PELHAM, Henry (1597-bef. 1664), of Gray’s Inn, Mdx., and Belvoir, Leics.

Like his second cousin Peregrine Pelham*, Henry Pelham was descended from a cadet branch of the Pelhams of Laughton in Sussex. Pelham’s grandfather, a younger son of the Sussex family, had acquired a substantial estate in Lincolnshire during the Elizabethan period, establishing his principal residence at Brocklesby, a few miles west of Great Grimsby.28Lincs. RO, YARB/3/3/2/2/1, f. 1. By 1597, when Pelham’s father, Sir William Pelham†, was elected knight of the shire, the Brocklesby Pelhams were one of the county’s leading families.

Henry Pelham, the third of Sir William’s six sons, entered the legal profession and although never called to the bar, retained his chambers at Gray’s Inn and became a lawyer of some renown. His failure to become a barrister probably stemmed from his decision in 1620 to interrupt his studies in order to accompany his cousin Sir Edward Conway I† on his diplomatic mission to the continent. Pelham was still abroad when he was returned for Great Grimsby to the third Jacobean Parliament in 1621, and he would represent the borough in the four succeeding Parliaments. However, it is was only in the Parliament of 1628-9 that he made any appreciable impact, speaking against arbitrary imprisonment and in favour of establishing parliamentary control of taxation before granting supply. His contribution to a debate on religion in May 1628, in which he urged that the only test of clerical conformity should be the articles prescribed in the Elizabethan act of 1571, suggests that he favoured a latitudinarian Protestant church and that he may have sympathised with the plight of puritan ministers who had fallen foul of the church authorities.29HP Commons, 1604-29. His sister-in-law, the godly Lady Brilliana Harley, was cautiously approving of his piety, finding him ‘to savour more of religion than his brother Herbert’.30Brilliana Harley Lttrs. 114.

After the death of his father in 1629, Pelham apparently chose to divide his time between his chambers at Gray’s Inn and a residence at or near Belvoir, the seat of his influential kinsman, George Manners†, 7th earl of Rutland.31Lincs. RO, YARB/3/3/2/2/1, ff. 36, 43; FL/DEEDS/1280; CSP Dom. 1635-6, p. 230; HMC Rutland, iv. 529. Pelham was legal adviser to Rutland, who had secured his appointment as deputy recorder of the nearby borough of Grantham (Rutland himself was the town’s honorary recorder) by October 1633.32Add. 37343, ff. 134, 137; Lincs. RO, ELWES/1/3/1; FL/DEEDS/1280; HMC Rutland, iv. 529. Besides Rutland, Pelham acted as a legal or business agent for the Lincolnshire peers Robert Bertie, 1st earl of Lindsey and Pelham’s kinsman, the future parliamentarian peer Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham.33Abstract Suss. Deeds and Docs. 136. He was also the legal adviser, not to mention close friend, of his second cousin Sir Thomas Pelham* of Laughton.34HMC Rutland, i. 520; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 442; Fletcher, Suss. 53.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Pelham and the earl of Rutland’s step-son, Sir Edward Baeshe of Stanstead Abbots, Hertfordshire, were returned for Grantham. Both men were elected on the interest of Rutland, the borough’s principal patron.35Supra, ‘Grantham’. It was almost certainly Rutland who had secured Pelham’s appointment a few weeks earlier as the corporation’s retained legal counsel. The corporation had made the appointment in recognition of Pelham’s ‘love and fidelity’ towards the town – athough in 1647, when it removed him from the office, it declared that ‘he never was employed by the corporation since the order was made ... he continuing at London during the said time’.36Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, ff. 6, 44v, 83; Grantham during the Interregnum ed. Couth, 97. On the election indenture, however, he was described as of Belvoir.37C219/42/1/134.

Pelham was named to two committees in the Short Parliament – the committee of privileges and a committee set up on 1 May for reforming the ecclesiastical courts – and was also entrusted with the task of preparing a bill for protecting the legal rights of infants in suits of common recovery.38CJ ii. 4a, 17a, 17b; Aston’s Diary, 109. Of the several contributions he made to debate, the most revealing was on 24 April, when he supported the godly Lincolnshire knight Sir Edward Ayscoghe* in his unsuccessful attempt to unseat his rival for one of the county seats, Sir Edward Hussey.39Aston’s Diary, 41, 47, 59, 109. But aside from his support for the ‘country’ veteran Ayscoghe against the future royalist Hussey, Pelham appears to have done little before the convening of the Long Parliament to distinguish himself as an opponent of the personal rule of Charles I or of the bishops’ wars. Indeed, in a letter written to the earl of Rutland in June 1640, at the height of preparations for the second bishops’ war, he predicted that the king would be able to assemble an army of 50,000 men – ‘a most puissant force, befitting the great king of Britain’.40HMC Rutland, i. 520-1.

