ARMYNE, Sir William, 1st bt. (1593-1651), of Osgodby, Lenton, Lincs., and Orton Longueville, Hunts.

Background and early career

Armyne was descended from an ancient Yorkshire family that had settled at Osgodby, near Grantham, in the early fourteenth century.75Lincs. Peds. 37, 38. His father, ‘a religious gentleman’, who sat for Grantham in 1589 and 1621, ensured that his heir received a godly education under the puritan master of Oakham grammar school and then at one of Cambridge’s most Calvinist colleges, Sidney Sussex.76Wood, The Saints Entrance into Peace, 17; Cliffe, Puritan Gentry, 75-6, 80, 92-3, 98. Armyne followed his father into Parliament in 1621, securing election for Boston, where he seems to have enjoyed the support of the town’s strong puritan element.77HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Boston’. He was returned for Boston again in 1624, for Grantham the following year and for Lincolnshire in 1626. He probably owed his return as a knight of the shire not only to the strength of his interest as one of Lincolnshire’s leading landowners, but also to the backing of the county’s godly grandee, Theophilus Clinton, 4th earl of Lincoln.78HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Lincolnshire’.

Armyne made his first appreciable impact as an MP in the 1626 Parliament – partly, it seems, as a result of the understanding that he forged at about this time with leading ‘country’ MP Sir John Eliot†. It was as one of Eliot’s lieutenants that Armyne participated in the parliamentary attack on the duke of Buckingham in 1626.79J. Forster, Sir John Eliot, i. 534, 569; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir William Armyne, 1st bt.’; C. Holmes, Seventeenth-Century Lincs. 104. Despite his opposition to George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, for which he was purged from the Kesteven bench in October 1626, he was appointed one of the commissioners for collecting the Forced Loan in Lincolnshire. Predictably, he refused either to collect or pay the levy, and in the spring of 1627 the privy council committed him to the Fleet prison, where he remained for three months.80C231/4, f. 210v; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir William Armyne, 1st bt.’; Holmes, Seventeenth-Century Lincs. 106. His fellow Lincolnshire loan refusers included Sir Anthony Irby*, Sir John Wray* and John Broxolme*. Armyne’s resistance to the Forced Loan seems to have boosted his standing in Lincolnshire, and he was returned for the county again in 1628. By this stage, his political alliance with Eliot was maturing into a firm friendship, and the two men apparently corresponded on a regular basis.81Forster, Eliot, ii. 377, 566, 652-3, 654, 696-7. Eliot referred to Armyne, Sir Edward Ayscoghe* and Thomas Hatcher* as the ‘honest sons of Lincolnshire’.82Forster, Eliot, ii. 650.

Armyne was afforded a chance to redeem himself in the crown’s eyes in 1628-9, when he was restored to the Kesteven bench and re-commissioned by his friend Robert Bertie, 1st earl of Lindsey – the newly-appointed lord lieutenant of Lincolnshire – as a deputy lieutenant.83C231/4, ff. 261v, 263; Lincs. RO, YARB/8/2/3; CCC, 1501, 1502, 1503. Like Ayscoghe and Grantham, however, Armyne had become closely associated by the mid-1630s with the bishop of Lincoln, John Williams, in his struggle against a powerful Laudian faction in the diocese.84CSP Dom. 1633-4, pp. 408-9; H. Hajzyk, ‘The Church in Lincs. c.1595-c.1640’ (Camb. Univ. PhD thesis, 1980), 129-30, 131-2. In addition, Armyne patronised and protected Puritan ministers ‘on whom the foot of pride would have trod if some who durst, as well as desired, had not succoured them ... for though the times knew he was not too great to crush, yet he was too well-beloved to provoke’.85Wood, The Saints Entrance into Peace, 18, 20; Cliffe, Puritan Gentry, 185, 206-7. His household chaplain during the mid-1630s was the future Presbyterian divine Thomas Cawton.86Cliffe, Puritan Gentry, 166; T. Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart Eng. (1997), 21, 26, 130. But as his cordial relations with Williams suggest, Armyne was not an enemy of the bishops per se, but rather of what he saw as the Laudian prelates’ ‘petty baubling fooleries’ and their ‘jostling spirit of domination’.87Wood, The Saints Entrance into Peace, 18, 19.

As well as resisting the tide of Laudian innovation, there are signs that Armyne opposed the crown-sponsored scheme to drain the Lindsey Level in Lincolnshire.88A Breviate of the Cause Depending (1655), 4 (669 f.19.63); CJ ii. 192a. In 1634-5, the crown seems to have toyed with the idea of removing him from the Kesteven bench again, only to think better of it (he temporarily lost his place as a justice of the peace at some point in the later 1630s for refusing to attend the judges to take the oaths of office).89C193/13/2, f. 38v; C231/5, p. 298. Moreover, by 1639, at the latest, he was apparently well known to Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, and Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland – two of the leading figures in the kingdom’s godly, anti-Spanish interest.90Northants. RO, D (CA)/661. The crown clearly recognised him as a potential troublemaker, for in the autumn of 1639 he was pricked as sheriff of Huntingdonshire in order to prevent his election to the forthcoming Short Parliament. He made at least some effort to collect Ship Money, but apparently used the ‘general backwardness’ of the Huntingdonshire people to pay the levy as an excuse to waste time in seeking further instructions from the privy council.91CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 470, 606; 1640, p. 339. Convinced that he was deliberately obstructing proceedings, the council admonished him in June 1640 for his ‘omissions and disservice’.92PC2/52, f. 292; CSP Dom. 1640, p. 340. In the event, only £262 of the county’s quota of £2,000 was ever collected.93M.D. Gordon, ‘The collection of ship money in the reign of Charles I’, TRHS, ser. 3, iv. 158.

