WHITAKER, Laurence (c.1578-1654), of Drury Lane, Westminster and Turnham Green, Chiswick, Mdx.

Anthony Wood’s apparently mistaken belief that Whitaker was a Somerset man was probably rooted in the association between Sir Edward Phelips and the young Whitaker, as master and servant. Whitaker (who signed his name thus) was probably born in the town he first served as a Member, and his career lay in the service both of great men and of the government. By 1622 he was living in St Giles-in-the-Fields in Drury Lane, where the residences of the wealthy men of the parish were concentrated. In 1622 he became a vestryman there, and held that office until his death over 30 years later. In 1623, Whitaker played a major part in the rebuilding of St Giles church, where the incumbent was Roger Maynwaring, later to become notorious for his sermons dwelling on the need for subjects to obey the king unquestioningly. There is no evidence of any friction between Maynwaring and Whitaker, who personally collected contributions towards the rebuilding from wealthy subscribers outside the parish, such as Sir Robert Phelips†, Sir Julius Caesar† and the disgraced Robert Carr, earl of Somerset.56Camden Local Hist. and Archives Centre, P/GF/C/4. He continued to support his minister when the Laudian William Haywood became rector of St Giles, standing shoulder to shoulder with him in May 1638 when they were trying to persuade the parishioners to obey the king’s injunction that the livings of the parish clergy should be augmented.57Rushworth, Hist. Collns. ii. 718-9. In 1641, Haywood was petitioned against as a papist, but there is nothing to connect Whitaker with the charges.58The Petition and Articles Exhibited (1641, E.158.5). Whitaker’s commitment to the spiritual life of his parish was a consistent background to his other public duties, and was one of the avenues by which he maintained contact with powerful figures in and around London.

As clerk of the privy council extraordinary from 1624, Whitaker answered many calls on his time to serve on commissions relating to trade and commerce. Setting aside his work as a magistrate and tax commissioner, Whitaker was named to at least five of these during the 1620s and at least 17 during the 1630s. In at least two of these, the commissions on beaver-makers (hatmakers) and gold thread, the line between the commissioners’ investigative and directive powers was so blurred that in 1641 some considered Whitaker lucky to escape an early expulsion from the Commons as a monopolist.59Two Diaries of Long Parl. 6; Clarendon, Hist. i. 228-9. This career during the 1630s as an agent for the personal rule of the king came after four periods of service in the Parliaments of the 1620s. In 1625, during the first Parliament of Charles I, he denounced the ‘swarming’ of papists in London, which was a theme he revisited in two effective speeches during the Parliament of 1628. By this time, his anxiety about the spread of popery in the capital at large had become a preoccupation with what he depicted as a Catholic invasion of his own parish of St Giles, ‘a little Rome’.60HP Commons 1604-1629. Whitaker managed to square his attacks on Catholicism with support for George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, in the 1626 Parliament, and was ambivalent in the view he took of Roger Maynwaring when the rector of St Giles was attacked in the House in the early summer of 1628 for claiming divine sanction for taxation without parliamentary approval.

It is clear that whatever commissions and projects came Whitaker’s way during the 1630s, he managed to find time from 1627 to be an active Middlesex justice of the peace, a role which even more than his work as a vestryman brought him a prominence in the life of the metropolis. At least one of the recognizances he took as a magistrate, in 1633, was from a man Whitaker charged with being a seminary priest.61Mdx. County Records iii. 1625-67 ed. J.C. Jeaffreson (1888), 166. On a number of occasions he worked with Sir Henry Spiller†, a known Catholic sympathiser, and Sir Richard Wynn*, a leading official in the household of the queen, further evidence of his capacity to work alongside men whose views on papists would not have matched his own.62Mdx. County Records iii. 1625-67, 49, 56. Despite his many connections in high places, Whitaker was not elected to a seat in the Short Parliament of 1640 or to one at the elections for the second Parliament that year. He had no known interest of his own in the west of England, but must have pressed his case when a number of towns in Devon recovered their parliamentary seats in 1640-1. Shortly before he died, John Mohun†, 1st Baron Mohun of Okehampton, procured a writ for Okehampton and Whitaker was successfully proposed by him to the electors.63W.B. Bridges, Some Account of the Barony and Town of Okehampton ed. W.H.K. Wright (Tiverton, 1889), 92. By 3 March, Mohun’s heir, Warwick Mohun, was putting it about that Whitaker’s election would not stand, presumably because of his reputation as a monopolist. Sir Samuel Rolle* hoped to take Whitaker’s place were he to have been disabled from sitting, but in the event no successful challenge was mounted against his election.64Buller Pprs. 34. There is nothing to associate Whitaker at this stage with the influence of John Pym* and the ‘junto’, which was influential in restoring the parliamentary franchise to other Devon towns.