In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, Pelham was returned for Grantham again, on this occasion with one of Hussey’s sons, Sir Thomas Hussey I.41Supra, ‘Grantham’. Once again, he was described on the indenture as of Belvoir.42C219/43/2/32. Although Pelham was clearly one of Lincolnshire’s more active MPs, it is difficult to gain a clear picture of his parliamentary career because of the clerk of the Commons’ persistent failure to distinguish between Pelham and his second cousin Peregrine Pelham, MP for Hull, referring to both simply as ‘Mr Pelham’. Given Henry Pelham’s parliamentary experience and legal training, it seems likely that the majority of such references in the Journals and the parliamentary diaries relate to him, particularly during 1642 and 1643, when the Yorkshire MP spent much time in the north. Certainly those appointments where legal expertise was required can reasonably be assigned to the Grantham MP, who was far more versed in the law than his cousin, a merchant.

From his early days in the Long Parliament, Henry Pelham sided with the forces in the Commons keenest to eradicate Laudian prelacy and all its works and to suppress popery. Revealingly, neither he nor Hussey would agree to present a letter to the House that Grantham corporation had drawn up late in October 1640 complaining about resistance among the townsmen to Laudian church innovations, describing it as unfit to be laid before Parliament.43Supra, ‘Grantham’; Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, f. 88v. Added on 1 December to the committee for popish recusants, he received several appointments during the opening session of Parliament concerning the perceived threat of popery in high places, and he was very probably the ‘Mr Pelham’ named with Robert Reynolds and Alexander Rigby I on 30 July 1641 to prepare a bill ‘that no papist shall have any vote in Parliament concerning matters of religion’.44CJ ii. 42b, 139a, 230b, 240b; Procs. LP vi. 153. In a debate on the new Canons on 14 December 1640, he spoke out against Laud’s arbitrary proceedings in the court of high commission.45Northcote Note Bk. 73. Two days later (16 Dec.), he was named to a committee to investigate the new Canons and to prepare a charge against the archbishop for his part in the ‘great design of the subversion of the laws of the realm and of religion’.46CJ ii. 52a. In the great root and branch debate on 8 February 1641, ‘Mr Pelham’ (probably Henry) joined those Commons-men – mostly, but not exclusively, future parliamentarians – who urged that the London root and branch petition, which called for the abolition of episcopacy, should be committed for consideration by the House rather than laid aside.47Procs. LP ii. 392.

When the impeachment of the 13 bishops deemed most culpable for the new Canons was debated on 8 and 12 August 1641, Pelham declared that they had acted against the royal prerogative, the rights of Parliament and in a manner ‘tending to sedition’ and to sow division between king and people and were thus guilty of treason.48Procs. LP vi. 293, 298, 383. He was probably the Member named to a committee set up three days later to prepare heads for a conference concerning the bishops’ impeachment.49CJ ii. 252b. A month later (8 Sept.), after the godly faction at Westminster had suffered several setbacks in its efforts to purge the church of its ‘popish’ accretions, Pelham informed the House that the Laudian bishop of Ely and dean of Peterborough had made a triumphalist return to their counties ‘as if now all hope of reformation in the church were past’.50Procs. LP vi. 686; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 368-70. Pelham’s evident hostility towards the Laudian episcopate seems to have endured until at least January 1644, when he was one of the Commons’ lawyers appointed to marshall the evidence against Laud at the archbishop’s trial.51CJ iii. 357b.

