-Aug. 1642

Thus, when it came to the autumn, Oldisworth’s alternative candidacy in another sphere of Pembroke influence, at the duchy of Cornwall and stannary borough of Plympton Erle, Devon, looks like an insurance policy. Returned both there and at Salisbury, he opted for the latter (9 Nov.), only to face even more organised challenges to the validity of the election than earlier in the year.58CJ ii. 22b. Once again the animus was directed chiefly against Hyde, but eventually it emerged from the committee of privileges (3 Mar. 1641) that whereas a large majority of the corporation had voted for Hyde and Oldisworth, ‘the whole number of the other citizens’ had elected godly activists John Dove* and John Ivie. A substantial body of MPs – marshalled, revealingly of divisions at court and in Wiltshire, by William Ashbournham* – thought that the franchise belonged to the latter, but when it came to a vote a majority decided otherwise, ‘many’, according to Simonds D’Ewes*, ‘out of affection especially for the earl of Pembroke’, so the original return was upheld.59CJ ii. 48b, 95b, 96a; Procs. LP i. 554, 558, 612-3; D’Ewes (N), 430-2.

For many months there was little overt sign of activity from Oldisworth to justify such indulgence. According to George Sedgwick, who had for the previous five or six years ‘very happily and contentedly’ been his assistant, he ‘quitted his relation to his lordship’, handing over the secretaryship to his deputy.60Nicholson, Burn, Westmld. and Cumb. i. 295. But this neither raised his profile in the House nor distanced him from Pembroke. At some time between late 1638 and 30 July 1641 Oldisworth re-married. His bride, Jane, eldest daughter of Sir John Stradling† and widow of William Thomas of Wenvoe, brought him to the heart of the Pembroke nexus in Glamorgan and supplied what were to be the most important connections of his parliamentary career.61PROB11/178/165 (Edmund Thomas); Bodl. Add. B.109, f. 18; Jenkins, Making of a Ruling Class, 296; S.K. Roberts, ‘Patronage, office and family in early modern Wales’, Welsh Hist. Rev. xxiii. 25-49.

Meanwhile, Oldisworth had only two committee nominations before his election for Salisbury was confirmed. On 10 December 1640 he was among Members added to the committee investigating exchequer official and Middlesex justice of the peace Sir Henry Spiller† as a delinquent for holding on to information damning of the lord lieutenant of Ireland, the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†), while on 15 February 1641 he was named to a large committee addressing a long-running legal dispute involving a member of the Herbert clan.62CJ ii. 48a, 85b. Having taken the Protestation promptly on 3 May, he collected no further tasks before obtaining leave to go into the country on 28 August.63CJ ii. 133a, 275a.

Yet he was unlikely to have been idle during this period. A dispute over rights at Sutton Marsh, which surfaced in the Lords in February and March 1641 as a cause between Pembroke’s heir Lord Herbert and the king’s cousin the earl of March (James Stuart, 1st duke of Richmond and 4th duke of Lennox), became a regular feature of Lords’ business over the next few months and was to become a long-running issue in Parliament.64LJ iv. 153b, 176a-177a, 204b and passim. This ‘cause’ (in which Oldisworth was an interested party) was complicated by general tensions at court and by particular dissension within the Lords over the trial and attainder of Strafford, which Pembroke publicly promoted. These formed a context for a violent clash between the earl and Lord Mowbray (Henry Frederick Howard, 15th Baron Mowbray and later earl of Arundel), the brief consignment of both to the Tower and Pembroke’s dismissal from his office as lord chamberlain (23 July).65Clarendon, Hist. i. 345; ‘Philip Herbert (1584-1650)’, Oxford DNB. It is inconceivable as these events unfolded around Westminster that Oldisworth escaped all involvement – whether in the ‘cause’, in the Strafford vote, or in the quarrel – while the eventual forfeiture of business and influence at court may well have contributed to his temporary withdrawal from London in late August.

There was then no mention of Oldisworth in the Commons’ Journal until February 1642. He was clearly more often present than appeared in that record, however, and perhaps more active. On 14 January 1642, as MPs continued to digest the implications of the king’s attempt to arrest the Five Members, Oldisworth alerted them to an assemblage of arms in suspect hands in and around Oxford, information that had perhaps come his way while attending to Pembroke’s duties as chancellor of the university.66PJ i. 62, 68. A capacity for vigilance in such matters, as well as his proximity to the earl, was apparently recognised in his inclusion, with otherwise very much more prominent MPs, on a joint committee with peers to examine suspicious correspondence intercepted in London (10 Feb.).67CJ ii. 424b. In similar vein, on 12 April he delivered to the House a letter from his brother-in-law Sir Henry Stradling, reporting on the situation in Kinsale in the aftermath of the Irish rebellion.68PJ ii. 157.

All this hints at a role as an intelligencer, for the earl and for others, while a complementary function as an investigator is apparently confirmed by his later addition to the Committee for Examinations (17 Aug.).69CJ ii. 725a. Since he was habitually the main channel through whom Pembroke discharged his responsibilities as a lord lieutenant, it is believable that Oldisworth drove the earl’s enthusiasm for the cause of Parliament that summer. On 9 May, as Pembroke vied with Henry Somerset, 5th earl of Worcester, for control of south-east Wales, Oldisworth moved successfully for a conference with the Lords regarding control of the magazine at Monmouth and other aspects of the safety of the kingdom; on 10 June he promised £50 and a horse for the defence (a fair sum given his modest social standing); and on 8 August he was deputed with Serjeant John Wylde* and William Strode I* to draft an order for the execution of the Militia Ordinance.70PJ ii. 295; iii. 471; CJ ii. 709b.

First civil war

During the first civil war Oldisworth’s modestly increasing profile in the House derived principally from his association with the earl, yet overall he seems to emerge as a figure of note in his own right, sometimes with distinct opinions. He looked after Pembroke’s private interests, as when he was added to the navy committee (14 Sept. 1642) for the express purpose of securing recompense for the Royal Fishing Company for loss of business at Dunkirk, or when he was involved in drafting the ordinance giving John Glynne* the office of custos brevium of common pleas, customarily in Pembroke’s gift.71CJ ii. 765a; iii. 371a, 385b, 392a. However, his role in probing intelligence, acknowledged in a committee appointment on 27 October, took him outside the earl’s immediate orbit, while his ecclesiastical concerns were more intense.72CJ ii. 824a. Resident in his native parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, he was entrusted, together with more illustrious fellow parishioners including Sir John Hippisley* and Sir Henry Vane* (whether I or II is not clear), with administration of the sequestered vicarage, with the appointment of replacement clergy and with the setting up of the new church at St Paul’s, Covent Garden (1 Dec. 1642; 12 Jan. 1643).73CJ ii. 870a, 924b. This represented a substantial long-term commitment, recognised in an order to pass instructions to the vestry in February 1644.74CJ iii. 399b; CCAM 25.

