RUDYERD, Sir Benjamin (1572-1658), of West Woodhay, Berks. and St James’s Park, London.

Connections and interests to 1640

As earlier in his career Rudyerd had owed his seat in Parliament (like his office in the court of wards) to the 3rd earl of Pembroke, so at both elections in 1640 he was beholden to the 4th earl, Philip Herbert*.33Letters of John Chamberlain ed. N.E. McClure (Philadelphia, 1939), ii. 263. Yet notwithstanding his close and enduring association with the Herberts, his contribution to the Commons went far beyond that of a mere client. Kinship, shared religious opinions and similar political outlook bound patron and beneficiary together, while Rudyerd’s role as trustee, with Sir Robert Pye I*, of successive earls’ estates, gave him an influential place in their counsels. Evidently even-tempered and humane, Sir Benjamin may indeed have exercised a calming influence on volatile Earl Philip.34‘Sir Benjamin Rudyerd’, ‘Philip Herbert, 4th earl of Pembroke’, Oxford DNB. There are some signs of co-ordination in their activities in Parliament, but wide experience, ideological commitment, rhetorical skill and a considerable personal reputation made Rudyerd an independent partner in the lower House rather than simply the mouthpiece of a leading nobleman. Together they combined commitment to traditional godly protestantism and antipathy to religious innovation (which paradoxically inclined them towards those who sought reform) with a preference for peaceable negotiation, which repeatedly sought an accommodation with the king. Alone, Rudyerd was among the pre-eminent parliamentary speech-makers, known inside and outside the chamber.

A relatively late entrant to Parliament in the 1620s, Rudyerd had been an eloquent champion of the church and its preaching ministry, and an advocate of adequate supply to support effective monarchy. He had also proved a useful supporter of the 3rd earl of Pembroke.35HP Commons 1604-1629. The pair had shared a particular intimacy in the joint composition of verse, but William Herbert’s death in 1630 made no observable difference to Rudyerd’s multi-faceted links with his family. Not only did Sir Benjamin also have Welsh ancestry on his mother’s side and a sister who was the wife of a Herbert of Brecon, but in the 1630s two nieces married Herberts from Monmouthshire, one being Henry Herbert*.36Vis. Hants, 141-2. Responsibilities as a trustee may if anything have increased.37Sheffield Archives, EM1351; Coventry Docquets, 221, 680, 706. On the other hand, Rudyerd’s circle was far from exclusive. As a member of the Providence Island Company and the leading gentleman of the Adventurers of London for trade in America, given its charter in April 1635, he worked with other puritan peers – Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland, William Fiennes, Viscount Saye and Sele, and Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke – as well as with John Pym*, with whom he had collaborated in the parliaments of the 1620s and with whom he was to maintain a association of trust despite their different styles of political operation.38Coventry Docquets, 266. As a letter of June 1637 reveals, he was on friendly terms with Pembroke’s cousin Robert Sidney, 2nd earl of Leicester.39Rudyerd Memoirs, 141. His house in St James’s park was well placed for mixing in polite society, while his office in the court of wards, apparently discharged conscientiously and humanely, put him in a position of power and influence among significant numbers of the elite.40CSP Dom. 1634-5, p. 359; 1639-40, p. 117; 1640-1, p. 483; 1625-49, p. 746; Bell, Court of Wards, 132. Such connections were to remain live through the next decade and a half, when Rudyerd’s course often seemed to run broadly parallel with those of some of his associates in the Lords.

In 1634 Rudyerd bought an estate at West Woodhay near Berkshire’s border with Hampshire and a few miles south of the road from Newbury to Marlborough; this became his main residence for taxation purposes.41VCH Berks. iv. 245.; E15/324/92. He was evidently a prosperous man, and William Prynne* alleged that, in the interval between the issuing of writs for elections in February 1640 and the opening of Parliament in April, the king, requesting various loans for the war in the north at the council table, proposed to ask him for £500.42W. Prynne, Hidden Workes of Darknes (1645), 181. If correct, the precise outcome is unknown. As became clear, Rudyerd was amenable in principle to supply, but not in this manner.

Short Parliament: the voice of reconciliation

Once the Commons got down to business, one diarist identified Rudyerd among the half-dozen most prominent activists, who ‘moved strongly to take beginning where they had left the last Parliament, ... [ripping] up the grievances both of church and commonwealth’.43Procs. 1640, 212. There is no doubting his relative contribution to proceedings: he is highly visible in all surviving accounts and his speeches exist in multiple, fairly consistent versions. However, his recorded comments are both more narrowly focussed and more charitably expressed than other those of other leading speakers like Sir Francis Seymour* and Harbottle Grimston*.

Rudyerd’s opening remarks on 16 April adopted a characteristically constructive and conciliatory tone: Members had ‘a great door opened to do good’. They should seize the opportunity to put behind them the ‘distempers’ of the 1620s and restore Parliament as ‘a bed of reconciliation between king and people’. Charles should be granted reasonable revenues and ‘temperate moderation’ would guarantee the future ‘happy Parliaments’ they all so much desired.44Procs. 1640, 138-40, 248-51; Aston’s Diary, 3-4; B. Rudyerd, Five Speeches (1641), 1-7; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1129-31. Taking up the theme again a week later he challenged the House to trust the king so that he might trust it in return. Rudyerd acknowledged that ‘the commonwealth ... was a most miserable spectacle, but we had the king’s word for redress, which as it was sacred, so likewise inviolable’45Procs. 1640, 169-70; Aston’s Diary, 36. In response to Grimston’s condemnation of Ship Money on 27 April, he regretted the necessity which had caused its levy and given rise to such dissension, but reiterated that the only way forward was trust. ‘Let us do that willingly which we must do, whether we will or no.’ His aim was ‘to preserve Parliaments’, for without them religion and liberties would suffer.46Aston’s Diary, 68, 71, 75; Procs. 1640, 178. As late as 4 May, when the message was relayed that Charles would forgo Ship Money in return for 12 subsidies, Rudyerd remained optimistic, counting it ‘a great happiness’ that there was a body to vote money instead of taxation at will. This was not a ‘gift’ but a well-advised ‘purchase’ of the king’s affections, with the prospect that ‘we shall cure all diseases’.47Procs. 1640, 194, 208; Aston’s Diary, 129.

In the meantime Rudyerd had still engaged in discussion of religious issues he clearly prized highly. Nominated to the committees for privileges and the act for apparel (16, 21 Apr.), on four successive days he was engaged in preparing for the conferences with the Lords on the articulation of religious grievances (especially in relation innovation and the commission granted to Convocation, then sitting) and of the liberties of the subject which formed the backdrop to their answer to the royal request for supply.48CJ ii. 4a, 8a, 8b, 9b, 10a, 12a. He contributed on 29 April to the ensuing debate on the prospective ecclesiastical Canons, although the exact meaning of his intervention is unclear.49Aston’s Diary, 92.

