SELDEN, John (1584-1654), of Inner Temple and Whitefriars, London.

As a notable sufferer for his opposition to royal policies in the 1628-9 Parliament, Selden commanded an audience for his opinions when the Long Parliament took up the same theme. As a jurist of national and international reputation, as an acknowledged expert on constitutional precedent and parliamentary history, and as a sociable scholar who had built bridges through the 1630s via a range of friends at and beyond the king’s court, he had earned wide respect. To a degree, by 1640 he stood above conflict and in some respects he was able to remain aloof for the remaining 14 years of his life. However, while his concern for legality was sometimes inconvenient to more radical voices in the Commons, this should not obscure either his substantial contribution to advancing the cause of reform before the outbreak of war or his continuing commitment to the parliamentary cause thereafter. Even though he did not participate in proceedings after Pride’s Purge, behind the scenes he retained some political stature.

Supping with the enemy? 1629-1640

Although in the 1620s Selden had made himself conspicuous for attacks on such cornerstones of Charles I’s government as the courts of high commission and star chamber, and the imposition of martial law, it for was his trenchant defence of parliamentary privilege in the case of Sir John Eliot† that he was committed to the Tower on 4 March 1629. When he was examined a fortnight later, Selden attempted to distance himself both from Eliot’s conduct and from his own words in the House, but this did not save him from prosecution, with others implicated, in star chamber. Unexpectedly the judges there upheld his contention that he could only be called to account for utterances in Parliament by Parliament itself. None the less, both his own and the crown’s reluctance to set any awkward precedents through compromise ensured that he remained in custody until bailed in May 1631.33HP Commons 1604-1629; CSP Dom. 1628-9, pp. 496, 499, 508, 540, 543, 548-9, 556, 563, 588-9; 1629-31, pp. 71, 96; Selden, ‘Vindiciae … Maris Clausi’, Joannis Seldeni Jurisconsulti Opera Omnia ed. D. Wright (1726) ii. pt. ii. 1434. It was an experience he not only survived but also put to scholarly use, and in ways not necessarily acceptable to Charles I. In an expanded second edition of his Titles of Honour (1631), he provided a carefully argued and formidably referenced argument for the development in England of a distinctive mixed monarchy, in which parliaments had a regular and permanent role, and painstaking recourse to legal record was fundamental.34‘John Selden’, Oxford DNB; R. Barbour, John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in England (Buffalo, N.Y. 2003), 175-8.

Despite this, a partial rehabilitation came quite swiftly after his conditional release. For this Selden was beholden above all to his long-established aristocratic patrons, most notably Thomas Howard, 21st earl of Arundel, the latter’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth, countess of Kent, her husband Henry Grey, 8th earl of Kent, to whom Selden was steward and frequent house guest, and Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke and Montgomery.35Selden, ‘Vindiciae’, Opera Omnia ii. pt. ii 1432; Berkowitz, Selden’s Formative Years, 283. By July 1631 he was back in his chambers at the Inner Temple, in receipt of what he described as ‘great favour’ from Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.36Add. 46188, f. 133. In November a newsletter writer confidently if rashly predicted there would be no imminent Parliament because William Noy† and Selden had come ‘on our side’.37CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 193. On 25 November 1632 Selden’s inn overturned a decision of 1624 permanently disabling him from being called as a reader, opening the way for future promotion; a year later he was duly called to the bench.38CITR ii. 203, 208. He also served with his old friends Edward Herbert I*, Edward Hyde* and Bulstrode Whitelocke* on the committee of representatives from each inn which organised a masque to be presented to the king and queen.39Whitelocke, Diary, 50, 54, 74, 143; Selden, ‘Vindiciae’, Opera Omnia, ii. pt. ii. 1432-3; Clarendon, Life (1760), i. 29. However, writing in August 1634 to the scholar and book collector Edward Conway, 2nd Viscount Conway, Selden was despondent that he would ever escape his obligation to report regularly to king’s bench.40CSP Dom. 1634-5, p. 185. It took a self-abasing petition that autumn, followed by a penitent submission, before Charles finally discharged him from his recognisances in February 1635.41CSP Dom. 1634-5, pp. 257, 527.

A prime mover here may have been Selden’s unlikely new scholarly associate, Archbishop William Laud.42HMC Hastings, ii. 77; Berkowitz, Selden’s Formative Years, 290-1. Although the lawyer had a long and close friendship with James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, and counted in his circle such clergymen as John Donne and John Williams, bishop of Lincoln and then archbishop of York, he was no clericalist and the infamy of his History of Tithes (1618) lingered among those who were.43Bodl. Selden supra 108, ff. 174–5v, 18; Add. 32093, f. 17; Hist. Univ. Oxford iv. 486; Berkowitz, Selden’s Formative Years, 288. ‘But’, observed Peter Heylyn, ‘being a man of great parts and eminent in the retired walks of learning, he was worth the gaining, which Canterbury takes upon him, and at last effecteth’. It was Laud who, according to Heylyn, persuaded Selden to resume work on his Mare Clausum.44P. Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (1671), 303. Originally commissioned by James I, this treatise had been abandoned – a casualty of earlier clashes with monarchy.45HP Commons 1604-1629. When published in 1635, with a dedication to Charles I, it proved to be a highly acceptable assertion of that monarch’s sovereignty over the seas.46Ioannis Seldeni Mare clausum seu De dominio maris libri duo (1635), [sig. A1], bk. 2. Since it rested on formidable scholarship, it was also widely respected, its force acknowledged even by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, against whose Mare Liberum it was directed.47Camb. Hist. of Political Thought 1450-1700 ed. J.H. Burns (1991), 524; ‘John Selden’, Oxford DNB; Barbour, John Selden, 202-8; CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 379. It quickly became a classic and was to underpin a significant part of Selden’s service to Parliament in the 1640s.

Rumour in February 1635 indicated that the king expected further service from Selden in return for mercy, possibly in relation to forest law.48HMC Hastings ii. 77. Selden was one of a quartet of experts to whom the petition of one Marmaduke Neilson was referred from Hampton Court in May, while as late as March 1640 he was employed to draft the preamble to the patent creating Lord Keeper Sir John Finch† a baron.49CSP Dom. 1635-6, p. 445; 1640, p. 12. The rapprochement with Laud appeared solid. In 1636 Selden dedicated to Laud his De Successionibus in Bona Defuncti (comprising two previously published works), praising the archbishop for his generous donation of oriental books to the Bodleian Library. That year Selden obtained from him as vice-chancellor a fellowship at Merton for his own protégé, the orientalist Henry Jacob.50Hist. Univ. Oxford iv. 483. Selden was, claimed Heylyn, ‘a frequent and a welcome guest at Lambeth house, where he was grown into such esteem with the archbishop, that he might have chose his own preferment in the Court’, as public opinion agreed, ‘had he not underrated all other employments in respect of his studies’.51Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 303. But both the executive of Charles’s personal rule and its opponents, who notably failed to call on Selden for legal support against Ship Money, may have mistaken their man.52Berkowitz, Selden’s Formative Years, 291. His most recent writings did not bolster either crown or episcopate as much as the dedications might imply.53‘John Selden’, Oxford DNB; Barbour, John Selden, 259. Plausibly, but not entirely sufficiently, he cited his health in declining a prestigious chance to accompany Arundel on embassy to Vienna.54Berkowitz, Selden’s Formative Years, 292. With the benefit of hindsight Heylyn detected another reason for Selden’s eschewing government employment, suggesting that ‘he had not yet forgotten the affronts which were put upon him about his History of Tithes … and therefore did but make fair weather for the time, till he could have an opportunity to revenge himself on the Church and churchmen’.55Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 303.

Selden certainly kept his counsel – and an eclectic circle of aristocratic, legal and scholarly friends, including, in addition to his patrons, Secretary Conway, various members of the Digby family and Patrick Young, the king’s librarian.56Add. 32093, f. 179; Bodl. Selden supra 108, ff. 3, 5, 19, 78, 84. His closeness to Elizabeth, countess of Kent, was evidently an open secret. When the earl died in November 1639 it was noted that even Selden could not assuage her grief; whether he subsequently married her was never certain, but he continued to live with her at Whitefriars with all appearance of contented domesticity.57CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 158; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 220-1; CP. Meanwhile in June 1639 Selden had also presented for approval the latest fruits of his scholarship. De Iure Naturali et Gentium Iuxta Disciplinam Ebraearoum, Libri Septem, actually published in 1640, was ostensibly a systematic and extended analysis of Jewish law. In practice, however, it had a much wider application. Reiterating themes explored in other recent works, Selden argued that there were no universally applicable rules in society; although the ultimate source of law was God, frameworks differed according to time and place, and had to be painstakingly learned; once mutually agreed, constitutions and contracts were binding, with no possibility of special pleading on the ground of necessity. Irrespective of whether contemporary readers invariably recognised its broader, contemporary resonances, this thinking clearly informed Selden’s response to subsequent events.58R. Tuck, ‘”The Ancient Law of Freedom”’ in Reactions to the English Civil War ed. J. Morrill (1982), 142, 149-50 and ‘Grotius and Selden’, Camb. Hist. of Political Thought, 524-8; ‘John Selden’, Oxford DNB; J.P. Sommerville, ‘Selden, Grotius, and the Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Revolution’, in Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe ed. V.A. Kahn (2001), 335-8; Berbour, John Selden, 213-8, 222-36.

Curbing abuses, 1640-1

Whether through scholarly distractions, or reluctance or uncertainty arising from the events of 1628-9, or some other cause, Selden appears not to have stood for Parliament in March 1640. On 17 October, however, he was returned with Sir Thomas Rowe* as junior member for Oxford University. According to the register of convocation, the vote was unanimous, although Anthony Wood heard that initially Dr John Prideaux of Exeter College and others ‘of the anti-Arminian or puritan party’ had favoured Sir Nathanael Brent, warden of Merton College.59Bodl. Oxford Univ. Archives, NEP/supra/Reg. R. pp. 181v-182; Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford (1786) ii. 424. Since Brent was at odds with Laud, and may have been supported by the earl of Pembroke as a challenge to the vice-chancellor’s authority, it has been suggested that it was the latter who procured the seat for Selden.60‘John Selden’, ‘Sir Nathanael Brent’, Oxford DNB. Yet Selden’s contacts in the university were probably wide and Pembroke was also a friend, so he may have emerged as an acceptable compromise candidate.61Hist. Univ. Oxford iv. 689.

Once in the Commons Selden revealed himself – for the most part – as his own man. While by no means the most visible of Members among committee nominations, his legal, historical and drafting expertise was frequently tapped, he made significant contributions to debates at key moments, and he regularly tried to put a brake on what he considered hastily-framed and flawed legislation. Placed on the privileges committee (6 Nov.), over the next few weeks he was among those deputed to investigate Cornish elections (14 Nov., 1 Dec.) and spoke several times on disputes in other constituencies (including Warwick, 18 Feb. 1641).62CJ ii. 20b, 29a, 40b; Procs. LP i. 147, 149; ii. 478. Confronted with the question of whether all the inhabitants or only the freemen could vote at Tewkesbury, he argued for the former on the basis that the royal charter of incorporation had been granted to the town, a position also consonant with his reported view that ‘all are involved in a Parliament’ and ‘all consent civilly’(26 Nov. 1640).63Procs. LP i. 306, 315, 316; [J. Selden], Table Talk (1689), 39. On the other hand, he seems to have been happy to uphold the return for Salisbury of Edward Hyde and Michael Oldisworth* by the mayor only, rather than the alternative choice of the citizens, because of custom since time immemorial (3 Mar. 1641) – although the fact that Oldisworth was Pembroke’s right-hand man may have been in play.64CJ ii. 39b; Procs. LP ii. 612, 617. His legal insights were also deployed on an act enfranchising the county palatine of Durham (1 Jan.).65CJ ii. 61b. Personal interest precluded his inclusion on the committee whose main brief (revived from the previous April) was to investigate the proceedings against Members of the 1628-9 Parliament, but Selden was called on to: confer about breach of privilege of the House of Lords (10 Nov. 1640); address the difficulties of summoning sitting Irish MPs to give account in London (12 Nov.); review the cases of prisoners in the custody of the serjeant-at-arms (16 Jan. 1641); suppress unauthorized publication of utterances within the palace of Westminster (6 Feb.); and, most importantly, discuss a bill for annual parliaments (30 Dec. 1640).66CJ ii. 6a, 25b, 27b, 53b, 60a, 69a, 80a.

