RAMSDEN, Sir John (1594-1646), of Longley Hall, Almondbury, and Byram Hall, Brotherton, Yorks.

The Ramsdens had entered the ranks of the gentry as a result of land purchased by Sir John Ramsden’s great-grandfather at the Dissolution.31Cliffe, Yorks. 16; D. Whomsley, ‘William Ramsden of Longley, gentleman, 1514-1580’, YAJ xlii. 143. Before the Reformation they had been yeoman clothiers, and the family was still closely tied to its commercial roots at the end of the sixteenth century, deriving its income not only from rents, but also the sale of sheep, wool, cloth, corn and malt.32Whomsley, ‘William Ramsden of Longley’, 143. Ramsden’s father had continued to build up the family’s estate, purchasing half of the manor of Huddersfield from the crown in 1599 – the family having first acquired property in the Huddersfield area, notably Longley Hall, through marriage, in the early sixteenth century.33W. Yorks. Archives (Kirklees), DD/R/dd/III/1; Ahier, Traditions of Huddersfield, 40; W.B. Crump, G. Ghorbal, Hist. of the Huddersfield Woollen Industry (Huddersfield, 1935), 44; Cliffe, Yorks. 97. Ramsden also made numerous property purchases, including the manor of Almondbury (a few miles south east of Huddersfield), the remainder of the manor of Huddersfield, and the manor of Byram (three miles north of Pontefract), which he acquired in the late 1620s and where he established a second family seat.34CP25/2/520/6CHAS1/EAST; W. Yorks. Archives (Kirklees), DD/R/dd/III/2; DD/R/dd/V/29; DD/RA/F/8. He preserved the family’s links with the West Riding woollen industry, retaining ownership of several fulling-mills in the Huddersfield area.35W. Yorks. Archives (Kirklees), DD/R/dd/II/25; Crump, Ghorbal, Huddersfield Woollen Industry, 44. In 1629, he was one of several West Riding gentry to whom a petition from the Leeds clothiers was referred, the petitioners having asked that their grievances be considered by such of the gentry ‘who best understand the nature of clothing’.36CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 500. Besides fulling-mills, Ramsden owned numerous coal mines.37W. Yorks. Archives (Leeds), RA/S1(1R); RA/S2(2R); Cliffe, Yorks. 356.

Ramsden had emerged by the late 1620s as an adherent of Sir Thomas Wentworth† (the future earl of Strafford) in his bitter power struggle with Sir John Savile†. Ramsden shared several friends and political allies with Wentworth – notably, Sir Richard Beaumont†, Sir John Jackson†, Christopher Wandesford† and Ramsden’s cousin, Sir Henry Savile† of Methley, who appointed Ramsden a captain in his militia regiment.38C54/2922/30; W. Yorks. Archives (Kirklees), DD/R/dd/III/2; DD/R/F/28; W. Yorks. Archives (Leeds), RA/S1(1R); Beaumont Pprs. ed. Macray, 54, 59, 62; Cartwright, Yorks. 202; H.B. MacCall, Story of the Fam. of Wandesforde (1904), 68, 270, 323; HP Commons, 1604-29, ‘Sir Richard Beaumont’; ‘Sir John Jackson’; ‘Sir Henry Savile’. Ramsden almost certainly owed his return for Pontefract in 1628 to Wentworth – the borough’s principal electoral patron – although he owned property in the town and was in the process of buying the nearby manor of Byram.39W. Yorks. Archives (Leeds), RA/S1(1R); W. Yorks. Archives (Kirklees), DD/RA/F/8; HP Commons, 1604-29, ‘Pontefract’. He seems to have remained on good terms with Wentworth after the latter’s elevation to the presidency of the council of the north in 1628; it was almost certainly with Wentworth’s approval that he was commissioned a colonel in the West Riding militia. However, he showed little of that zealous attendance to duty in office which characterised Wentworth’s closest supporters in Yorkshire. Although not entirely inactive in local government, he was not the most assiduous of magistrates, attending few, if any, of the West Riding quarter sessions.40W. Riding Sessions Recs. ed. J. Lister (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. liv).

