ALFORD, John (c.1590-1649), of Offington, Broadwater, Suss. and Whitefriars, London.

Although there were Alfords in Sussex by the beginning of the thirteenth century, the connections of this Member’s immediate forebears extended from Buckinghamshire to Cheshire and Denbighshire.27Alford Family Notes, 10, 23. The patronage of the Cecil family underpinned the parliamentary career of John’s grandfather, Roger Alford† (d. 1580).28HP Commons 1558-1603. His father, Edward Alford†, who sat in Parliament seven times between 1593 and 1628, became one of its most prominent Members, and a vocal proponent of the interests of his locality.29HP Commons 1604-1629. John, his eldest son, was educated at St John’s College, Oxford, where the president, John Buckeridge, took a stance against puritanism as well as popery, and where the future archbishop, William Laud, was still a member.30Al. Oxon. In 1620 he married a daughter of Sir Thomas Bishopp† of Parham, a suspected Catholic, and as part of the settlement acquired land in Hamsey, Sussex, and in Kent.31Hasted, Kent, viii. 488.

Having made himself troublesome, Alford’s father was politically neutralized in 1625 by being pricked as sheriff, but in that capacity he helped secure a seat in the 1626 Parliament for his son John at New Shoreham (a few miles from the family home at Offington) alongside William Marlott†. Both Alfords sat in 1628, John being returned for Arundel. In neither Parliament did he make much impact, although it is difficult to distinguish him from his father in the records.32HP Commons 1604-1629.

John Alford succeeded to the family estates in November 1631, and was soon added to the commission of the peace, although he proved far from zealous in attending quarter sessions, and was briefly removed from office in July 1637.33PROB11/161/72; Notes IPMs Suss. 3; C231/5, p. 77; ASSI35/79/9. Instead, he busied himself with extending his estates, and with Laurence Pay, archdeacon of Chichester from 1634, purchased lands in Yorkshire from Sir John Caryll of Harting, one of the county’s most prominent Catholics.34C54/2925/28. He worked alongside another, Sir Henry Compton*, to list those who had refused to pay powder tax in Sussex, and was a trustee in July 1641 for a crypto-Catholic, John Tufton, 2nd earl of Thanet.35SP16/407, f. 142; SP16/425, f. 142; Add. 33058, f. 67; C54/3276/25. However, his most important friend, and possible patron, in the 1630s and early 1640s was Robert Sidney, 2nd earl of Leicester, from whom he leased land in Kent and to whom he was a creditor.36Harl. 7617, f. 93; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 201, 314, 322, 365, 372, 390.

From the late 1630s Alford appeared regularly on local commissions.37C181/5, ff. 69, 69v, 145, 167v, 206, 253; SR. At elections for both the Short and Long Parliaments, he was returned for New Shoreham, almost certainly in opposition to the active ‘puritan faction’.38Add. 5698, f. 186; CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 386-7. Alford made no mark in the records of the former, and was hardly prominent in the latter. He was named to the committee to discuss with peers the trial of the king’s minister Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford (30 Nov. 1640), but like his younger brother Sir Edward Alford*, voted against the attainder (21 Apr. 1641).39CJ ii. 39b; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 248. He took the Protestation promptly on 3 May, but then did not appear again in the Journal until 30 July, when he obtained leave to go into the country.40CJ ii. 133b, 230b. In the first week of May he had been nominated with the earl of Leicester’s heir Philip Sidney*, Viscount Lisle, and Hugh Potter* to receive the pension of £1,000 due to Leicester’s brother-in-law Henry Percy* as master of the horse to Prince Charles.41CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 570. Percy’s implication in the army plot, and his subsequent expulsion from the House, may have prompted Alford’s withdrawal.

In 1642 Alford’s sympathies, like those of most of his family and friends, were with the king, and he was among those named in the royalist commission of array for Sussex, issued on 6 August.42Northants. RO, FH133, unfol. As party to the attempt to demand the Chichester garrison for the king, on 9 August Alford was summoned to appear before Parliament alongside Sir William Goring, Sir Thomas Bowyer*, Sir William Morley*, and Thomas May*.43CJ ii. 711a. Like his son-in-law Sir Thomas Eversfield*, and others suspected of royalism, Alford tried to placate Parliament by taking the oath of loyalty to its lord general, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex (27 Aug.) and by offering £100 for the parliamentary war effort (26 Sept.).44CJ ii. 740a, 783b; PJ iii. 478. But a summons to the Commons issued on 29 November went unheeded.45CJ ii. 869b. By some oversight, Alford, Sir Thomas Eversfield and Henry Goring* were appointed to the commissions for assessment and sequestrations in Sussex (14 Apr. 1643), but their names were subsequently removed (4 Sept.).46CJ iii. 45a, 227a; LJ vi. 203a.