Church reform and relations with Scotland, 1640-1

Rudyerd’s disappointment when Parliament was dissolved on 5 May may be readily surmised. That his faith in the institution was undiminished is evident in his speech at the beginning of business in the next Parliament on 7 November, although he confessed that ‘the deplorable, dismal condition both of church and state’ by this time propelled him towards unaccustomed vehemence of expression. His priorities were encapsulated in his first sentence: ‘we are here assembled to do God’s business and the king’s, in which our own is included, as we are Christians, as we are subjects’. In the conviction that failure to give precedence to the things of God had undermined previous parliaments, he proceeded to identify the major causes for concern – the prosecution of preaching ministers over their refusal to countenance ‘vain petty trifles’ like dancing on Sundays; the promotion by the likes of Peter Heylyn of ‘obsolete antiquated ceremonies new furbished up’; the countenancing of anti-puritan rhetoric from papists like the Franciscan controversialist Christopher Davenport (Franciscus à Sancta Clara). If religion, for a long time under threat, were secured then the whole kingdom would be the safer. Turning to ‘the miseries of the commonwealth’, he insisted that Members should not use them to take advantage of the king. They were ‘at a vertical point’ (a phrase that caught the attention of several auditors). Their trust was to do better than the subversive and destructive royal advisers who had weakened Charles’s authority, exhausted his treasury and eclipsed his reputation, thereby ‘almost spoil[ing] the best instituted government in the world’. ‘Reciprocation’ was ‘the sweetest, the strongest union’ between ruler and ruled; the ‘fountain’ of frequent, generous parliaments was preferable to the ‘leaking conduit pipes’ of ‘projects and monopolies’, and to the broken cistern of the exchequer. While disclaiming animosity, envy or desire for any man’s blood, Rudyerd proclaimed himself

zealous for a thorough reformation, in a time that exacts it, extorts it. Which I humbly beseech this House, may be done with as much lenity, as much moderation, as the public safety of the king and kingdom can possibly admit.50Rudyerd, Five Speeches, 8-16; The Speeches (1641), 1-10 (E.196.2, 3, 4); Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 24-6; iii. 1341, 1349-51, 1355, 1358; Procs. LP i. 34, 38, 42.

Over the ten months until he obtained temporary leave of absence on 31 August 1641, Rudyerd’s main effort in the House was directed towards speeches in the same vein.51CJ ii. 278b. They reached a wide audience, and were the chief cause of Peter Heylyn’s seeking refuge in the country.52P. Heylyn, Extraneus Valupans (1656), 55 (E.1641.1). Meanwhile, Rudyerd’s contribution to committee work was modest; significantly about half of it involved participating in and preparing for conferences with the Lords, with whom he was a natural negotiator.

Religion, and the attainment of a Protestant middle way, remained a major preoccupation. On the same day that he delivered the speech above he was nominated to discuss a fast day with the Upper House and to take measures to ensure all Members of the Commons had recently taken the sacrament.53CJ ii. 23b, 24a. The following spring he was named second to work on the act to promote the preaching of the gospel (12 April 1641).54CJ ii. 119a. When the Canons issued by Convocation came up for debate, he was predictably forthright in his condemnation of ‘innovations and alterations in doctrine and discipline’ (15 Dec. 1640), although he thought that, having used ‘untempered mortar’, the ‘spiritual engineers’ had achieved only a ‘tottering hierarchy’. But as he moved to have ‘these heavy, drossy Canons, with all their base metal ... melted and dissolved’, he gave notice that he had no agenda to overthrow episcopal government while ‘one good Cranmer, or one good Latimer or Ridley’ might be found to ‘counterbalance’ the pride and arrogance of ‘any proud Becket, or Wolsey-prelates’ or any Edmund Bonner.55Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 111; Rudyerd Memoirs, 174-6.

However, according to Simonds D’Ewes*, it was not until 8 February 1641 that Rudyerd launched fully into this debate.56Procs. LP ii. 390. In a published but undated speech which may reasonably be ascribed to this day, he revealed that he considered it right to attack those clergy who abandoned ‘the simplicity of the gospel’ for ‘a specious, pompous, sumptuous religion, with additionals of temporal greatness’ and ‘a Roman ambition’ which substituted ‘government’ for preaching and which threatened the monarchy itself. Restraint of bishops ‘to the duties of their function, as they may nevermore hanker after heterogeneous extravagant employments’ was a proper concern of Parliament. Yet he submitted that ‘a popular democratical government of the church’ was neither ‘suitable [n]or acceptable to a regal monarchical government of the state’. Thus he argued for the punishment of ‘the present offenders’ but for an appropriately-endowed ministry overseen by bishops shorn of overwheening and corrupting powers, ‘according to the usage of the ancient churches’. Invoking again the memory of ‘those glorious martyr-bishops who were burned for our religion in the times of popery’, he commended as worthy of double honour those good bishops who preached still.57Lord Digbies Speech in the House of Commons (1641), 15-18; Rudyerd, Five Speeches, 20-3; The Speeches, 15-20; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1344-7; iv. 183-4.

Prompt in taking the Protestation on 3 May, Rudyerd perhaps considered that the argument for moderation in religious reform had been won.58CJ ii. 133a. As debate was renewed the following month, he expressed the dismay of those who perceived an accelerating radical impetus. When it was moved on 11 June to order translation of a long speech in favour of episcopacy containing much Latin, according to one Member he ‘told us that it was a parliamentary waste’.59Procs. LP v. 98. In a rejoinder the same day to the anticlerical eloquence of Nathaniel Fiennes I*, he professed astonishment. The idea that there could be no ‘reformation’, no ‘purging’ of the episcopate but only ‘abolition’ and ‘demolition’ ‘turns me round about, it makes my whole reason vertiginous’. Once again he conceded ‘that some of our bishops have had ambitious, dangerous aims, and have so still, that in their government there are very great enormities’. He also acknowledged the historical contribution of Christian states to the establishment of churches and the role of Parliament in the dissolution of the monasteries – due punishment for ‘the profane superstitions, the abominable idolatries, the filthy nefandous [abominable] wickedness of their lives’, which ‘did call down for vengeance’. But the ‘principal parliamentary motive’ then, ‘to enrich the crown as that the people would never be put to pay subsidies again’ and to use the surplus to maintain ‘a standing army of forty thousand men for a perpetual defence of the kingdom’, had not been realised. By the blessing of God religion ‘hath been reasonably well preserved, but it hath been saved as by fire, for the rest is consumed and vanished’. Although ‘the people have paid subsidies ever since, and we are now in no very good case to pay an army’, it was unacceptable to ‘look with a worldly, carnal, evil eye upon church lands’. Clergy and scholars, ‘not bred to multiply threepences’, required respect and endowment, and it would ‘be a shameful reproach to so flourishing a kingdom as this’ if they were ‘poor and beggarly’: ‘burning and shining lights do well deserve to be set in good candlesticks’.60B. Rudyerd, Speech concerning Bishops, Deans and Chapters (1641, E.198.40); Five Speeches, 24-9; Procs. LP v. 97. His argument and his imagery here as elsewhere stuck in the memory.61E.g. [S. Butler], A Letter from Mercurius Civicus to Mercurius Rusticus (1643), 5

The same constructive approach, measured tones and inherent generosity were apparent in other aspects of Rudyerd’s activity in the Commons. Placed on committees reviewing the court of wards and the council of the Marches of Wales (16 Feb., 13 Aug. 1641), Rudyerd appears to have been open to reform; he supplied the former with helpful information.62CJ ii. 87a, 253b; CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 483. His sensitivity to a popish threat made him an unsurprising addition to those delegated to investigate a fatal attack in the palace at Whitehall on an employee of the House who brought intelligence of Catholics around Westminster (27 Nov. 1640).63CJ ii. 37b. Having personal knowledge of lunacy in the murderer and his family in the course of wards business, Rudyerd argued in debate the next day for a minimum sentence which recognised the malefactor’s mental incapacity.64Northcote Note Bk. 11. Having successfully proposed that William Prynne, the most high-profile victim of the court of high commission be restored to his chambers at Lincoln’s Inn (20 May 1641), presumably he was an open-minded auditor of petitions from London prisoners (28 Aug.).65Procs. LP iv. 491; CJ ii. 274b. Involved from an early stage (30 Nov. 1640) in talks with the Lords over the prosecution of the lord lieutenant of Ireland, Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, he moved (12 Apr. 1641) for continued liaison with the upper chamber and stressed the peers’ conviction that the offence was something short of treason.66CJ ii. 39b, 98a; Procs. LP iii. 512, 517. Although one diarist recorded him using untypically extreme language against the earl – ‘as a flatigious [criminal], facinerous [evil], as dangerous [as] a man be’ (14 Apr.) – two days later he urged MPs to ‘invert not the saying, “Slow to speak and swift to hear”’ for ‘judges must first fully hear and then justly determine’.67Two Diaries of Long Parl. 38; Verney, Notes, 49.