Parliamentary career, 1641-3

Armyne was returned for Grantham on 29 March 1641 in place of the recently deceased Thomas Hussey*.94Supra, ‘Grantham’. The distinction that Armyne had won as a Parliament-man and defender of his country’s liberties recommended him to the Commons in several roles that required both parliamentary experience and the respect of the leading figures in either House. For example, between taking his seat in April 1641 and the outbreak of civil war in August 1642, he was appointed messenger to the Lords on seven occasions and was included on four teams for managing or reporting conferences.95CJ ii. 170a, 240b, 251b, 258a, 262a, 317a, 321b, 341a, 657a, 702b, 713b. Given his standing as a senior Member, however, he was named to relatively few committees – less than 40 – during this period and spoke very little in debate. Moreover, only a handful of his committee appointments related to the reform of the secular and religious ‘abuses’ of the Personal Rule.96CJ ii. 129a, 136b, 146b

Armyne was more closely involved, it seems, in Parliament’s efforts to pay off and disband the king’s and the Scottish armies in northern England, where the soldiers were causing considerable hardship to the inhabitants.97CJ ii. 149a, 152a, 172b, 238b, 240b, 258a; Procs. LP, iv. 459, 460; v. 604; vi. 215. His thinking on this issue was probably coloured by the fears of the parliamentary leadership, known as ‘the junto’, that the king might use his journey to Scotland in August 1641 to build a party for himself among the disgruntled English soldiery.98Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 360. This may explain Armyne’s appointment to a number of committees in July and August for expediting the disbandment process and making provision for the kingdom’s – and the junto’s – security while Charles was in the north.99CJ ii. 189b, 208a, 211a, 238b, 240b, 243a, 257a, 262a. On 20 August, the two Houses appointed a high-powered delegation, which included Armyne, John Hampden and Sir Philip Stapilton, to attend the king in Edinburgh.100CJ ii. 262b, 264a, 265b-266a; LJ iv. 370b. Ostensibly, this committee was to liaise between king and Parliament, but its real purpose was to keep tabs on Charles and to strengthen the leadership’s links with the Scottish Covenanters.101Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 321. Armyne was an active member of this committee, signing many of its letters to John Pym and Speaker William Lenthall during September and October.102Beinecke Lib. Osborn shelves, Howard of Escrick mss, corresp. folder.

August 1641 marked the beginning of Armyne’s long and intimate involvement in the management of Parliament’s relations with the Scots.103CJ ii. 240b. Indeed, over the course of the 1640s, he was probably more active in this sphere than any other Member of either House. His interest in Scottish affairs seems to have stemmed from a political concern, shared by most of the junto, to enlist the military support of the Covenanters in coercing and – following the outbreak of civil war in England – defeating the king. Although he was thoroughly committed to the cause of godly reformation, his later association with the Westminster Independents suggests that he had little sympathy with the Scots’ clericalist Presbyterianism as the basis of an English church settlement. His willingness to court Scottish military support helped to draw him into the handling of Irish affairs at Westminster. On returning from Scotland in November 1641, he was named to a series of committees set up in response to the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion. And on 3 December, he was appointed with Hampden and Stapilton to treat with commissioners from Edinburgh for the deployment of 10,000 Scottish troops in Ulster – a process that continued into the summer of 1642 and involved disbursing large sums of money to the Scots and bringing pressure to bear on those at Westminster reluctant to countenance Scottish intervention in Ireland.104CJ ii. 313a, 331a, 335b, 341a, 393b, 401a, 410b, 442b, 657a, 672b, 702b; D’Ewes (C), 297; PJ, i. 211, 260. He himself invested £400 as an Irish Adventurer in March 1642.105CSP Ire Adv. 1642-59, p. 152.

Armyne was a minority teller with the junto-man Denzil Holles on 7 December 1641 in support of a bill for placing the nation’s armed forces under the command of a lord general and lord admiral. The names of these new commanders were left blank in the bill, but it is very likely that the junto intended the first office for the Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, and the second for either Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, or the earl of Warwick. This thinly-disguised attempt to transfer control of the militia and navy from the king to the Houses was designed not only to weaken Charles’s power, but also to strengthen the junto’s hand in the military preparations against the Irish rebels.106CJ ii. 334b; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 435; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 460-1. That same day (7 Dec.), Armyne delivered a petition to the House from the godly Yorkshire knight Sir William Constable*, objecting to the return of the court adherent William Dearlove for the Yorkshire constituency of Knaresborough.107D’Ewes (C), 242.

Armyne’s ties to the junto were a factor in his nomination in May 1642 to a seven-man committee for assisting and monitoring Sir John Hotham* as governor of Hull.108CJ ii. 577b. The composition of this committee was apparently determined by John Pym and his allies and reflected their desire to surround Hotham with men they trusted.109Infra, ‘Sir John Hotham’; CJ ii. 584b-585a; Clarendon, Hist. i. 523-4. Six days later (24 May), the Commons sent Armyne, Ayscoghe, Sir John Wray and several other Lincolnshire MPs into the county to execute the Militia Ordinance.110CJ ii. 585b; LJ v. 87a-88b. It was with these appointments that the Lincolnshire county committee was established. Armyne spent most of June in Lincolnshire assisting its parliamentary lord lieutenant, Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham, in his efforts to wrest control of the county’s trained bands from the king’s party.111CJ ii. 592b-593b, 611a; LJ v. 104, 131b-132a; PJ, iii. 5, 8, 114; HMC Portland, i. 40. Armyne had returned to the House by 7 July, when he carried up to the Lords the draft treaty with Scotland for sending 10,000 Scottish troops to Ulster.112CJ ii. 657a; LJ v. 188b.