Yet unlike his brother Edward, who joined the king at Oxford, and his brother-in-law Sir Edward Bishopp*, who was taken prisoner when Arundel Castle fell to Parliament in January 1644, Alford played no visible further part in the royalist war effort. In common with other friends and family in Sussex (including Eversfield, Goring and Cecil Tufton), Alford got on with personal business, settling his estates and transacting business as a trustee for Bishopp*.47W. Suss. RO, Wiston MS 3624. Doubtless in order to prevent its sequestration, in 1642 he and Goring acquired the advowson of Hollington from Francis Browne, Viscount Montagu of Cowdray, a Catholic for whom he was a trustee.48Suss. Manors, i. 220. Alford’s will, drawn up in July 1643, reveals his social circle: Eversfield, Goring, Sir William Goring of Burton, Sir John Leedes*, and, in contra-distinction to the others, Sir Thomas Pelham*.49PROB11/208/34.

It may have been Alford’s friendship with Pelham, one of the leading parliamentarian gentry in Sussex, which prompted him to take his seat in the House once more in late September 1643, after a summer when parliamentarian defeats were counterbalanced by suspicions regarding the Irish Cessation. On 28 September, however, the Commons ordered Alford to attend the committee for sequestrations to give an account of his absence before he could be readmitted.50CJ iii. 256b. He evidently satisfied the committee, and his estate was not sequestered, but there is little sign of his presence in Parliament in the ensuing months. On 5 February 1644 his absence was excused until 1 March; he re-appeared in the Journal on 27 March, when he subscribed the Solemn League and Covenant.51CJ iii. 389b, 439a. Perhaps partly because he helped shift the balance of power away from the ‘war party’ in the Commons, there was evidently some hostility towards his return to Westminster. On 30 March, when equal votes were recorded in a division over a conference with the Lords, Alford’s enemies doubted whether his voice counted, ‘he having been long absent from the House and not yet reported ... whether he were to be admitted to sit there or no, though he were received to take the covenant’. There was little reason to deny Alford his place, however, and although a report was called for, the Speaker’s casting vote settled the question.52Add. 31116, p. 256.

Alford remained compromised by the royalism of those close to him. On 8 July Alford wrote to Sir Thomas Pelham apologising for the activities of his ‘son’ – presumably Eversfield – and to ‘crave leave to plead my absolute innocency of any the least thought of trespass, or contempt to the proceedings of the committee at Lewes’. He claimed that his son was misguided by ‘his own will’, and that he ‘must stand or fall to his own affections, which I hope and wish may be such as may to the full give the committee ample satisfaction’. The ‘miseries of the times’ were ‘such as what was black yesterday is white today’, and thus, although he himself was ‘clear and unspotted’, ‘if such be my fate, shot by the indiscretion of another’s actions, I must perish; tis as sad as what the times can produce’.53Add. 33084, f. 65. In August the Commons referred Alford’s assessments to the Committee for Compounding, while on 29 October the House referred reports of meetings of ‘disaffected’ people in Alford’s house to the Committee for Examinations.54CJ iii. 588a, 681a.

The ending of the first civil war appears to have ushered in a level of rehabilitation, however. While later in 1645 Alford fell out with the earl of Leicester over the latter’s lands in Norfolk, that year saw him on good terms with both Sir Thomas Pelham and the lord lieutenant of Sussex, Leicester’s brother-in-law Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland.55HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 452, 557; Alnwick Castle, Northumberland accounts, U. I. 6, unfol. In January Alford was dispatched by the Commons with Pelham and Sir Thomas Parker* to organise the defence of Sussex.56CJ iv. 14a. In May he was again named a commissioner for sewers.57C181/5, f. 253. It was probably thanks to Pelham and Northumberland that in February 1646 Alford returned to the commission of the peace.58C231/6, p. 40. Already in September 1645 he had signed a letter from the county to William Lenthall, defending the local administration from the allegations of local Clubmen.59Bodl. Tanner 60, ff. 251-5. Otherwise, however, he was little in evidence either at sessions or in Westminster, where his next recorded appearance was on 22 July 1646, when he was granted leave to retire to the country on grounds of ill-health.60CJ iv. 14a, 623b.

Alford’s next and final mention in the Journal came on 8 March 1648, when he was appointed to a committee to consider the losses of fellow Sussex Member Henry Peck* in the Forest of Dean.61CJ v. 484b. Shortly after he appears to have been removed once again from the commission of the peace.62W. Suss. RO, QR/W62; ASSI35/89/9. His absence from the Commons was excused on 26 September, but he fell victim to the purge on 6 December.63CJ vi. 34b; A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.52).

Alford did not live to see the execution of Charles I. Shortly after settling his estate, Alford died on 5 January 1649, and was buried at Broadwater.64C3/221/500; PROB11/208/34. His nephew John Alford† represented Midhurst in the Exclusion Parliaments of 1679 and in the Convention of 1689, but with him the family’s representation at Westminster came to an end.65HP Commons 1660–1690.