Pelham was equally keen to reform the secular ‘abuses’ of the personal rule, particularly in relation to the judiciary and the prerogative courts. In debates on the floor of the House in December 1640 and July 1641, he argued that those judges who had supported Ship Money were guilty of high treason and should be brought speedily to trial, and he would be appointed in the spring of 1642 to help prosecute one such offender, Sir Robert Berkeley.52Northcote Note Bk. 38; Procs. LP v. 481; CJ ii. 504b, 571a. Chairman of the committee set up on 16 February 1641 to consider the irregular proceedings of the court of wards, Pelham may well have been the MP named to the 28 June committee on the bill for abolishing the court of star chamber.53CJ ii. 87a, 148a, 159b, 191a; Procs. LP ii. 758; iv. 553, 567, 616. One of the Pelhams, again probably Henry, also chaired the committee established on 7 July for stopping payments authorised by the king to Secretary Sir Francis Windebanke* and other courtiers who had fled abroad.54CJ ii. 201a, 234a; Procs. LP v. 675; vi. 12. If these appointments were indeed Pelham’s, as seems likely, it suggests that he was a figure of some importance among the more reform-minded MPs and that, as such, it was he and not his cousin who was appointed a reporter of a conference on 5 August concerning the appointment of a custos regni to govern England during the king’s visit to Scotland and to a committee set up the same day on a bill for the Brotherly Assistance to the Scots.55CJ ii. 238a, 239a. It was evidently Henry Pelham who was named to the 2 November committee of both Houses to consider affairs in Ireland in the wake of the rebellion there.56CJ ii. 302a; PJ iii. 86. He was also a leading figure in parliamentary business relating to the East Anglian region during the early 1640s, chairing committees concerning the government of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, a fen drainage dispute around Wisbech in Cambridgeshire and, most importantly, the committee for the fens, to which was referred in February 1642 the protracted dispute between the supporters and opponents of the Great Level drainage project.57CJ ii. 197a, 338b, 393a, 421b, 434a, 492b, 504a, 589b, 603a; D’Ewes (C), 310; PJ i. 160, 165, 166-7, 396; PJ ii. 71.

Pelham seems to have played little part in Parliament’s military preparations during the spring and summer of 1642, possibly because he was in a quandary as a result of the strongly royalist leanings being shown by his eldest brother, Sir William Pelham.58PJ iii. 68. Nevertheless, in mid-June he pledged to advance £100 towards the defence of Parliament, and late in September he declared himself ready to assist the parliamentary commander-in-chief, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, with life and fortune.59PJ iii. 470; CJ ii. 783b. Both of the Pelhams were named to committees from the autumn of 1642 for supplying and regulating Parliament’s forces, but it is impossible to be certain which of the two men received the majority of these appointments.60Infra, ‘Peregrine Pelham’; CJ ii. 803a, 808b, 825b, 826b, 834b, 848a, 849a, 865b, 883b; iii. 41a, 73a, 385a, 418b, 455b. As the more senior Commons-man and more experienced draftsman, it was probably Henry who was included on high-powered committees in November to prepare instructions for the committee to attend and advise the earl of Essex on campaign, to prepare a declaration highlighting the royalists’ perfidy in attacking Brentford while still engaged in peace talks, and to devise a parliamentary arrest warrant.61CJ ii. 848a, 849a, 865b.

Pelham’s most important appointment at Westminster during the war was his addition, by mid-October 1643, to the Committee for Sequestration*, of which he became a leading member. He attended the committee’s meetings regularly, was one of the judges on appeal cases and quite frequently served as chairman.62Supra, ‘Committee for Sequestration’; SP20/1, ff. 60, 541; SP20/2, ff. 1, 221; SP20/3, ff. 63, 110, 116; SP20/4, ff. 4, 28; SP20/5, f. 138; CJ v. 97b; LJ ix. 128a; Add. 40630, f. 134. According to one pamphleteer, Pelham ‘did usually for fees (or rather bribes) advise and assist delinquents in getting off their sequestrations; he drew their petitions and countenanced their causes for his own private lucre and advantage’.63A. Wilbee, Secunda Pars de Comparatis Comparandis (1647), 4 (E.413.1). Pelham’s legal training helped to secure his chairmanship of a committee set up in February 1644 for assessing the claims of defecting royalists. But the parliamentary diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes, for one, had a low opinion of both his professionalism and probity, recording that Pelham reported from this committee ‘very sillily; perhaps bribes stuck in his teeth’.64CJ iii. 390b, 459a, 540b; Harl. 166, f. 76v. It was probably Henry who was also named to several committees during 1643 and 1644 concerning the public accounts and who chaired a committee set up in July 1644 for the relief of parliamentarian war widows.65CJ iii. 115a, 186a, 302a, 568b, 610a, 645b.

Pelham’s committee appointments provide little insight into his political views and alignment. It is perhaps significant that he was named to only one committee during the war – set up in August 1644 – regarding Parliament’s terms for peace.66CJ iii. 594a. On the other hand, he was never closely associated with initiatives favoured by the war party. The ‘Mr Pelham’ named to committees in February and March 1645 for recruiting the New Model army and on the Self-Denying Ordinance may well have been Peregrine, who supported both the policy of new modelling and the appointment of Sir Thomas Fairfax* as the army’s commander.67Infra, ‘Peregrine Pelham’; CJ iv. 51a, 88a.