With the outbreak of civil war, Armyne once again emerged at the forefront of Parliament’s dealings with the Scots. Between August 1642 and his departure for Scotland a year later to negotiate the Solemn League and Covenant, he was named to 14 committees that were aimed in one way or another at consolidating ties between Westminster and Edinburgh. He was named in first place to seven of these committees and played a leading role in drafting the commission appointing conservators of the peace between the two kingdoms and generally in soliciting military assistance from the Covenanters.113CJ ii. 737a, 803b, 813a, 818a, 839a, 842b, 854b, 901b, 904a, 940a, 949b, 994b; iii. 3b, 9b, 77b, 78a, 82b, 109b. At the same time, he continued to liaise with the Scots commissioners about the maintenance of the Scottish forces in Ulster and other matters of common concern to the two kingdoms.114CJ ii. 763a, 772b, 802b; PJ, iii. 348-9. Almost half of his 22 nominations as a messenger to the Lords during this period, and almost a third of his nineteen appointments either to manage or report conferences, related in some way to the expediting of Anglo-Scottish business.115CJ ii. 764a, 779b, 797b, 802b, 806b, 808a, 881a, 884b, 889a, 915b, 916b, 918b, 923a, 954a, 974a, 977a, 981b, 988b; iii. 2a, 77b, 78b, 83b, 86a, 87b, 89a, 96b, 100b, 102a, 104b, 112b, 113b, 116b, 129b, 130a, 143b, 145a, 149a, 153a, 157a, 157b; LJ v. 516a.

The most important of his three tellerships during the first year of the war was in support of Scottish interests in Ireland.116CJ ii. 947a, 973a; iii. 94a. On 28 January 1643, he and another architect of the projected Scottish alliance, Sir Henry Vane II, were majority tellers against a motion that the king be requested to send Robert Sidney, 2nd earl of Leicester, to Ireland to take up his office as lord lieutenant. The opposing tellers, Sir John Clotworthy and Edmund Waller, represented those in the Commons who wanted an Englishman in overall command of the Protestant forces in Ireland, rather than – as the treaty for sending Scottish troops into Ulster conceded – a Scotsman. Armyne’s leading role in Anglo-Scottish affairs necessarily involved him in parliamentary business concerning Ireland – hence his nomination in September 1642 to Parliament’s standing committee for Irish affairs.117CJ ii. 750b. Although he seems to have little to do with formulating Irish policy at the highest level before 1646, he received appointment to several ad hoc committees for furthering the war effort against the Irish Catholics.118CJ ii. 883b, 984a; iii. 109b, 127b, 154a.

In keeping with his enthusiasm for bringing in the Scots – an initiative associated with the ‘fiery spirits’ at Westminster – Armyne threw his full weight behind the vigorous prosecution of the war in England. He affirmed his support for the earl of Essex in words on 27 August 1642 and in deeds over the following months, when he contributed money (at least £100), horses and all his plate on the propositions for maintaining Essex’s army.119CJ ii. 772b; PJ, iii. 322; Add. 18777, f. 109v. From the autumn of 1642, the Commons regularly enlisted his services in supplying the lord general’s forces, directing and vindicating his proceedings against the king and for congratulating him on his ‘great service’ to the commonwealth.120CJ ii. 771a, 795b, 825b, 838b, 901a, 971a, 995b; 84a. In addition to making several reports from the committee to receive the answers of those MPs who scrupled to contribute upon the propositions, he pursued these perceived backsliders when occasion arose on the floor of the House.121CJ ii, 769a, 803b, 818b, 819a; Harl. 163, ff. 376, 382v, 416. Keen to promote the war effort in Lincolnshire and the northern counties, he asked the House to consider how it might supply Captain John Hotham* and Sir Edward Rodes*, who at that point were the most forward of the Yorkshire parliamentarians in taking the fight to the king’s party.122Add. 18777, f. 19v. However, with the confirmation in October of the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*), as commander-in-chief of Parliament’s northern army, Armyne was apparently unswerving in his commitment to the maintenance of Fairfax’s forces and military authority.123CJ ii. 891b, 899b, 909a, 915b, 923b, 947b, 950b, 981a; iii. 112b, 140a; Add. 18777, f. 123; Harl. 164, f. 266v. Similarly, he figured prominently in Parliament’s efforts to strengthen its tenuous hold on Lincolnshire and the Midlands, where his own properties were being plundered by royalist troops.124CJ ii. 889b, 890a, 894b, 903a, 917a, 918b, 919a, 958a; iii. 2a, 20b, 139a; Harl. 164, f. 266; HMC 7th Rep. i. 1; Holmes, Seventeenth-Century Lincs. 178.

Despite his alignment with the war party at Westminster, Armyne had a hand in Parliament’s first concerted attempt to reach an accommodation with the king – the treaty at Oxford in the spring of 1643. He was named to several committees for preparing Parliament’s peace terms, and he either managed or reported three conferences for establishing a key part of the framework for these negotiations – a cessation of arms.125CJ ii. 963a, 974a, 978b, 981b, 991b; iii. 2a. In the various debates on the peace terms in February, he seems to have steered a middle course between the more pacific element in the House, which favoured a treaty before the armies disbanded, and Pym and most of his allies, who sought to scotch the whole business by insisting on disbandment before negotiations – an unworkable proposal given the lack of trust between the king and the junto at Westminster. Armyne suggested that disbandment should occur concurrently with the negotiations, and he urged that the lord general’s advice be sought concerning the possible dangers of demilitarisation – a suggestion that the peace-party grandee Denzil Holles attacked as too time-consuming.126Add. 18777, ff. 151, 158, 160v. It was perhaps Armyne’s moderate stance in these debates that recommended him to the Commons on 28 February as one of Parliament’s negotiating team.127CJ ii. 985a. He was the only one of the four Commons-men appointed to this commission that was closely associated with the war-party grandees. Another possible factor in his selection was the trust apparently reposed in him by the earl of Northumberland, who headed the delegation to Oxford. There are hints in the Commons Journals and, by the mid-1640s, in the earl’s correspondence that the two men were on friendly terms, and there is certainly evidence that Armyne was well known to members of the earl’s circle in the north, in particular Hugh Potter* and Robert Fenwick*.128Alnwick, O.I.2(f): Northumberland to Hugh Potter, 12, 20 May 1645; P.I.3(q): Potter to Northumberland, 9, 15, 23 May 1645; CJ ii. 925b. Armyne performed his duty faithfully at Oxford, where he seems to have earned the respect of his fellow negotiator Bulstrode Whitelocke, who described him as ‘a gentleman of good understanding and conversation and [one that] would give his opinion upon good reason’.129LJ v. 688a, 689, 692a, 700a-701b, 710a; vi. 5b-7a; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 201. No amount of ‘good understanding’ could bridge the gap between king and Parliament, however, and after the treaty ended in deadlock in mid-April, Armyne was named to a committee for drawing up a declaration justifying the two Houses’ sincerity in striving for a settlement.130CJ iii. 58a.