Ramsden’s marriage to a wealthy London widow in 1633 probably meant that he spent a good deal of time away from Yorkshire during the mid-1630s – although it would have been time well spent, for his second wife came with a jointure of at least £12,000 and lands worth £400 a year (at Ramsden’s request, she sold most of her property in Essex for £2,300). For his part, Ramsden settled lands worth £1,272 a year on his new wife for her jointure.41C10/32/121; C10/51/150; C33/210, f. 752; C54/3158/35; Strafforde Letters, i. 116. With his wife’s fortune to draw on, he was active in the property market during the mid-1630s, purchasing large tracts of reclaimed fenland from the crown and selling them on to other buyers. His principal associates in these and other property and financial transactions during the 1630s included his close friend Sir William Savile* (Wentworth’s estranged nephew), Sir Edward Osborne* (vice-president of the council of the north) and Francis Nevile*.42Supra, ‘Francis Nevile’; infra, ‘Sir William Savile’; E134/14CHAS1/MICH47; C54/3082/2, 4; C54/3121/13; C54/3143/5; C54/3157/24; C54/3158/35; W. Yorks. Archives (Kirklees), DD/R/F/28; Notts. RO, DD/SR/207/403. In 1636, he was appointed sheriff of Yorkshire, possibly with the intention of stinging him into greater activity in the crown’s service. If this was the case, then it seems to have worked, for he collected the full amount of Ship Money for the county, earning the king’s ‘grace and favour’ as a result.43M.D. Gordon, ‘The collection of ship-money in the reign of Charles I’, TRHS ser. 3, iv. 161; Strafforde Letters, ii. 82. In 1638, Wentworth recommended Ramsden to his friend William Cavendish†, 1st earl of Newcastle as overseer of the earl’s estate in Pontefract.44Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P17/306; Add. 70499, f. 240.

Ramsden appears to have remained a loyal servant of the crown for most of the personal rule of Charles I, and it was only during the preparations for the first bishops’ war that he openly began to question the wisdom of royal policy – at least in so far as it applied to Yorkshire. In January 1639, following a royal order that the county’s trained bands muster for possible deployment against the Scots, Ramsden signed a petition to the king from the Yorkshire deputy lieutenants and militia commanders, expressing their readiness to march to any rendezvous, but reminding Charles that their troops were ‘never ... once employed out of our county upon any remote service whatsoever’.45SP16/409/53, f. 141; SP16/409/67, f. 167; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 353-4. He signed a similar petition in March, in which the petitioners asked that their men be paid a month prior to mobilization.46SP16/414/92, f. 217.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Ramsden was returned for Pontefract in first place, along with Wentworth’s younger brother Sir George Wentworth I.47  Supra, ‘Pontefract’. Once again, Ramsden almost certainly enjoyed the backing of Wentworth (now the earl of Strafford). Nevertheless, three days before his election, on 23 March, Ramsden had signed what Strafford regarded as an insolent letter from the Yorkshire deputy lieutenants and militia officers to the privy council in which they had refused to send reinforcements to Berwick until the necessary money had been provided and due consideration had been given to ‘the last year’s past and great charge of this county’. Strafford vowed to give those responsible for this letter ‘something to remember it by hereafter’.48SP16/448/66i, f. 133; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 573; Strafforde Letters, ii. 408-9. Ramsden received only three appointments in the Short Parliament – to the committee of privileges (16 Apr.); a committee to consider the case of the anti-Laudian cleric, Peter Smart (21 Apr.); and to a committee set up on 30 April for receiving petitions and representations concerning trade.49CJ ii. 4a, 8b, 17a. He made no recorded contribution to debate.