Among those delegated on 8 January 1641 to prioritize committee business (a task to which he was again assigned on 19 May), Selden himself was busy with various issues, pressing and otherwise.67CJ ii. 65b, 151a. Along with nominations to committees reviewing familiar or uncontroversial business (Virginia planters, 6 Jan.; naturalization of foreign merchants, 7 Jan.), he accumulated more technical tasks like preparing an act limiting the Michaelmas law term (27 Jan.) and reforming abuses in the high constable and earl marshal’s court (23 Nov. 1640).68CJ ii. 34b, 64a, 64b, 73b. This court, he explained to the Commons on 23 November, exercised imperial law ‘not now in force in this kingdom’, and was limited both by common law and custom; later in committee (2 Dec.) Simonds D’Ewes* recorded that he pronounced its abuses ‘most violent [and] unjust’.69Procs. LP i. 249, 252-4, 258, 422. In this context some business took months to come to fruition: entrusted on 4 December with a review of forest rights, Selden did not present a bill limiting the bounds of woodlands until 8 June 1641; when the resultant act was passed on 9 July he then had the task of drafting a commission for its implementation.70CJ ii. 45a, 216a; Harl. 163, f. 285; 478, f. 31v; 5047, f. 12.

One of the group of eminent MPs appointed on 10 November 1640 to draw up a declaration on the state of the kingdom, Selden was from the first involved in the most urgent and controversial matters before the Commons.71CJ ii. 25a. With his colleague Sir Thomas Rowe he was on 12 and 20 November and 4 December a reporter of conferences with the Lords on the treaty with the Scots; on 19 November he was named to prepare the bill for the grant of £100,000 to maintain their army and the next day he tabled an unspecified motion related to the approval of commissioners.72CJ ii. 27b, 31b, 32b, 45a; Procs. LP i. 211. Although not included on the committee named on 11 November to draw up charges against Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, he was among the lawyers selected to scan king’s bench files for attainder records on the 19th and in debates on the impeachment articles demonstrated his concern that they be precisely expressed.73CJ ii. 26b, 31b; Procs. LP i. 270, 274. On 30 November he was among Members appointed to discuss with the Lords the Commons’ desire to be represented at the examination of witnesses in the case, while on 6 January 1641 he was first among nominations to a committee to organise related prosecutions of leading Irish peers implicated in the late rebellion.74CJ ii. 39b, 64a. Drawn in again to consider the Commons’ right to participate in proceedings (18 Feb.), on 23 February he was finally added to the committee to prepare the charge against Strafford and on 6 March conferred with the Lords about the trial.75CJ ii. 88b, 93b, 98a. In the debate that followed the reading of Strafford’s attainder on 19 April, Selden revealed his opinion that the earl’s crimes fell short of treason; two days later he was duly in the minority who voted against it.76Procs. LP iv. 7-9, 12, 42; Harl. 478, f. 8v.

Prominent in the investigation of grievances arising from the personal rule of Charles I, Selden showed himself no less concerned for legality. One of a relatively small committee named on 28 November 1641 to review proceedings in the exchequer, with particular regard to the collection of tonnage and poundage since 1625, and the upshot of action in the last Parliament, with regard to this and other issues raised in and by the Petition of Right, he was characteristically keen to clarify its remit.77CJ ii. 38a; Northcote Note Bk. 12. He sat on the committee charged with examining, among other allegedly illegal levies, the collection of coat and conduct money, and with preparing a bill regulating the future rating activities of lords lieutenant, their deputies and other county officials (14 Dec.).78CJ ii. 50b. He possibly chaired committees which worked on amendments to the subsidy bill (6 Feb. 1641) and inserted a clause to ensure that neither its passing, nor that of any other act, would determine the end of the parliamentary session (1 May); he was certainly called on to shepherd it on its difficult course through the Commons (9 June), in the middle of drawing a bill for the coining of plate (8 June).79CJ ii. 80a, 131b, 170b; Harl. 163, ff. 285, 303b; 478, f. 46. Later he was added to the committee fixing the London poll tax (21 June).80CJ ii. 180a; Harl. 163, f. 336v. Meanwhile, he had been working with others on the question of tonnage and poundage, and become sucked into loosely related affairs like the regulation of Thames watermen.81CJ ii. 152b, 155a. In a debate on tax farming on 22 May he gave the House a detailed exposition of customs history and was promptly added to a committee on customs officers, while he was noticeable among those to whom the preamble and later amendments to a temporary bill of tonnage and poundage were committed on 27 May and 2, 10 and 17 June.82CJ ii. 154b, 159b, 164b, 172b, 178b; Procs. LP iv. 530-2, 535, 537, 540. An additional member of the committee revived on 13 May to address the contentious issues of distraint of knighthood and of Ship Money, it was Selden who on 8 June presented bills to abolish both.83CJ ii. 145a; Harl. 163, f. 285; Harl. 478, f. 31v; Among those to whom the latter was recommitted on 19 June, his attention then turned to legislation for the regulation of two other bugbears, the courts of star chamber and high commission (26 and 28 June).84CJ ii. 181b, 189b, 191b; Harl. 163, f. 359; Harl. 479, ff. 3, 5.

Civil jurisdiction and religious affairs, 1640-1

From the first week of the session Selden had been included on committees to hear petitions from some of the most notorious sufferers from the justice meted out by these courts in the 1630s.85CJ ii. 24a, 25a. The cases of William Prynne*, Henry Burton and John Lilburne, referred to Selden and others on 3 December 1640 and 4 May 1641, had continued to focus attention on their perceived abuses.86CJ ii. 45a, 134a. Well aware that both clergy and laity sat in high commission, and thus shared responsibility for its faults, Selden still seems to have considered it a key instance of clergy overstepping the mark.87Table Talk, 13-4. The distinctive furrow which he ploughed in the Commons through the religious business of the Long Parliament was characterized by concerns both for strict legality (which could uphold some traditional clerical rights) and for the supremacy of civil power (which kept them within bounds). ‘There is no such thing as spiritual jurisdiction’, he was supposed to have declared, for ‘all is civil’ and all by divine right in the sense that God was the originator of all law; divines should do no more than the state permits, while Convocation could do nothing contrary to the laws of the kingdom.88Table Talk, 16, 26-7, 43.

When the House planned a debate on the controversial Canons issued after the dissolution of the Short Parliament, Selden was chosen (18 Nov. 1640, with John Whistler*, Member for Oxford, and Sir Thomas Widdrington*) to seek out and supply the necessary warrants and papers.89CJ ii. 24a, 25a, 30b, 33a. On 26 November he reported that there had been two licences under the great seal for the continuation of Convocation after the dissolution, the latter issued after the end of the session; his motion that the debate be deferred until these could be produced was accepted.90Procs. LP i. 310, 324, 328. In the interim he received an abject letter (dated 29 Nov.) from his ‘loving poor friend’ Laud, professing ‘hearty’ sorrow for error ‘in any point of legality’ and undertaking to press the king that day for a licence to review and abrogate the ‘unfortunate Canons’; these he hoped would ‘be suffered to die as quietly’ as other unpopular government measures, ‘without blemishing the church which hath so many enemies’.91Bodl. Selden supra 108, f. 137. Selden was probably the man in the best position to help – on 9 December he headed the list of Commons lawyers appointed to investigate the legal situation further – but the archbishop’s appeal to ‘credit’ with him was, as the desperate tone of the letter implies, a risk.92CJ ii. 48a.

As indicated, Selden’s perspective on Convocation was not Laud’s; on 1 February 1641 he acknowledged that its claim to be divinely ordained was (at least) questionable.93Harl. 6424, f. 108; CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 450-1. However, his precise contribution to discussion of the Canons is unknown, beyond the fact that, in contrast to other Erastians like Nathaniel Fiennes I*, he does not appear to have spoken on their content. In the weeks that followed he was probably a moderating influence on the committee considering the abolition of superstition and idolatry (appointed 13 Feb.): the ‘trimming’ of religion seems to have been to him a matter of personal preference and ceremonies to have performed a useful function in maintaining order.94CJ ii. 84b; Table Talk, 10, 50. Likewise, he apparently steered a middle course through the complaints of Peter Smart against the dean of Durham, John Cosin, arguing (6 and 9 Mar.) that it was not illegal to employ Catholic workmen to beautify the church, although his efforts to simplify charges (also 4 Mar.) did not prevent the case still detaining a Commons committee to which he was appointed on 7 June.95Procs. LP ii. 624, 650, 676-7; CJ ii. 169a. On committees investigating recusants (1 Dec. 1640, 8 May, 2 July 1641) it is conceivable that, although he had no obvious sympathy for those who chose obedience to a foreign power and canon law, he advanced the view that they should be left unmolested provided they kept English law and paid their fines.96CJ ii. 42b, 139a, 197a.

Yet the same perspectives made Selden a promoter of lay and parliamentary control to an extent at least uncomfortable to the Laudian establishment. Placed first on the committee to investigate the grievances of parishioners of St Gregory by St Paul’s that their church had been demolished by order of the privy council to make way for the renovation of the cathedral (25 Nov. 1640), he dissented from the declaration on deliberations delivered on 11 February 1641, revealing that he saw it as a civil and criminal matter within the Commons’ jurisdiction.97CJ ii. 36a; Procs. LP ii. 417, 421. Pragmatic concern for the adequate administration of justice led him to concede exceptional blurring of boundaries: on 5 February he observed that there was no reason to exclude civil lawyers from exercising temporal jurisdiction, since their experience would be valuable in a context where technical knowledge was at a premium; on 22 April (doubtless representing also the opinion of his constituents) he argued that in universities, where even civilians were scarce, ordained men might exceptionally wield such power.98Procs. LP ii. 374; iv. 59. None the less, on 1 March he was nominated to prepare the case for the removal of clergymen from commissions of the peace, and on 3 June he was among Members chosen to answer the Lords’ objections to a broader bill excluding all in holy orders from temporal affairs.99CJ ii. 94b, 165b.