Armyne and the Covenanters, 1643-5

With the collapse of the Oxford treaty, Armyne began to beat the drum again for the vigorous prosecution of the war and a Scottish alliance. He was a prominent member of the group of peers and Commons-men that from May 1643 tried pressure the Lords into appointing parliamentary commissioners for negotiating a military pact with Edinburgh.131CJ iii. 86a, 87b, 89a, 96b, 143b; LJ vi. 46a; Mercurius Aulicus no. 20 (14-20 May 1643), 252 (E.104.21). On 30 May, he and Henry Darley were named by the Commons as commissioners to the Scots in the (vain) hope that the Lords would reciprocate.132CJ iii. 110a. That same month, Armyne supported calls by Essex, Pym and their allies for impeaching the queen – an initiative that Edmund Waller* denounced as ‘a rejection of all means of peace, and a sentence to fight it out to the last man’.133Mercurius Aulicus no. 21 (21-7 May 1643), 271 (E.105.12); Somer’s Tracts, iv. 499-501.

The discovery of the Waller plot early in June 1643 and that of Randal MacDonnell, 2nd earl of Antrim, later the same month gave the war-party grandees further opportunity to coerce the opponents of a Scottish alliance – a stratagem in which Armyne seems to have been complicit.134CJ iii. 116b, 118a, 122b, 126a, 149a; LJ vi. 83b, 114a; Harl. 164, f. 399v; Harl. 165, ff. 98, 112. Pym certainly used the Waller plot to introduce a Scottish-style ‘oath and covenant’, which Armyne took on 6 June.135CJ iii. 118a. By this stage, he and other war-party adherents were beginning to lose patience with the peace peers in the Lords, and when this group also blocked the creation of a new great seal he moved that if the Lords would ‘not join with us in the ordinance for the making of a new broad seal we should do it ourselves’.136Harl. 165, ff. 95v-96. He was warmly seconded by William Strode I. Armyne subsequently played a leading role in presenting the Commons’ arguments on this issue to the Lords.137CJ iii. 129a, 129b, 130a. He probably felt at least something of the fiery spirits’ frustration at the dilatory conduct of the war by mid-1643. But he was evidently well regarded by the earl of Essex, for he headed the Commons’ contingent in the parliamentary delegation sent to the lord general – at his own request – early in July to confer about the military situation.138CJ iii. 151b; LJ v. 116b.

Pressure on the Lords to acquiesce in the dispatch of a negotiating team to Scotland paid off in July 1643, and Armyne and his fellow parliamentary commissioners arrived at Edinburgh early in August, charged with the task of negotiating a military alliance with the Scots and promoting ‘a nearer conjunction betwixt both churches’.139Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 466; LJ vi. 139a, 140a-142a. By mid-September, the two sides had reached an understanding in the form of the Solemn League and Covenant. Armyne reportedly took the new oath in Edinburgh Cathedral in mid-October – although if so, he was obliged to take it again at Westminster in June 1646.140Bodl. Nalson III, f. 94v; HMC Portland, i. 136-7; H. Guthry, Mems. (1747), 141;CJ iv. 586a. Late in October, Parliament entrusted Armyne and Henry Darley with the task of ‘perfecting’ the treaty and smoothing its implementation, and on 29 November they were among the signatories to an additional treaty with the Scots allowing them overall command of the Protestant forces (English and Scots) in Ulster.141CJ iii. 289b, 291b; LJ vi. 277b, 365b, 366b. Armyne entered England with the Scottish troops of Alexander Leslie, 1st earl of Leven, in January 1644, assuring Parliament that it could ‘confidently expect all possible endeavours from this army’.142LJ vi. 400. In his absence, he was named in the ordinance for establishing the Committee of Both Kingdoms* (CBK), which made it to the statute books at Westminster in mid-February 1644 after much wrangling between the earl of Essex’s friends and those, like the earl of Northumberland, who were eager to clip his wings.143Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’. Armyne’s appointment probably owed more to his prominence in Anglo-Scottish affairs than to any hostility on his part towards the lord general.