Oldisworth was reputed a more pious man than Pembroke: perhaps unfairly, later satire depicted him as doing the earl’s praying for him.75e.g. The speech of Phillip Herbert, late Earle of Pembrook and Montgomery (1649), 7 (E.571.25). He is likely to have facilitated the setting up in 1643 of the French congregation which, under the earl’s patronage, met first at Durham House in the Strand (confiscated from the bishop) and then at Somerset House. Under the francophone ministry of Jean Despagne, former chaplain to the exiled Huguenot grandee Benjamin de Rohan, known as ‘duc de Soubise’ or ‘duc de Fontanay’ (d. Oct. 1642), it practised Calvinism within a conservative liturgy and attracted significant numbers of MPs and peers.76J. Despagne, Abrege au sermon funebre (1650), 13-14 (E.3253); V. Larminie, ‘The Herbert Connection, the French Church and Westminster Politics’, in Huguenot Networks 1560-1780 ed. Larminie (New York, Abingdon, 2017), 41-59. Called as a witness to the trial of William Laud (9 Mar. 1644), Oldisworth testified to the archbishop’s promotion of Christopher Dow, who had published in favour of Arminian ‘innovations’.77CJ iii. 422a; LJ vi. 469a. He was later a nominee to committees which considered the publication of the Greek Bible known as the Septuagint (with Rudyerd, Pembroke’s legal advisor Bulstrode Whitelocke* and John Selden*: 3 Jan. 1645) and an ordinance for regulating sexual morality and blasphemy (29 Jan.).78CJ iv. 9a, 35b. He was among commissioners for the regulation of Westminster abbey (7 July 1645) and he recruited as a fast day preacher (3 Oct. 1646) Humphrey Chambers, a Westminster Assembly member who had recently accepted a Wiltshire living from Pembroke and who went on to sign the Presbyterian Attestation (1648).79CJ iv. 198b, 681a; ‘Humphrey Chambers’, Oxford DNB. It is conceivable that Oldisworth’s own religious preferences were closer to Despagne’s than to strict Presbyterianism, however. According to his nephew Henry Jeane, he ‘highly reverenced’ in life and later ‘bore a zeal unto [the] memory’ of the Assembly’s prolocutor, William Twisse (d. 1645), a Calvinist theologian who disliked extempore prayer and defended the Prayer Book.80H. Jeanes, The Riches of Gods Love (Oxford, 1653), dedication; Al. Ox.; Calamy Revised, 298; ‘William Twisse’, Oxford DNB.

The court experience which informed Oldisworth’s testimony against Laud and service on security matters also rendered him an obvious supervisor of royal palaces and peers’ residences, and organiser when they were put to new uses. With Rudyerd and others he was appointed on 26 June 1643 to purge papists and ‘disaffected persons’ from attendance on the royal children still at St James’s; with former household officers he was set to oust both delinquent or ‘scandalous’ lodgers and sellers of beer, victuals and other undesirable commodities and services from Whitehall (26 June 1643; 28 Feb., 18 June, 22 July 1644).81CJ iii. 145b, 410b, 533b, 567a. Meanwhile, he was given responsibility with Henry Marten* (15 Aug. 1643) for seeing that the king’s goods remaining behind were not spirited away.82CJ iii. 205a. What had become by the end of 1647 a standing committee for the palace of Whitehall (consisting of at least Oldisworth, Marten, Hippisley, Sir Humphrey Mildmay*, Cornelius Holland* and John Gurdon*) may have evolved from this point, since the same men were commonly involved.83SP16/515/2, f. 113. Several times ordered with Holland to fit out Worcester House for visiting commissioners from Scotland (30 Jan., 10 July, 17 Oct. 1644), Oldisworth seems to have performed the function of an accommodation officer.84CJ iii. 383a, 557a, 668a. He was nominated with Selden and others to investigate a suitable home for scholars fleeing royalist Oxford to pursue their studies (5 Dec. 1643) and included with Rudyerd, Hippisley and both Vanes on a committee for the reception of Dutch ambassadors (6 July 1644).85CJ iii. 329b, 552b.

Amidst all this, Oldisworth collected a variety of appointments which ostensibly had less to do with Pembroke than with his own personal skills. He was named to two committees tasked with raising money (28 Sept. 1643; 21 Aug. 1644); to translate from French diplomatic material and draft answers (22 June 1643; to reconcile parliamentary ordinances pronounced contradictory (21 Mar.); and to review the provision of wood for the City of London and the kingdom as a whole (7 Sept.).86CJ iii. 141a, 257b, 434a, 601a, 619b. Even where his activity appeared to stem from his connection to the earl, moreover, it also served to establish his independent standing.

The preparation of propositions and instructions related to the peace negotiations at Oxford in the spring of 1643, for which Pembroke was a commissioner, twice saw Oldisworth as a messenger to the Lords (21 Jan.; 6 Apr.).87CJ ii. 936b; iii. 33b. Perhaps at this point he shared the earl’s eagerness for peace, but when overtures were renewed the following year, he was depicted in satirical literature as dissenting, albeit for unexplained financial, rather than for political, reasons: ‘This peace (quoth Michael Ol[di]sworth),/ Will bring no fee to me;/ And yet my Lord hath sworn for it,/ And will not follow me.’88The Sence of the House or the Opinions of some Lords and Commons (1643 [1644]). An even more enigmatic stance was portrayed in the summer of 1644. According to royalist newspaper Mercurius Aulicus, after the parliamentarian victory at Marston Moor, Pembroke went hastily to St Martin-in-the-Fields, where apocryphally or actually he drowned out the Sunday lecturer, ‘swearing “God damn him, Prince Rupert was routed”’. In attendance as usual was ‘his genius (Michael Oldsworth) being close at his lordship’s heels (though his lordship follows Michael) who smiled several ways, and vexed his formal beard, to make it yield one look like a man of understanding’.89Mercurius Aulicus no. 28 (7-13 July 1644), 1086 (E.3.19).

While it served royalist purposes to belittle the earl by magnifying the role of an inscrutable servant, Oldisworth’s testimony to the House and to the Committee of Safety was evidently an indispensable element in resolving a dispute over Pembroke’s rights in ironworking in Derbyshire, shared with the delinquent Sir William Savile and thus at risk of sequestration (20 Apr. 1643). It emerged that the Committee of Both Kingdoms had initially acted on his information and a final decision was postponed until he could attend Parliament.90Harl. 164, f. 375b; CJ iii. 53b. On the other hand, Oldisworth’s appearances in connection with the earl’s Wiltshire interests, and indeed with his own constituents – from whom there are rare surviving letters from August 1642 and January 1643 – were few.91HMC Portland, i. 49, 50, 87. An exception was his nomination to the committee for raising troops for the county (17 June 1644), where he was listed last.92CJ iii. 532b.

Significantly, Oldisworth was most visible in areas where Pembroke’s business coincided more nearly with his own family interests. With the earl’s trustee Sir Robert Pye I* he joined to assist Thomas Pury I* and other Pembroke clients to sustain the parliamentarian interest in the garrison at Gloucester (19 Sept. 1643).93CJ iii. 247a. He secured an order for supplies of ammunition (7 Aug. 1643) for his wife’s brother-in-law Colonel Thomas Carne, Pembroke’s executive deputy as governor of the Isle of Wight, and when Carne’s rule was challenged, successfully proposed the enlargement of the committee for the island, on which he was himself included (29 Mar. 1644).94Harl. 165, f. 146a; 166, f. 40b; CJ iii. 440b. He evidently participated in a subsequent vote of confidence in Carne, organised by Sir Edward Hungerford*, William Wheler* (a Westminster neighbour) and others (20 Apr.), and was later deputed to address to Carne a letter of thanks from the Speaker (21 Oct.).95CJ iii. 672a; S.K. Roberts, ‘”Specially trusted by the Parliament”: Thomas Carne of Brocastle’, Morgannwg, l. 61-76; PROB11/178/185.