This did not mean that Selden considered that the clergy should forfeit their public voice outside the church, and still less that the episcopate should lose a place within it. In his widely reported exchange with Harbottle Grimston* on 1 February he ruled out ‘meddling’ by Parliament in purely religious matters.100CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 450-1. Government by bishops and archbishops, he apparently said, ‘no doubt came in imitation of the temporal government, not jure divino’, but they were ‘useful’ to king, state and scholars and by tradition they had a right to sit in Parliament equal to that of the ‘best of earls and barons’; without their vote in the Lords they were useless.101Table Talk, 5-9. Accordingly, Selden spoke against the London petition for the abolition of episcopacy (8 Feb.) because it would destroy the church, whilst also objecting to the manner of its presentation and the distraction it provided from consideration of more pressing abuses.102Procs. LP ii. 391. Expatiating a month later on bishops’ rights in the Lords dating from Anglo-Saxon times, he confused at least one hearer and allegedly ‘puzzled’ the whole House with his arguments, but his opinion carried weight: that day he was duly placed on the committee preparing an act against pluralism in clerical appointments (10 Mar.).103Procs. LP ii. 694, 696, 700, 702-3; CJ ii. 100b. On 12 May he delivered Oxford University’s petition for the continuance of episcopacy and cathedral churches, subsequently supporting the exclusion of the latter from a bill to abolish the former (15 June); on 21 June he was named to a small subcommittee formed to guarantee the indemnity of tenants of dean and chapter lands, suggesting that the preservation of property rights may have been his priority.104Procs. LP v. 171, 175; Harl. 477, f. 64v; Harl. 163, f. 337v.

The pursuit of legitimacy, 1641-2

Judged on committee nominations alone, Selden’s part in Commons business in the spring of 1641 was relatively modest, but diary entries indicate that on the floor of the House he was a constant voice in favour of prudence and legitimacy. He continued in this mode until at least the early autumn, participating at all moments of particular tension or controversy. At the same time, an overriding concern for the preservation of Parliament may underlie signs of some greater commitment to moves which challenged royal policy. When the Protestation against popery was discussed on 3 May, he expressed concern that it be clearly defined so as to prevent dangerously differing interpretations.105Procs. LP iv. 176; v. 616. He was added that day with Lucius Cary*, 2nd Viscount Falkland, another who occupied subtle middle ground, to the committee charged with drawing up the form of subscription, although on one account friends tried to have him excused.106CJ ii. 132b; Harl. 164, f. 195; 477, f. 28v. Whatever his residual reservations, he took the Protestation later in the day.107CJ ii. 133a.

In the aftermath of revelations of the ‘army plot’ to rescue Strafford from the Tower Selden was nominated to committees to prepare an act for securing the safety of the king and subjects’ liberties (6 May) and confer with the Lords about defence on land and sea (8 May).108CJ ii. 136b. In debate (22 May) on articles of treaty with the Scots which followed the king’s announcement of an intention to visit his northern kingdom, Selden ‘spoke very vehemently’ against a clause proposing the yielding up of political fugitives, ‘showing that it was against the law of nations to deliver such as fled to them for refuge and protection’; the result would be that ‘we should … be judged by a law we knew not’.109Harl. 163, f. 223v; Procs. LP v. 227. On 5 June he was among the dozen Members instructed to ‘set all things aside and to expedite the cause’ against Laud; his visibility in the Commons around this time makes it unlikely that he escaped this duty, though the effects are unknown.110CJ ii. 168b. His sympathies may have been strained as contemplation of the ending of the Scots’ occupation in the north east revived issues on which he had opposed Charles’s government in the 1620s. On 25 June he was perceived to have spoken more forcefully than anyone against the general use of martial law (a concept he rejected altogether but conceivably feared in this instance would threaten Parliament). He advised that any temporary disciplinary power given to commanders should be very strictly defined, and he was duly named first on the committee to prepare instructions to the general for disbanding the English army.111Procs. LP v. 347, 353; CJ ii. 188b. The next day he was among Commons’ representatives who conferred with the Lords on the timing of the king’s journey to Scotland, while on the 28th he was at a conference discussing the Ten Propositions for managing the peace with Scotland and securing redress of grievances in England.112CJ ii. 189b, 190b. A sign that he was regarded as reliable by Commons activists was his addition, also on the 28th, to the committee set up in response to the army plots.113CJ ii. 190b; Harl. 479, f. 4.

As work on legislation tackling the abuses of the 1630s began to come to fruition and Selden and others discussed the final stages of bills to abolish Star Chamber and high commission, the question of recompense for his and others’ sufferings in 1629 resurfaced. On 6 July it was resolved that the searching of the chambers of Selden, Denzil Holles* and Sir John Eliot had been a breach of privilege, and it was noted that Selden had been ‘in prison many years’.114CJ ii. 200b; Harl. 479, f. 39; 163, f. 385; Whitelocke, Diary, 123. In the course of debates around this theme, from part of which he was properly absent, he reasserted the parliamentary privilege of exemption from the attention of the Westminster courts (8 July).115Procs. LP v. 561.

To the approval of some diarists, but doubtless to the dismay of clergy who had thus far presumed on Selden’s support, on 12 July he spoke in favour of the committal of ecclesiastical jurisdiction to laymen.116Procs. LP v. 603, 608. The form of the new order for church government voted on the 16th appeared clandestinely with an appendix containing the somewhat misleading exchange with Grimston on divine right.117The order and form for church government … Whereunto is added Mr Grimstons and Mr Seldens arguments concerning Episcopacie (1641, E.2631A). But such unauthorized publication provoked the revival of the committee for its suppression; added to this body on 23 July, Selden should have found no trouble in endorsing its aim of keeping the lid on proceedings within the House, or its expanded remit to review potentially subversive preaching.118Harl. 479, f. 86; CJ ii. 221b. On 30 July he was nominated to the committee to prepare the impeachment of the bishops who had countenanced the sitting of Convocation outside the parliamentary session and produced the Canons; that he accepted the task is evident in the fact that he was named again on 11 August to discuss the matter with the Lords.119CJ ii. 230, 252b. This was not what Laud had hoped for, but it was consonant with Selden’s conception of legality. Consistent also was the latter’s inclusion (31 Aug.) on the committee to frame an order against altars, the Book of Sports and other features of Caroline church life: liturgy was necessary and the Book of Common Prayer desirable, but consecrated places were a human creation, and once religion was settled, alteration and innovation was dangerous.120CJ ii. 278b; Table Talk, 15, 32, 50-2.

On 12 July Selden was once again among MPs selected to prioritize business.121CJ ii. 207b. Intensely active in June, July and August, he collected committee nominations on diverse matters including: the confirmation of the statutes of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (2 July); a review of patents granted to the Merchant Adventurers (14 July); bills for the regulation of musters and trained bands (15 and 24 July), the importation and manufacture of gunpowder (21 July), and the printing and censorship of books (24 July); authorization of the printing of parliamentary proceedings (21 Aug.), and various private petitions and settlements.122CJ ii. 197a, 210b, 212b, 215a, 217a, 219b, 222b, 223a, 238a, 250b, 267a, 274b. However, in addition to his ecclesiastical preoccupations he regularly brought his expertise to bear on unfolding political discussions in an ill-attended House. He was prominent on the committee chosen on 28 July to establish the custos regni or right of Parliament to sit during the king’s absence in Scotland; specifically summoned to a further meeting on 5 August, he was a manager of consultations with the Lords on 29 July and 7 and 9; the Lords’ Journal noted that he cited many precedents.123CJ ii. 227a, 230a, 238a, 243b, 247a; Procs. LP vi. 120, 250; Harl. 479, ff. 104, 126, 133; LJ iv. 335b. With others he then prepared the commission authorizing assent to legislation in this period (10 Aug., the day of Charles’s departure).124CJ ii. 249a. He also drew the bill to arrange for the paying off of the Scots army (2 Aug) and, with Falkland, the instructions for the commissioners to be sent north to the king (14 and 20 Aug.).125CJ ii. 232b, 239b, 256b, 265b; Harl. 479, ff. 115, 154v. On 11 August he was added to the committee for remonstrances, while on the 14th and 28th he was a manager of conferences with the Lords.126CJ ii. 251a, 257a, 275b.

However, the public revelation on 12 August of the ‘conspiracy’ to use the army in the north to bring Parliament to heel, discovered three months earlier, demonstrated the limits of Selden’s commitment to driving on the cause of parliamentary power. Appealing a statute of Edward III, he argued that the intentions of Henry Jermyn* and Henry Percy*, although criminal, were not treasonable.127Procs. LP vi. 376, 383. Returning to the case on 25 August, according to Simonds D’Ewes* he ‘made a long speech by which he argued that the conspiracy … was all pardoned and abolished by the act of pacification between the two kingdoms, and to that end read several clauses in that act’.128Procs. LP vi. 554. Having been on the committee involved in its preparation (21 Aug.), when the ordinance for disarming recusants was presented to the Commons Selden attacked it, ‘showing that it made new laws which it could not’. In comprehending wider categories of ‘persons suspected to be dangerous’ it risked imposing penalties on the innocent. He urged, fruitlessly, that the ordinance be suppressed.129CJ ii. 268a; Procs. LP vi. 582.

In the final week before adjournment on 8 September 1641, Selden was, unusually, visible in the Journal only on the last day, when he was among those deputed to prepare a letter requiring magistrates to protect deer in Windsor forest.130CJ ii. 282a. Immediately Parliament reassembled on 20 October he was named with Falkland and others to prepare papers for a conference with the Lords on securing the kingdom and Parliament, but thereafter – apart from an order transmitting his compensation case to the Lords (28 Oct.) – he was absent from the record until 17 January 1642.131CJ ii. 290a, 298a. Whether he was unwell (as he claimed to have been a few months later), or uncomfortable at proceedings, and therefore absent, or simply keeping his head down in the chamber, is unknown. It is surprising to find him apparently silent in the circumstances of the Irish rebellion and the Grand Remonstrance, and it presents a contrast with his profile in the new year. However, the fact that his reappearance came in the wake of the return to the House of the Five Members on 11 January at least raises the possibility that shock at the implications of the king’s attempt to arrest them galvanized him into renewed effort to protect Parliament. On the 17th he was added to the committee entrusted with measures for putting the kingdom into a posture of defence and named to confer with the Lords on parliamentary privileges and the representation to be made on this to Charles; he worked on the latter again the following week, and subsequently (16 Feb.) on the act vindicating the Five Members and Lord Kimbolton from charges of treason.132CJ ii. 383b, 384a 398a, 436a.

Over the next few months Selden was regularly associated in important activity with fellow lawyers like Whitelocke and Whistler and with activists like Hampden, John Pym and Nathaniel Fiennes I. He was closely involved in drafting the Scottish and English parliaments’ plans for intervention to crush the rebellion in Ireland (27 Jan., 4 and 25 Feb., 23 May), and nominated to investigate the suspect communication of parliamentary proceedings by Viscount Falkland (8 Feb.) and to prepare a public justification for Parliament’s taking control of the militia without the king’s consent (14 Mar.).133CJ ii. 400a, 412a, 421a, 456a, 478a, 583a. Once again he had the opportunity to deploy his principles of orderly settlement by the state of those religious matters with social and political implications, principles consistent with his Eutychii Aegyptii (1642), which envisaged a system ‘not unlike the modified episcopacy advocated by Archbishop Ussher’.134‘John Selden’, Oxford DNB. He formulated arguments to induce the king to assent to the bill for disabling clergy from exercising temporal jurisdiction (8 Feb.), drafted a bill for the suppression of innovations (12 and 17 Feb.), perused statutes against priests and Jesuits (26 Feb.), headed the list of Members deputed, among other tasks, to prepare a declaration vindicating the Commons’ ecclesiastical policy (4 Apr.), refined the creation of a new parish in Westminster (8 Apr.), and was nominated to work with ministers on the way forward in church government (25 Apr.).135CJ ii. 419b, 427a, 438a, 456, 510b, 517a, 541b. As previously, he also used his skills in more technical or less controversial matters like the appeal by Dutch merchant strangers for exemption from payment of subsidies (26 Mar.), the speedy carriage of letters (13 Apr.) and the inheritance of Lady Anne Clifford, wife of the earl of Pembroke (7 Apr.).136CJ ii. 499a, 515a, 517a, 533b.