Sir Henry Vane II’s return to Westminster in October 1643 left Armyne as Parliament’s senior official representative to the Scots, and such he would remain for the next 18 months. Throughout 1644 and into 1645, he and his fellow commissioners (who included Richard Barwis* and Robert Fenwick) functioned as Parliament’s senior executive officers in the four northern counties and worked closely with Archibald Campbell, 1st marquess of Argyll, and other Covenanter leaders to sustain the Scottish military presence in the region.144CJ iii. 432a; iv. 9b; LJ vii. 44, 59b-60a, 123b; CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 31-2; HMC Portland, i. 169, 180, 181; Harl. 7001, f. 177. However, by the autumn of 1644, it is possible to detect a note of tension creeping into Anglo-Scottish relations in the north – largely as a result of Parliament’s failure to supply Leven’s army, thus causing it to tax and plunder indiscriminately. In September, the Scots commissioners at Westminster were moved to refute information that Armyne and his colleagues had relayed to Parliament concerning the abuses of the Scottish army in the north.145Corresp. of the Scots Commrs. in London, ed. H.W. Meikle, 38, 39; HMC Portland, i. 206-7; HMC 10th Rep. vi. 153-4. The Scots commissioners also suspected that a three-man parliamentary commission – Armyne, Brian Stapylton* and William Thomson* – to the Scottish Parliament early in 1645 was an underhand design by Oliver St John, Sir Henry Vane II and others ‘who profess to be our friends’ to gather potentially damaging intelligence in Edinburgh. The commissioners regarded Armyne as a ‘very honest gentleman’, but feared that he was too much under the sway of the arch-tolerationist Vane II.146CJ iv. 7b, 9b; LJ vii. 123b; Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen (2nd edn.), ii. 401. As late as March 1645, leading Covenanters were commending Armyne for his ‘fidelity and painfulness to preserve a good correspondence betwixt these kingdoms’.147LJ vii. 290b. Yet a few months later, Armyne can be found encouraging the earl of Northumberland’s steward, Hugh Potter – a man who had paid court to the queen in 1643 and whom the Scots could not but regard as an enemy to their interest – to return to the Commons where their mutual ‘friends’ were eager to see him.148Infra, ‘Hugh Potter’; Alnwick, P.I.3(o): Potter to Northumberland, 29 Apr. 1643; P.I.3(q): same to same, 9 May 1645. According to Potter, Armyne was ‘very sensible’ of the Scots’ ‘high outrages’ in the northern counties and was ready to offer his services to Northumberland, who had emerged by the spring of 1645 as a leading figure in the anti-Scots faction at Westminster, soon to be dubbed the Independents.149Alnwick, O.I.2(f): Northumberland to Potter, 12 May 1645.

Armyne and the Independents, 1645-8

Armyne’s relations with the Scots moved from cooperation to confrontation during 1645, and by 1647 he can be accounted among the Independent grandees at Westminster. His transformation from friend to opponent of Scottish intervention mirrored that of almost every other figure closely involved in negotiating the Solemn League and Covenant, and owed much to the misconduct of the Scots’ forces in the northern counties and their unilateral garrisoning of Carlisle in June 1645, which Armyne and his fellow commissioners Henry Darley and Richard Barwis took as a personal affront as well as a breach of the alliance.150CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 614. The Scots for their part, accused Armyne and his colleagues of deliberately stirring up opposition to their army.151Infra, ‘Henry Darley’; ‘Richard Barwis’; CJ iv. 206a, 216a. Differences in religious outlook also contributed to this falling-out between the one-time allies. It is likely that Armyne became increasingly disenchanted with the Scots as their demands for a clericalist Presbyterian settlement in England grew more insistent during the course of 1645. He evidently thought highly of the Presbyterian divine Jeremiah Whitaker, and he favoured a Presbyterian church settlement – as long as it did not deny toleration to ‘orthodox’ Independents.152CJ iv. 218a, 585b, 629b; v. 327b; Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, ii. 430; Cliffe, Puritans in Conflict, 105, 143. The Congregationalist minister Seth Wood, whom Armyne had presented to the vicarage of Lenton before the war, insisted that his patron ‘so well loved a tender conscience that would not incommodate it in the least’.153Wood, The Saints Entrance into Peace, 20; Calamy Revised, 542. This claim is consistent with the high regard in which Armyne held another Presbyterian divine, Edward Bowles, who had accompanied him to Edinburgh early in 1645.154Bodl. Nalson III, f. 315; LJ vii. 123b. A friend of the Fairfaxes and official minister to the northern parliamentary commissioners, Bowles was equally indulgent of those among the godly who preferred ‘an union of hearts rather than a neighbourhood of houses to make up a congregation’.155E. Bowles, Manifest Truths, or an Inversion of Truths Manifest (1646), 71 (E.343.1); Calamy Revised, 67.

Armyne’s estrangement from the Scots is clearly visible in the Barwis affair – a quarrel over military resources and political patronage that broke out in the summer of 1645 between the Scottish commanders in Cumberland and Westmorland, and Richard Barwis, Sir Wilfrid Lawson* and their local allies.156D. Scott, ‘The Barwis affair: political allegiance and the Scots during the British civil wars’, EHR cxv. 843-63. The Westminster Independents were prepared to overlook the fact that some members of Barwis’s faction had assisted the royalists or persecuted the region’s separatists so long as they acted as a bulwark against Scottish encroachment in the region, particularly in the wake of the Scots’ occupation of Carlisle. According to the radical Cumberland pamphleteer John Musgrave, Armyne helped to ensure that Lawson, William Brisco* and their friends were retained in local office and shielded from prosecution on charges of delinquency.157J. Musgrave, Yet Another Word to the Wise (1646), 3-5, 26 (E.355.25); A Fourth Word to the Wise (1647), 8 (E.391.9). This favour was returned by Lawson, who was instrumental in having Armyne’s son William elected knight of the shire for Cumberland in 1646.158Supra, ‘Cumberland’. To the region’s puritan separatists, Armyne’s willingness to cooperate with the likes of Lawson against the Scots meant that he was ‘ever accompted a friend to Cavaliers’.159J. Musgrave, Musgrave’s Musle Broken, or Truth Pleading Against Falshood (1651), 7 (E.626.26).