Suppressing Catholicism, 1640-1

Whitaker had taken his seat by 9 February 1641, when he handed over to the Speaker a bundle of letters from the north of England on its way to the secretary of state, Sir Francis Windebanke*, which had come to Whitaker in his capacity as a Middlesex magistrate. The House decided against opening the letters. Three days later, perhaps in a backlash against his forwardness, he was named in connection with the hat monopoly, but the allegation was taken no further, despite the expectation of Warwick Mohun and the hopes of Sir Samuel Rolle.65D’Ewes (N), 338, Two Diaries of the Long Parl. 6. Thereafter, he was named steadily to committees on bills through the rest of the year, amounting to 55 committees in total in 1641, on among other things, 17 separate bills. These bills were on a wide range of subjects, the most important of which were the bill on reforming the church courts (27 Apr.) and the bill for securing the true religion and punishing recusants (6 May).66CJ ii. 128b, 136b. By the time this bill was drafted, Whitaker’s preoccupation with the spread of popery in general, and the numbers of priests and recusants in London in particular, had emerged once more as a theme. On 26 March, Whitaker was named to the committee on the bill to prevent the dangers posed by popish recusancy, and on 12 April to that dealing with the bill against the popish hierarchy.67CJ ii. 113b, 119a. With four other Members, the others either with seats near Parliament or with a place in the commission of the peace for Middlesex and Westminster, he was required on 4 May to liaise with the Middlesex bench on the numbers of papists about town and to ensure they were prosecuted.68CJ ii. 134b. It was in furtherance of this assignment that he spoke effectively a few days later (7 May) on how a priest had confessed that the Catholic hierarchy not only operated a church within the Church of England, but also sustained a ‘popish commonwealth’. As in previous Parliaments, Whitaker drew on evidence from his own parish. In St Giles he alleged there were 375 papists as well as three or four popish peers, and returned to his theme of infiltration: ‘I see priests in the court, in Westminster Hall, and at every committee in the Painted Chamber’.69Procs. LP iv. 248, 253.

An element of ambiguity about this speech of Whitaker’s on 7 May could be allowed. At first sight it seems as if he was accusing the Lords of harbouring Catholics, as the Painted Chamber was the principal venue for conferences between the Houses. But both Painted Chamber and Westminster Hall were notorious as the largest chambers in the palace of Westminster, where strangers could easily make their way among the peers and Parliament-men. His denunciation of priests at court was less capable of an alternative construction, however, and seems to mark the end of Whitaker’s career as a servant of the royal government. It has been suggested that his break with the government was prompted by the disappointment in 1635 of his failing to achieve promotion from clerk extraordinary of the privy council to becoming principal clerk, or by his second marriage, which in 1638 brought him into contact with a group of puritans from eastern England. His second wife’s sister had married Sir Thomas Bedingfield*, brother of Anthony Bedingfield*.70Keeler, Long Parl. 388-9. But his denunciations of papist infiltrators had begun by 1625 at the latest, and what was distinctive about the circumstances of 1641 was that Whitaker had an eagerly attentive audience. As a Middlesex justice of the peace and a Parliament-man, he was ideally placed to harvest plots and rumours of plots in the metropolis, and feed them to a perfervid House of Commons. As a magistrate, Whitaker regularly brought recognizances he had taken of suspects to the Middlesex sessions, even after his election to Parliament, at least until July 1642.71LMA, MJ/SB/B/1-30. The frequency with which Whitaker’s reports were written up in the private diaries of the Long Parliament attest to the impact he made.

Whitaker’s close associates in this work were the Members for Middlesex and Westminster. During 1641, for example, Whitaker was named to committees with Sir Gilbert Gerard on 17 occasions. A typical resolution of the House on hearing a report by Whitaker, Gerard or one of their associates was to order a house search. The first of these seems to have taken place on 12 May, when the Commons authorised a search of the house in Holborn of Jane Shelley, wife of Sir John Shelley, a Somerset baronet and recusant.72CJ ii. 144a; CB i. 25; CCC 2370-1. Gerard’s report of the search mentioned a Frenchman trying to evade detection, and a letter implying a plot to overthrow the Protestant religion. The report produced a Commons order for a committee to consider dangerous words spoken by recusants, to which Whitaker and seven others were named. On 14 May, Whitaker kept the momentum going by reporting an item of armour discovered in a hayloft, declared to be the property of a French servant of the king. Nothing further was done about it, however.73Procs. LP iv. 340, 348, 377; CJ ii. 147a. Whitaker reported again to the House on Lady Shelley on 11 June.74CJ ii. 173b.

Whitaker was the driving force behind the augmentation on 20 May of a committee to examine (that is, to interrogate) popish recusants who had left London. This committee by its very nature had the power to pursue individuals across the country.75Procs LP iv. 486, 492. The following day he reported from the committee formed on the 14th: in addition to conducting examinations of witnesses as well as of alleged papists themselves, the committee drew up heads to present to the House on the need to preserve the country from Catholicism.76Procs. LP iv. 507. Again, it was Whitaker who lobbied Lord Keeper Edward Littleton†, 1st Baron Lyttelton, to secure a place in the Middlesex commission of the peace for Sir Gilbert Gerard. This was a prelude to a commission to a group of five (Whitaker, Gerard, Sir Arthur Ingram, Sir Robert Pye I and John Glynne) to administer the oaths of supremacy and allegiance to Catholics in and around London (26 May). Among the first to be called upon by Whitaker were Sir Kenelm Digby and Sir John Winter, both prominent lay Catholics.77Procs. LP iv. 583, 617; CJ ii. 158a; ‘Sir Kenelm Digby’, ‘Sir John Winter’, Oxford DNB. The group of magistrates taking examinations reported back to the larger committee for recusants, which Whitaker chaired. It was from that committee on 5 June that he reported on the interrogations of four ‘whole recusants’ and three ‘half recusants’, and the stages by which Winter was taking the oaths.78CJ ii. 168a. A new dimension to the hunt for papists was opened up on 22 June, when Whitaker reported the cases of 17 wards, whose wardships had been entrusted by the court of wards and liveries to recusants. Then there were the cases of foreign-born Catholic merchants to pursue (22 June) and the unnamed papists ‘of great worth’ who were resisting the summons to attend the committee (25 June).79CJ ii. 182a, 182b; Procs. LP v. 271, 282, 287, 352.