With regard to financing both the royal family and the military campaign in the north, Rudyerd was consistently a voice for prudence, realism and equitable compromise, probably at cross purposes with those who cultivated the Scots as a weapon against the king. In response to a petition from Northumberland outlining the distress caused by the occupying Scots army, he was quick to move for a declaration promising charitable relief (10 Nov. 1640).68Procs. LP i. 80, 87. He recommended that the bill to confirm the jointure of a queen who had provided the king ‘with hopeful and fruitful progency’ and who showed ‘good affection to Parliament’ should be passed ‘cheerfully’ (12 Dec.), and he took a leading role in its later committee stages (17 Feb. 1641).69Northcote Note Bk. 53-4; CJ ii. 87b. When the Commons debated a subsidy for the army he urged ‘that timely provision be made, or it may cost us more than money’ (23 Dec. 1640), rejoicing at the prospect of a full financial settlement (29 Dec.).70Northcote Note Bk. 106; Rudyerd Memoirs, 166-7; Bodl. Tanner 65, f. 242. Apparently anxious not to delegate the managing of the Commons’ part in treating with the Scots solely to John Pym*, who might be expected to manipulate it to prolong their occupation (18 Nov.), by 21 January 1641 Rudyerd was ready to thank the peers’ commissioners for mediation between the Scots and the king ‘whereby (God assisting) we are now probably drawing near to a blessed peace’, but in a subtle speech that tried hard to be reasonable (if it ignored Scots poverty) he recognised there was some way to go to meet all aspirations. He addressed the uncomfortable fact that the Scots, having secured from Charles assent to acts of their Parliament ratifying their religion, laws and liberties, now unexpectedly claimed £514,000 to cover the expenses of their campaign. He appreciated that success by the sword ‘enlarges men’s desires, extends their ambition, [and] breeds thoughts in them they never thought before: this is natural and usual’, but he trusted that ‘being truly touched with religion according to their profession’ they would keep their original promise. The English ‘could allege’ that the cost of recovery in the north would be costly and long-drawn-out and that the sum demanded exceeded any former subsidy to the king ‘at a very dry time, when the king’s revenue is totally exhausted, his debts excessively multiplied, this kingdom generally impoverished’. However, he ‘delighted not to press such tenter-stretched arguments’, was prepared to concede to the Scots a just and honourable compensation, and hoped for ‘a closer, firmer union between the two nations ... with inestimable benefits to both’.71Procs. LP i. 171; vii. 171; Five Speeches, 16-19; The Speeches, 11-13; Rudyerd Memoirs, 169-72; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 167-8. On the English side, in response to a troubling relation in the Commons on 18 February that only a fraction of sums promised to the their army had been collected, he insisted that ‘if we failed with this money it would endanger both our honour and our safeties’.72Procs. LP ii. 479.

From the outset, Rudyerd was called on to address sensitive political and security matters: his relatively few committee nominations (averaging about two a month for the first year) were thus significant. Moreover, a good deal of his activity in some way concerned the nobility, the royal family or both. On 10 November 1640 he was named both to draw a declaration on the state of the kingdom and confer with the Lords on breach of privilege.73CJ ii. 25a, 25b. His links with noblemen temperamentally more radical than himself may well have been strengthened by the appointment of Saye and Sele as master of the wards in January 1641. The following summer he participated in several important conferences with peers, including those on disorder (11 May), Charles’s proposed journey to Scotland (26 June), and John Pym’s controversial ten propositions to increase parliamentary control over national and local officeholders (28 June).74CJ ii. 143b, 189b, 190b, 207a, 259b. It was perhaps with a view to protecting friends in the Upper House, as well as to dampening dangerous speculation, that he moved on 24 June to block the further reading of intercepted letters discussing peers’ relations with the queen and their views on the fate of Strafford.75Procs. LP v. 317. Interventions on 26 July and 12 August suggest attempts to reduce the severity of proceedings against Henry Percy*, brother of Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, and brother-in-law of the earl of Leicester, for his part in the alleged ‘army plot’, while on 13 August Rudyerd moved for the discharge of Sir Percy Herbert† from detainment from the committee for convicted recusants.76Procs. LP vi. 96, 386, 404. However, it is difficult to determine whether the driving force here was pressure from patrons or desire for moderation: either way, it doubtless owed something to an obliging nature also displayed towards colleagues in the Lower House, for at least two of whom he proposed and obtained leave at this time.77Procs. LP v. 633; vi. 184.

Rudyerd was especially visible in Parliament that July and August, and in characteristic form. Having proposed that the queen’s mother, Marie de Medici, should be offered £10,000 to encourage her speedy return to France, he was placed on the committee to find the money (5 July), while two weeks later he was chosen to compose the Commons’ thanks to the queen for acceding to their request not to follow her abroad.78Procs. LP v. 499; vi. 45; CJ ii. 199a. Also on 5 July he reminded MPs of the former engagement to restore the family of the king’s sister Elizabeth to the Rhine palatinate, and proposed a committee to resurrect the issue, to which he was duly nominated that day.79Procs. LP, v. 496, 499, 501; CJ ii. 199b. On this he was perhaps taking up the baton from Sir Thomas Rowe*, whose absence on embassy to the imperial court lent a context for and urgency to Rudyerd’s raising the issue, but it was a cause close to his heart both for family reasons – his sister-in-law Harington was in service to the queen of Bohemia – and, as is evident from his two speeches, because it accorded with his sense of the international obligations of England as the leading Protestant nation.80B. Rudyerd, Two Speeches concerning the Palatinate (1641); Procs. LP vii. 184; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 315-16. Parallel moves in the 1620s had foundered on the financial weakness of the crown, but that Rudyerd had not entirely forgotten this awkward fact, or more general concerns about money, is demonstrated by a speech on 31 July in which, in response to the lord treasurer’s report on the costs of the navy, he urged settling ‘a revenue for the king’.81Procs. LP vi. 162.

In the meantime Rudyerd offered perspectives on other, related aspects of the international situation. When on 8 July Pym drew attention to warrants granted to recusants to levy men for foreign military service, Sir Benjamin was quick to take up his argument that this might be prejudicial to the kingdom.82Procs. LP v. 560. He returned to the theme on 28 August, moving for a vote to register opposition of a plan to send 4,000 Irish into Spanish service.83Procs. LP vi. 594. He recognised that the ruler of an island might be ‘the great arbiter of all the affairs of Christendom’, as Henry VIII had been, but the object was to achieve a balance of power in Europe. At this juncture, as well as tending to ‘damp and discountenance the affairs of the prince elector’ which should have first call on surplus troops, it would be ‘exceeding prejudicial to us, and to our religion’ to assist the king of Spain against Portugal and, indeed, to assist the king of France either. If ‘the present government of Ireland be not able to restrain their disordered people’, said Rudyerd optimistically, then the new lieutenant-designate (the earl of Leicester) was ‘abundantly capable to reduce them to due obedience’. Meanwhile, ‘we should not be forward to spend our men, but rather to preserve ... them for our own use ... for our friends, for our religion’.84B. Rudyerd, His Speech made in answer to the French and Spanish (1641) (E.199.6); Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 381-2.