Perhaps Armyne’s most telling intervention against the Scottish interest in the north occurred following his appointment in July 1645 to a commission headed by the Independent grandee Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, to treat with the Scots for the surrender of Carlisle and their other garrisons in northern England.160LJ vii. 515b. Although the negotiations came to nothing, Wharton and Armyne took the opportunity to reorganise the English forces in the north – partly, it seems, as a deterrent against further Scottish plundering in the region – and to remodel the region’s parliamentary committees, removing enemies of the Barwis faction and inserting men whom Musgrave alleged were former delinquents and persecutors of local separatists.161LJ vii. 566b, 569, 573, 592, 605, 657, 690, 691a-695a; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 92; HMC Portland, i. 280; Scott, ‘Barwis affair’, 855-6, 857. Armyne was returned the thanks of the House on 12 November 1645 for his services in the north, and that same day he was named to a committee for preparing a letter to the Scots, demanding the return of the disputed garrisons.162CJ iv. 339b, 340a. A few days later, he put in his first appearance at the CBK, where he evidently sided with Samuel Browne, William Pierrepont and Oliver St John (all Independents) in their resolve to deny the king’s request for a personal treaty and to persist with a policy of what amounted to a dictated settlement.163Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iv. 369b, 381a; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 230. By late 1645, he had been added to another powerful executive body, the Committee for the Revenue*, to which Northumberland, Wharton and their fellow Independent grandee William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, would be added in March 1646.164Supra, ‘Committee for the Revenue’; Belvoir, PZ.1, f. 43.

With Newark, on the Nottinghamshire-Lincolnshire border, the focus of military operations in the north by late 1645, Armyne was appointed on 5 December to a commission of both Houses to reside with the English and Scottish forces besieging the town.165CJ iv. 366b. The commissioners’ principal task was to supply and police the pay-starved and ill-disciplined Scottish army in order to prevent any ‘plundering, robbing or spoiling’ of the Newark area.166CJ iv. 374b-375a; LJ viii. 43b-44a. Leven’s army, however, as the commissioners informed Parliament, contained too many horse for the region to sustain and was also a prey to plundering and ill-discipline.167LJ viii. 136; Bodl. Tanner 59, ff. 42, 71, 170. At the conclusion of the siege of Newark early in May 1646, the commissioners praised the English forces for their ‘fidelity, courage and good discipline’, but were pointedly silent about the conduct of the Scottish army.168LJ viii. 310a. On 30 May the commissioners were thanked by the Commons for their ‘great industry, faithfulness and judgement’.169CJ iv. 559a. Back at Westminster, Armyne was named to a committee set up on 9 June for preparing a declaration relating the House’s ‘complaints and jealousies’ against the Scottish army.170CJ iv. 570b. And as a veteran of Anglo-Scottish affairs, he was named first to a committee set up on 25 June to hear an address by the marquess of Argyll aimed at repairing breaches in the alliance.171CJ iv. 586b. In response to this olive branch, the Commons established a committee on 14 July, to which Armyne was named, for making the Newcastle peace propositions more palatable to the Scots.172CJ iv. 617a.

Armyne’s activities and appointments at Westminster assume a more obviously partisan character from the late summer of 1646. On 21 August, for example, he was named first to a committee set up specifically to take issue with the Scots and their Presbyterian allies over how much money Parliament owed Leven’s army in arrears of pay.173CJ iv. 650b; Harington’s Diary, 33. And on 7 October, he was sent as a messenger to the Lords to urge the expediting of an ordinance for continuing the Army Committee* and treasurers-at-war, without which the Independents’ main powerbase, the New Model army, could not be paid. Mindful of this fact, the Presbyterian majority in the Lords denied Armyne’s request.174Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; CJ iv. 687a; LJ viii. 514a. In all but one of his nine tellerships between September 1646 and the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster the following July, Armyne partnered leading Independents.175CJ iv. 662b, 672a, 677a, 680b, 697a; v. 107a, 117b, 132b, 179b. Thus on 4 September, he and Sir William Brereton were minority tellers against the issuing of a writ for a ‘recruiter’ election at Callington, in Cornwall – a borough likely to return crypto-royalists or Presbyterians.176CJ iv. 662b. On 18 September, Armyne and Sir William Masham were minority tellers in a division concerning the disposal of the king’s person – an issue that the Independents were contesting with the Scots. The majority tellers were the Presbyterian grandees Denzil Holles and Sir Philip Stapilton.177CJ iv. 672a, 675a. A week later (25 Sept.), he partnered his wife’s nephew William Pierrepont as a majority teller in favour of directing resources towards the projected campaign in Munster of Northumberland’ nephew Philip Sidney, Viscount Lisle*, rather than diverting funds to Ulster and Connaught as the Presbyterian grandees desired.178CJ iv. 677a. The following month, he was named to the Derby House Committee of Irish Affairs* – a sub-committee of the CBK that was to become Parliament’s main executive body by the spring of 1647. Armyne was one of the most assiduous members of this committee, which he continued to attend until the autumn of 1648.179SP21/26, pp. 44, 171; SP28/353, ff. 17, 22, 24, 26; CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 726-9, 731-40; CJ v. 107a.

Having remained at Westminster during the Presbyterian ascendancy of early 1647, Armyne distinguished himself in the Independents’ defence of the New Model army and of their political cause more generally. On 8 April he backed Algernon Sydney* for the governorship of Dublin, thereby re-affirming his support for the Independents’ Irish policy, which centred on the lieutenancy of Sydney’s brother, Viscount Lisle.180HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 565. And upon coming across a pamphlet in Huntingdonshire – where he was on leave for a month – alleging that the army was full of royalists, Armyne sent the offending publication to the county’s most illustrious officer, Oliver Cromwell*.181Clarke Pprs. i. 28. In addition, each of Armyne’s four tellerships during the first half of the year paired him with Independent grandees – either Sir Arthur Hesilrige or Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire – and were in divisions of a highly partisan nature.182CJ v. 107a, 117b, 132b, 179b. On 5 March, for example, he and Evelyn defeated the Presbyterian grandees Sir Walter Erle and Sir William Lewis to ensure the retention of Sir Thomas Fairfax* as commander-in-chief of the army.183CJ v. 107a. And it was Armyne and Evelyn who were tellers for the noes on 20 May on whether to burn the Levellers’ ‘Large Petition’ – ‘pray[ing] a toleration, [and] that there may be no House of Lords, no payment of tithes nor taxes, nor the army disbanded till all be done’ – a division they lost to the Presbyterian pairing of Holles and Edward Massie.184CJ v. 179b; Juxon Jnl. 151. Armyne was among those Members (most of them Independents) who took refuge with the army after the Presbyterian ‘riots’ of 26 July and signed their ‘engagement’ of 4 August, in which Fairfax and his men were eulogised for their ‘Christian, noble and public affection to the good, peace and prosperity of this kingdom and ... [their] faithfulness to the true interest of the English nation’.185LJ ix. 385b.