It is difficult to gauge the extent of Oldisworth’s direct involvement in Isle of Wight affairs. In 1645, as inroads were made against royalist forces in the west of England and south Wales, Pembroke exhibited renewed enthusiasm for the parliamentarian cause and approval of the New Model army. At this juncture Oldisworth’s importance in this region is more clear-cut, although his exact stance is almost as elusive as that of Pembroke himself.96S.K. Roberts, ‘How the West was won’, Welsh Hist. Rev. xxi. 672-3. On 13 August Oldisworth and kinsman Colonel Thomas Morgan were added to the Gloucestershire committee.97CJ iv. 239b; LJ vii. 537b. In the next few weeks he worked with three others on parliamentary propaganda directed at the counties of south Wales (15 Aug.), was added to the committee for Pembrokeshire (23 Aug.) and took related orders to the Lords (6, 8, 9 Sept.).98CJ iv. 242b, 252a, 265a, 266a, 267a; LJ vii. 571b. Given leave to go into the country on 30 September, Oldisworth went with Carne to Glamorgan.99CJ iv. 294a. Since the latter’s nephew and the former’s Stradling connections were identified with the royalists there, Oldisworth and Carne were apparently regarded at Westminster as having – or had worked with their local friends to convince colleagues that they had – a key role to play in undermining support for the enemy, first as opposing forces prepared to engage and then, following various successes, as Parliament sought to assert more permanent control of an area plagued also by factionalism and by ‘neutral’ ‘clubmen’.100CJ iv. 321a; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 120; Roberts, ‘Thomas Carne’, 69-70; Roberts, ‘How the West was won’, 657-8; L. Bowen, ‘“So much environed with ill-neighbouring counties”: isolation and political connection in civil-war Pembs.’, unpubl. ppr. (2019); R. Lort, Epigrammatum Rogeri Lort (1646), 12. Conceivably – in a potentially risky bid for conciliation – they were the prime movers behind the appointment as local parliamentarian commander of the youthful former royalist Bussy Mansell*, protégé and former ward of Sir Edward Stradling. Equally, however, as leading signatories to a letter of 30 October to Parliament from the committee at Cardiff (an isolated stronghold of puritanism and Pembroke influence) they exhibited a commitment to the Independent agenda of securing obedience by converting a ‘tractable’ people from adherence to ‘a prelatical, ignorant and corrupted’ clergy to the cause by the speedy despatch of ‘godly ministers’ along with a contingent of the New Model.101A.N. Johnson, ‘Bussy Mansell (1623-1699) political survivalist’, Morgannwg, xx. 9; Bodl. Add. B.109, passim; Jenkins, Making of a Ruling Class, 105; Roberts, ‘How the West was won’, 659, 662, 665; LJ vii. 681b, 682a; HMC Portland, i. 304. Oldisworth may have regarded Wales as ripe for a show of force and a more radical form of the gospel than Westminster. However, it is not clear that in every respect he was at one, then or later, with the uncompromising programme of fellow committee-man and rising star Philip Jones*, who although not an MP until 1646, came to be a long-term ‘dictator’ of the region.102cf. Jenkins, Making of a Ruling Class, 110.

Oldisworth may have stayed on in Cardiff in November while Carne and Jones went to London, the latter to cement his links with the New Model and secure his first military commission as governor of Swansea.103s.v. ‘Philip Jones’. However, perhaps crossing paths with the returning Jones, Oldisworth was back in London by 5 December to deliver a letter to the CBK.104CSP Dom. 1645–1647, p. 249. It is plausible that he then spent much of the next few months attending to the affairs of Pembroke and south Wales in London.105e.g. see also LJ viii. 400a, 400b. On 7 January 1646 he was given responsibility with Pembroke client Glynne and Welsh MP Simon Thelwall* for the trial for treason of Judge David Jenkins, an ultra-royalist who had promised severe penalties for all who opposed the king.106CJ iv. 398b; Jenkins, Making of a Ruling Class, 104-5. He later obtained permission to visit the prisoner in the Tower on business related to Pembroke’s papers.107CJ iv. 443a. When Edward Carne led a royalist revolt in Glamorgan and Cardiff was besieged, Oldisworth was in London to convey to the CBK Parliament’s urgent order for reinforcements to be sent from north Wales and Gloucester (3 Mar.).108CJ iv. 461a. The quashing of the rising by the combined efforts of Mansell, Major-General Rowland Laugharne† and Sir Trevor Williams* and the subsequent promotion of the latter two to military command in the region sent Thomas Carne back to the Isle of Wight, but at Westminster Oldisworth emerged unscathed.109Roberts, ‘How the West was won’, 664; Roberts, ‘Thomas Carne’, 71-2. He may have concurred in, or even proposed, the concession to the rebels that they might continue to use the Prayer Book.110Roberts, ‘How the West was won’, 666. On 7 April he received a second committee appointment, with Glynne, Whitelocke and others, to organise the sale of brass and statuary at Windsor castle for the maintenance of the garrison (with attendant opportunities for personal profit), while on the 28th he was granted a rebate of more than £800 on payment made to the court of wards for his step-son, Edmund Thomas*. That no further charges were due from this was a substantial concession, and some compensation for disappointment in another direction. A debate dating from June 1644 on whether to award him the place of registrar of the prerogative court of Canterbury had been ‘laid aside’, owing to support for rival claimants.111CJ iii. 537b, 687b; iv. 502b, 525a; CCAM 687; Harl. 166, f. 77a.

Reconstruction and political faction 1646-8

On 20 June 1646 Oldisworth was given leave to go into the country.112CJ iv. 582b. The Thomas estate at Wenvoe was one probable destination; the reassertion of Pembroke’s influence in Glamorgan and the complex manoeuvring with Independents surrounding local recruiter elections were among his likely objects, although the surrender of Oxford opened up a range of Herbert interests, from Oxford, through Wiltshire westwards, to which reliable access had hitherto been lacking.113Roberts, ‘How the West was won’, 666-7. He reappeared in the Journal only on 30 September, when he was named to a committee considering oaths taken by public officials and a remedy for clandestine marriages.114CJ iv. 678b. In October there was an uncharacteristic burst of further nominations, including to committees to vet prospective sheriffs and magistrates and prepare an ordinance for the sale of certain delinquents’ lands (30 Oct.), as well as, more predictably, to another considering a petition from James Herbert* (3 Oct.).115CJ iv. 681b, 682b, 709b, 710b. Probably he, or Pembroke, sought a share of influence in post-war reconstruction and revenge, but another factor encouraging greater engagement may have been the presentation of the Westminster Assembly’s proposals for the shape of worship and the church. On 16 October Oldisworth was again placed on a committee for the Septuagint, along with Selden, Holland, Pye, Whitelocke and other familiar associates.116CJ iv. 695a. A satirical pamphlet published around this time, ostensibly addressed to Glynne, depicts Oldisworth as converting the earl – despite the latter’s incomprehension – to the merits of the Assembly’s Directory ‘as the best nursery of devotion in the world’, but once again it is difficult to say whether this fully captured Oldisworth’s position – or indeed that of Pembroke, who had previously been ‘exceeding urgent and smart’ in encouraging the Assembly’s reforming work.117[T. Swadlin], A Letter of an Independent to his honoured Friend Mr Glyn (1646), 4 (E.315.1); Juxon Jnl. 62, n. 142.