A new committee, which included nominees of the citizens of London, was called on 2 July to enquire after tax arrears by recusants, and three days later Whitaker was empowered to demand poll money from the Middle Temple and the associated chancery inns.80CJ ii. 197a, 199a; Procs LP v. 500. Then, seemingly abruptly, the momentum of Whitaker’s crusade was brought to halt when he himself was named in the retrospective investigation of the events in the House on 2 March 1629 which had led to the long imprisonment of Sir John Eliot†, Benjamin Valentine* and William Strode I*. In his capacity as clerk extraordinary to the privy council, Whitaker had searched Eliot’s chamber and trunks, and stood in his place on 8 July to defend himself. He did not deny his actions, but pleaded in mitigation the confusion of the times, the length of time which had elapsed since his actions, and the commands of the king and 23 privy councillors which had lain heavily upon him. Once again expulsion from the Commons seemed a possibility, but in the event he knelt at the bar to hear that he had indeed been guilty of a breach of privilege and would serve a period in the Tower.81CJ ii. 202b, 203a, 203b; Procs. LP v. 563. Just under a week later he petitioned the House, and secured an order for his immediate release.82CJ ii. 211b. The following day (15 July), Gerard included the committee for recusants, chaired by Whitaker, among those he reported on as ‘fit to stand’ after an attempt to rationalize them. Whitaker himself was in the chamber again by 20 July.83CJ ii. 212a, 217a.

He was back on the hunt for recusants, using the recusancy committee as his vehicle, by 28 July, when he reported on the case of a Scots priest.84Procs. LP vi. 121. It is striking how often the diarists recorded Whitaker’s reports, noting the lurid elements in the rumours and allegations he had been investigating. Typical was the letter at Lady Shelley’s that talked of destroying the ‘hellish brood’, taken to mean Protestants (12 May); the order of the Portuguese ambassador to kill the constables coming to apprehend frequenters of the mass (12 Aug.); the report that a man heard a papist Frenchman say that 15,000 of his countrymen would invade at the trigger of an uprising in the City (29 Dec.); a reported army of 30,000 in Picardy, poised to invade (20 Jan. 1642), the list of soldiers hostile to Parliament (26 Jan.), and the footman arrested for calling out ‘Down with Protestants, and up with the papists’.85Procs. LP vi. 379; D’Ewes (C), 360; PJ i. 111-2, 181, 233. After his release from the Tower, Whitaker was added to the committees on the popish hierarchy (3 Aug. 1641), a committee working on how to ban Catholic tradesmen from pursuing their callings in London (16 Aug.) and committees on managing epidemics and regulating new buildings in London, topics which drew on his experience as a magistrate as well as a commissioner during the 1630s. It was a measure of Whitaker’s stature, notwithstanding his brief, perfunctory period of punishment, that on 9 September he was named to the committee which continued to direct parliamentary affairs during the recess of 10 September to 20 October.86CJ ii. 288b.

Informations and Examinations, 1641-2

When the House re-convened, Whitaker resumed his work of examining suspects and informers, the pursuit of Catholics given even sharper focus as news came through of the rebellion in Ireland. Because his report rested on an examination taken by the mayor of Canterbury and then sent to the Commons, it was probably Laurence rather than William Whitaker who spoke to indict a Catholic for words hostile to Parliament (22 Oct.), and it also probably Laurence rather than William that spoke on 2 November against the Lords’ protection of the Catholics among their number, which led to the successful motion proposed by William Strode I for a fresh bill to convict recusants and to outlaw certiorari, the writ which protected the peers from prosecution for recusancy.87D’Ewes (C), 23-4, 68-9; Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 421. Once close himself to the higher lay officers of the queen’s household, Whitaker was actively interrogating those closer personally to Henrietta Maria: her confessor, her carver and her apothecary (4 Nov.).88D’Ewes (C), 79. It would be entirely in keeping with Whitaker’s profile if it was he who seized a psalter from a gentlewoman and kept hold of it despite an attempt by William Tomkins* to persuade the House to make him give it back.89D’Ewes (C), 95n. But to add to the harrying of Catholics there was now a greater emphasis on matters of security and military intelligence, as fears of armed conflict in England rose. Whitaker himself was caught up in this, as he was one of a small group who set a guard on the house of the Catholic Henry Somerset, 5th earl of Worcester (16 Nov.).90CJ ii. 317a. He helped investigate the king’s sending of armed men to Westminster (13 Dec.), and was first named to a committee for a bill to disarm papists (20 Dec.). On the last day of 1641, he was named to another committee seeking to discover by whose authority drums were beaten to call men to arms.91CJ ii. 340a, 349b, 365a. These were all ad hoc committees, but it was probably because of his status as a Middlesex justice that he was required to search three houses for arms and other incriminating material (4, 12, 27 Jan. 1642).92CJ ii. 368a, 375a, 375b, 398b. Immediately after Whitaker had reported a fruitless search of the house of Sir James Hamilton (13 Jan.), the House delegated powers of examining all informations that came its way to a committee of which he was a member.93CJ ii. 375b. This was the origins of the long-standing Committee for Examinations, in its early days more usually called the Committee for Informations, and Whitaker took the chair. It is evident, however, that his pre-eminence owed everything to the frequency with which he had been regaling the House with horror stories of papists and other traitors since virtually his first appearance in the chamber.