During the summer of 1640, with the second bishops’ war causing severe hardship in Yorkshire, Ramsden joined the county’s ‘disaffected’ gentry in their petitions to the king – in which they complained about the cost of military charges and pleaded poverty in the face of royal efforts to mobilise the county’s trained bands against the invading Scots – including that of mid-September, where they reiterated the demand made by a group of dissident English peers that Charles should summon Parliament.50Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1215, 1231; Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland Ms vol. 1608-1700, N38 Car. I. If Ramsden stood for Pontefract in the elections to the Long Parliament, it would appear that his opposition to royal policies – and, by extension, to Strafford – over the summer cost him his seat, for the borough returned the earl’s younger brother and his cousin: Sir George Wentworth I and II.51Supra, ‘Pontefract’.

Ramsden aligned with the nascent parliamentarian interest in Yorkshire during the early months of 1642. In January, he signed a petition from the county’s gentry to the king, protesting at his attempted arrest of the Five Members and his withdrawal from Westminster, which they regarded as the work of evil counsellors intent on creating divisions between him and ‘you more loyal subjects of the Reformed religion’.52Eg. 2546, ff. 23-4. The following month, Ramsden signed two further petitions from the Yorkshire gentry – one to the Commons, requesting, among other things, that the votes of the papist peers be abolished and that ‘ceremonial burdens’ in religion be removed, and the other to the Lords, asking the peers to work more closely with the Commons for the relief of Ireland’s Protestants.53PA, Main Pprs. 15 Feb. 1642, f. 55; LJ iv. 587a. These petitions were signed by most of the future leaders of the county’s parliamentarian party, including Sir John Bourchier*, Sir Matthew Boynton*, Sir Thomas Fairfax*, Francis Lascelles*, George Marwood* and Thomas Stockdale*. However, there were also several future royalists among the signatories, notably Sir John Goodricke†, Sir Marmaduke Langdale and Ramsden himself. Their willingness to ally with zealous puritans such as Bourchier and Boynton is a measure of their alarm at the king’s bungled attempt against the Five Members and subsequent withdrawal from Westminster.

Ramsden’s support for Parliament at this stage may have owed something to dislike on his part of Laudian ‘ceremonial burdens’. One of the executors named in his will of September 1642, for example, was his ‘very good friend’, the godly vicar of Huddersfield, Edward Hill, who would become a Presbyterian.54PROB11/199, ff. 335v, 336v; Calamy Revised, 263; Marchant, Puritans, 254. However, there is no firm evidence that Ramsden was sympathetic to the cause of further reformation in religion. And the timing of his defection to the king’s camp – which occurred at some point during the spring or early summer of 1642 – suggests that he was strongly influenced by royal propaganda that re-branded Charles as a constitutional monarch and defender of the church ‘by law established’. Appointed to the Yorkshire commission of array in June, he was involved that summer in raising troops for the king in the West Riding.55Northants. RO, FH133; E. Peacock, ‘On some civil war docs. rel. to Yorks.’, YAJ i. 95. And early in August, he signed a petition to Parliament from the county’s royalist gentry, protesting at the proceedings of Sir John Hotham* as parliamentary governor of Hull.56LJ v. 273b-274a. When Ramsden, Osborne, Sir Henry Slingesby* and other royalist gentlemen attempted later that month to secure York for the king and, more specifically, against the Hothams, they were successfully resisted by the corporation.57York City Archives, York House Bk. 36, f. 74v. On 26 September, he joined Nevile, Savile and other prominent Yorkshire royalists in a letter to the commander of the king’s northern army, the earl of Newcastle, requesting military assistance against the Hothams’ ‘infesting the country’.58Newcastle Mems. ed. Firth, 189. Ramsden’s alarm at the Hothams’ belligerency may help to explain his presence just three days later, on 29 September, among the signatories to the Yorkshire ‘treaty of pacification’ – an abortive attempt by the Fairfaxes and other West Riding gentry to keep the county neutral. The royalist signatories to this treaty also included Ramsden’s friends Nevile, Osborne and Savile.59A. Woolrych, ‘Yorkshire’s treaty of neutrality', HT vi. 696-704. The treaty was immediately condemned by Parliament and was soon rendered a dead letter in Yorkshire where the tide of war was flowing too strongly too resist.60CJ ii. 794a. Ramsden was closely involved in efforts to raise money for Newcastle’s army; and in February 1643, he was party to the so-called Yorkshire engagement, by which the signatories pledged their estates as security on loans for the supply of the earl’s troops.61CCAM 908. He himself lent £300 and signed bonds on the engagement for large sums of money.62Add. 15858, f. 237; Bodl. Tanner 62, ff. 655-6; Doncaster Archives, DD/CROM/11/6.