Celebrating achievement and averting calamity, 1641-2

It was three days after this speech that, notwithstanding his prominent inclusion on a committee dealing with the establishment of a new overseas trading company (30 Aug.), Rudyerd obtained leave of absence.85CJ ii. 276a, 278b. He was back at Westminster on 20 October, when Parliament re-assembled after a six-week recess, and was immediately active. The first to break the silence as the Commons digested letters from the governor of Berwick and the parliamentary commissioners to Scotland, Rudyerd, who had previously signalled his close interest in the commissioners’ brief, stood up to urge that the contents merited a conference with the Lords.86D’Ewes (C), 14; Procs. LP vi. 404. He was placed on the resulting committee, whose designated aim was to ‘secure the kingdom and Parliament’.87CJ ii. 290a.

For the remaining weeks of 1641 references to Rudyerd are surprisingly sparse, but his rare recorded appearances in proceedings could be confident and commanding. Once again on 1 November he was first to react to momentous news, moving for urgent action for the suppression of the rebellion in Ireland, although with John Hampden* he was subsequently (12 Nov.) excused the duty of going to inform the City of London of measures to raise money for the purpose; Sir Robert Pye I* and Sir Henry Mildmay*, sent instead, were probably more forceful agents.88D’Ewes (C), 62, 129; CJ ii. 313a. Named second (13 Nov.) to the committee investigating the delicate issue of offence offered to Amerigo Salvetti Antelminelli, envoy of the duke of Florence, by men employed by the House to apprehend Catholic priests, Rudyerd was probably more in his element.89CJ ii. 314a. His concern to protect Parliament from the false aspersions cast by papists and others led him to express qualified support for the Grand Remonstrance (22 Nov.): as one diarist noted somewhat opaquely, ‘the narrative part in part he agrees to, but not the prophetical part’.90Verney, Notes, 122.

In December Rudyerd operated in the familiar territory of consultation with the Lords, this time over petitioning from the Fens (11 and 27 Dec.).91CJ ii. 338b, 358b. But his main contribution was on 29 December, when he reviewed in unusually uncompromising terms the context in which Parliament was to decide how to treat with the Scottish commissioners over the situation in Ireland. Six impediments hindered expedition of the agreement: divisions between the two chambers at Westminster, for which he blamed ‘the bishops’ (i.e. the imprisoned hardliners) and ‘such Lords as favour them’, whom he demanded be respectively ‘speedily brought to trial’ and ‘removed from the presence of his majesty’; unprecedented disagreement within the Commons; ‘the multiplicity of petitions daily delivered to the House’ requiring time-consuming attention; the practices of papists in general, and priests and Jesuits in particular, in slowing action on Ireland; the delay in the execution of priests lately condemned; the failure to remove ‘popish officers of this state, that have places of great trust and strength committed to their fidelity’. Although he cited ‘the records’ of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth and James I, ‘our late peaceable Solomon of blessed memory’ to prove his point and earned from his printer an approving epithet, there was a notable lack of his habitual logic, subtlety and understanding. In his urgency, there were also no visible qualms about the Scots.92B. Rudyerd, His Learned Speech (1641, E.199.45).

It is conceivable that shock at events in Ireland accounted for Rudyerd’s change of tone and for a modest but palpable hardening of his position: he had personal knowledge of the destruction through his wife’s nephew Thomas Roper, 2nd Viscount Baltinglass, whose petition for preferment to compensation for a ‘whole estate ... ruined by rebels’ he presented to the Commons on 25 January 1642.93PJ i. 159, 166; CJ ii. 392b. In an undated speech in favour of generous provision for the poor English refugees who had returned from the plantations he bore witness to the impact of the rebellion. He claimed to have known some who, in the months preceding it, ‘were resolved to make Ireland their retreat as the safer kingdom of the two’, but now ‘we see a great, a dismal change’. He shuddered audibly: ‘God knows whose turn shall be next ... that which happens to one country, may happen to any’.94B. Rudyerd, Two Speeches in the House of Commons (1642), A2-v (E.200.19).

The speech of 29 December also heralded six months of higher profile in the Commons. On 5 January Rudyerd was nominated to a resurrected committee to review the state of Ireland (of which an 8 February report indicates that he was a leading member), while on the 17th he was also placed on the committee at Grocers’ Hall, newly constituted to oversee important political affairs and communicate with the recently-departed king, and on an overlapping committee specifically conferring with the Lords over the parliamentary privileges which Charles had breached on 3 January in his abortive attempt to arrest MPs.95CJ ii. 369a, 384a, 385a; PJ i. 319. He was also among those who discussed with peers the king’s answer to the Scots commissioners’ proposals on Ireland (27 Jan.).96CJ ii. 400a. As he revealed on 7 February, he was keen to persuade Charles to return to London, probably not least to expedite these discussions.97PJ i. 297. His sentiment was doubtless reinforced following the revelation of compromising letters from George Digby*, Lord Digby, to the queen and others: he was named to the committee to answer the king’s response (18 Feb.).98CJ ii. 439a. Three other nominations that month included those to work on the bills to suppress religious innovation and promote both sabbath observance and preaching (17 Feb.), and to fix punishments for John Williams, archbishop of York (22 Feb.).99CJ ii. 438a, 440a, 448b. Dissatisfaction at the slow pace of reformation prompted him to move on 26 March for ‘a speedy day ... to settle the distractions of the church for the present, and to provide for the future’.100PJ ii. 89. In such matters, he explained in an undated speech on Ireland published around this time, convenience was an inadmissible criterion:

when religion is so nearly concerned, I love not to take any civil or politic respects into consideration; reason of state hath almost eaten up all the laws and religion of Christendom.

Far from being too ‘nice and tender’ in letting a perception of the popish threat drive foreign policy, as some had suggested, the English political nation had not been sufficiently bold. Since the Irish made ‘religion the cause of their rebellion ... shall we be ashamed, or afraid, in reducing them to their duty and obedience?’ God would not honour those who did not honour him.101Two Speeches in the House of Commons (1642), 5-6 (E.200.20).

Such sentiments may hold the key to Rudyerd’s stance over the next few months, as he argued for peace but ultimately adhered to Parliament. Following the king’s rejection of the militia ordinance, presented to him by Pembroke and Holland at Newmarket, Rudyerd was on committees preparing justifications of parliamentary action (14, 29 Mar.).102CJ ii. 478a, 504b. He was also among the first named to respond to Charles’s actions following the latter’s arrival in Yorkshire (29 Apr.).103CJ ii. 548b. Meanwhile Rudyerd got his wish for further action on religious reform. He was involved in committees for building up the church (4 Apr.) and overhauling the Charterhouse and the Savoy (9 Apr.), as well as for rewarding Speaker William Lenthall* (4 Apr.) and upholding the inheritance rights of Pembroke’s wife, Lady Anne Clifford, against her cousin Henry Clifford, 5th earl of Cumberland (7 Apr.).104CJ ii. 510b, 511a, 515a, 519b. He still found time to promote the interests of the queen of Bohemia and her family, moving for financial provision in a bill of tonnage and poundage (23 Apr.), and as late as 17 June could swallow his anti-Catholic scruples sufficiently to move for the bailing of Sir Percy Herbert, this time detained for clandestine disabling of the public magazine in Montgomeryshire.105PJ ii. 207; iii. 92. His talents were employed in cultivating the Portuguese ambassador (10 June), and at this juncture he did not escape treating with merchants and other potential lenders of funds to Parliament (13 May; 3, 7 and 14 June).106PJ iii. 57; CJ ii. 570b, 601b, 610b, 617b, 623a, 633a. He himself offered £100 ‘freely without interest’ (10 June).107Bodl. Tanner 63, f. 53.