The context of this emphasis on rumoured military activity was, of course, the king’s attempt on the Five Members (4 Jan. 1642) and the atmosphere of near panic it provoked. Yet Whitaker seems not to have been close to Pym or the other junto members, and more than once appeared willing to give the king the benefit of the doubt. He supported the appointment of a serjeant-major to the expeditionary force to put down the Irish rebellion, even though he was said to have been among Charles’s entourage on 4 January and spoke in effect in support of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (4 Mar.) when he sought to exonerate the king from complicity in any planned violence towards the London citizenry when the Five Members were sought out.94PJ i. 383, 502. The amalgamation of Whitaker’s Committee for Informations with that of Miles Corbett* (18 Feb.) on the case of Michael Pemberton, who had come to London from York with the king, and which focused on the conduct of the king’s men on 4 January, was an important stage in the evolution of what became known as the Committee for Examinations. Over the long term, Corbett proved to be as closely associated with this committee as Whitaker, but there seems no evidence of friction between the two men, not can it be shown that Corbett’s involvement reflected any sentiment that Whitaker was not tough enough in his handling of the king’s associates.95CJ ii. 439b; PJ i. 410.

In fact, the Committee for Examinations evolved over time and through various name changes. Despite the amalgamation with Corbett’s committee, Whitaker continued to chair the Committee for Informations, as it was generally called in its early life, until February 1643.96CJ ii. Thereafter, Corbett more often than Whitaker was in the chair, until the summer of 1645, when Whitaker seems to have resumed his chairmanship. The evolutionary development of the committee extended to its title. Occasionally, the committee was described by the Journal clerk as the committee for intelligence, which to modern eyes is a more meaningful description of its interests and business.97CJ ii. 759b. Otherwise, it was usually called the Committee for Informations until early 1643, and thereafter the Committee for Examinations. Some of the apparently relaxed approach by the clerk towards matters of nomenclature is a suggestion of the limited extent to which the committee developed as an organized body. It is not known to have had a staff or a body of records in the way that the great executive committees of the Long Parliament had them, nor did it have a regular meeting place. Indeed the terms of its brief included the liberty to meet wherever it sought fit, outside the palace of Westminster. Furthermore, this was never the only committee which examined the reports and statements relating to intelligence that came before the House: inevitably there were many other ad hoc bodies, and Whitaker sat on many of those too. The volume of information bombarding the Commons on the eve of civil war and during the conflict itself would quickly have overwhelmed any single committee.

Whitaker often went beyond merely interviewing suspects and informants, to exercise investigative powers as well. Thus he was required on 24 February 1642 to discover who framed a petition on the militia and the common council of London, and the following day interviewed the French ambassador with a view to discovering the intentions of the French government towards Ireland.98CJ ii. 452a, 454b, 456b; PJ i. 465, 466. In the prelude to the outbreak of civil war in 1642, the most significant examinations taken, or informations collected, by Whitaker were probably those of the renegade Sir Edward Dering* (5 Apr.); on the retinue going to York with the king (17 June); on the armed strength of the king at Newcastle-upon-Tyne (20 June), which led Whitaker to read out the parliamentary declaration against the commission of array (30 June); and the ordinance which the Committee for Informations produced to confirm Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, in his command of the navy (1 July). This last piece of legislation was one product of a busy day which had begun with a report by Whitaker that Princes Rupert and Maurice were on their way to England in the king’s service, and led to a conference with the Lords on control of the navy managed on the Commons side by Whitaker, John Pym, Miles Corbett and Denzil Holles.99CJ ii. 511b, 630a, 644b, 645a, 646b, 647a; PJ iii. 153-4, 155

Whitaker’s work as the most visible reporter to the Commons on intelligence matters absorbed a very large part of his time. This was never a full-time job for him, however. In the first half of 1642, he was named to committees on an anti-Laudian bill to suppress ‘innovations’ in religion (17 Feb.), and a bill for the better maintenance of the ministry (25 Mar.).100CJ ii. 437b, 496b. He was called to draft an order on the prevention of immigration of Irish Catholics (8 Mar.), and was joined in the task by John Glynne, Bulstrode Whitelocke* and Edmund Prideaux I*.101CJ ii. 472b, 480b. He helped prepare a response to one of the king’s declarations from York (29 Mar.) and considered the cases of those who refused Parliament’s protestation of May 1641, which he himself had taken without demur.102CJ ii. 133a, 530a. With Samuel Vassall and Sir Thomas Erle he drafted an order prevent arms from being taken to the king at York, and went to the Tower with Erle, Sir Robert Harley and Sir Peter Wentworth to examine the officers of the Mint on their stocks of gold and coin (26 May).103CJ ii. 587a, 590b. Again acting in concert with Erle, he was authorized to open letters that cast light on an alleged scheme by the king’s advisers to pawn the crown jewels (8 June).104PJ iii. 41.