In the late spring, as the prospect of resolving differences with the king receded and Charles began to gather supporters and resources to himself at York, Selden was for a while less visible in the Journals. Named on 21 April to prepare for a conference with the Lords on the safety of the kingdom and to the ecclesiastical committee on the 25th, he was mentioned only twice in May.137CJ ii. 535b, 541b, 572b. However, on 16 May he was listed first on the all-important committee to establish precedents for parliamentary action independently of royal assent. Quite what this signified is uncertain. At this juncture, according to Edward Hyde (a defector to York that month), Charles’s advisors were telling him that they ‘did not doubt of Mr Selden’s affection to the King’; they dissuaded the latter from a plan to make Selden lord keeper in place of his friend Edward Littleton, but cited disinclination for office, age, poor health and inertia rather than disaffection.138Clarendon, Hist. ii. 109, 114. Such were the reasons adduced by Selden himself for declining a summons to York in a letter to William Seymour, 1st marquess of Hertford, on 14 June: he had ‘been many weeks very ill’ and was ‘still so infirm that I have not so much as any hope of being able to endure any travel’. Although he added discouragingly that ‘if I were able to come … I have no apprehension of any possibility of doing his Majesty service there’, and that indeed his presence might be ‘a cause of some very unseasonable disturbance’, he assured Hertford of his ‘loyal and humble affections’ to the king.139Add. 4247, f. 14; Bodl. Selden supra 123, f. 159.

But Charles’s issue of the commission of array on 12 June proved to be a turning point. In the first half of the month Selden had been named only once in the Journal, although it was to prepare an important ordinance to raise additional naval forces (2 June).140CJ ii. 600b. Two weeks later (an interval accommodating some indisposition) he was a teller for the minority which considered that Sir Christopher Hatton* should be excused attendance in the House (ironically, an absence then used to execute the commission).141CJ ii. 626b. The next day, however, he was included in the conference with the Lords to discuss suppression of the commission.142CJ ii. 630a. Within the following fortnight he was named to committees to draw up a declaration of its illegality, respond to the king’s justificatory declaration and proclamation against counter measures, and discuss further action on Parliament’s Nineteen Propositions; on the 30th he was among managers of a conference with the Lords on these matters.143CJ ii. 632a, 633a, 635b, 637a, 638b, 643a, 645a. Replying on 29 June to a letter in which Falkland (who was with the king) had apparently taken him to task, Selden played down his involvement: his authority ‘doubtless [went] here for little or nothing’ and he was not present in the House for the vote on the illegality of the commission or subsequent ‘agitation’, appearing only on the 28th. While he admitted his contribution to the committee meeting on the 17th, where ‘among the rest my opinion (and that upon the best consideration I could make) was, that [the commission] is against the law’, his account was otherwise misleading.144Add. 4247, f. 13; Bodl. Selden supra 123, f. 160. He clearly had participated in at least some of the Commons’ defiant actions over this period. With the benefit of hindsight, Hyde put it more strongly.

Mr Selden had … in the House of Commons, declared himself very positively and with much sharpness against the commission of array, as a thing expressly without any authority of law, the statute upon which it was grounded being, as he said, repealed, and discoursed very much of the ill consequences which might result from submitting to it. He answered the arguments which had been used to support it, and easily prevailed with the House not to like a proceeding which they knew was intended to do them hurt and to lessen their authority.

More than that, ‘his authority and reputation prevailed much further than the House, and begot a prejudice against [the commission] in many well affected men.’145Clarendon, Hist. ii. 205. Hyde was probably right that Selden’s opposition to the commission was widely influential, and it reached Sir John Danvers* in London that those at York were highly disconcerted by his standpoint, but the extent to which he swayed fellow MPs is impossible to gauge. What is made explicit by his notes is the firmness of his conviction, based on lengthy and complex analysis of many precedents.146Bodl. Selden supra 124, ‘Militia Commission of Array’ ; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 359.

In July and August Selden was associated in further parliamentary moves against the commission, including censure of those who had acted on it (5 July), the ordinance for making Pembroke governor of the Isle of Wight (6 Aug.) and the answer to the king’s rejection of the Houses’ justificatory Declaration (18 Aug.).147CJ ii. 652a, 706b, 725b. He was also named to consider a commission for the continuation of the Irish Parliament (19 July) and to a secret task on 10 August.148CJ ii. 681a, 712b. For a man of such stature, this amounted to rather modest service, however. On 9 July he was a teller for the minority who unsuccessfully opposed a proposition to raise 10,000 volunteers in the City of London.149CJ ii. 663a. This suggests that there might have been something in Hyde’s claim that Selden ‘did as frankly inveigh against the ordinance for the militia’ issued by Parliament on 12 July as he had against the commission of array. This time, said Hyde, ‘his confidence deceived him’, and those ‘who suffered themselves to be entirely governed by his reason’ when the results advanced ‘their own designs, would not be at all guided by it, or submit to it’ when the results ‘contradicted’ them.150Clarendon, Hist. ii. 206. It is certainly plausible that Selden entertained reservations about the ordinance: he thought Parliament could not ‘make law that was never heard of before’; Whitelocke described parallel scruples over a commission as deputy lieutenant, dispelled mainly by the example of fellow lawyers including Selden himself.151Table Talk, 30; Whitelocke, Diary, 132.

Leaven at Westminster, 1642-3

For whatever reason, in the early months of the war Selden’s record in the House is sparse. His next appearance in the Journal after 18 August 1642 was 17 October, when he was the last nominated to a committee to frame a declaration instructing the ecclesiastical courts to implement existing statutes concerning tithes, a subject on which he probably came fairly readily to mind.152CJ ii. 811a. Two weeks later official links with his constituency were broken when the king made the city his headquarters; letters from friends in Cambridge that autumn indicate that scholarly discourse continued, but evidence for communication with scholars at Oxford does not survive.153Bodl. Selden supra 108, f. 247; 109, ff. 204, 262. A diarist recorded Selden’s inclusion on 31 December on a subcommittee to decide where episcopal jurisdiction should lie until the question were resolved by act of Parliament, but he seems to have been avoiding the Commons chamber itself.154Add. 18777, f. 109. Having heard on 31 January 1643 that ‘Mr Selden doth ordinarily walk in the hall in the twilight and after the rising of the house and hath forborn to come to the house these three months’, on 4 February his colleagues requested his attendance on pain of a fine.155Add. 18777, ff. 139v, 142; CJ ii. 955a. He obeyed promptly, appearing on the 6th to affirm the vote adhering to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, as commander of the parliamentary forces and swallowing his antipathy to oaths to take the Covenant.156CJ ii. 957a; Table Talk, 37-8.

Somewhat surprisingly, Selden then embarked a pattern of regular activity that lasted until 1647. Perhaps his health had improved; perhaps he considered that nothing would be more dangerous than to leave Westminster to radicals; clearly he had no sentimental attachment to Charles I. Reportedly, he viewed ‘a king [as] a thing men have made for themselves, for quietness’ sake’. The court had altered for the worse and this king was ‘abused by flatterers’. He scorned the calling of his friends from Parliament to Oxford.157Table Talk, 27-9.

On the other hand, as before, Selden was almost always a voice for moderation. On 8 February he seemed to speak for exploring accommodation with the king.158Add. 18777, f. 146. His counsel was not always convenient. Ordered the next day to prepare with Whitelocke and others a declaration that the jurisdiction of Parliament was superior to that of any other court, he underlined the uncomfortable fact that giving Parliament control of its prisoners would mean that the Lords would have power to commit commoners, but was ignored.159CJ ii. 959b; Add. 18777, ff. 147, 147v. When Serjeant John Wylde* reported on 2 March that the lands of impeached bishops and of delinquents would be sequestered, Selden reminded the Commons of the previous intention to except from this the universities and the deans and chapters.160Add. 18777, f. 169.

That his expertise was generally valued and his opinion generally respected (if not invariably followed) is reflected in Selden’s appointments over the spring and early summer of 1643. Placed on the committee to consider the plight of parliamentarian prisoners at Oxford (7 Mar.), he was added to those preparing instructions for the commissioners treating the Articles of Cessation with the king (23 Mar.), among those delegated to draft a justification of Parliament’s rejection of Charles’s terms (24 Apr.), and one of the five (including Pym) who withdrew to consider the manifesto on progress (17 May).161CJ ii. 992a; iii. 15a, 58a, 89a. He investigated information and charges from and against individuals, and examined petitions from local committees.162CJ ii. 975a; iii. 1a, 20b, 68b, 74b, 134b. Legal matters that came his way included the collection of fines (10 Mar.), problems of the Marshalsea court (27 Mar.), and the weighty issue of dealing with business in the absence of the great seal and individual judges (19 May).163CJ ii. 997b; iii. 20a, 92b. For the first time he regularly appeared among nominations to committees dealing with money: examination of the treasurer’s accounts (20 Mar.); raising funds for parliamentary forces (12 Apr.) and for Ireland (20 and 21 Apr.); improving arrangements for the newly-introduced weekly assessments (1 May); drafting an ordinance against the concealment of malignants’ estates (24 May).164CJ iii. 9b, 41a, 53b, 55a, 65b, 100a. He was on the face of it a strange choice (14 Feb.) to manage, with Francis Rous*, a conference with the Lords on the confession to be used on fast days.165CJ ii. 965a. In this instance as in others, he was probably the mouthpiece of moderates. When on 10 April those whom D’Ewes termed ‘the violent spirits’ promoted the introduction of an oath of association, ‘Mr Selden (who abhorred this course) and others were appointed … a committee for preparing of it’.166CJ iii. 37b; Harl. 164, f. 362v. It might have been with the same reservations that he sat on the committee to expedite proceedings against Laud and Matthew Wren, bishop of Norwich, and to prepare an ordinance for an assembly of divines (3 May).167CJ iii. 68a. Concern for due process, not to speak of historic artefacts, probably lay behind his acting as a teller against forcing the doors to the cathedral treasury and its regalia if the dean and chapter of Westminster refused to yield up the keys (2 June).168CJ iii. 112b.

That Selden took the renewed Covenant on 6 June was probably merely a recognition that this was inescapable, although his view of the obligations imposed by contracts should have made it more than a formality.169CJ iii. 118a. The next day he was appointed with 19 other MPs to attend what was to be the Westminster Assembly of divines, doubtless recommended by his learning and (to those wary of Presbyterian pretensions) his Erastian anti-clericalism.170CJ iii. 119b; Harl. 164, f. 399v. He did not disappoint on either count, declining to be overawed by the ministers’ piety and announcing an intention to stick closely to his brief from Parliament.171Harl. 165, f. 105v. Mercurius Aulicus reported on 23 July his scorn as the divines rapidly became enmeshed in theological controversy: when they could not agree over the nature of Christ’s descent into hell (proclaimed in the Apostles’ Creed), he ‘told them he could not choose but wonder, that an Article which had been generally received in the Christian church 1,500 years, should now be doubted of’.172Mercurius Aulicus no. 30 (23-29 July 1643), 394 (E.64.11). Anthony Wood heard that he ‘silenced and puzzled the great theologists thereof in their respective meetings’, while John Aubrey noted Whitelocke’s comment that ‘he was wont to mock the Assembly men about their little gilt Bibles, and would baffle them sadly’ with his superior knowledge of the original Greek and Hebrew.173Ath. Ox. iii. 368; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 220. This bruising encounter was to be of long duration, and its impact was only heightened when Selden’s intimidating Old Testament learning was further demonstrated in De anno civili et calendario veteris ecclesiae (1644) and Uxor Ebraica (1646).