Meanwhile Oldisworth was noticeably promoting and safeguarding Pembroke’s interests, political and territorial, both in Wales and elsewhere.118Notts. Archives DD/SK/134/8, 9; Herbert Corresp. ed. W. J. Smith (1968), 124. On 15 October he relayed to the Admiralty committee the earl’s recommendations, in his capacity as vice-admiral for south Wales, for officials within this jurisdiction; these were later approved.119LJ viii. 581b, 624a. Writing to his uncle in November, Sir Trevor Williams was convinced that securing Oldisworth’s support would be an important element in his candidature for a parliamentary seat at Monmouth.120Roberts, ‘How the West was won’, 656. In a three-cornered contest, Williams, identified with the Presbyterian interest, was unsuccessful; so was Thomas Carne. Since the victor, Independent Thomas Pury II*, must have gained Pembroke’s approval, it would be illuminating to know whether the preference was the earl’s alone or also (despite his previous loyalty to Carne) Oldisworth’s.121Roberts, ‘How the West was won’, 667.

While Pembroke’s personal association with Pury endured, neither he nor Oldisworth maintained links with Independency through 1647. As the earl swung towards hostility to the army, expressed in an incendiary speech to the common council in early May in which he accused it of conspiring with the king, Oldisworth can be glimpsed largely in supportive mode, although perhaps with an element of damage limitation.122Clarke Pprs. i. 24, 26, 28. From December 1646 to October 1647 he was only four times a nominee to Commons’ committees.123CJ v. 51b, 100a, 167a, 220b. On 31 March, whether on his own initiative or otherwise, he was given responsibility for implementing an order that the keeper of the Spring Gardens – Pembroke – should close them on Sundays and fast days (an issue perhaps as much to do with public order as with sabbatarianism).124CJ v. 131a. Appointed on 11 May to the committee tasked with preparing a settlement of £5,000 a year on General Sir Thomas Fairfax* (which he may have viewed as a ploy to neutralise the army threat), on 22 June he was deputed with Mr Thomas (probably Esay Thomas*, Presbyterian Member for Bishop’s Castle) to write to Laugharne and the beleaguered committee at Cardiff ‘to disabuse the people concerning those suggestions that the king and Sir Thomas Fairfax’s army are joined against Parliament’.125CJ v. 167a, 220a. The object was to counter a threat from Glamorgan gentry who gathered to assert a dual loyalty to those two powers: whether early stirrings of this had informed Pembroke’s May speech, or whether the rising was conjured partly by reports of the speech, is impossible to say. However, the same day Oldisworth was ordered, with Presbyterian Member Arthur Owen* (a cousin of Laugharne) to discover the names of the insurgents so that they could be removed from the commission of the peace. Together they were also nominated to a committee to review the governance of south Wales, manned by both Presbyterians and clients of Pembroke not so easily labelled but content to associate with them for the time being.126CJ v. 220b. The balance of probability is that Oldisworth was implicated in a scheme to wrest control of the Cardiff committee from the Independent Philip Jones and vest it in Laugharne.127S.K. Roberts, ‘Officeholding and allegiance in Glamorgan’, Morgannwg, xliv. 22.

As divisions between political Presbyterians and Independents came to a head in June and July 1647, Pembroke was suspected of intriguing for a peace with the king. A satirical speech published shortly afterwards, which caricatured the earl as an ignorant and unappealing fence-sitter, presented Oldisworth as his amanuensis.128SP16/515/2, f. 41; The Earl of Pembroke’s Speech (1648, E.441.27). He was hardly passive, however. On 1 August, at the height of the Presbyterian coup, he was chosen with one of its leaders, Sir William Lewis*, and another notable adherent, Sir Philip Percivalle*, to prepare letters inviting the king to meet Parliament, and warning the New Model not to come within 30 miles of London.129CJ v. 263b. Even if this arose partly from a deal to ensure the support of Pembroke and all who might prefer to occupy the middle ground, it advanced the key objective of the coup. Oldisworth was not, like two of the earl’s sons, placed on the Presbyterians’ ‘committee of safety’, but his position is clear to see. When the army’s march on London reversed the coup, and those who had fled Westminster returned, Oldisworth stuck to his guns: on 13 August he was a teller with one of the Herberts in favour of the majority who opposed a declaration from the Lords condemning Presbyterian use of the London militia.130CJ v. 273b.

It may have been a sign of a somewhat hollow victory that Oldisworth was then absent from the Journal for two months. It was probably no coincidence that around this time Henry Parker, Oldisworth’s chief rival for the office of registrar of the prerogative court, re-launched his campaign for the place. Parker, who had rendered himself very useful to the Independents, asserted not only his own prior claim but also a bar to Oldisworth’s holding the office in the shape of the Self-Denying Ordinance and of parliamentary resolutions of 10 June 1647. For good measure he accused Oldisworth of trying to obtain the place without the prior agreement of the House and damned him by yoking him in friendship to Richard Kilvert, a former lawyer of star chamber and the court of high commission who had continued in the prerogative court.131H. Parker, Memorial (1647, 669.f.11.8, 110); ‘Henry Parker’, Oxford DNB. For the time being, however, Parker’s own connections were insufficient to resolve the case and secure him the place.

Oldisworth’s re-appearance in the Journal on 14 October revealed a continuing alignment with Presbyterians. On that day he was a teller with John Swynfen* against the inclusion of an Independent-promoted clause in the proposition on church government permitting individuals to absent themselves from parish worship if they could demonstrate ‘reasonable cause’ or presence ‘elsewhere to hear the word of God preached or expounded unto them’.132CJ v. 333a. Once again, however, it is not clear that this betokened rigid Presbyterianism. Oldisworth had just obtained from the Lords an order for the provision to the rectory of Wenvoe of the apparently Presbyterian Timothy Woodroffe, but the latter soon moved on to serve the more unequivocally like-minded family of Sir Robert Harley*.133LJ ix. 471a; Al. Ox. ‘Woodroffe, Timothy’; T. Woodroffe, A Religious Treatise upon Simeon’s Song (1659, E.2119.1).

Otherwise, Oldisworth resumed a characteristic pattern of scattered committee nominations, with an emphasis this time on addressing the problem of wounded soldiers (11 Nov.), paying off the army (20 Nov.) and repairing war damage (10 Jan. 1648).134CJ v. 352a, 356a, 364b, 425a. He was still signing orders from the committee for accommodation at Whitehall in December 1647.135SP16/515/2, f. 113. An absence from the Journal between mid-January and mid-May 1648 is perhaps accounted for by the distraction of the parliamentary visitation of the University of Oxford. Oldisworth was regarded as virtually if not actually at Pembroke’s elbow as the earl arrived in the city in April to lend authority to the proceedings. Another in the series of specious speeches ‘copied’ by Oldisworth, purportedly delivered on this occasion, gave him particular prominence in its title, while Mercurius Pragmaticus had a ‘tongue-tied’ Pembroke (cast this time as an Independent) promising, when formally presented with a Bible, that

though he could not read it himself; yet his man Michael Old[i]sworth should take the pains now and then; because Michael is the better head-piece, though my Lord wears a diamond hat-band, and is either a witch or a prophet in the art of expounding.136Newes from Pembroke and Mongomery or Oxford Manchesterd by Michael Oldsworth and his Lord (1648, E.437.7); Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 4 (18-25 Apr. 1648), sig. D2 (E.437.4).

That Oldisworth was Pembroke’s ‘encourager and director’ in handling the visitation, as alleged by one local commentator, is given some credence by a letter almost certainly addressed to him from his brother-in-law George Stradling, a fellow of All Souls under the visitors’ most effective foe, the future archbishop Gilbert Sheldon.137?T. Barlow, Pegasus, or, The flying horse from Oxford (1648), 12; Al. Ox. ‘Stradling, George’. Stradling, while appreciative of the ‘many real testimonies of [Oldisworth’s] affection’ and inclined to take his counsel to ‘be cautious and wary’, sought to refute what seem to have been vigorous arguments by Oldisworth regarding the role of the university in ‘the great controversy of the kingdom’, the ‘blood and treasure’ expended on it by Parliament and the right of the latter to exact retribution on the former.138Bodl. Add. B.109, ff. 123v-4.