On 10 June Whitaker promised that he would ‘freely give’ £20 to the parliamentary cause.105PJ iii. 472. Although he had come in to the House by patronage other than that of the junto, it appears that by the summer of 1642, much of Whitaker’s high-profile work was helping the reputations of the parliamentary leadership. Investigations not infrequently threw up slanders against them, for example against John Pym (15 Mar., 12 Oct) and the earl of Warwick (26 Sept.).106PJ ii. 39; Harl. 164, f. 14v; Add. 18777, ff. 11v, 12. Not all these disparaging or inflammatory public speeches were from ‘simple fellows’ of the streets; some (26 Sept., 14 Oct) were from the pulpit.107CJ ii. 807b; Add. 18777, ff. 11v, 12, 28; Harl. 164, f. 247v. On 10 September, Whitaker examined his first published book, A Safeguard from Shipwreck, which argued that Catholics could go to parish churches, be in communion with the Church of England and take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance. This useful propaganda item in the war against popery was approved by the House and supplied with a preamble by Francis Rous*.108CJ ii. 760b A few months later (3 Feb. 1643), he was busy clamping down on books that were offensive to Parliament. After his report on two publications had led to the imprisonment of printer and stationer, the brief of the Committee for Examinations was explicitly declared to include the suppression of any similar titles.109Add. 31116 p. 45. The scale of the activity at the Committee for Informations is visible on 26 September 1642, when the cases of 9 individuals came before the House on reports by Whitaker.110CJ ii. 782b, 783a.

By the end of 1642, Whitaker was no longer simply the obsessive papist-hunter of 1641, but had become an important figure in Parliament’s strategy of winning over opinion and combating dissident comment both in the capital and in the country. It was during this period of almost frantic activity, just as the war was beginning, that Whitaker started to keep his diary of parliamentary proceedings.111Add. 31116. As a diarist, Whitaker confined himself largely to the principal matters under discussion, as he saw them, and although he did not exclude his own involvement in them from account completely, he eschewed the personal detail that marks the diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes*. The diary is very useful as one of the stock of Long Parliament diaries, particularly for the later period it covers, but it only dimly illuminates Whitaker’s character and motivations. Inevitably, by virtue of his primacy in the Committee for Informations and because he never gave up his active participation in the Middlesex commission of the peace, he was well informed and a sure source of both fact and rumour for others in the House, providing D’Ewes, for example, with the latest on intercepted letters from Holland (15 Dec. 1642) when they encountered each other on the stairs.112Harl. 164, f. 263. His commitment to the parliamentary war effort seems to have been unquestionable: it was he who moved on 31 December that Members should declare what they were contributing to the cause.113Add. 18777, f. 109v.

Committee-man, 1643-5

In 1643, Whitaker was named to 30 committees, a respectable total, but not one which matched the number of times he was mentioned in the Journal. Among the committees to which he was called early in the year were one on acquiring horses for the army (26 Jan.), the committee for sequestering the property of all who fought against Parliament (3 Feb.) and the committee for despatches (27 Mar.), where alleged abuses at the Marshalsea prison were to be considered.114CJ ii. 943a, 953b; iii. 20a. This was one of a number of committees on prisons and prisoners that had claimed Whitaker’s time since August 1641, beginning with that on petitions from London prisoners (28 Aug. 1641).115CJ ii. 274b, 807b, 825b, 875a, 898a. Other committee appointments tended to complement his work on the Committee for Examinations, such as one investigating the apparent attempt by an army captain to smuggle £400 in gold in a soap barrel to the king’s headquarters at Oxford (1 May).116CJ iii. 65b, 66a; Harl. 164, f. 381v. The Committee for Examinations was the principal agency for investigating rumours, so in the same category of complementary bodies came the committee which was charged with drafting the inevitably futile order on preventing the spread of false reports (21 Apr.).117CJ iii. 54b. The Committee for Examinations itself, Whitaker still in the chair, was by early 1643 widening its remit. It was investigating Londoners who had not contributed towards Parliament’s military taxation (20 Jan.), reporting to the House with a recommendation, subsequently accepted, that the issue be referred to the Committee for Advance of Money, and the offenders sent to prison.118CJ iii. 935b; Add. 31116 p. 43. In similar vein, the committee moved beyond examining specific offensive texts to considering ways by which a general censorship on ‘scandalous’ materials might be established (3 Feb.).119CJ ii. 953a; Add. 31116, p. 45. Whitaker’s tone in this was unsurprisingly partisan, announcing to the House on 2 March how he was looking into ‘papers more bitter’ from Oxford.120Add. 18777 f. 169v.