The announcement of the royalist plot by Edmund Waller* which coincided with the resolution to hold the assembly was a setback for the peace party. When examined, Waller admitted to having begun to open the subject with Selden, Whitelocke and William Pierrepont*, but according to Whitelocke, ‘they all inveighed so much against anything of that nature as baseness and treachery, that he said nothing to them of any of the particulars, and had such respect for them, that he was almost persuaded himself to give it over’.174Whitelocke, Diary, 147. Having been thus exonerated, on 29 June Selden spoke up against the arrest of Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, who had been implicated by Waller, on the ground of insufficient evidence of treason and his privilege as a member of the Lords.175Harl. 165, ff. 100v-101.

Selden’s activity for the remainder of 1643 demonstrates his commitment to the parliamentarian cause at a period when the military tide was running against it, but also his antipathy to the more strident voices at Westminster. Among intercepted papers was a letter of 26 September which indicated that those at Oxford still considered him, like Denzil Holles, a potentially sympathetic contact.176Harl. 165, f. 225. He was one of three Members chosen on 18 July to prepare an ordinance requiring counties to supply horse, while the next day he was named to prepare a vindication of the new covenant proposed as part of the Anglo-Scottish alliance.177CJ iii. 172b, 173b. On 29 July he was appointed to review the powers given to any committees of both Houses to receive and disburse money.178CJ iii. 186a. Added on 1 August to the Committee for Examinations, the Commons’ tool for investigating security matters, the following day he was ranged against Holles as a teller for the majority against the creation of a special body to probe the loss of the west to the royalists that had followed the defeat of Sir William Waller* at Roundway Down and the surrender of Bristol by Nathaniel Fiennes.179CJ iii. 189b, 191b. But he was nominated to look into unsearched and unauthorized transport (7 Aug.) and, in response to disturbances in Hertfordshire, was ordered with two other lawyers to establish a provost marshal to suppress riotous assemblies (9 Aug.).180CJ iii. 196b, 199b. His membership of the Assembly no doubt underlay his inclusion on a committee considering its propositions for lay officials to oversee sabbath observance (19 July), although his later delegation to work on an ordinance to preserve the rights of patrons of livings may have chimed more exactly with his views on lay control (6 Nov.).181CJ iii. 173b, 302b. He continued to be involved in negotiating with the Scots (3 Aug., 4 Sep.) and on 30 September subscribed the Solemn League and Covenant which secured the alliance.182CJ iii. 192a, 227b, 259a. Later he was among MPs who advised action on papers from the prince d’Harcourt as the French envoy passed through London on his way to Oxford in November.183CJ iii. 316b.

On 19 September Selden first appears in the records of the Committee for Sequestrations, in which the earls of Northumberland and Pembroke, his old patron, were prominent – although he would not formally be added to this committee until August 1644.184SP20/1/Pt 1, f. 62v; CJ iii. 581b; LJ vi. 663a. He attended at least 31 sittings between then September 1643 and 2 January 1646, building up to a particularly intense spell of activity in the summer and autumn of 1645.185SP20/1/Pt 1, ff. 70, 128, 130v, 131, 132, 141; Pt 2, ff. 163, 168v, 177, 180, 196v, 280, 342; Pt 3, ff. 245v, 353v, 356, 365, 377, 415, 428v, 438, 440, 462, 466, 507, 541, 553; SP20/2 ff. 1, 12, 46, 48. His professional expertise was called upon to prepare the ordinance for the abolition of the court of wards (24 July, 22 Nov.), and was tapped again in committee work on invalidating the great seal at Oxford (21 Oct.) and creating a new one at Westminster (11 Nov.), and in vesting the office of master of the rolls in the Speaker of the Commons, a measure he brought in (7 and 8 Nov.).186CJ iii. 179b, 283b, 303a, 308a, 317a; Harl. 165, f. 224v. Later he worked on the ordinance settling the office of custos brevium in the court of common pleas (20 Jan. 1644).187CJ iii. 371a. Meanwhile in October 1643 Selden was made keeper of the records in the Tower of London, an office he kept until the 1650s, and he chaired a committee ordered on 2 November to preserve sequestered books, manuscripts and other historical artefacts.188CJ iii. 291a, 296a, 298b; LJ vi. 286a; Harl. 165, f. 226. At the same time he collected other tasks, including adjudication on petitions. He is unlikely to have been sympathetic to that of the strident Presbyterian Clement Walker* (12 Oct.), imprisoned in the Tower for his verbal attack on William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, and for personal and ideological reasons may have opposed that of Henry Parker (an advocate, unlike Selden, for the primacy of necessity in politics) for the registrarship of the prerogative court of Canterbury; Parker’s rival, Michael Oldisworth*, was backed by Pembroke.189CJ iii. 274b, 313b. Appropriately, Selden addressed university-related matters: the provision of facilities for scholars who had left Oxford (5 Dec.) and a petition from Trinity College, Cambridge, for the removal of sequestration from colleges which had donated plate to the king (12 Dec.).190CJ iii. 329b, 338b. Together with D’Ewes, whose admiration for Selden’s learning was somewhat tempered by a desire to claim credit for himself, Selden shepherded Cambridge’s case through the Commons and various meetings with the Lords.191Harl. 165, ff. 241, 245, 268; Harl. 483, f. 3; CJ iii. 356b, 358a.

Following the victory of Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester, at Lincoln, on 12 December Selden was nominated to prepare an ordinance permitting him to proceed against scandalous and ill-affected clergy in the associated counties.192CJ iii. 338b. His addition four days later to the Committee for Plundered Ministers was in relation to a case involving the patronage of the important Westminster parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields rather than in recognition of any extraordinary godliness (the usual qualification for membership).193Supra, ‘Committee for Plundered Ministers’; CJ iii. 342b. Otherwise, the fall-out from military and political developments occupied Selden periodically through the winter months. Like D’Ewes, he sought to curb the attempt by the earl of Essex to exempt those connected with his army from the commission for martial law (18 Nov.).194Harl. 165, f. 210v. On 18 December he was placed on a committee to investigate proceedings taken against MPs by judges operating within the western region dominated by the royalists, while four days later he was deputed to work on the ordinance punishing Henry Rich†, 1st earl of Holland, for his defection to the king.195CJ iii. 344b, 349a. When the debate on the latter opened up to consider the disablement of delinquent members of both Houses, Selden characteristically spoke against complex measures which threatened parliamentary privileges.196Harl. 165, f. 253. On 8 January 1644 he was one of the MPs sent for by name by the Lords to confer over impeachment of the queen for her role in plotting foreign financial and military intervention, while on the 29th he prepared for a parallel conference on delinquents.197CJ iii. 360b, 379b; LJ vi. 369b; Harl. 165, f. 270.

‘The Erastian party’, 1644-7

In February and early March 1644 Selden was absent from the Journal, and a period of comparatively regular appearances at the Committee for Sequestrations beginning on 25 March succeeded four months of inactivity.198SP20/1/Pt 1, ff. 128 seq. Similarly in the late spring he was a somewhat intermittent presence. It is possible that he was ill, but he was not entirely idle: D’Ewes noted that he delivered commanding speeches at the Assembly on 20 February.199Harl. 166, f. 15v. His contributions to proceedings bore a close relation to his parliamentary activity in religious matters over the next two years. On 13 March he and Rous were instructed to acquaint the Assembly of the House’s agreement to print the divines’ letter to Reformed churches overseas; at Selden’s instigation (according to D’Ewes) the Commons had decided against printing one missive to the Assembly from Zeeland because it advocated church government by divine right.200CJ iii. 426b; Harl. 166, f. 32. Selden probably brought his own secular and legalist perspectives also to the ordinance for abolition of superstitious and illegal worship (committed 27 Apr.) and certainly to the ordinance on payment of tithes, which he brought in on 13 June, to which he returned on 20 August and on which he managed a conference with the Lords on 6 November.201CJ iii. 470b, 528a, 599b, 689a; Harl. 166, f. 108v. In June the Scottish commissioner Robert Baillie noted with dismay the baleful influence of Selden and those hostile to Presbyterianism on Assembly debate on a new order for ordination. Members had

scraped out whatever might displease the Independents, or patrons, or Selden and others, who will have no discipline at all in any church Jure divino, but settled only upon the free will and pleasure of the parliament.202Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 31.

When the order was debated in September by a committee of the whole House, D’Ewes noted that Selden spoke ‘brilliantly’, ‘several times to my just admiration’, on the subject of ‘how far the clergy might claim to rule over the souls of the people’.203Harl. 166. f. 113; 483, f. 117. With this on his mind he must have brought particularly complex insights to the meetings to which he was summoned that month to discuss again the trial of ‘the bishop of Canterbury’, so keenly promoted by the Presbyterian William Prynne; on 8 January 1645 he was one of a quartet of MPs handed the distasteful task of drawing an ordinance detailing arrangements for Laud’s execution and burial.204CJ iii. 628a, 633b; iv. 13b. None the less, it is clear that in retrospect he could not entirely regret this: his De Synedris et praefecturis juridicis veterum Ebraeorum (1650-5) asserted that the high priest could be tried for capital offences.205J.P. Sommerville, ‘Hobbes, Selden, Erastianism and the history of the Jews’ in Hobbes and History ed. G.A.J. Rogers and T. Sorrell (2000), 170.

Meanwhile, Selden’s place on the Committee for Plundered Ministers was confirmed on 19 November 1644.206CJ iii. 699b. When the Commons debated the Directory for Public Worship on the 26th, he was placed on a committee to consider the clause on the Lord’s Supper; in the next few days he was also involved in the progress of the ordinance in the chamber.207CJ iii. 705b; Harl. 166, f. 186v. Jumping the gun of its passing, on 6 March 1645 a delegation of ministers asked that, Easter being imminent, there might be a parliamentary order empowering ‘some other godly or well-affected of the parish’ to exclude the unworthy from communion, but according to D’Ewes, ‘Mr Selden very excellently showed this power desired was a vast power never challenged by any church … [and that there was] no authority for it in scripture’. He intervened to the same effect when the Lords sent down the requested order four days later, although he achieved only postponement.208Harl. 166, ff. 182, 183. It was an issue to which he returned many times in speeches in May, August and September 1645, always arguing against such ‘arbitrary’ power and claiming that, contrary to the authorities cited by the ministers, in the discipline of Geneva and Scotland matters were conducted otherwise.209Harl. 166, ff. 207b, 209b, 249b, 250b, 256b, 260b, 262b, 266a. In the early summer Baillie identified Selden as ‘head’ of an ‘Erastian party in the parliament’ which was ‘stronger than the Independent, and … likely to work us much woe’. The Scot longed for a champion to ‘beat down that man’s arrogance’, one who could ‘confound him with Hebrew testimonies; it would lay Selden’s vanity, who is very insolent for his Oriental languages’.210Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 107. Baillie was to be disappointed: Selden was still involved in framing an amended ordinance for exclusion from the sacrament in September and October 1645 and May 1646; frustratingly for the Presbyterians he was made a commissioner when it was enacted in June 1646.211CJ iv. 290a, 300b, 553b, 562b; A. and O. A feeling that he was a thorn in their side can only have been strengthened by his inclusion on 16 April 1646 on a committee which was to present the Assembly with a statement of how it had breached parliamentary privilege.212CJ iv. 511a.