Rudyerd had not given up hope of a healing of political divisions. As the House debated on 23 June the king’s answer to the Nineteen Propositions, he and Thomas Tomkins* moved to seek an accommodation.108PJ iii. 120. On 9 July, with the king’s army encamped around Hull, he contemplated the abyss and ‘in fearful expectation of dreadful calamities’ launched another attempt in a speech which became widely quoted. He invited MPs to consider the many unforeseen developments of the previous three years: the queen’s departure, the king’s removal to York for his safety, the ‘total rebellion in Ireland’, ‘the distempers ... in church and state’. He also invoked the many achievements: the removal of monopolies, high commission, star chamber and bishops’ votes; the regulation of the privy council; the restraint of royal forests; triennial, nay perpetual, Parliaments. In 1639 this would have seemed ‘a dream of happiness, yet now we are in the real possession of it, we do not enjoy it’, although the king had ‘promised and published he will make all this good to us’. The stumbling block to acceptance of Charles’s latest concessions on recusancy was the desire for ‘further security’, but insistence on this was unnecessary and unrealistic. It risked ‘the loss of what we have already; let us not think we have nothing because we have not all we desire, and though we had, yet we cannot make a mathematical security’. Men could not bind God’s providence. ‘At the very brink of combustion and confusion’ every man in the chamber was ‘bound in conscience to employ his utmost endeavours to prevent the effusion of blood’ to save his liberties, his estates and his soul.109Two Speeches Spoken in the House of Commons (1643), 4-6 (E.94.7); A Most Worthy Speech in the House of Commons (1642); Two Worthy Speeches (1643); Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 753-4; J. Heath, A Brief Chronicle of All the Chief Actions (1662), 6.

Rudyerd had not appeared in the Commons Journal since 20 June, and did not do so again until 4 August, when he was appropriately included on the committee preparing the act for due observation of public fasting.110CJ ii. 633a, 702b. There is no evidence as to whether, in the interim, he turned to practical negotiation, or as to his purpose in obtaining leave on 8 August to go into the country.111CJ ii. 709a. However, his speech swiftly reached York, being published there on 23 July.112B. Rudyerd, A Worthy Speech (1642, E.200.53).

‘Lukewarm’ Parliamentarian, 1642-3

There was no sign of Rudyerd being at Westminster again until 25 October, when he was added to a committee considering the form of prayer used by the Speaker at the beginning of each day’s proceedings.113CJ ii. 822b. It is possible that he had been in London and was motivated to resume attendance by news of the inconclusive battle at Edgehill. Whatever the explanation, over the next seven weeks he was an occasional but significant presence in the Journal. On 27 October he was among MPs delegated to go with peers to inform the City authorities of Parliament’s intelligence of Edgehill, while the next day he was nominated to the committee for receiving despatches from Members still in their own counties.114CJ ii. 825a. On the 31st he joined Edmund Waller* and others in another attempt at conflict resolution, arguing ‘that the Scots when they were in contention with the king did petition him for peace 52 times, and therefore we should not think much to petition him again, we being his subjects, and he our lawful king’, but failed to secure debate on this.115Add. 31116, p. 9; Add. 18777, f. 47. With Sir Henry Mildmay he went on 4 November to convey the House’s formal farewell to the earl of Leicester on his departure to take up office in Ireland; later he was on a committee considering reports from the army there, together with the king’s reaction (10 Dec.).116CJ ii. 835b, 883b. Meanwhile, following the return to London of Parliament’s lord general, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, Rudyerd prepared with John Glynne*, William Pierrepont* and Pym a justification of why neither House could accept from the king a safe conduct for commissioners to treat for peace at Reading (8 Nov.).117CJ ii. 840b.

He could hardly have sustained such activity if he doubted Parliament’s right to contend for its cause, and perhaps a combination of Pembroke’s recent poor relations with the king and his own religious convictions convinced him at this point that he could wield more influence at Westminster than at Oxford. If so, the conviction appeared to waver as the year turned, and royalist forces separated him from both his Berkshire estate and his Wiltshire constituency. On 31 December he offered a somewhat modest £30 when MPs promised loans for the maintenance of their army, but the gulf between his priorities and those of militants like Pym was exposed.118Add. 18777, f. 110. On 3 January 1643 the latter ‘moved for a national association between us and Scotland’, ostensibly as an anti-papal alliance, but patently also as a means to underwrite resistance to the king, while Rudyerd, in no way dissenting from the magnitude of the perceived Catholic threat – ‘the papists have given us assurance we shall haue no toleration of our religion beyond seas’ – proposed a very different solution. What was needed was ‘the planting of a preaching ministry throughout the kingdom’ and the suppression of the sins of ‘idolatry, oppression and [?]fullness’. Precisely what he had in mind here is not clear, but there is no doubt that his focus was moral reform, not a military pact.119Add. 18777, f. 112.

Failing once again to carry the debate, he absented himself from the Commons. On 13 January 1643 Rudyerd was enjoined to attend the House and not to depart without leave.120CJ ii. 925b. He had reappeared by 17 February, when he delivered another impassioned plea for negotiation. Pronouncing the votes for disbanding the armies in March ineffectual, he urged MPs to confront the seriousness of the current situation and proceed towards a complete resolution. Very little had been achieved since the previous summer and ‘now the disposition of the kingdom, for the greatest part, stands bent toward a peace’. No treaty ‘of any importance’ was ‘ever swallowed whole’; ‘harsh and rough’ propositions could be rejected by ‘wise treaters’. Having ‘tasted the bloody fruits of war’, the nation was heading towards ruin, and short of a ‘great miracle’ would arrive there if nothing were done. He derived some grim comfort from the consideration that ‘our miseries are not likely to last long’: since Britain was an island ‘we must fight as in a cockpit’, ‘the whole kingdom will suddenly be but one flame’. But there was a clear responsibility to avert it: ‘blood is a crying sin, it pollutes a land’.121Rudyerd, Two Speeches, A2-A3; Speech in the High Court of Parliament the 17 of February (E.90.15).

For two or three months Rudyerd was only occasionally present in the chamber, preaching moderation when opportunity allowed. He was named to small committees to receive information from Sir Edmund Stafford (21 Feb.) and to draft a response to intercepted letters from Elizabeth of Bohemia (4 Mar.).122CJ ii. 975a, 989a. When the Lords and Commons took opposite decisions over whether to fire ordnance at the Tower of London to mark the king’s accession day, and ‘hot spirits’ defended the latter’s order to suspend it, Rudyerd was among those who spoke for its retention on the ground of the universal dishonour created ‘for the sparing of so small and inconsequential a quantity of powder’.123Harl. 164, f. 342v. On 17 April he was again enjoined to attend the House, implying suspicion of potential defection.124CJ iii. 48b. There were those who thought his reputation as a ‘true Protestant and patriot’ a ‘plausible pretence’ and that his search for accommodation merely ‘weakened the hands of the many well-affected’, while the poet John Taylor, writing in Oxford, suggested that Rudyerd did not fit easily in either camp, dismissing his speeches as ‘lukewarm (too cold for the king, too hot for Parliament)’.125Accommodation discommended as incommodious to the Commonwealth (1643), 3; J Taylor, A Preter-Pluperfect Spick and Span New Nocturnall (1643), 3 (E.65.1).

However, when Rudyerd returned to more regular appearances in the Commons from mid-May 1643, it was initially to engage in activity well within his comfort zone. He began to attend the select Committee for Irish Affairs, and on 18 May he was placed on the committee preparing a declaration that rebellion in Ireland had intended ‘the utter overthrow and extermination of the Protestant religion’.126SP16/539/127, ff. 24, 25, 26, 32, 40v; Add. 4771, ff. 15, 48v, 55; CJ iii. 91a. On the 24th he obtained a pass for two children of his royalist court of wards colleague Sir William Fleetwood* (another who owed his seat to Pembroke) to travel to Woodstock.127Harl. 164, f. 391v. Among the first to subscribe the new Covenant on 6 June, the following day he was named as a lay member of the Westminster Assembly of divines, this prospect perhaps another inducement to stay on side.128CJ iii. 118a, 119b.