Armyne was subsequently named to several high-powered committees for investigating the Presbyterian coup of late July 1647 and for repealing the legislation passed while it remained in force. On 7 September, he was a majority teller with Evelyn on whether to disable one of the alleged ringleaders of the riots, John Glynne, from sitting as an MP.186CJ v. 272a, 288a, 295a, 322a. He was a leading member of the Commons team that helped arrange for the king’s rejection of the Newcastle Propositions in September and for the introduction in their place of new propositions based upon the army’s and Independents’ peace terms, the Heads of Proposals.187CJ v. 289b, 294a, 321b, 327b, 345b, 346b; LJ ix. 425b; J. Adamson, ‘The English nobility and the projected settlement of 1647’, HJ, xxx. 568, 582-4. Granted leave of absence on 3 November, he had returned to Westminster by mid-January 1648, when he and his fellow English members of the CBK were established as a new executive body, the Derby House Committee* (DHC).188Supra, ‘Derby House Committee’; CJ v. 348b, 416a, 417a.

Armyne seems to have contributed relatively little to proceedings on the floor of the House during 1648. He was a teller in two divisions, served as a messenger to the Lords on four occasions and was named to just seven committees.189CJ v. 417a, 447b, 467a, 473a, 483a, 489a, 607a; vi. 27b, 75b, 81a, 82a, 87a; LJ x. 308a. Perhaps his most revealing appointment that year was his tellership with Hesilrige on 26 February against toning down a clause endorsing toleration in a parliamentary declaration to the Scots.190CJ v. 473a; A Declaration of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament Concerning the Papers of the Scots Commissioners (1648), 54 (E.432.1); ‘Boys Diary’, 162-3. That he was granted leave on 15 March to take the waters at Bath suggests that he was not in the best of health at this time.191CJ v. 499a. One reason for his relatively low profile in the Commons may well have been assiduous attendance of the DHC for most of 1648. Armyne put in more appearances at Derby House than almost any other member of the committee.192Supra, ‘Derby House Committee’. He made several reports from the DHC to the Commons and was part of the team at Derby House that liaised with Cromwell about military affairs in the north.193CJ v. 445b, 504a, 560a, 591b, 595a; vi. 37a; LJ x. 516b; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 650, 658. Armyne’s collaboration in the Commons with Evelyn, Pierrepont and other members of the Derby House ‘junto’ did not go unnoticed by the army’s enemies.194[C. Walker*], Hist. of Independency (1648), 105-6 (E.463.19); A Letter from an Ejected Member of the House of Commons to Sir Jo: Evelyn (1648), 24-5 (E.463.18). He attended his last meeting of the committee on 27 November – two days after the Commons had given him and his son-in-law, the Lincolnshire recruiter Thomas Lister, leave to go into the county to supervise the bringing in of the army assessment.195CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 332; CJ vi. 87b.

Career in the Rump, 1648-51

Although Armyne retained his seat at Pride’s Purge on 6 December 1648 and was named as a commissioner to try the king, he apparently remained absent from Westminster throughout December and January. Like most of the Independent grandees, he evidently had misgivings about the wisdom and legality of purging the Commons and of trying and executing Charles. Nevertheless, he had overcome whatever scruples he had about serving in the Rump by 13 February 1649, when he was elected to the first council of state.196CJ vi. 141a. Why he was chosen before more enthusiastic Rumpers is not clear – unless it was lend the new regime greater respectability by electing men of standing and experience. It appears that he made his dissent to the 5 December 1648 vote – that the king’s answers at Newport were a sufficient ground for a settlement – on the day of his election.197PA, Ms CJ xxxiii, p. 684; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 366. He attended 148 of the 319 meetings of the first council, in which he seems to have been an important figure in the formulation of Irish policy.198CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. lxxiv-lxxv, 42, 48, 62, 103, 126, 177, 208, 219, 221, 227, 243, 252; CJ vi. 175a, 175b, 176b, 258a.

It was Armyne who, late in March 1649, informed the Rump of the council’s nomination of Cromwell as commander-in-chief of the campaign to re-conqueror Ireland.199CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 60; CJ vi. 176b. It is largely on the basis of such appointments that Armyne has been identified as a friend and political ally of Cromwell.200Worden, Rump Parl. 116, 136, 179, 184. Armyne certainly seems to have thought highly of Cromwell and felt no need of an introduction when penning a congratulatory letter on the latter’s victory at Dunbar in September 1650.201HMC 8th Rep. ii. 64; Original Letters, ed. Nickolls, 19. However, the tone of this letter does not imply any great intimacy between the two men, and the evidence for their friendship remains largely circumstantial. Armyne has also been described as a friend of Sir Henry Vane II, although by the late 1640s it appears that Vane was closer to Armyne’s son-in-law, Thomas Lister*, than to Armyne himself.202Infra, ‘Thomas Lister’; Lincs. RO, 5-ANC1/2/3/19; V. Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger (1970), 172, 198. Armyne and Vane certainly did not agree when it came to tolerating heterodox religious opinion. What to Armyne were the ‘wild exorbitancies’ of sectarian religion were to Vane part of God’s great unfolding design ‘both in the inward and outward world’.203Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Wood, The Saints Entrance into Peace, 20. The two men went head-to-head on this issue in two divisions on 31 January 1651 on whether to allow extracts of a book by the religious radical and bugbear of the clerical interest, John Fry*, to be questioned by the House.204CJ vi. 529b; Worden, Rump Parl. 241. Armyne, Hesilrige and William Purefoy I represented those Rumpers keen to punish Fry for his attacks upon the ‘chaffy and absurd doctrine’ of the Trinity; the opposing tellers were Vane, Whitelocke and (interestingly) Lister.205CJ vi. 529b; Worden, Rump Parl. 261; S. Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the Eng. Revolution (2010), 164-5.