Back at Westminster in the early summer, Oldisworth was among those nominated to prepare the ordinance supplying key vacancies caused by the visitors’ ejections (17 June).139CJ v. 603b. Otherwise he was preoccupied with insurrection. With Pye, Pury and others he sat on committee to address riot in London and to regulate the Westminster militia (17, 27 May).140CJ v. 562b, 575b. Appointed on 12 May with many in the Pembroke circle, including Thomas Carne and Edward Stradling, to the militia committee for Glamorgan, the same day he was added to a Commons’ committee discussing disposal of prisoners taken in south Wales.141LJ x. 255b; CJ v. 557a. Deputed to write a letter of thanks to the forces who had captured Chepstow castle (29 May), he was also among those discussing an ordinance for sequestering the estates of delinquents and papists in south Wales and Monmouthshire (6 June).142CJ v. 576b, 587a.

Overall, however, continuing instability – rather than more positive considerations – may have led him to support Pembroke in forsaking the chamber and engaging with the new opportunity for peace offered by the negotiations with the king at Newport. Between mid-June and December he did not appear in the Journal. Satire issued in September depicting Pembroke’s ineffectual role as a peace commissioner once again cast Oldisworth as amenuensis. It raises the question as to whether the fundamental lack of faith in the treaty ascribed to the earl was the product of a perception that his former secretary was pessimistic as to its chances.143My Lord of Pembrokes speech to His Maiesty, concerning the treaty, (1648, E.464.14).

Rump Parliament

Pembroke’s decision to abandon negotiations, and subsequently to acquiesce in the purge of Parliament on 6 December, was pilloried in another pamphlet acquired by George Thomason on the 19th. What purported to record Pembroke’s farewell to the king and speech to the Lords at his return to London, was as ever ‘copied’ by Oldisworth.144The Earl of Pembrokes Farewell to the King (1648, E.476.22). ‘Grave Michael Holdsworth (my Lo[rd] of Pembroke’s tutor)’ was spotted in the House on the 15th.145Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 38 (12-19 Dec. 1648), sig DD4. Four days later he carried from the Rump to the Lords an ordinance making the earl constable of Windsor castle and keeper of its park.146CJ v. 100a, 101a. Although the appointment had been agreed back in July, in this context it looked like a reward for a brazen and dishonourable volte face, and some commentators were quick to assign Oldisworth a stake in the distasteful spoil.147CSP Dom. Add. 1625-49, p. 717. Unlike other MPs who were army officers in contravention of the Self-Denying Ordinance, Oldisworth was ‘no colonel, but governor of Pembroke and Montgomery, and hath a share with his lord out of Sir Henry Compton’s office [as custos brevium] worth £3,000 a year and is keeper of Windsor Park’.148A list of the names of the Members of the House of Commons (1648, 669.f.12.103); A More Exact and Necessary Catalogue of Pensioners in the Long Parliament (1648). The pairing had become a cliché: royalist poet John Cleveland referred in the same breath to ‘Mahomet and his pigeon, or my Lord of Pembroke and Michael Old[i]sworth’; royalist poet Robert Herrick, in a deeply ambiguous tribute to ‘the most accomplished gentleman Master Michael Oulsworth’ plucked him from the shadows and propped him up by means of the pillar and pedestal of fame.149J. Cleveland, Midsummer Moon or Lunacy Rampant (1648), 6; R Herrick, Hesperides (1648), 390-1.

On 20 December Oldisworth was among MPs who formally dissented from the vote of the 4th to continue peace negotiations.150PA, Ms CJ xxxiii, pp. 473-4; C. Walker, Anarchia Anglicana (1649), 49 (E.570.4). His motivation might be clarified significantly if it were possible to the pinpoint the start of his close connection to Edmund Ludlowe II*, who was at this point already convinced of the necessity of proceeding to the trial of the king. Before the autumn of 1649, and almost certainly before the end of May, Ludlowe married Oldisworth’s step-daughter and ward, Elizabeth Thomas, and commenced a deep and mutually supportive association with the Oldisworth/Thomas/Stradling affinity.151Ludlow, Mems. i. 235; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 167; Whitelocke, Diary, 245-6. Since Ludlowe, an MP from 1646, had a clear record of disagreement with the Presbyterians on the Wiltshire committee as well as of suspicion of the army, Oldisworth cannot have been ignorant of the implications of the alliance he was nurturing. If he embarked on it before the end of 1648, it would be a pointer towards his harbouring longer-term radical inclinations.

Whether recent or otherwise, Oldisworth’s conversion to the new regime looks thorough-going. During 1649 he made an unprecedented 27 appearances in the Journal – half as many again as in his previously most visible year, 1644, and much more than his average – and collected a number of important committee nominations. Appointed on 21 December 1648 to a committee to investigate the state of the treasury, on 6 January 1649 he was added, with Ludlowe and others, to the Committee for Advance of Money* at Haberdashers’ Hall.152CJ vi. 102a, 112a. His subsequent inclusion on other financial committees – notably those setting up a committee for public accounts (2 Mar.), reviewing the excise (23 Nov.), increasing the powers of both the CAM and the Committee for Compounding (3 July 1650), and increasing public revenue (28 Aug. 1650) – was hardly surprising given his experience in managing money in the royal household. What is surprising is that more such opportunities had not come his way more frequently in the past.153CJ vi. 154a, 279b, 319b, 436b, 459b; vii. 63a.

Meanwhile, also on 6 January 1649 Oldisworth was placed with Ludlowe and Whitelocke on the committee preparing an ordinance settling the proceedings for the king’s trial and added to the Derby House Committee.154CJ vi. 112b, 113b. It is not clear what part he took in either, but when he next appeared in the Journal on the 29th and 30th it was as a member of the reception committee for ambassadors from the United Provinces and an overlapping group preparing a defence of the trial and its outcome to offer on that occasion.155CJ vi. 124a, 125a. On the 31st he joined leading regicides on a committee to consider the disposition of Charles’s body and to peruse his papers.156CJ vi. 127a.

When the Derby House committee was superseded in February by the council of state, Oldisworth lost his brief position at the nucleus of power. However, Pembroke was a councillor, and at least occasionally Oldisworth was called in to give his opinion, for example on matters related to plantations and libellous publication.157CSP Col. America and W. Indies, i: 1574-1660, pp. 349, 351; SP25/62, f. 67; 25/65, f. 223; SP25/63/2, f. 94. In April 1649 the earl, deprived of his parliamentary seat by the abolition of the House of Lords, was elected to serve for Berkshire in the Commons. When he appeared in the lower chamber a specious version of his maiden speech had him offer to resign his chancellorship at Oxford to Oldisworth – a sign perhaps that satirists gloried in the reduction of Pembroke to a more appropriate place on the same level as his former secretary.158The speech, of Phillip Herbert, late Earl of Pembroke (1649), 6 (E.551.6). Oldisworth and enthusiastic Rumper John Weaver* were pictured as steering the dumb and inexperienced earl in the desired direction.159The speech of Phillip Herbert, late Earle of Pembrook and Montgomery ...upon passing an act for a day of thanks-giving (1649), 3 (E.571.25). However, it seems clear that the dependence was no longer mutual. While the number of Oldisworth’s appointments declined after 1649, Pembroke’s death in January 1650 did not have an obviously detrimental effect: appointments in 1651 equalled the total in 1644.