Given his views on the settlement of religion within fixed, pragmatic limits, Selden probably had a more positive attitude to the ordinance for replacing the Book of Common Prayer with the Directory, on which he was nominated to work on 17 April 1645, and a stern response when investigating the alleged contempt of the bishop of Durham in ignoring the law proscribing Prayer Book baptisms (8 Apr.).213CJ iv. 104a, 114a. Likewise, whatever his antipathy to excessive sermonizing, he probably had non-theological reasons for supporting the maintenance of preaching ministers in the north, Cambridge and Gloucester (3 Apr., 17 Oct., 22 Dec.) and the regulation of the worship and organisation of Westminster Abbey (7 July); indeed, he was the first nomination to, and probable chair of, a committee to establish a preaching ministry through the whole kingdom (7 Apr. 1646).214CJ iv. 97b, 198b, 312a, 381b, 502a; Perfect Occurrences no. 15 (10 Apr. 1646), sig. P3v (E.506.28). But he is likely to have been an uncomfortably opinionated member of the committees to oversee the setting up of congregational and classical presbyteries in London and inaugurate the system in the provinces (15 July 1645) and to consider the inclusion of previously exempt localities, including his home parish of Whitefriars (21 Jan. 1646).215CJ iv. 218a; Likewise, given his previous record, he was probably a critical voice on the committee to prepare the ordinance for sequestration of the estates of deans and chapters (16 Sept. 1645).216CJ iv. 275b. However, his chairmanship (with Francis Rous) of the committee to probe the unauthorized printing of the Remonstrance of the Dissenting Brethren, directed towards Presbyterians in the Assembly, did not prevent Parliament’s agreement that Assembly leaders be allowed to respond (11 Dec. 1645).217CJ iv. 373a.

Less controversial was Selden’s chairmanship of the committee which recommended the Assembly’s petition for printing the Septuagint Bible (3 Jan., 22 Mar., 17 Apr. 1645); this involved close liaison with Patrick Young, the king’s librarian and made full use of his longstanding textual scholarship.218CJ iv. 9a, 86a, 114b; It was Selden who successfully persuaded the House to grant Young an allowance for what proved to be a long term commitment: Selden was in charge of a committee for the printing of the Bible and publication of the Septuagint in October 1646, and was still some way short of his goal in June 1647.219Whitelock, Diary, 194; Harl. 166, f. 237; CJ iv. 201, 694a. With John Maynard* Selden also brought in an ordinance that no foreign impressions of English Bibles should be sold without the Assembly’s approval (20 Aug. 1645).220CJ iv. 248a. Meanwhile his scholarly links to his constituency remained apparently severed. On 14 October 1644 he was ordered to prepare an ordinance to ensure that Oxford college revenues would be deposited with the parliamentarian committees of the counties in question rather than being forwarded to the royalist headquarters.221CJ iii. 662b. Nominated to the committee to prepare for the regulation of Cambridge (14 June and 22 Nov. 1645), he was delegated (4 Aug.) to write to the leadership of the Eastern Association instructing them to secure the university’s privileges in the meantime.222CJ iv. 174a, 229b, 350b. He also headed the list of MPs nominated to adjudicate on differences between the university and Cambridge town. In July 1645 he was elected master of Trinity College and there was evident disappointment when he declined the office.223Bodl. Selden supra 110, ff. 3, 11; LJ vii. 678b.

Selden remained a stalwart of committees on religious matters through 1646. He presumably saw no problem when consulted on the opinion of the House that sequestered ministers should not be allowed to regain their livings or exercise cures of souls (7 July), but it was perhaps with mixed feelings that he resumed work with four others on the ordinance abolishing deans and chapters (29 Sept.).224CJ iv. 606b. Since they were now no longer ‘usefully’ employed in the Lords, he may have seen less difficulty in the sale of bishops’ lands, but conceivably took a positive, contractual view of any obligation to pay allowances to those bishops who had adhered to Parliament (2 Nov.), encouraged by his relationship with Ussher and his concern for scholarship.225CJ iv. 712a; Table Talk, 7, 9. Whatever his opinion of Sir Nathanael Brent, who by a narrow majority was retained on 17 October as judge of the prerogative court of Canterbury notwithstanding the abolition of episcopacy, it is likely that Selden was concerned to set up a workable system for the probate of wills when confronted with the bill then committed.226CJ iv. 696b. He also returned to the familiar ground of ministers’ maintenance (11 Nov.).227CJ iv. 719b. His appointment on 3 October with three other lawyers to peruse the ordinances on the discipline and government of the church, and to prepare the means to enable magistrates to enforce them, sat comfortably with his views on state regulation.228CJ iv. 678a. The same sentiments doubtless informed his key role in ensuring that the draft Westminster Confession of Faith was printed for the exclusive use of MPs and Assembly members finalizing its content (14 Oct., 7 Dec.), while he would have been a hostile member of the committee examining a pointedly-timed treatise published by London Presbyterian ministers asserting ‘the divine right of church government’.229CJ iv. 688a; v. 2b, 11a; Jus divinum regiminis ecclesiastici (1646, E.364.8).

Delinquency, faction and other business, 1644-5

Meanwhile, Selden continued to be active on the Committee for Sequestrations – indeed, he was one of its most diligent members.230SP20/1, passim; CCAM 497. In April 1644 and June 1645 he was delegated to prepare ordinances to improve procedures, while in November 1645 he was added to the committee preparing the form of pardon to be sued by compounders.231CJ iii. 473b; iv. 178b, 331a. In April and May 1645 he was also named to work on measures for regulating the public accounts and for establishing subsidies and weekly assessments, but according to D’Ewes he was suspicious of the motives of men like Prynne in seeking to extend financial powers.232CJ iv. 116a, 123b, 146a. Selden was among several Members who allegedly spoke for many when they ‘lay open the insolency [and] shamelessness of these men to desire such a vast power to themselves’.233Harl. 166, f. 205. It was perhaps with a view to curbing such ambitions that he was named to chair, with Robert Reynolds*, a committee for preserving parliamentary privilege in the matter of the revenue of the kingdom (16 Feb. 1646).234CJ iv. 444a. Equally, only occasionally did Selden deal with the individual cases of delinquents that came before Parliament – those of the lord mayor of York (Aug. 1644) and of John Paulet, 5th marquess of Winchester (18 Oct. 1645) – a fact doubtless beneficial to his reputation.235CJ iii. 597a; iv. 313a. But as the royalist cause began to run out of steam, he was on the committee appointed on 13 September 1645 to assess which of the recently taken prisoners were to be admitted to compound.236CJ iv. 273b.

Despite attempts at abolition, the court of wards was still in existence at Oxford, and wardship continued to be inextricably connected with sequestration at Westminster. Selden was named to committees on wards (delinquent or otherwise and their estates (12 June 1644, 5 Mar. 1645), fresh attempts to abolish the court itself (Oct. 1644), and arrangements for collection of arrears and payment of compensation after its final demise (May 1646); according to Bulstrode Whitelocke, in debates of January 1646 Selden was pre-eminent in ‘opening’ ‘the learning of the wardships’.237CJ iii. 526b, 647b, 663a; iv. 70a, 538b, 551b; Whitelocke, Diary, 185. As before he collected nominations on other legal matters including the abolition of tenure by knight’s service (16 Aug. 1644), the appointment and payment of judges and sheriffs (May 1644, 29 Mar. 1646) and writs (28 June 1644).238CJ iii. 510a, 511a, 544a, 581b; iv. 491a. Similarly, he continued to prioritize business (3 Oct. 1644), probably beyond February 1646, when he was on the committee to review the committee of petitions.239CJ iii. 649b; iv. 440b. In the interim he heard several personal disputes, petitions from various localities, investigated the peerage of the earl of Somerset, and embarked on the regulation of heralds and heraldry (for which he was a commissioner, 19 Mar. 1646).240CJ iii. 534b; iv. 34b, 103a, 141b, 149a, 150b, 256a, 256b, 296a, 348a; A. and O.

Selden’s international standing made him an obvious choice as a negotiator with foreign powers, just as Mare Clausum had linked him with the navy. As a member of several ad hoc committees on maritime affairs and of the Committee for Foreign Affairs (July 1644) and the Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports (Apr. 1645), he was well placed to play a role in Parliament’s dealings with the Dutch and in establishing a consul in Flanders.241Supra, ‘Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports’; ‘Committee for Foreign Affairs’; CJ iii. 534a, 551a, 568a, 593a; iv. 57a, 112a, 128b, 129b, 152b; LJ vi. 675a; A. and O. Selden figured prominently among MPs called on to respond to the Dutch offer to mediate to settle a peace in November and December 1644, to communicate with and support Elector Charles Louis of the Palatinate (31 Aug. 1644, 22 Sep. 1645, 4 Apr. 1646), and to review the standing of the French ambassadors sent to Oxford and Scotland, as well as other diplomats and agents not employed by Parliament (4 Mar. 1646).242CJ iii. 613b, 689a, 713b; iv. 281a, 462b, 500b.

Throughout Selden was involved in the discussion of successive peace proposals, but not divorced from measures designed to secure parliamentary victory. In 1644 he worked on the bill for a settled militia and on recruitment and payment of Sir William Waller’s army (13 June, 28 June, 17 Aug.); in September he was added to the committee for Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire.243CJ iii. 527b, 544b, 594a, 617a; LJ vi. 696a. Named three times to different aspects of the peace treaty, he chaired one of the committees (17 Aug.). 244CJ iii. 594a, 647b, 665a. Against a background of neutralist as well as royalist unrest, over the winter he was involved in consultations over the cases of various plotters and rebels, including Lord Maguire.245CJ iii. 671a, 694b; iv. 27b, 28b. He was also among those who drafted the Commons’ response to the Lords’ objections to peers being removed from military commands under the proposed Self-Denying Ordinance (8 Jan. 1645).246CJ iv. 13b. With Samuel Browne* and Maynard he wrote to the parliamentary commissioners at Uxbridge instructing them to prepare a joint case against the propositions on the militia of both kingdoms (17 Feb.), while the next day he was engaged with Browne and others on reviewing the articles made on the surrender of King’s Lynn.247CJ iv. 51a, 52b. In April he prepared the ordinance for establishing a court martial to try the rebels in Kent, while in September he helped prepare a declaration to be sent to Jersey expressing solidarity with those who had suffered at the hands of its royalist governor, and threatening stern reprisals for the deaths of any friend of Parliament.248CJ iv. 117a, 271b.

Following the sensational accusations made by Thomas Savile†, 2nd Baron Savile in July 1645 that Denzil Holles and Bulstrode Whitelocke had taken part in secret talks brokered by the French ambassador alongside their official negotiations at Uxbridge, Selden was first named among MPs to conduct the investigation; it revealed nothing damning.249CJ iv. 195a. Later that month he also chaired, with Rous, the group which drafted a submission to be made before the House by James Cranford, a Presbyterian printer who had spread counter allegations that the culprits were in fact William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, and other Independents.250CJ iv. 213a. Writing to Cranford in the Tower later, Robert Baillie, who had encouraged his actions, assured him that Rous and Selden would be satisfied ‘without putting you to confess any words which might be against your mind’.251Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 155. Yet Baillie was sometimes deceived in his assessment of Rous, and can hardly have been sure of Selden, whose outlook on much was so different from his own. In the welter of accusations and counter-accusations, it is difficult to view Selden as a sympathiser with either Presbyterians or Independents: rather, he emerges at this point as engaged in damage limitation. That September he and seven other lawyers considered the exemplary punishment to be meted out to four men and a woman who had (falsely, the Commons decided) accused the Speaker, William Lenthall*, and his son John Lenthall* of sending thousands of pounds to Oxford.252CJ iv. 274a.