Pelham’s role in the war effort, certainly by mid-1645, was confined largely, it seems, to his work on the Committee of both Houses for the Eastern Association*, to which he had been added by January 1644 at the latest.68CJ iii. 372b. He signed a number of the committee’s orders, served as messenger to carry legislation concerning the Association up to the Lords, and in July 1645 he was appointed to go to Lincolnshire to help organise the defences at Grantham against the royalist garrison at Newark.69Add. 19398, ff. 220, 224; Add. 61682, ff. 93, 130, 154, 156; SP28/251, unfol.; Bodl. Nalson XIV, f. 254; CJ iii. 655b, 688a, 688b; iv. 16b, 202a, 278b, 283a, 673a; LJ vi. 717a; vii. 49a, 584a; viii. 67b; HMC 8th Rep. i. (1881), 9, 10. He may well have drafted the ordinance that he reported from the Eastern Association committee early in 1644 for giving Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester, what D’Ewes described as ‘a new and vast power’ to purge ‘malignant’ clergymen in the Association and at the University of Cambridge and to install godly ministers in their place.70CJ iii. 372b; Harl. 165, f. 280. Pelham seems to have favoured a similar policy with regard to the University of Oxford, and in his native Lincolnshire he was a patron of the Lincoln Presbyterian preacher Edward Reyner.71CJ iv. 641a; CSP Dom. 1625-49, pp. 712-13; E. Rayner, Orders from the Lord of Hostes (1646), sig. A2 (E.337.1). He continued to be associated with measures relating to the fens, securing nomination in first place on 28 April 1646 to a committee on an ordinance for draining the Great Level, and on 2 July he was ordered to prepare an ordinance for purging royalist officeholders at Lincoln, where he had been appointed town recorder late in December 1642 following Parliament’s removal of his royalist predecessor.72CJ ii. 890a; iv. 525a, 597b.

Although Pelham was to side with the Presbyterians in the crisis of July 1647, his committee appointments in 1646 and for much of 1647 reveal no clear pattern. His selection in October 1646 to chair a session of a committee of the whole House for turning the Newcastle peace propositions into ordinances represented an acknowledgement of his managerial skills man rather than of any partisan commitment on his part.73CJ iv. 694a, 695a; LJ viii. 523. Although he was probably the ‘Mr Pelham’ named to the Presbyterian-dominated committee set up on 10 October to investigate the commissions of major-generals, in the six months surrounding this appointment he was also named to committees for heightening the power of the Independent-controlled Committee for Revenue*, for supervising and hearing complaints against one of the Presbyterians’ main political powerbases, the Committee of Accounts*, and for recompensing the Independent grandee William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, for his defunct office as master of the court of wards.74CJ iv. 653a, 689b, 727a; v. 63a. He also served as a teller with one of Saye’s friends, William Ashhurst, on 13 October, in a division concerning the custody of the great seal.75CJ iv. 691b. Pelham’s inclusion on the committee of 27 March 1647 to assess opposition among the New Model soldiery to plans for deploying them in Ireland, may suggest Presbyterian sympathies on his part.76CJ v. 127b. On the other hand, he was named to committees early in May for rewarding Oliver Cromwell* and on an ordinance for establishing a committee of indemnity, which was one of the soldiers’ main demands.77CJ v. 162b, 166a.

It was only in the wake of the Presbyterian coup of 26 July 1647 that Pelham became closely identified with the Presbyterian cause. On 30 July, with William Lenthall and many Independents of both Houses having fled to the army, Pelham was nominated Speaker of the Commons by a ‘general approbation’ of the Members.78CJ v. 259b. Why they chose Pelham and not a lawyer with strong connections to the Presbyterian grandees is not clear. Perhaps the House wanted a more neutral figure in order to preserve at least a semblance of parliamentary freedom. Pelham's intimacy with the earl of Rutland – who was closely linked to the Presbyterian leadership by mid-1647 – may also have recommended him to the House.79J. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics 1645-9’ (Cambridge Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1986), 247. After making the traditional protestations of unworthiness for so great a charge, Pelham was conveyed to the chair by Sir Anthony Irby and Richard Lee.80CJ v. 259b, 260a; LJ ix. 358b. The next day, he and the new Speaker for the Lords – Pelham’s kinsman, Lord Willoughby of Parham – signed letters to Fairfax, advising him of Parliament’s decision to invite the king to come to London to treat in person and warning the army not to advance any nearer to the capital.81Sloane 1519, f. 162; CJ v. 261b; LJ ix. 370b; HMC 6th Rep. 190; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 737; The Case of the Impeached Lords, Commons, and Citizens (1648), 9-10 (E.423.16). Fairfax ignored this warning, and on 6 August the army entered London and restored Speaker Lenthall and the other fugitive Members.