The one area of policy on which Armyne and Vane collaborated, and apparently saw eye to eye, throughout their careers was Parliament’s relations with the Scots. Having been architects of the Solemn League and Covenant, they both came to regard the Scots as exemplars of (in Armyne’s words) ‘abominable hypocrisy and self-seeking’, and it is no surprise to find both men named to a conciliar committee set up on 2 July 1649 for vindicating the honour of the English nation against the aspersions of the Scottish Parliament.206Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 19; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 217; A Declaration of the Parliament of England (1649, E.565.17).

Armyne was probably more active as a councillor of state than as an MP. He was named to a little over 30 committees in the Rump before his death in April 1651, which represents a modest haul for a man who had figured so prominently in parliamentary politics for most of the 1640s. And although he was named to committees in February and March 1649 for vindicating the Rump’s proceedings and abolishing kingship, most his appointments were on issues of lesser moment and suggest that he was not as vitally concerned as some of his former collaborators – particularly Hesilrige and Vane II – in the struggle for the new regime’s soul.207CJ vi. 143b, 158a. Similarly, although he was appointed teller on no less than 20 occasions in the Rump, the majority of these divisions concerned relatively minor matters and reveal little about his political alignment.208CJ vi. 179b, 192b, 262a, 270b, 348b, 368a, 369a, 370b, 374a, 383b, 417b, 439a, 446a, 528a, 529b, 543a, 547a, 547b. That he was no friend to Marten and his programme of social reform is clear from his majority tellership with Sir John Danvers on 27 July 1649 against passing amendments, reported by Marten, to a bill for the relief of poor individuals imprisoned for minor debts. The losing tellers were Marten and Cornelius Holland.209Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; CJ vi. 270b. Armyne and Marten clashed in another division, on 20 February 1650, over whether to elect Sir Henry Vane I to the second council of state. Marten and his fellow republican Edmund Ludlowe II won this vote, and Vane was rejected.210CJ vi. 369a. Armyne’s tellership with William Cecil, 2nd earl of Salisbury, on 23 February 1650 in favour of an act giving more time for office-holders to take the Engagement – abjuring monarchy and the Lords – again suggests that he had little in common with hard-line Rumpers like the opposing tellers, Marten and Sir Michael Livesay.211CJ vi. 370b. In a division on 1 March, Armyne and the Presbyterian-leaning Alexander Popham were minority tellers against passing a bill championed by Hesilrige for propagating the gospel in the four northern counties. Armyne probably feared that this legislation would undermine the rights of lay patrons like himself.212CJ vi. 374a. On the other hand, his last tellership, which was with Hesilrige on 11 March 1651, was in favour of empowering the council of state to purge the commonwealth’s garrisons and forts of all those who had refused to take the Engagement.213CJ vi. 547b.

Armyne’s commitment to the Rump was sustained, it seems, by his enthusiasm for its conquest of Ireland and Scotland. The invasion of Ireland and defiance of the Scots remained his principal portfolios in the second council of state, to which he was elected on 15 February 1650, attending 192 of its 296 meetings.214CSP Dom. 1650, pp. xl-xli, 2, 18, 60, 100, 339, 344; CJ vi. 362b, 425b, 433a, 479a, 480a, 531b. Again, it was Armyne who reported the council’s decision in June 1650 that rather than resign his commission as lord lieutenant of Ireland in order to assume command against the Scots, Cromwell should vest his authority in a deputy (his son-in-law Henry Ireton*) and a parliamentary commission.215CSP Dom. 1650, p. 219; CJ vi. 435b. On 7 February 1651, Armyne was chosen for the third council of state – and as in the previous conciliar elections he was appointed with three other senior members to count and report the votes for the additional places on the executive.216CJ vi. 368b, 532a, 532b. His attendance at 35 of the council’s first 36 meetings does not point to any obvious health problems on his part, which suggests that his death on or about 10 April was sudden and unexpected.217CSP Dom. 1651, pp. xxxv, 66; CJ vi. 548a; Lincs. Peds. 41.

Armyne’s death was treated at Westminster as the loss of an elder statesman. The council of state ordered that all of its members attend his obsequies in London on the morning of 5 May.218CSP Dom. 1651, p. 176. Likewise, the Rump ordered that all parliamentary committees forbear to sit that afternoon, when his hearse was to begin its journey from Westminster to Lincolnshire.219CJ vi. 569a; CSP Dom. 1651, p. 179. Armyne was buried at Lenton on 10 May.220Wood, The Saints Entrance into Peace, frontispiece. Seth Wood, in his funeral sermon that day, spoke warmly not only of his patron’s godliness, but also of his courage in the parliamentary cause: ‘when the sea was most tempestuous and many of the pilots called for the cock-boat to save themselves in, he launched into the deep in the ship called the commonwealth and returned home in her with honour and safety and brought off his own and his country’s venture’.221Wood, The Saints Entrance into Peace, 22. Armyne died intestate – another indication, perhaps, of the suddenness of his demise – the administration of his estate being granted to his widow.222PROB6/26, f. 186; Eg. 3517, f. 32. Aside from his son William, no immediate member of his family sat in Parliament.