He had contemplated the Assembly’s establishment in an undated speech published the previous year. After a characteristic appeal for the prioritising of religion ‘with sobriety, wisdom, charity, until we have settled it in a solid grounded peaceable way’, he identified ‘the masterpiece’ of the intended assembly as the selection of ‘fit agents’. These he defined, in terms he perhaps also applied to secular magistrates, as

wise, learned, unbiased men, such have showed themselves desirous of reformation in the government, in the liturgy, willing to remove whatsoever may offend or scruple weak and tender consciences; men not hide-bound in their opinions, lovers of peace more than of themselves. Peace is tranquillitatis ordo [just order, as in St Augustine] and order is the soul of outward things: it keeps them quiet and clear from jostling and interfering with one another.

Well aware that proficiency in preaching did not equate to ability ‘for this active, extensive employment’, he called not for ‘narrow, shady, speculative men, but rather, men of large, sober, practical understanding, prudent men’. Prudence was indeed the ‘reason and rule of things which are to be acted’. That said, he was prepared to accept all nominations in the hope that, in pursuit of the ‘long-delayed reformation’, ‘all of us join as one man for the peace of Jerusalem and the Israel of God’.129Rudyerd, Two Speeches in Parliament, A2-v.

Rudyerd was to speak three times in the Assembly. On 13 December 1643 he appeared to irritate Edmund Calamy with a characteristically mild observation that it was ‘strange to seek for’ precise models of leadership in a New Testament Church by scanning the Old Testament, while on 12 April 1644 he sought clarification as Assembly members discussed their communication with Parliament.130Mins. and Papers of the Westminster Assembly ed. C. van Dixhoorn, ii. 449; iii. 11. His most substantial recorded contribution, made on 30 April 1646 when he was despatched as one of a four-man delegation from the Commons concerned to rein in clerical pretension, suggests that his stance changed little over time. The ‘jus divinum’ [divine right] claimed by its members for their proposed settlement was ‘of a formidable and tremendous nature’ which would have to be justified by ‘clear, practical and express scriptures, not by far fetched arguments’. Rudyerd’s reading of the New Testament led him to reject ecclesiological dogmatism. ‘The first rule is to let all things be done decently and in order to edification. Decency and order are variable and therefore cannot be jure divino.’ He acknowledged the general perception that ‘the present Assembly are pious and learned men, but a Parliament is to make laws for all sorts of men’. For these latter, in a context where ‘neither do all the churches agree throughout’, ‘strict discipline’ administered by the clergy lacked sanction. ‘The civil magistrate is a church officer in every Christian commonwealth’ and even in Scotland ‘the clergy are moderated’ by the ‘scattered parliament’ of the nobility and gentry in their midst.131Mins. and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, iv. 97.

Meanwhile in the Commons Rudyerd was nominated to committees to supply the royal children at St James’s with attendants and chaplains whose religion was sound (26 June) and to advise on what to do with MPs who had taken and violated the Covenant (23 Aug.).132CJ iii. 145b, 216b. In an apparent sudden flurry of activity in late July and August he was again delegated to work on the abolition of the court of wards (24 July), to regulate money-raising (25, 29 July) and to confer with the Lords on the queen of Bohemia (21 Aug.).133CJ iii. 179b, 181a, 186a, 213b. But in the midst of this he doggedly contended for peace. When on 4 August, following the twin disasters of the defeat at Roundway Down and the surrender of Bristol, some of the more militant MPs opposed a meeting with peers to discuss further propositions to be sent to the king, Rudyerd stood up to counter this, reminding his colleagues once more of the unlooked-for spilling of blood.134Harl. 165, f. 135v. Persuasive on this occasion, he took the message of acceptance to the Lords the next day and reported the ensuing conference.135CJ iii. 195b, 196b; LJ vi. 171b. Yet like other moderate spirits, he appears to have appreciated the unwisdom of abject capitulation: notwithstanding the violent demonstrations in London against the war, with Mildmay and Grimston he was deputed to convey to Essex the resolution of the House to adhere to him as their commander in the west.136CJ iii. 200. He supported the appointment of Sir William Waller*, a man who had ‘done good service’, as governor of Portsmouth (12 Sept.), and was among MPs nominated to compose differences between Waller and Essex (28 Sept.); it was probably very agreeable to Rudyerd that they could report back that ‘the lord general said what is past is buried and will begin upon a new score’.137Add. 18778, f. 38v; CJ iii. 256a.

Presbyterian in religion and politics, 1643-5

Despite his advancing age, from October 1643 to November 1645 Rudyerd had a fairly regular pattern of visible activity in the House, with an average of two committee nominations a month. Only in December 1644 was he absent altogether from the Journal. A relatively modest number of appointments related to religion, but they were significant. On 28 February 1644 Rudyerd and Mildmay were awarded control of who should preach at Whitehall, while in March he was called as a witness to the trial of Archbishop William Laud.138CJ iii. 410b, 422a. Added to the Committee for Plundered Ministers on 19 November, he also worked on the ordinance abolishing superstitious worship (27 Apr.) and considered the petition for the printing of the Septuagint bible (3 Jan. 1645).139CJ iii. 470b, 699b; iv. 9a. A persistent advocate – his awareness of difference in practices apparently trumped by his desire for orderliness – of a clear set form for church government and worship (for example in debate on 30 Apr. 1644), he was among MPs who discussed the clause on the Lord’s Supper in the proposed order (26 Nov.) and who prepared the ordinance enforcing the final Directory (17 Apr. 1645).140Harl. 166, ff. 54, 56; CJ iii. 705b; iv. 114a. Reputation made him an opponent of Independency, although he was self-evidently a practical Erastian rather than a clericalist.141J. Graunt, Truths Victorie Against Heresie (1645), dedication (E.227.7). He was on committees which directed the establishment of classical Presbyterianism in London (15 July); the regulation of Cambridge University, filling of its academic vacancies and supply of its pulpits (14 June, 17 Oct.); and the mastership of the Lord Leycester hospital in Warwick.142CJ iv. 174a, 218a, 312a. He had already interested himself in the mastership of the Savoy hospital, unsuccessfully promoting the candidature of the king’s librarian and Septuagint scholar Patrick Young (10 Apr. 1644).143Harl. 166, f. 47v.

Meanwhile he maintained other longstanding preoccupations. Named to the committee conferring with the Lords on the incorporation of the Merchant Adventurers (7 Oct. 1643), he was included on the Committee for Foreign Plantations on 2 November.144CJ iii. 266b; A. and O. He continued to be active on committees dealing with the affairs of the prince elector (30 and 31 Aug. 1644, 21 Feb. and 22 Sept. 1645) and in November 1645 was named to the committee for ensuring the payment of his parliamentary pension.145CJ iii. 612b, 615a; iv. 58a, 281a; CCC 28; A. and O. Rudyerd’s experience made him useful, among other sundry items of business, as a negotiator with ambassadors from the United Provinces over trade (6, 24 July; 16 Aug. 1644) and adjudicator on the urgency of petitions to the House (16 May; 3 Oct. 1644).146Supra, ‘Committee for Foreign Affairs’; CJ iii. 343b, 371a, 541b, 552b, 568a, 593a, 619b, 649b. Additionally, following the death in December 1643 of his erstwhile Providence Island colleague John Pym, he emerged as his leading executor, at least in relation to securing payments to Pym’s encumbered estate which in any way came within the purview of Parliament; the task proved troublesome.147CJ iii. 336b, 342b, 661b; iv. 59b; LJ vii. 24b.