Negotiating settlement and faction, 1646-8

Selden’s activity in the House continued unabated throughout 1646. As divisions of the New Model prepared to mop up the royalist forces remaining after an autumn of defeats, on 1 January he was chosen to chair with John Lisle* a committee working on an ordinance for the execution of martial law.253CJ iv. 394a. At the end of the month he was added to the committee discussing the latest round of peace proposals, perhaps specifically with its additional task in mind: the production of a justification of the causes of the war, to be recorded in the records of Parliament and the Westminster courts.254CJ iv. 424b. In March Selden was engaged in conferences over propositions from the Scots.255CJ iv. 478b, 491a. Two months later he was among MPs pressing for the examination of John Cheislie, secretary to the Scots commissioners in London, after the seizure of his compromising letters to the cavalry officer Alexander Lindsay, 1st earl of Balcarres, who was himself negotiating with the king.256CJ iv. 540a. By this time Charles I had actually placed himself in the hands of the Scottish army at Newark. On 16 May Selden was among Members nominated to draft a declaration asserting to the latter the particular right of the English Parliament to dispose of the king’s person.257CJ iv. 548b.

Dealing with the Scots, treating with the king and addressing the consequences of the formal ending of hostilities was Selden’s primary concern in Parliament for the rest of the year. Committee nominations related to the surrender of Oxford on 24 June were followed by involvement in the summer and early autumn in the drafting of papers sent to Charles at Newcastle and Scots and French envoys.258CJ iv. 558b, 584b, 587a, 604a, 622b, 673b. That he sought a political settlement which would assert tradition and the rule of law seems certain, but what terms he wished to impose upon the king and how he intended they be guaranteed are less so; it would be characteristic if he were interested in the detail, but also if he sometimes failed to communicate that subtlety to others. Again included in discussion on a militia of the whole kingdom (13 June), in August Selden was named to prepare an ordinance to combat scandalous pamphleteering against Scotland and particular its army still quartered in the north-east of England.259CJ iv. 576a, 644b. On 25 August he was instructed (with Browne) to inform the countess of Kent that her castle at Goodrich would be demolished as part of the more general slighting of fortifications; he was to reassure her that compensation would be forthcoming, although probably with little confidence that this would be honoured promptly, since his own award of £1,000, finally made in June 1645, was as yet unpaid.260CJ iv. 189b, 651a. He gave opinions on the implementation of the Articles of Oxford (7 July, 11 Sept.) and as a member of the Committee for Sequestrations was unsurprisingly chosen to address a variety of measures related to delinquents, compounders and their creditors.261CJ iv. 603a, 605b, 620a, 637b, 641b, 666b. Later he was added to a committee considering accusations against the governor of Hereford, John Birch* (29 Oct.).262CJ iv. 708a. In October he was also given special care of discussions on the leaking of speeches made to Parliament by John Campbell, 1st earl of Loudon, the Scottish chancellor, who was attempting to persuade the king to accede to English demands. 263CJ iv. 694a, 694b. He was also on the committee considering whether the attempt by the apparent attempt by the delinquent marquess and marchioness of Hertford to secure papers and effects belonging to the recently-deceased earl of Essex breached either the Articles of Oxford or parliamentary privilege.264CJ iv. 696b.

As before, Selden was occasionally drawn into revenue matters and as a lawyer was again instrumental in the legitimation of Parliament’s great seal, as well as steps to free particular prisoners, review sheriffs’ oaths, prevent dubious marriages and regulate proceedings in chancery.265CJ iv. 592b, 594b, 653a, 657a, 660a, 673b, 678b, 701a, 702a, 703b, 714a, 736b. There were still repercussions from the abolition of the court of wards.266CJ iv. 727a. He continued to deal with individual petitions and in December 1646 was one of the MPs called on by the Lords to confer on differences between the earls of Northumberland and Pembroke.267CJ iv. 617, 681b, 735b. He also heard the Levant Company’s complaint against the erstwhile ambassador to Constantinople, Sir Sackville Crowe† (17 Sept.).268CJ iv. 671a.

Selden’s profile in the Journal was significantly reduced in 1647, with fewer than half the number of committee nominations of the previous year. This may have arisen partly from another consequence of the surrender of Oxford, namely the proposed visitation of the university, to the prevention or curtailment of which he devoted much energy (as discussed below). But like other centre-ground MPs, Selden may have been periodically disinclined to participate in a House subject to power struggles between Presbyterians and Independents. University-related nominations in January were complemented by others: to communicate with the French ambassador (11 Jan. 1647), to consider the trials of delinquents excepted from pardon (25 Jan.) and, as parliamentary commissioners arrived in Newcastle to secure the king, to relay to the Scottish Parliament the English vote to proceed with the treaty (26 Jan.).269CJ v. 48b, 61b, 65b. However, despite the expression of approval embodied in a resolution that he receive £5,000 for his sufferings nearly twenty years earlier (18 Jan.) – which this time produced some tangible result within a few months – mentions of Selden were sparse in the spring and early summer.270CJ v. 54b-55b; CCC i. 64-8; LJ ix. 184b. He was on the relatively lengthy lists of Members placed on committees to exclude ‘malignant’ ministers from parishes or other employment (22 Mar.), order the London militia (2 Apr.), resolve the Newcastle election (6 Apr.) and (in response to pressure from army agitators) provide indemnity against prosecution for all who had served Parliament (7 May); he was named to the Committee for Indemnity on 21 May.271CJ v. 119b, 132b, 134a, 166a; A. and O. His signature shows that he also attended the Committee for Foreign Affairs on 29 April.272Add. 4155, f. 243.

As the Presbyterians gained the ascendancy in negotiations with the king and the army became more radicalized, Selden seems to have evaded the limelight. For eight weeks from 14 May to 8 July there was no mention of him in the Journal and on 20 May the bench at the Inner Temple recorded that owing to his ‘great business’ he was unable to audit the treasurer’s accounts.273CITR ii. 276. The logic of his stance against clerical power aligned him at this juncture with those against a Presbyterian-brokered peace. His reappearance in July was in company with others who sought a settlement on different terms and had already shown themselves prepared, for the time being, to reassure the army. On a small committee which included Nathaniel Fiennes I* and Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire*, Selden produced an ordinance meeting army demands that reformadoes (ex-soldiers from regiments outside the New Model) be expelled from London.274CJ v.237b. Two weeks later he was first named, again with Fiennes and Evelyn, to prepare an ordinance condemning the ‘solemn engagement’ to uphold the Covenant and restore the king which had been issued by City apprentices and reformadoes.275CJ v. 255b. Selden and Fiennes had encountered each other on many committees on religion as well as in the Westminster Assembly, and worked together on resistance to the visitation of Oxford; this proximity was replicated in most of Selden’s committee appointments from this time on. Although the latter did not share the reputation for family piety of his younger colleague, the two leading advocates of Erastianism had much in common.

Unlike Fiennes, however, following the Presbyterian coup in late July, Selden did not flee to the army and sign the engagement with it issued on 4 August. Likewise, there is no evidence that he was a party either to the talks with army officers at Sion House which discussed a separate treaty with the king or to the Heads of Proposals published on 1 August. On the face of it, his natural prudence and conservatism would have made him an unlikely fellow traveller with those involved. On the other hand, by the same token it is possible that Selden was absent from the Commons for the duration of the coup. Once the Independents returned to Westminster he was named to the committees of 11 and 18 August for an ordinance repealing all acts passed between 26 July and 6 August.276CJ v. 271b, 278b. He chaired the group who on 1 October prepared a declaration against the disorders of that period, although when he reported the next day the document was rejected as too temperate and (a reflection of their different approaches) recommitted under the care of Fiennes.277CJ v. 322a, 324a.

On 3 September Selden was named to the committee to authorize the appointment of Colonel Robert Hammond*, an opponent of the Presbyterians now seen as wishing to distance himself from army radicalism, as governor of the Isle of Wight, while on 15 October he was nominated to review the case of John Lilburne, denied release from the Tower despite the Independent victory and still stirring up Leveller opinion in the army.278CJ v. 291a, 334a. On 22 October he was chosen to address the politically-charged issue of satisfying arrears of army pay.279CJ v. 340a. As Parliament, in competition with the army, resumed a new round of negotiations with the king, now at Hampton Court, Selden was again involved. Among those delegated to prepare a proposition on the government and doctrine of the church (30 Sep.), he then worked on a proposal for a Presbyterian settlement which accommodated nonconformity (6 Oct.).280CJ v. 321b, 327b. Part of a smaller group (with Fiennes) who poured over amendments to this from the Lords (16 Oct.), he was included in the joint committee which finalized the proposals to be sent to Charles (30 Oct.).281CJ v. 336a, 346b. In the meantime, with Fiennes, Whitelocke, Evelyn and others he prepared communications to the Scots commissioners (2 Oct.).282CJ v. 325a.

Journal entries give the impression that at the end of October Selden relapsed into six weeks of inactivity, but he was probably still at work behind the scenes. On 11 December he conveyed four important bills to the Lords covering the maintenance of military and naval forces, the justification of the late war, the creation of peers and the adjournment of Parliament.283LJ ix. 570a, 570b. Nominated on 14 December to punish the soap monopolist Sir Henry Compton, the next day Selden was put in charge of preparing an answer to the Scots’ commissioners’ latest submission; on the 16th he conveyed to the Lords the Scots’ request to be notified of English communications with the king.284CJ v. 383a, 385a; LJ ix. 577b. On 24 December, the day Parliament presented its stern terms to the king on the Isle of Wight, a quartet consisting of Selden, Fiennes, Henry Marten* and William Pierrepoint was given the urgent task of drafting another answer to the Scots.285CJ v. 404a. As a final mark of his prominence, unprecedentedly on the 28th Selden delivered to the Lords his third message in a fortnight, this time requesting payments to Patrick Young.286LJ ix. 616a.

Selden’s position on the Vote of No Addresses to the king taken in the Commons on 3 January 1648 is unknown. The fact that he was not included with Fiennes among those mandated to prepare a justification of the action may be significant. His appointment the next day to the large committee reviewing public grievances was his last nomination (although not his last recorded service) until 13 November, when he rejoined Fiennes in another attempt to refine propositions from the king.287CJ v. 417a; vi. 75b. His inclusion among those drafting the latest attempt to put Parliament’s case for past and present action (17 Nov.) was his last committee service in the Commons, and his active career on the floor of the House appears to have ended shortly thereafter.288CJ vi. 79a.