On 6 June 1643, Whitaker took the new oath and covenant, and on the 19th was named to the committee charged with vindicating it from public criticism.121CJ iii. 118a, 173b. On 19 July, he was one of the committeemen considering propositions from the Westminster Assembly on sabbath observance. This was probably his first involvement with doctrinal matters. His crusade against popery had from the outset been rooted more in anxieties about state security than in theological principles, and religious affairs in the doctrinal sense had not been evident in his nominations to committees before this.122CJ iii. 173b. When the Solemn League and Covenant with the Scots was placed before the Members (30 Sept.), Whitaker joined Bulstrode Whitelocke and John Maynard in requesting more time to consider it and complied with them three days later.123CJ iii. 259b, 262a. His co-adjutors in this were friends and lawyers: Whitaker himself is not known to have been especially close to either man, and had never been called to the bar, despite his extensive experience of sitting as a magistrate. In Maynard’s case it was the Covenant’s assumption of the ‘extirpation’ of episcopacy that figured strongly in his reluctance to assent to it, and perhaps Whitaker shared these reservations.

One of Whitaker’s most important projects during the summer of 1643 was to try to win Dutch support for the war against the king. On 22 June, he, Pym, Francis Rous, Robert Reynolds and Michael Oldisworth met to supervise a translation of documents in French addressed to the states-general of the United Provinces by Sir William Boswell. Boswell had been resident agent of the English government in The Hague since 1632, and was an active supporter of Charles I. It was Whitaker who reported from the committee, and despite several postponements drafted a document rebutting Boswell’s arguments and making Parliament’s case for its actions.124CJ iii. 141a, 184a, 204b. He was named to a committee whose task it was to promote Sir Walter Strickland* over Boswell as the true representative of the English government, and on 17 August it was again Whitaker who went to the Lords with the completed repudiation of Boswell and the declaration to the States-General.125CJ iii. 205a, 208b. In October, Whitaker was one of a committee with the Lords to consider a message from the French ambassador-extraordinary, d’Harcourt (7 Oct.), whose declared mission was to broker a peace between the English Parliament and Charles I. Whitaker and his colleagues were forced on the defensive when first d’Harcourt was treated roughly by the soldiery in London (31 Oct.) and then, on 9 November was robbed in Somerset House. Whitaker had to apologise to d’Harcourt and then joined with other justices of Middlesex and Kent to search for the malefactors.126CJ iii. 266b, 296a, 306b; Gardiner, Hist. Great Civil War, i. 271-2. D’Harcourt abandoned London for Oxford, and later (10 Jan. 1644), Whitaker opened letters intended for the envoy which showed to the satisfaction of the House his subservience to Henrietta Maria; the trunk was passed on to the Committee of Safety.127CJ iii. 362a, b; Harl. 165 ff. 270-1; Add. 31116, p. 212. He took a more robust approach to the Spanish ambassador, visiting him (22 Nov.) with three other MPs to warn him of the imminent arrests at his residence of Catholic priests.128CJ iii. 318a.

A few days after the visit to the Spanish ambassador, Whitaker was called to chair a committee of the whole House, apparently for the first time (24 Nov.). This was on the military situation in the north, but when he occupied the chair again exactly a week later the subject matter moved on to the command of the army by Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex. On 1 December, Whitaker sat in the chair between 9 in the morning and 5 o’clock in the evening, when debate raged over the size of Essex’s army. This was again the topic of a much shorter debate chaired by Whitaker on 4 December.129Harl. 165, ff. 215v, 213, 232. He was absent because of illness between 6 and 8 December, but resumed the chair on the 13th, replacing Thomas Pury, who had taken over in his absence. As chairman, it was Whitaker who reported from the committee of the Whole House the main outline of the size of the army and the source of its financial support.130CJ iii. 340a; Add. 31116, p. 197; Harl. 165, f. 242v. This was by no means the end of the affair, as further sessions of the committee of the whole House met under Whitaker’s chairmanship into early January 1644, D’Ewes noting how the subject had dragged on in debate for about 3 months, ‘to the wonder of all men’.131CJ iii. 345b, 356b, 364b; Harl. 165, ff. 257v, 265, 270; Harl. 483, ff. 4, 7v; Add. 31116 p. 206. When Whitaker eventually steered the ordinance to publication (1 Feb. 1644), it was very short, setting the establishment numbers and bestowing £20,000 from the excise for the army’s maintenance.132A. and O. i. 375. When the legislation came to be revised very soon afterwards, Whitaker and the chairman of the committee on Parliament’s armies, Robert Scawen, taking the lead, it was clear to observers that the objections to it came from Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Oliver St John, soon to be identified as leading Independents, thus providing a clear pointer as to the cause of the slow progress.133Harl. 166, f. 14v. The rise of faction notwithstanding, the choice of Whitaker as chairman of many meetings of the committee of the whole House is testimony to his reputation as a safe pair of hands, his acceptability to a wide cross-section of the House and of course to his general stature.