Evidence for Rudyerd’s closeness to Pym in the last months of his life is fragmentary, but a bond which transcended differences of temperament and attitude to war is evident in the difficult days of 1642-3. When Pym was examined in September 1643 in connection with the accusations of Sir Edward Bayntun* that he had betrayed the cause, two communications from the king’s lord treasurer which he admitted receiving came from the deceased Sir Arthur Ingram* and from Rudyerd, apparently a man safe from presumption of underhand dealing 148E.g. CJ iii. 235b/236a. The two men were at one in their support for both the earl of Essex and Waller, and promotion of reconciliation between them. After Pym’s death, the continuing association they had shared with peers who were former Providence Island Company members coalesced for Rudyerd with his conciliatory inclinations into alignment with the embryonic peace party, for the time being helping to prosecute the war, but attempting to contain it. Already on 11 November 1643, when another Company colleague, the earl of Holland, was arrested following his temporary defection to the king, Rudyerd endorsed D’Ewes’ motion to leave his case to the less severe mercy of the Lords.149Harl. 165, f. 229v. On 25 December he and John Selden attempted unsuccessfully to block the bridge-burning ordinance whereby all those officials in the Westminster law courts who had obeyed Charles’ command to convene at Oxford should forfeit their places as if they had died.150Harl. 165, f. 257.

Meanwhile, from the autumn of 1643 Rudyerd was nominated to several committees concerned with raising men and money, with regulating receipts and with resolving differences in the administration of particular localities.151CJ iii. 260b, 302a, 385a, 507b, 618a, 676a. On 3 January 1644 he registered great appreciation at the receipt by the House of a letter from Essex apologising for past shortcomings, promising a better relationship with Waller and seeking greater ‘care’ for his ‘faithful’ army.152Add. 18779, f. 40; CJ iii. 357a On the one hand, he apparently expressed concerns about the power of the military ‘to recruit, to manage and do all things, gather money, [and] make peace and war’ (10 Feb.), but on the other hand he was a member of committees involving compounding with delinquents and he attended the Committee for Sequestrations on at least two occasions (5 Apr., 31 May).153Add. 18779, f. 64v; CJ iii. 671a, 679b; iv. 148b, 273b; SP20/1, ff. 130v, 163. Perhaps the prospect of receiving money from confiscated estates for the purposes of settling Pym’s debts and legacies reconciled him to the unsavoury business of mulcting private estates, especially where papists were concerned (22 Feb. 1645).154Add. 31116, p. 389; LJ vii. 24b. In April 1644 he was among MPs who reviewed the conduct of war in south Wales and Gloucestershire, while in June he was made a commissioner for Berkshire, where he was subsequently to discharge other local offices.155CJ iii. 455b; LJ vi. 605b; A. and O. Doubtless a sympathetic ear to petitioning for peace from City of London (16 May), he was named to the peace-party dominated committee charged with the ordinance for giving additional power to its militia (13 June).156CJ iii. 495b, 527b. Against the backdrop of threatened mutiny in regiments in England, Rudyerd was named to the committee reviewing the costly campaign in Ireland (29 July), while a month later he was among those still faithful to Essex deputed to thank him for his fidelity even as he faced disaster in the south west (29 Aug.).157CJ iii. 574a, 611a. Following news of the earl’s resounding defeat at Lostwithiel, he was among MPs chosen to meet with peers to consider overtures from the king (16 Sept.).158CJ iii. 629a.

Rudyerd’s links with the Lords continued to interlock with his pursuit of a political accommodation. He was probably a voice for Pembroke when complaints from the committee of the Isle of Wight (where the earl was an absentee governor) about his deputy, Colonel Thomas Carne, and his steward there, William Stephens*, reached the Commons via the Committee of Both Kingdoms (21 Sept.).159CJ iii. 635b. Shortly afterwards he was added to a joint committee dealing with the association in the midlands commanded by another parliamentarian peer whose adherence to the cause was regarded by militants as lukewarm, Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh (1 Oct.).160CJ iii. 647b. Later that month he was an unsurprising nominee to the committee preparing an ordinance for the release from imprisonment of former plotter Edmund Waller (21 Oct.), but was also included on committees raising defence forces for London (25 oct.) and raising money to pay the forces of the 2nd Baron Fairfax, (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*, 28 Oct.).161CJ iii. 671a, 676a, 679b. Over the winter, as Parliament considered the creation of a New Model army – a move supported by Pembroke – Rudyerd was rather less in evidence in the Journal and in diaries than he had been, and such references as there are relate mostly to religion. But that he remained an important point of liaison between the two Houses is indicated by his inclusion on the committee to ‘preserve good correspondence’ (18 Mar. 1645).162CJ iv. 83b. He was among MPs deputed to give decommissioned commanders like Denbigh and Essex and their officers compensation and arrears for their service, while also sitting on the committee to find money to pay off the Scots (2 Apr.; 20 May).163CJ iv. 96b, 148b. Since part of this involved discharging the wardships of those who had died in action, Rudyerd’s expertise was useful, as it was in rewarding peers like Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, with the wardships of heirs of dead royalists (8 July).164CJ iv. 201a.

Rudyerd’s part in this, as well as his local links and his association with Pembroke, lay behind an approach to both men by John Boys, royalist governor of Donnington Castle, Berkshire, which had withstood prolonged siege. Rudyerd laid the correspondence before the Committee of Both Kingdoms on 14 June.165CSP Dom. 1643-5, p. 591. During the autumn he was engaged with Sir Robert Pye I in Pembroke’s financial transactions with other peers and found time amongst sundry Commons committees to cultivate Bulstrode Whitelocke* and take him to dinner with the earl.166Sheffield Archives, EM1362/6; Whitelocke, Diary, 181, 183. There are glimpses of him in company with other leading Presbyterians moving (unsuccessfully) for their candidate as the new cursitor of the exchequer (with Pye, 29 Sept.) and promoting a petition from Sir William Balfour (with Sir William Lewis and Denzil Holles, 17 Nov.).167Add. 18780, ff. 130, 166v. But after having been added on 4 November to the committee investigating captured correspondence from George Digby*, 1st Baron Digby, which undermined would-be peacemakers by revealing the extent of Charles I’s negotiations with foreign powers, after the 18th, when he signed a letter of the committee on provision for the prince elector, he was apparently absent from Westminster for several months.168CJ iv. 332a; CCC 28.

Final parliamentary service, 1646-8

It may have been as late as May 1646 when Rudyerd reappeared in the chamber. That illness rather than disaffection was at least partly the explanation for absence, and that he retained the confidence of many is suggested by an order of 16 April which had specially commended him and Lord Saye to the committee preparing the ordinance for the abolition of the court of wards.169CJ iv. 512a. Having defended the right of those who had abandoned their offices in Westminster courts to reclaim them, Rudyerd himself, as has been suggested, had worked faithfully at wardship business, reduced but still more onerous than in its rival at Oxford.170Harl. 165, f. 135v; CJ iii. 351. The Commons continued to refer to him related petitions in the course of the long-drawn out discussion of compensation which preceded abolition.171CJ iv. 532a, 709b, 710a, 710b, 727a; Add. 31116, p. 580; CSP Dom. Add. 1625-49, p. 754. A resolution taken on 9 January 1647 to award him a total of £6,000, half of it in two lump sums and the rest as an annuity chargeable on delinquents’ estates, was not acted upon until at least the end of that year.172CJ v. 46a, 46b, 182a, 301b, 403b; CCC 53.

In the meantime Rudyerd was less visible at Westminster than previously, with fewer nominations and apparent gaps in attendance in his concluding two and a half years of service. He sat on only two more committees on religion, dealing with the revenues of (St) Paul’s cathedral (7 May 1646) and the ordinance excluding ‘malignant ministers’ from parishes, university fellowships and hospitals (22 Mar. 1647).173CJ iv. 538b; v. 119b. An unsurprising addition to commissioners for exclusion from the sacrament (3 June 1646), he was twice the conduit for conveying thanks for parliamentary sermons to Charles Herle (27 May 1646, 27 Oct. 1647).174CJ iv. 556a, 562b; v. 344a. Herle, lecturer at Westminster Abbey, was a Presbyterian of conciliatory inclinations who had gained the approval of the Pym circle in the earlier 1640s and who had drawn on the theory of the king’s two bodies to justify the passing of legislation at Westminster in his absence – a formulation that may well have eased Rudyerd’s conscience.175‘Charles Herle’, Oxford DNB.