Member and advocate for Oxford University, 1646-53

However, Selden subsequently maintained a presence at Westminster, above all manifest in his efforts on behalf of his constituency. From the time the committee to regulate Oxford University was first established on 1 July 1646, with Selden among its members, he had been viewed by academics as their greatest hope of escape.289CJ iv. 595b. Soon after the surrender, Vice-chancellor Samuel Fell, dean of Christ Church, had written to Gerard Langbaine, Hebraist and provost of Queen’s College, asking him to acquaint ‘Mr Selden, the great honour of our mother the university’ with its parlous financial state, ‘and desire him to relieve his declining, undone mother’.290Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford, ii. 486. On 28 September Langbaine assured Selden of prayers in Oxford for his endeavours as ‘Pandora’s box is poured out upon us’, while on 27 October he wrote of living ‘six months under the rod’ and of fears that ‘Oxford will fall to be in Banburyshire’ (i.e. the archetypal nest of puritan philistine radicalism) as sermons announced that learning was an enemy to religion.291Add. 32093, ff. 237, 239, 241. For a surprisingly long time Selden was apparently instrumental in holding back the tide of parliamentary intervention, having the matter in hand. In December 1646 he chaired a committee discussing a petition from the university and carried the result to the Lords.292CJ iv. 739b,: v. 2b, 3a. He was on the committee formed on 13 January 1647 to preserve the rights of newly-restored chancellor Pembroke and to nominate visitors from outside the House, and was himself named (10 Feb. and 14 May, with another perceived friend of the university, Nathaniel Fiennes) as a commissioner to sit in London.293CJ v. 51b, 83a, 174a; A. and O. In this capacity, according to Anthony Wood, he did ‘all in his power to mitigate the harshness of his colleagues in the committee’ and went ‘so far as to advise the university as to the course it should pursue in resisting the visitation’; he ‘stood forth as their champion’, recruiting Matthew Hale* and Chaloner Chute I* as their counsel. But despite assistance from Fiennes, Whitelocke and Sir Henry Vane II*, Selden was outvoted and the visitation went ahead, with attendant ejections of fellows who would not comply.294Reg. Visitors Univ. Oxford, pp. lxx-lxxi; Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford, ii. pt. ii. 528. According to an anonymous writer from Breda in October 1659, part of Selden’s ultimately fruitless case for resistance ‘as he himself told me’, was that the Presbyterian ministers nominated as visitors were rendered ‘uncapable of exercising any such civil jurisdiction’ by the act of Parliament to which he had himself been a midwife, and he ‘besought them to consider the reason’ for that act.295Bodl. Rawl. D.170, pp. 101-2.

In November 1647, a month without parliamentary nominations, Selden was attending visitors’ committee sessions. Presumably not all scholars who had stayed on in Oxford through the royalist occupation elicited his sympathy. Present when Samuel Fell was allegedly called in and ‘berated’ by Pembroke on 15 November, Selden may have shared some of the earl’s frustration with this particularly inflexible cleric.296Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford, ii. pt. ii. 533-5. But the next day he thwarted an attempt by zealous Presbyterians Francis Cheynell and Henry Wilkinson to revoke the grant of to the university of legal counsel.297Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford, ii. pt. ii. 537. On at least three occasions in December, again according to Wood, he continued to do battle in the Painted Chamber, aided by Whitelocke, Fiennes and Vane, and fortified at least once by dinner with Pembroke – asserting the university’s privileges, questioning the credentials of the Presbyterians and interceding for particular individuals like the future bishop George Morley and even Fell. He pointed out uncomfortable inconsistencies: six of the visitors (among them Cheynell and Wilkinson) belonged to the Westminster Assembly which ‘had since the sitting of this Parliament in some points absolutely denied the authority of Parliament, notwithstanding which the Parliament did not think it fit to take their Estates from them’.298Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford, ii. pt. ii. 540, 544-7; Whitelocke, Diary, 202; CCSP i. 414, no. 2735. To the gratitude of Langbaine, Selden continued to advocate the university’s cause through the spring of 1648, being certainly present in committee in March, when he pleaded successfully for the distinguished orientalist Edward Pococke to be made professor of Hebrew and a prebendary of Christ Church.299Bodl. Selden supra 108, f. 58; Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford, ii. pt. ii. 555, 851.

The assumption, echoed in royalist intelligence which in mid-February mentioned his participation in debate on Parliament’s declaration against the king, was that Selden was still an active member of the Commons.300CCSP i. 412, nos. 2724-5. On 27 March he delivered a message to the Lords with 13 bills, including an order for the expenditure of £500 on books for Cambridge University Library.301LJ x. 157b. A newsletter writer identified him at that time as ‘the man that solicits the business in the behalf of the rest of his brethren’ in the Westminster Assembly.302Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 1 (28 Mar.-4 Apr. 1648), sig. A2v (E.434.17). However, although entries in Whitelocke’s diary reveal that Selden was in London with the countess of Kent in May (when he gave advice to Edmund Sheffield, 2nd earl of Mulgrave, soon to become a member of the Derby House Committee) and in July, no other evidence has emerged of Selden’s activities from April to mid-October.303Whitelocke, Diary, 215, 217. It is therefore possible that he shunned not only the chamber but also the committee room during this period. Yet he was visibly in harness some weeks before his penultimate nomination on 13 November. On 21 October he dined with Whitelocke and fellow moderate Sir Benjamin Rudyerd*, while a week later Edward Reynolds, the new dean of Christ Church, asked him to move in the Commons for continuing the annexation of prebends to professorships.304Add. 32093, f. 266. On 30th the university again named him as their official negotiator and a month later the ever grateful Langbaine reiterated the request for a proviso on professorships in the ordinance on deans and chapters.305Bodl. OUA, Reg. T, p. 22; Selden supra 108, ff. 15-16v, 118-119v.

Selden was probably among those who fell victim to Pride’s Purge on 6 December 1648: his name appeared in one of the contemporary lists of those secluded.306A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62); Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 385. However, he soon regained a certain standing with the commonwealth regime. According to Whitelocke, who also kept his head down at this point, by January 1649 he and Selden were ‘often’ at the house of Henry Elsyng, clerk of Parliament, who in December ‘quitted his place for indisposition of health, but … acknowledged to Whitelocke that it was because he would have no hand in the business against the king’.307Whitelocke, Diary, 227. After its publication in February, Oliver Cromwell* apparently asked Selden to write a reply to Eikon Basilike, Charles’s putative spiritual autobiography.308[Selden], Opera Omnia, i. p. xliv. On 23 February the council of state, to which Whitelocke had just been elected, sent for Selden and the regicide Thomas Chaloner* to advise on ambassadorial procedure; a second summons for assistance came from the Derby House Committee the next day.309CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 14, 18. In early March Reynolds was still hopeful that Selden would continue to influence the committee for dean and chapter lands on behalf of Christ Church, and he certainly had some contact with the committee on a personal level as on 23 April he was granted £2,500 charged on their account; in September, with Whitelocke, he also obtained compensation for the countess of Kent for the demolition of Goodrich Castle.310Bodl. Selden supra 109, f. 482; A. and O.; Whitelocke, Diary, 246. In May 1649 he was nominated as a commissioner for the drainage of the Great Level and on at least three occasions – around April, in June, and in March 1650 – he had dealings with the committee for compounding over delivery of delinquents’ evidences.311A. and O.; CCC 1293, 1395, 1447. This was a consequence of his still discharging the office of keeper of the records in the Tower, although as the council of state noted in December 1650, this had been an unprofitable office since the abolition of the court of wards, and by August 1651 he seems to have relinquished it, or at least most of its duties.312CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 391, 476; 1652-3, p. 259; CJ vi. 617b, 618a. On the other hand, in January 1651 there was even talk of reinstating Selden, with Rudyerd (who had also been purged) and others, in the Commons.313Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 289.

Selden’s published output continued. Fleta (1647), a treatise on English law from the reign of Edward I, was followed by the monumental De Synedris, published in three volumes from 1650, which reiterated his opposition to clerical power but which appeared also to advocate a mixed monarchy.314‘John Selden’, Oxford DNB; Camb. Hist. of Political Thought, 529; Sommerville, Hobbes, Selden, 163. Writing and the encouragement of other scholars might by itself account for his having a lower profile in public life.315Bodl. Selden supra 108, ff. 105, 147; supra 109, passim; Rawl. D.390, f. 22; BL Add. 4273, art 1. By this time, however, Selden’s health may have taken a turn for the worse. The countess of Kent died in early December 1651, leaving him a life interest in her estates. (It is noteworthy that the conveyances related to this had been made on 12 July 1647, at the height of Selden’s resistance to Presbyterianism, and involved among others the delinquent marquess of Hertford and the hitherto moderate engager with the army William Pierrepont.)316PROB11/218/662. When as executor he was ordered by the Committee for Compounding to attend and explain why the inheritance of his benefactress’ sister the countess of Arundel should not be sequestered, he asked to be excused, being confined to bed with a dangerous sickness.317CCC 2473-5. However, in April 1653 Langbaine, if not without flattery, still considered him a credible choice to represent the university in the proposed new Parliament, while in December the council of state sought his advice in dealing with Portuguese action on the Exchange.318Bodl. Selden 109 supra, f. 338; CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 287. In spring 1654 he was in correspondence with Whitelocke, on embassy in Sweden, where Selden was a topic of conversation with Queen Christina.319Whitelocke, Diary, 320, 342; Add. 32093, f. 328.

In his will of 11 June 1653 Selden pronounced himself to be in good bodily health. He left £100 each to his sister, her family and several women; £500 to Rachel Williamson, whom Aubrey implies may have been a lover; silver and crystal items to the marquess of Hertford, the earl of Northumberland, Josselin Lord Percy, Sir Thomas Cotton and the late earl of Kent’s nephew, Grey Longuevile; and his oriental books to his executors to dispose of for public use in a convenient library.320Bodl. Selden supra 110, ff. 43 seq.; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 220. Soon afterwards he gave notice to Oxford University of an intention to donate to it books received from William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke, Sir Thomas Rowe and Sir Kenelm Digby, but it seems that he hesitated between leaving his own collection to the university or to the Inner Temple.321Bodl. OUA, NEP/supra/Reg. T. p. 251; CITR ii. 314; Bodl. Selden supra 110, f. 58; Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford, ii. pt. ii. 942. A fortnight after handing over his goods to his trustees and executors Matthew Hale, Edward Heyward, John Vaughan and Rowland Jewks (27 Oct.), he told Whitelocke he wished to change his mind.322Bodl. Selden supra 110, f. 19; Whitelocke, Diary, 397. Accounts of his death on 30 November display a similar divergence. While John Aubrey heard that Thomas Hobbes prevented a minister coming to attend him, others asserted that ‘Selden upon his deathbed disclaimed all Hobbism, and the like wicked and atheistical opinions … confessed his sins and desired absolution’, given by his old friend Archbishop Ussher.323Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 221; Bodl. Selden supra 110, f. 58; Rawl. B.158, f. 175 Although Selden may have felt less need than contemporaries to distance himself from Hobbes, the latter account may contain more truth. ‘His funeral sermon was preached by the primate of Armagh’, noted Whitelocke, ‘who gave him his deserved praise as a prodigy of learning and hospitality’, adding plausibly, ‘he was no lover of the clergy and their pride and greatness, and he was true to Parliament’s interest’.324Whitelocke, Diary, 403. He may have had children, as Aubrey claimed, and his will mentions a William and Jane Lidall who were being educated at the countess’s expense, but he left no legitimate heirs to follow him into Parliament.325Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 220; Bodl. Selden supra 110, ff. 43 seq. After careful negotiation, his collection of books and manuscripts went in 1659 to the Bodleian Library.326Bodl. OUA, WPα/15; NEP/supra/Reg. T. pp. 349-50; Reg. Ta. p. 7; Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford, ii. pt. ii. 806, 942, 944.

Assessment

Selden’s learning, expertise, personal history and international reputation earned him respect in Parliament, rendered his services extremely useful to it, and ensured that, once he had aligned with it during the civil war, he was not a prisoner of factional politics. While his outlook on the clergy rendered unlikely anything but a temporary alliance with the Scots and, on religious issues, with the Presbyterians, his conservatism and concern for legitimacy hardly made him a friend of the army. Scholarship gave him friends across political divisions, but he appears to have been most comfortable occupying the centre ground. Cut off from his constituency when Oxford was the royalist capital, he inhabited the metropolitan legal world, but also associated with others from the Thames valley region. Once the first civil war was won, he co-operated with those associates to spearhead resistance to parliamentary visitation of his university, and continued lobbying behind the scenes at Westminster once his career in the House was ostensibly over. No social radical, he yet retained his standing under the commonwealth.