Oldisworth engaged in a range of Commons business. Some of it was predictable, most notably his involvement with Hippisley, Mildmay and Holland in the committee for lodgings at Whitehall (14 Feb. 1651), or reprised earlier responsibilities, as when he chaired a committee investigating a pamphlet supposedly leaking details of a foreign treaty (9 Apr. 1651).160CJ vi. 534b, 558a. Some of it had a radical edge. Given his continuing Mineral and Battery interests and his advice to the council of state, he was involved in surprisingly few social and economic issues, but with Pembroke and Pury he was named to the committee to prepare an act for the relief of prisoners for debt, usually a sign of reforming zeal (20 Apr. 1649).161CJ vi. 187b, 190b, 418a. In April 1651 he was named to discuss the abolition of titles of honour conferred by Charles I after his departure from Parliament.162CJ vii. 562b. Alongside Windsor forest business which came his way via the council (and on which Whitelocke and Ludlowe were deputed to confer with him on 31 May), Oldisworth was named to discuss the exemption or otherwise of certain parks and castles from sale to cover soldiers’ arrears (7 July).163CJ vi. 254a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 167. With Ludlowe and Pury he sat on committees preparing the act for removing obstructions to the sale of crown lands (7 Feb. 1650) and debating a petition from the 5th earl of Pembroke, that his interests as keeper of royal parks escape intact from that sale.164CJ vi. 358b, 398b. Added in April 1651 to the committee for removing obstructions, until the end of the Rump Oldisworth acquired nominations relating to the disposal (and selective preservation) of royal, ecclesiastical and delinquent lands: on 31 March 1653 he was a teller for the minority who favoured a second reading for an act doubling the sums to be raised on such property.165CJ vi. 403b, 455b, 476a, 519b, 558a, 563b, 598b, 611b, 616b; vii. 115a, 191b, 245a, 250b, 274a.

An expectation of favourable treatment may have attended his petition of April 1652 to the Committee for Compounding to rescue his stake in Sutton Marsh lands from the delinquency fines of the duke of Lennox.166CCC 1531-4. This remained unresolved, but it was an indicator of Oldisworth’s rapprochement with the regime that his long-running dispute with Henry Parker reached a compromise. Following a report from the Committee for Advance of Money, the Commons resolved that Oldisworth and Parker should enjoy the office of registrar of the prerogative court jointly (18 July 1649).167CJ vi. 263b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 238. A degree of commitment and trust is also implied by Oldisworth’s inclusion on committees settling the Tower Hamlets militia (10 May), taking subscriptions to the Engagement from MPs (12 Oct.) and (with Pury) overseeing the storage of parliamentary records (14 Dec.).168CJ vi. 206b, 307b, 333a. Later he was selected to draft a letter from the Speaker to thank Colonel George Monck* for his services in Scotland (22 Aug. 1651) and included among MPs refining the narrative justifying a public thanksgiving for victory at the battle of Worcester (19 Sept.).169CJ vii. 5a, 20a.

Oldisworth’s religious position remains nuanced. His addition (with the more obviously radical Ludlowe) to the committee for the revenues of the dean and chapter of Westminster (5 Feb. 1649) looks like an extension of his previous work.170CJ vi. 132a. He seems to have been regarded as keen to promote preaching – sometimes at this juncture an indicator of Independent rather than Presbyterian sympathies – being included on committees to supply pulpits in Oxfordshire (6 Apr. 1649), Coventry (23 Aug. 1650) and more generally (21 Dec 1649).171CJ vi. 180b, 336b, 458b. He was a prominent member of the committee for regulating the universities, which worked with the Committee of Plundered Ministers in settling a godly ministry.172CJ vi. 180b, 263b, 336b, 458b. Yet his membership of the committee enabling and regulating presentations to benefices (18 July 1649) could be seen as an endorsement of Erastian principles.173CJ vi. 186b-187a, 200b; LPL, Sion L40.2/E16, passim. And it is conceivable, in the context of his appointment to committees considering the treatment of popish recusants who conformed (30 June 1652) and defining the limits of religious toleration (6 Jan. 1653), that he became more open to heterodoxy than he had been in the early 1640s.174CJ vii. 147a, 244a.

With Pembroke and Ludlowe, Oldisworth was on the committee which promoted the establishment of two colleges in Ireland for the advancement of Protestantism (30 Nov. 1649).175CJ vi. 327b. He maintained his interest in the University of Oxford, where he seems to have been a force for preservation or moderate evolution rather than for radical reformation. Writing to John Selden in February 1651, the provost of the covertly royalist Queen’s College, Gerard Langbaine, noted in connection with the fellowship’s preferences for filling vacancies that ‘Oldisworth ... has expressed himself a cordial friend hitherto, and is willing to go through with his undertaking’.176Bodl. Selden supra 109, f. 335. The assertion is the more plausible in that, as will be seen, he managed to retain good relations with the Stradlings. Oldisworth’s inclusion on the committee regulating the university for the purpose of considering that body’s petition (14 Apr. 1649) might be regarded in a benign light, just as the contemporaneous suggestion that Pembroke might hand him the chancellorship might be interpreted, among other things, as a concession that he was not unqualified.177CJ vi. 187a; The speech, of Phillip Herbert, late Earl of Pembroke 16 April (1649), 6 (E.551.6). A rare experience as a Commons committee chairman occurred when he was given joint charge of discussion of a further petition in June 1652.178CJ vii. 141a.

Ultimately, Oldisworth’s political stance is also elusive. Although with Sir Robert Pye I and William Cecil*, 2nd earl of Salisbury, he was one of the 4th earl of Pembroke’s executors, the bulk of the work was deputed to his colleague Sidney Bere and he does not seem to have been especially intimate with the 5th earl.179CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 47; C6/119/112; C6/149/50; Cal. of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House, xx. p. 419. Pamphlets depicted him at the father’s deathbed, and exhorted the heir to follow Oldisworth’s counsel, but the satirical series stopped.180The first part of the last wil & testament of Philip, Earle of Pembrooke (1649 [1650]); The Last Will and Testament of the Earl of Pembroke (1650), 2. Oldisworth’s visible alliances were now lateral, if no less ambiguous. For a while, at least, he was close to Whitelocke, with whom he shared interests at Oxford and Windsor, and whom he brought in as governor of the Mineral and Battery Company in December 1650.181Whitelocke, Diary, 245; Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. x. f. 109; BL Loan 16 pt. 2, f. 103v. The connection to the maverick Ludlowe was perhaps the warmest and, at least after he was appointed lieutenant-general of horse in Ireland, probably coloured Oldisworth’s contribution to committees supplying men and money for the kingdom.182CJ vi. 250a, 336a, 563b, 573a; vii. 23b. Oldisworth was evidently close to the Anglo-Welsh kinship circle into which he and Ludlowe had married. In January 1652 the diary of Dutch visitor Lodewijck Huygens reveals several Morgans (two of whom ‘had been ardent supporters of the king’s party’), Jane Oldisworth and Edmund Thomas gathering at the London house of diplomat and MP Walter Strickland*, awaiting the return of their host and Oldisworth from Parliament; he then went on to stay with their relatives, including Stradlings and Carnes, in Glamorgan.183Lodewijck Huygens: the English Journal 1651-1652 ed. A.G.H. Bachrach and R.G. Collmer (Leiden, 1982), 63, 125-9. Strickland was, perhaps indicatively, a religious Presbyterian of open and inclusive instincts whose political alliances were varied. Oldisworth had been named (27 Dec. 1650) to the committee discussing the bill for naturalisation of Anne Morgan, Strickland’s wife, who had been born in the Netherlands.184CJ vi. 515b. Meanwhile, Oldisworth maintained his interest in Wales and the west. He was placed with three Herberts and a Morgan, as well as Philip Jones, on the commission to try insurgents (25 June 1651).185SP29/45, f. 83. Later that summer he prepared the Speaker’s letter of thanks to the corporation of Gloucester for its fidelity to Parliament (25 Aug.) and was named to the committee considering a petition from those who had suffered from the campaign culminating in the battle of Worcester (10 Sept.).186CJ vii. 5b, 15a.