Ramsden’s commitment to the king’s cause was not confined to raising money for his armies. He was one of several northern royalists who attended the queen on her landing at Bridlington in February 1643; and later the same year he assumed a field command in Newcastle’s army.63W. Yorks. Archives (Leeds), WYL150 (former Vyner ms 5809); Newman, Royalist Officers, 310. By the spring of 1644, he was serving in the forces that Newcastle had left in Yorkshire under the command of Colonel John Belasyse*, who had replaced Sir William Savile as governor of York after the latter’s death late in 1643 (in his will, Savile had referred to Ramsden as his ‘kind friend’ and had named him, Francis Nevile and another gentleman his executors).64Infra, ‘Sir William Savile’.

In April 1644, Ramsden was among the royalist officers who were captured by the parliamentarians at the battle of Selby and, with Belasyse, was sent under guard to London.65LJ vi. 522b, 689a. On 31 May 1644, the two men were brought to the bar of the Commons, where the Speaker acquainted them with the ‘horror and grievousness’ of their offence

which was no less than, at one blow, to endeavour the ruin of religion, liberty, the privileges and very being of Parliaments and the introducing of popery and slavery ... and for these grievous crimes of high treason, you are ... committed as traitors to the Tower ...’66CJ iii. 512b; Add. 31116, p. 282; Harl. 166, f. 68.

After this harangue, Ramsden and Belasyse were committed to the Tower. Ramsden was described by the author of Mercurius Britanicus ‘as civil a malignant as is in this cause’ – which was perhaps an acknowledgement that he was not thought of as ‘popishly affected’ – and ‘one of those that are traitors in white satin [probably a reference to the livery of the earl of Newcastle], but the better he hath been, he is so much the worse’.67Mercurius Britanicus no. 32 (15-22 Apr. 1644), 253 (E.43.19). Within a few months of his imprisonment, he was exchanged (Belasyse had to wait until January 1645); and by late 1644 he was serving in the besieged royalist garrison at Pontefract.68N. Drake, ‘A jnl. of the first and second sieges of Pontefract, 1644-5’, ed. W.D.H. Longstaffe, in Miscellanea (Surt. Soc. xxxvii), 3-5, 78, 80-1. In July 1645, he was one of four royalist commissioners in the negotiations for the surrender of Pontefract Castle.69The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer no. 109 (15-23 July 1645), 872 (E.293.21). Nothing is known about him thereafter until his death nine months later in the royalist stronghold of Newark, where he was buried on 27 March 1646.70Foster, Yorks. Peds.

In his will, dated 3 September 1642, Ramsden referred to an indenture made two days earlier by which he had assigned several of his properties, including over 600 acres in Hatfield Chase, to Savile, Osborne, John Farrer (who sided with Parliament during the civil war) and Edward Hill to hold in trust and to sell after his death to pay off his debts. He appointed these four men his executors.71PROB11/199, ff. 335v-336v. In 1651, his son claimed that his father had left a personal estate of at least £2,000, a figure he revised in 1657 to £5,000. Ramsden’s widow, on the other hand, claimed that her husband’s personal estate had been negligible. Ramsden’s debts, according to his son, amounted to at least £8,000; according to his wife, £5,300.72C33/210, f. 752; C10/32/121; C10/51/150. None of Ramsden’s immediate family sat in Parliament.