Perhaps because of his work on hypothecating the excise to support maintenance of the army, Whitaker was given charge of a committee (7 Feb. 1644) to extend that tax to commodities on which it had not previously been levied.134CJ iii. 391a. The original committee included Sir Henry Vane I and Whitaker’s Middlesex associate, Sir Gilbert Gerard, and Whitaker read the first draft of the ordinance on 8 April.135CJ iii. 391a, 452b. It was not well received by the Commons. A central objective of the extension of the excise was to discharge the state’s debt to tradesmen in the metropolitan area whose outlay in provisioning and supplying the parliamentary armies had never been satisfied. Many recognized the problem, but the majority opinion considered the proposed rates too high and the range of new excisable commodities too extensive. ‘All disliked it’ according to D’Ewes, and a fresh committee was named (11 May).136CJ iii. 391a, 452b, 489a; Harl. 166, f. 49. On 15 June, Whitaker brought in a fresh ordinance, which passed both Houses on 3 July.137CJ iii. 528b, 531b, 549a; Add. 31116, pp. 290, 296. Whitaker’s excise committee remained in being after this completion, however, as a petition from one of the London livery companies was referred to it in August. A year later, another ordinance for paying off poor tradesmen was in Whitaker’s hands, but his reports were more than once postponed, and by 23 August 1645 the ordinance was at the Committee for Examinations, presumably for no better reason than that it was convenient for Whitaker to be able to work on it there alongside activities more germane to that body.138CJ iv. 132a, 171b, 186b, 231a, 243a, 245a, 250b, 251a. Some 23 resolutions passed the Commons on this ordinance on 23 August 1645, among them an order that provision for indebted tradesmen be made from the revenues allocated for maimed soldiers and widows, and a concession that the printer to the House of Commons was to be included as an artificer eligible for relief. Despite these brave resolutions, however, three months later the ordinance had not been completed, appeared to have stalled, and had to be resurrected by a fresh committee (6 July 1646) and the care of it placed in other hands.139CJ iv. 265a, 294b, 351a, 351b, 603a.

In September 1644, Whitaker played a major part in investigating the escape from the Tower of Connor Maguire, 2nd baron of Enniskillen, and Hugh MacMahon, the principal conspirators arrested after the 1641 rebellion in Ireland. On 10 September, Whitaker was one of another small delegation to the Spanish ambassador’s residence to demand a list of priests and to search for the property of Parliament’s enemies. The ambassador would only admit to keeping small items belonging to the Spanish-born widow of the recusant Sir Lewis Tresham, and refused a search on the grounds that were he to permit one he would be executed when he returned to Madrid.140CJ iii. 623a; Add. 31116, p. 317. No sooner had Whitaker reported this to the House than he was required to return to the ambassador’s with his colleagues, this time to search for Maguire and MacMahon, who had escaped on 18 August.141CJ iii. 627b, 628a. One of the ambassador’s servants had reported that they had escaped from the Tower using saws acquired by Irish priests. Whitaker recorded how on 14 September the ambassador denied sheltering the escapees, ‘and if it were otherwise let him be reputed the most infamous man in the world’.142Add. 31116, pp. 319-20. On the 19th, Whitaker, Sir John Clotworthy* and Denzil Holles found Maguire and MacMahon in the house next to Whitaker’s own in Drury Lane. Whether they claimed the £200 reward for the recapture of the Irishmen is not clear, but the leading members of the Committee for Examinations, Whitaker and Corbett, led the investigation into the whole affair. On their authority as Middlesex magistrates, Whitaker and Isaac Penington*, lieutenant of the Tower, took the examinations of Maguire and MacMahon before the two men were tried on a commission of oyer and terminer. Whitaker played a major part in tracing those who had played an ancillary part in the break-out from the Tower, and interviewed Melchior de Sabran, the French resident diplomat. In the House, D’Ewes spoke to defend another high-born suspect interviewed by Corbett or Whitaker, the duke of Gelderland in the United Provinces. Whitaker helped manage the trial of the Irishmen, drove it on in spite of delays, and secured their convictions for high treason in November 1644. 143CJ iii. 633b, 673b, 686a; Add. 31116, pp. 321, 322, 326, 337; Harl. 166, f. 127; The Whole Triall of Connor, Lord Macguire (1645), 16, 17 (E.271.10). It turned out that saws had indeed been used in the escape, but that no priests had been involved.144‘Connor Maguire, 2nd baron of Eniskillen’, ‘Hugh Mac Mahon’, Oxford DNB. The hunt for Maguire and MacMahon had been conducted in an atmosphere of anxiety in the Houses about Members’ security, the outer doors of the Commons chamber being kept shut while the fugitives were at large.145Harl. 483, f. 119v. William Prynne* can hardly have been alone in noting Whitaker’s prominence over what was by this time a period of 20 years in rooting out popish plotters.146W. Prynne, Hidden Workes of Darknes (1645), 79-80, 239.

As well as participating in the trial of the Irish rebels, in November 1644, Whitaker saw through the House an ordinance to raise taxes to maintain the fortifications and guards for London and Westminster, which reached fruition early in December.147CJ iii. 703b; A. and O. i. 574. Whitaker’s interest in military administration, resumed from the earlier long debates over the size of Essex’s army, was confirmed in the opening weeks of the following year (13 Jan. 1645) when he was called with the two lawyers John Maynard and Thomas Lane to draft an ordinance for a new model army.148CJ iv. 18a. He was one of the committee (24 Mar.) on the related legislation, the measure that became known as the Self-Denying Ordinance, which passed the Houses in April.149CJ iv. 88a. But more significantly for Whitaker’s career over the next few years was the afternoon of 10 February, when he chaired a committee of the whole House on religion.150Add. 31116 p. 382. He had chaired committees of the whole House on previous occasions, and it may well have been his standing as someone who had not been vocal in expressing himself in the House on religious questions that commended him to his colleagues for this task. Before the House was a paper from the Westminster Assembly on the subject of where authority should lie for the regulating of admission to the Lord’s Supper or communion in the state Presbyterian church then in embryo. Between March 1645 and May 1648, Whitaker was to chair the committee of the whole House on the disciplinary machinery of the state church, in its guise as the grand committee for religion, on at least another 86 occasions.151CJ iv-v passim.