It may be that for Oldisworth, as for Ludlowe (for whom he may have been the most trustworthy conduit of news from home), Worcester marked a departure in his attitude towards Oliver Cromwell, now inclined to choose ‘new friends’.187Ludlow, Mems, i. 282. Over the 18 months that followed, a partisan of Ludlowe, who sought to assert his own authority in Ireland following the death of Lord Deputy Henry Ireton* against replacements from England and to defend himself from growing suspicion of radical intent, would have cause to be suspicious of those with most power in government at home. The fall-off in Oldisworth’s appearances in the Journal in this period was relatively smaller than that of some wary Rumpers, perhaps precisely because he wished to keep an eye on Ludlowe’s interests. He received two committee appointments in June 1652 and on 27 July, when he and Strickland were nominated to a committee to consider queries from the Committee for Compounding about exceptions to the Act of General Pardon, so could have been party to some of the debates culminating in the act for the settlement of Ireland, passed on 12 August.188CJ vii. 141a, 147a, 158b. He was in the House the next day, when the army presented its petition for the dissolution of Parliament, and was placed on the committee set up to consider it.189CJ vii. 164b. How assiduous he was in attending a committee which for a time met daily, and how he stood in regard to the friends of Cromwell who dominated it, is unknown. It is conceivable that he agreed with the dismay of fellow member Whitelocke at army ‘insolence’, but he was still around at the end of September to consider the bill, introduced in response to army pressure, to disable the disaffected from voting in elections or bearing office.190Whitelocke, Mems, 541; Diary, 278; Worden, Rump Parliament, 308–10; CJ vii. 187b. Invisible in the Journal in November and December, he then received four nominations in January 1653, only to disappear until 31 March, his last recorded contribution to the Parliament before its dissolution on 20 April.191CJ vii. 244a, 245a, 250b, 251a, 274a.

Protectorate

Oldisworth had been removed from the Westminster bench by late 1653 and did not serve in the Nominated or protectorate Parliaments. This suggests either that the interest of the earl of Pembroke was weaker in the 1650s, or that Oldisworth enjoyed less confidence from the 5th earl, or that Oldisworth continued to share his stepson-in-law’s distrust of Cromwell, or that he was affected by Cromwell’s distrust of Ludlowe, or probably a combination of all four. Initially, however, he successfully petitioned to keep his office in the prerogative court (Oct. 1653) and custody of its records (Dec.); he effectively had sole charge, Parker having died and left his claims to his widow.192SP25/71, f. 166, SP25/72, f. 117, SP18/42/7. A few months afterwards his position was potentially threatened when four councillors, including Strickland, investigated the Rump’s response to representations from the creditors and servants of the late king. Reporting on 4 July 1654, they pronounced that the latter’s petitioning ‘is a close design, which when unmasked there will appear much of self-interest, of malice and revenge’. The covert instigators were ‘Mr Oldisworth, Mr William Thomas and others of their party’. In 1651, they found, Oldisworth had persuaded the committee for the sale of the king’s goods (of which he was a member) to look into the allegations of non-payment made by Thomas and others; after ‘many meetings and much time spent ... nothing at all [was] proved of what was pretended’ but the matter had been revived in 1652 and 1653. Examining renewed petitions to the protector, the councillors concluded that while some claimants were ‘good people’ or ‘widows and orphans’, others were delinquents or had inflated demands; Thomas (plausibly a connection of Oldisworth’s by marriage) had sought £4,000 when only £400 was due.193SP18/73, ff. 221-2.

A further petition from former household servants of the royal family presented to the council on 17 July does little to dispel the impression of manoeuvring by a group operating within, but not in sympathy with, the new regime. It requested that the accounts of the committee for the disposal of goods be examined by Oldisworth, his old privy chamber associate Sir John Thorowgood* (now a Westminster and Middlesex magistrate), William Wheler* (whose wife had been royal laundress), Colonel Anthony Rous* (former member of the committees for petitions and for the sale of forests, and now judge of the probate court), and Rous’s kinsman John Hooke* (keeper of the tennis court at St James’s).194SP18/73, f. 81. The uniting threads (apart from the prerogative court) were perhaps closeness to the late earl of Pembroke and a moderate Presbyterianism, but whether anything more politically subversive than the desire for profit was at work seems impossible to determine. The accusations against Oldisworth apparently went no further and Rous, Thorowgood and Wheler in different ways came to terms with the protectorate.

Over the next few years Oldisworth himself continued to be a local office-holder. Although not named again as an assessment commissioner until 1659, he was chosen as a commissioner of oyer and terminer for the Oxford and Gloucester circuit, and as a commissioner of sewers in Middlesex and Westminster.195C181/6, pp. 164, 176, 303, 320. Apparently still residing in St Martin-in-the-Fields, he was a regular attender at meetings of the Mineral and Battery Company and signed orders of the governors of Westminster school and almshouses.196BL Loan 16, pt. 2, ff. 97 seq.; Add. 63788B, ff. 128-129v. Here he was well placed to supply intelligence to Ludlowe while he remained in Ireland, some of it directly supplied by the government; the conduit here was Charles Fleetwood*, Ludlowe’s one-time superior, whose conversations with Oldisworth were perhaps oiled by the fact that Sir Miles Fleetwood*, Charles’s brother, was a former courtier.197Ludlow, Mems. i. 423-4.

When Ludlowe returned home in 1655 to face accusations of intent to raise insurrection, it was Oldisworth who, once the immediate crisis was over, whisked him off to lay low in Essex, the destination perhaps determined by a lingering stake in the Poyntz inheritance, or perhaps by an invitation from Thorowgood, seated at Ongar.198Ludlow, Mems. ii. 10-13. Ludlowe was still or again in Essex in August 1658, when he went up to London to collect Oldisworth and bring him back; both were in Westminster soon after the death of Oliver Cromwell, when Ludlowe’s sister wrote conveying her love to ‘uncle and aunt Oldisworth’.199Ludlow, Mems. ii. 43–4; CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 678. Given that Ludlowe was at this time being courted by royalist agents, it is unlikely that Oldisworth escaped overtures and possible that he even encouraged them; on the other hand, neither can he have been unaware of Ludlowe’s meetings with commonwealthsmen.200CCSP iv. 16; TSP vii. 550. Whether at this point he favoured more the conservative agenda of old Presbyterian allies or the radical agenda of old colleagues like regicide Cornelius Holland is unclear.