Form would suggest that he was an earnest but emollient contributor to the ordinances for the regulation of Oxford University, where Pembroke had been restored as chancellor (1 July 1646, 13 Jan. 1647), and a constructive presence on the handful of committees dealing with miscellaneous social, financial and legal issues that came his way (notably poor relief, 23 Nov. 1647).176CJ iv. 595b; v. 51b, 181a, 366b, 383a, 505b, 616b; vi. 27b. Otherwise he appeared occasionally, sometimes at critical moments and often in matters also involving peers, representing what was almost certainly a counterweight to more radical players. With Charles in Scots hands at Newcastle, Rudyerd was named to a committee making representations to the northern kingdom’s commissioners (9 June 1646); he was also among those deputed to join the Lords to hear the report of Archibald Campbell*, marquess of Argyll, on his meeting with the king (25 June).177CJ iv. 570b, 587a. Following revelations of the latter’s secret negotiations with Scotland and with France, he was named to a small committee of heavyweight MPs entrusted with preparing a declaration rejecting any ‘interposition’ between king and Parliament (22 July).178CJ iv. 622b. He was nominated to joint committees to compose emerging differences between the earls of Northumberland and Pembroke (2 Dec.); to attend the prince elector once more in his lodgings at Whitehall in what his uncle suspected betokened negotiation over political power (25 Mar. 1647); and to disentangle the financial affairs of parliamentarian peer Edmund Sheffield, 2nd earl of Mulgrave (13 May).179CJ iv. 735b; v. 125a, 170b.

It is difficult to discern whether Rudyerd’s periodic absences from the Journal are attributable principally to his and Pembroke’s disenchantment with the Independents and the army, to his age or to some other cause. Gaps in the record in August/September 1646 and February and April 1647 may be variously interpreted, but that between late May and late October 1647 is suggestive of some desire to stand aloof from clashes between different parties at and beyond Westminster, or at least a perception that negotiation was best conducted outside the chamber for the time being. As the Commons returned to a degree of normality after the coup and counter-coup of the summer, Rudyerd’s first committee appointment for more than six months was to deal with business related to the Leveller Colonel John Lilburne’s accusations before the Commons about the loyalties of certain peers (1 Nov.).180CJ v. 347b. Two weeks later he was also named to investigate the circumstances of the king’s escape from Hampton Court (12 Nov.).181CJ v. 357a.

Rudyerd celebrated Epiphany 1648 at Bulstrode Whitelocke’s home, in the mixed political company of Sir Gilbert Gerard*, Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham, and Geoffrey Palmer.182Whitelocke, Diary, 203. His sole committee nomination in the first eight months of the year was to settle the jurisdiction of the court of admiralty (20 Mar.) and he seemed to have been absent from Westminster for a significant period when on 7 July he was ordered to appear forthwith to answer two actions, one by Sir David Watkins against him, Alexander Popham* and Edward Popham*, the other in connection with a transaction he had entered with Pym.183CJ v. 505b, 649a. He must have obeyed fairly promptly since at least one source credits him with a final speech in the Commons. It displays considerable disillusionment at the powerlessness of the institution where he had played a distinguished role, but also a touch of Rudyerd’s old spirit.

We have sat this long, and are come to a fine pass; for the whole kingdom is now become Parliament all over. The army hath taught us a good while what to do; the city, the country, and reformadoes, teach us what we should do; and all is, because we ourselves know not what to do. Some men are so violent and strong in their own conceits that they think all others dishonest who are not of their opinion; but he that calls me knave because I differ from him in opinion is the veryer knave of the two.184Rudyerd Memoirs, 244.

There is no further sign of Rudyerd in the Journal until 22 and 23 September, when he was placed on the committee handling negotiations with the king on the Isle of Wight.185CJ vi. 29b. His last nomination, on 9 October, was to work on an ordinance to raise money from delinquents’ estates for the horse guards attending Parliament.186CJ vi. 47a. If he had been suffering from ill-health earlier in the year, there was no indication of it now: on the 21st he and John Selden* took Whitelocke to dine with the countess of Kent in Whitefriars.187Whitelocke, Diary, 223. As a peace-maker of long-standing, at Pride’s Purge on 6 December Rudyerd was removed from the House and briefly imprisoned, but was released soon afterwards.188Mercurius Elencticus no. 5 (5-12 Dec 1648), 527 (E.476.4); A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648); The Parliament Under the Power of the Sword (1648); Mems. of the Verney Fam. i. 443.

Last years and the cost of Pym’s legacy

He retained his house in St James’s Park until his death and at least initially seems to have been often in London. In April 1651 his wife’s kinsman John Harington I* visited him together with Sir Robert Pye I and Sir Gilbert Gerard, who had also been excluded from the Commons.189Harington’s Diary, 66. Loss of secure parliamentary privilege was to cost Rudyerd considerable discomfort. In pursuance of his trusteeship of the Pym estate, a few weeks later he attended the Committee for Compounding (not for the first time), only to be arrested for Pym’s debt as he returned home. John Rushworth informed the committee on 12 June that Sir Benjamin had been imprisoned at the Counter in Wood Street. It is not clear how long his ordeal had lasted. On 13 June the Rump authorised the sheriffs of London and Middlesex to free him, but permitted the plaintiff (over whose identity there was some confusion) to sue out a new writ, and it was not until the 26th that the Committee for Compounding called the creditors to account for their actions.190CCC 454, 1898, 1900; CJ vi. 587b, 588a. In December Rudyerd, Richard Knightley* and others obtained an order for arrears of the profits of a delinquent’s estate promised by Parliament to the Pym family years previously, but on 12 May 1652 Rudyerd was arrested again as he was leaving a meeting called at Serjeants Inn by the barons of the exchequer to discuss wards business. This time the Commons ruled more decisively that the barons ‘ought to grant benefit of privilege to Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, as if his attendance had been upon the court sitting, and to discharge [him] from arrest accordingly’.191CCC 1901; CJ vii. 131b.

Rudyerd received only one appointment after 1648 – to the London oyer and terminer commission in 1655.192C181/6, p. 134. By the time he made his will in 1658, a fortnight before his death aged 85, he had given his only son William (born in 1624) a life interest in the estate at Woodhay and charged any debts on land nearby lately purchased. Perhaps this was partly an attempt to guard against any additional liabilities incurred through the Pym trusteeship. Provision for the raising of £1,500 for any daughter or daughters William might have and the absence of mention of other goods suggests that Rudyerd did not possess great wealth.193PROB11/284/232. Following his death on 31 May he was buried in St Lawrence’s church at West Woodhay.194Rudyerd Memoirs, 255-6; VCH Berks. iv. 245. None of his direct male descendents entered Parliament.

Rudyerd’s fading as a parliamentary presence from 1646, exclusion in 1648 and apparent swamping thereafter by the burden of Pym’s debts present a sad and disconcerting end to what had been a distinguished career in the House. An accomplished orator, he had contributed reason and moderation to debate – except, perhaps, when it came to papists and Strafford. A keen reformer of abuses at the beginning of the Long Parliament, and a consistent voice for a cleansing and reordering of the church, he seems to have managed to avoid controversy in the first and hypocritical zeal in the second. The impression of the man who had the rare distinction of earning respect from his office in the court of wards, is that he carried a certain efficiency and compassion into a House where he had many friends and, until the failure of peace-making in 1648, relatively few enemies.