No reprisals were taken against Pelham for his presumption in having usurped Lenthall’s place. Indeed, on 18 August 1647, he was named to a committee to bring in an ordinance declaring void all the legislation passed by the Houses in the absence of their legitimate Speakers.82CJ v. 278a. Furthermore, on 9 October he was named to a committee for absent Members, the purpose of which was to put pressure on the many Presbyterian MPs who had stayed away from the House after 6 August.83CJ v. 329a. Nevertheless, he remained aligned with the Presbyterians, or at least with the less radical wing of the Commons, in seeking to reach a settlement with the king. Thus on 6 November 1647, he was a majority teller with Sir Walter Erle against including a clause in the preface to the Hampton Court peace propositions that Parliament expected Charles to give his assent to its terms.84CJ v. 352b.

Pelham was named to six committees at most during 1648 – the majority of little factional significance – and 23 September he was a messenger to carry legislation to the Lords for uniting the committees of Lincolnshire.85CJ v. 425a, 538b, 608a, 640b; vi. 29b, 47a, 62b; LJ x. 508a. However, his penultimate appointment – to the 27 October committee for turning the Newport propositions to which the king had assented into parliamentary bills – suggests that he remained committed to a negotiated settlement with Charles.86CJ vi. 62b. Similarly, his minority tellership with Arthur Annesley that same month in a division on former dean and chapter leases would seem to place him among those Members willing to take a soft line on any religious settlement.87CJ vi. 51b. His main field of activity at Westminster, certainly by the autumn of 1648, seems to have been the Committee for Sequestration.88LJ x. 429a, 496a; CJ vi. 48b, 53a; SP20/5, f. 138. His last appointment before Pride’s Purge was on 18 November, when he and his fellow Lincolnshire lawyer William Ellys were ordered to report a sequestration case to the Commons.89CJ vi. 81a. It seems likely that Pelham’s acceptance of the speakership during Lenthall’s absence in 1647 had left him a marked man in the eyes of the Independents, and on 6 December he was among 40 or so Members who were arrested and imprisoned by the army. Fortunately for Pelham, he was on close terms with his fellow Gray’s Inn lawyer Sir Thomas Widdrington*, who used his influence as Fairfax’s brother-in-law to have Pelham released on parole on 9 December.90Mercurius Elencticus no. 55 (5-12 Dec. 1648), 527, 532 (E.476.4).

After Pride’s Purge, Pelham withdrew from public life, spending most of his time either at Gray’s Inn or at Hollingbourne, Kent, where he had purchased a house and lands.91C6/4/159; C6/142/152; C6/149/43. His only known appointments after 1648 were to successive Lincolnshire sewers commissions.92C181/6, pp. 39, 205, 323, 390; Lincs. RO, Spalding Sewers/449/8-11. In March 1650, he testified before the Committee for Compounding* on behalf of his kinsman and subsequent business partner, Lord Willoughby.93CCC 1838; C6/142/152. There is no basis for claims that he married a daughter of Sir Thomas Pelham in later life.94Keeler, Long Parl. 300; A. Pelham, D. MacLean, Some Early Pelhams (Hove, 1931), 233. Following the re-admission of the secluded Members in February 1660, Pelham was listed among those who had returned to the House, but there is no evidence that he resumed his seat.95The Grand Memorandum, or a True and Perfect Catalogue of the Secluded Members (1660, 669 f.24.37).

Pelham did not long survive the Restoration, dying at some point between early 1660 and July 1664. In his will, which he had drawn up in March 1659, he asked to be buried at Hollingbourne. However, there is no entry to this effect in the parish register during the early 1660s. He left the bulk of his landed estate to his nephew George Pelham and made bequests totalling £1,750. His will either remained unproved or was proved in chancery after its terms had become the subject of a chancery suit between his nephews George† and Charles Pelham.96C6/29/33. His nephew George represented Great Grimsby in the Exclusion Parliaments.97HP Commons 1660-90.