Returned Rump, May 1659-March 1660

Unlike Ludlowe, Oldisworth was not elected to the third protectorate Parliament. But the close connection between the two men was observed as both entered the returned Rump in May 1659. Listing those who re-assembled, one observer paired ‘Levelling Ludlow’ and ‘Pembrochian Oldsworth that made the earl his master’s wise speeches’.201A. Annesley, Englands Confusion (1659), 10. In the five months following his first appearance in the Journal on 11 May, the latter looks to have re-attained the moderate prominence he had enjoyed in 1649 and 1651. His appointments followed familiar lines in familiar company.

Frequently with Whitelocke, Holland, Pury I and/or one of the Stricklands, and sometimes with Ludlowe, he was nominated to address navy and admiralty matters (including the important choice of commissioners: 11, 18 May), to devise measures for the preservation of forests (11 May), to expedite a bill for the sale of Whitehall and Somerset House (16 May), to review the public debt and bring in money (21 May, 20 June), and to investigate revenue for the poor knights of Windsor and other hospitals (20 Sept.).202CJ vii. 648b, 656a, 656b, 662a, 690a, 781b. Perhaps thanks to his connection to Walter Strickland, he was on committees giving audience to the agent from Hamburg (14 June) and the resident from Venice (26 Aug.).203CJ vii. 685a, 769a. He was added to the Committee for Plundered Ministers on 25 June and, over a summer of rebellion and suspicion of rebellion, was on committees for the Westminster militia (24 May), the security of London (9 July) and the demolition of Liverpool castle (19 July).204CJ vii. 664a, 684b, 693b, 710b, 723a. Oldisworth had probably already long lost his place in the probate court by the time he was nominated to a committee preparing the latest in a succession of parliamentary attempts at regulation (14 July).205CJ vii. 717b. His claims there may have been the subject of his petition, committed on 24 August to MPs including the potentially sympathetic Holland and Salisbury, although it more likely related to his long-running problems with his lands at Sutton Marsh; it eventually joined all except one petition during this session (from Solicitor-general Reynolds) in going nowhere.206CJ vii. 767a; CCC 1531-4.

He may already have been hoping for the replacement of this Parliament by a new one. In a comment hinting at the reality of potentially subversive discussions with the enemy, the exiled secretary Edward Hyde* wrote to royalist agent Alan Brodrick at the end of July that he wished Oldisworth’s prophecy of a dissolution would come true.207CCSP iv. 298. But Oldisworth was evidently still in the Commons in September, when his long-suffering constituents sought his presence in Salisbury to discuss a petition and when his own petition was still under consideration.208CJ vii. 780a, 781b; Wilts. RO, G23/1/4, f. 116v; CCC 1531-4. He was probably still there on 4 October, when, on the day that the House resolved to pay army arrears from the proceeds of sales of land belonging to royalists involved in the summer’s insurrection, he was nominated with Whitelocke and others to prepare an additional act for sequestrations.209CJ vii. 791b. It is plausible that this and the army petition with further demands presented on the 5th discouraged him from further attendance before cashiered officers under John Lambert* surrounded Parliament and achieved the ‘interruption’ of proceedings on the 13th.

Following the defeat of the military coup and the re-assembly of the Rump on 24 December, Oldisworth soon re-appeared, his firm opposition to Lambert indicated by his inclusion on a committee to review the cases of persons committed since the ‘interruption’(30 Dec.).210CJ vii. 800a. Until the middle of February he was to be seen among conservative republicans like Solicitor Reynolds and Robert Nicholas*, and the radicals who were close to Ludlowe, on committees attempting to reinvigorate the Rump by controlling elections for new Members (3, 11, 23 Jan. 1660), rescuing its legitimacy from the dissolution of 1653 (7 Jan.), and considering a fresh Engagement (10 Jan.).211CJ vii. 803a, 805a, 806b, 807a, 818b He was appointed to committees to nominate admiralty and navy commissioners (12 Jan.) and to reconstruct commissions of the peace (24 Jan.).212CJ vii. 811a, 821a.

In the absence of other evidence, it is impossible to say whether this betokened a conversion from dabbling in negotiation with royalists, or that the royalists had read him incorrectly, or that he was choosing a course in the hope of bolstering up Ludlowe, now under attack for his conduct in Ireland, or a complex combination of these and other considerations. Unlike Ludlowe (who commented retrospectively), he was apparently prepared to test the good faith of George Monck when he approached London with his army: Oldisworth joined Hesilrige on a committee justifying the actions of the lieutenant-general (31 Jan.).213CJ vii. 827a. He was subsequently on the committee which, in accordance with the recommendation of the council of state, sought to bring London to obedience by choosing a new common council (9 Feb.) and, as it became evident that the Rump’s days would be numbered, to consider papers regarding a form of government (13 Feb.) and to investigate scandalous information about MPs (15 Feb.).214CJ vii. 838b, 842a, 843b.

Perhaps Oldisworth was by now feeling vulnerable. He was then absent from the Journal for more than three weeks. In early March he was depicted with Whitelocke, Nathaniel Fiennes I*, the notorious Bristol ‘Quaker’ James Naylor, and numerous regicides and notable radicals as an enemy of magistracy, ministry, Monck and the Stuarts, and as a schismatic opponent of all order in church and state.215A Phanatique League and Covenant (1659 [1660], 669.f.24.11). This description is markedly at odds with the impression of Oldisworth’s last appearance in the Commons’ Journal. On 9 March, following the return of the Long Parliament, he was added in the company of resurgent Presbyterians and old associates Glynne and Wheler to the committee of religion, in order to redress grievances regarding tithes and church livings in Wales.216CJ vii. 868a.

Post-parliamentary career and assessment

Oldisworth seemingly ended his parliamentary career with a foot in both camps. In the last days of the Long Parliament and during the Convention, of which he was not a Member, he apparently laboured tirelessly at the council – to which his channel of access is unclear – and among MPs and peers to have Ludlowe included in, rather than exempted from, the Act of Indemnity.217Ludlow, Voyce, 103, 165, 186-7, 189. An impressive spectrum of supporters were enlisted to plead this cause and, when that failed, to assist Ludlowe to evade capture; these included royalist Stradlings and miscellaneous Catholics.218‘Edmund Ludlowe II’.

Oldisworth himself seems to have done nothing to hide from the attention of the Restoration regime. In December 1660 there was a false report that Ludlowe had been captured at his home.219HMC 5th Rep.158, 201. His and his wife’s steadfast loyalty to the regicide, which continued long after Ludlowe had fled into exile, can hardly have been invisible and doubtless contributed to a certain reputation for radicalism which surfaces in some subsequent accounts of Oldisworth.220Ludlow, Voyce, 338. But he continued to attend Mineral and Battery meetings in Sheer Lane and elsewhere until August 1663 and seems to have remained attached to St Martin-in-the-Fields, where he was buried on 1 February 1664.221BL Loan 16, pt. 2, ff. 125-38v; St Martin-in-the-Fields par. reg. His widow was left to pursue in Parliament his claims in Sutton Marsh, but they had no surviving children, and no further Oldisworths sat in the House.222LJ xi. 665a, 665b, 668a.

That no will should have come to light compounds Oldisworth’s elusiveness. A well-known figure to his contemporaries, he was credited with wielding considerable influence and patronage, but in what direction and with what financial rewards is largely unknown. Leaving aside his central role in asserting the Pembroke interest, his contribution to Parliament extended to a wide variety of business and in some areas of particular expertise was periodically important. On the whole his preferences seem to lie with Presbyterianism and the middle ground of politics, but from time to time he demonstrated that he could break out of that, and his deep affection for the uncompromising religious and political radical Ludlowe reveals a readiness to entertain more complex attitudes.