The first thorny problem confronting the committee of the whole House in March 1645 was that of what constituted a sin meriting the barring of an individual to the means of grace provided by the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. It was quickly agreed that these should be sins of ‘ignorance and scandal’ (21 Mar.) but identifying what opinion or conduct precisely deserved that description proved infinitely more difficult.152Add. 31116, p. 399. On 27 March, D’Ewes recorded that a whole morning disappeared in debate on a single point under Whitaker’s chairmanship: at length it was agreed that ‘a competent measure of understanding’ was a necessary requirement for admission to the sacrament.153Harl. 166, f. 195; CJ iv. 90a. The House voted a list of sins on 2 April, but a visit by a delegation of ministers from the Westminster Assembly a week later (10 Apr.) threw open again the whole question of the catalogue of causes of suspension. On the 15th, a list of 8 articles sent from the Assembly on points of divinity, understanding of which was considered essential for partakers of communion, was voted on at the committee of the whole House, and when the committee met again on the 17th it was under pressure from a paper from the Scots commissioners urging the implementation of the Directory for Public Worship, to replace the Book of Common Prayer. On that occasion, 16 resolutions on exclusions from the sacrament were passed under Whitaker’s chairmanship, while on the same day he, Francis Rous and Zouche Tate were required to ask the Assembly to produce a confession of faith.154Add. 31116, pp. 403, 407, 409, 410; CJ iv. 95b, 96a, 105b, 106a, 111a, 113b, 114a.

Whitaker continued to chair many meetings of the committee of the whole House in April and May on the subject of exclusions from the Lord’s Supper, but during that period the debate shifted towards the equally controversial question of who was to decide whether or not to suspend an individual from the sacrament. Once again, the Commons began with a vote that this should be a task for lay elders of congregations (21 Apr.).155Add. 31116, p. 411; CJ iv. 118a. After many long debates, it was voted on 1 May that the system facing someone suspected of a capital offence would be judgment in the criminal courts followed by certification to church elders to ensure exclusion from the sacrament, the principle of which was doubtless intended to be voted on as a general one of principle.156Add. 31116 pp. 412, 414, 416. After votes were sent to the Lords on readmissions and appeals (13 May), Whitaker’s committee of the whole House turned to arrangements for distributing the Directory. On 21 June, he noted the discussion on this as ‘finished’, but the ordinance was soon back before the grand committee after objections were raised, and it was 26 August before the ordinance was published.157Add. 31116, pp. 418, 419-20, 423, 424, 430, 431-2, 433, 435, 436; CJ iv. 232a, b; A. and O. i. 755. In the closing stages of that exercise, the Assembly ministers renewed their lobbying on sins requiring suspension from communion, a seemingly patient Whitaker confiding to his diary (8 Aug.) how the ministers urged

how much it would discourage them in their ministry if they might not have power to suspend notorious sinners from the sacrament, alleging such power in the ministers and elders to be of divine right; alleging also that if they might not have that power they should be forced to give over their ministry and rather endure affliction than iniquity.158Add. 31116, pp. 448-9.

The effect of their re-statement of the principle of divine right and clerical prerogative was to vitiate the earlier round of debate on exclusions from the sacrament; the ‘variety of opinions’ on the floor of the House ensured that the renewed discussion dragged on beyond October, when Whitaker had hoped for a vote ‘tending to a conclusion’ of the business.159Add. 31116, pp. 453, 455, 459, 461, 462, 464, 471, 473, 476, 479, 486, 487, 502, 508. The ministers proved exceptionally persistent and effective lobbyists, and a number of further petitions and papers from them were received by the House and debated in the committee of the whole House.160Add. 31116, pp. 473, 476, 486, 487, 490, 491, 492. On 2 January 1646 a day of public humiliation was voted the same day as another paper from the Assembly ministers, finding fault with Commons votes and identifying the problem of sins ‘not enumerated’: that is, the need for catch-all provision to suspend from the sacrament. An ordinance was finally engrossed on 3 March 1646, a whole year after Whitaker had first presided over the deliberations on it.161Add. 31116, pp. 502, 508, 512-3, 513-4.

The chairing of the committee of the whole House occupied the bulk of Whitaker’s parliamentary activity in 1645, but he was to be found on other committees consistent with his previous evident interests. He continued to work on measures to protect poor tradesman to whom the state was indebted, and was named to ordinances on rewarding the war treasurers, Hill and Pennoyer, from sales of delinquents’ estates (18 Apr.). He was included in the committee for an ordinance on taking accounts (26 Apr.) and probably because of his important role in chairing the committee of the whole House on the proposed Presbyterian church was added to a committee to consider papers from the Scots commissioners (2 May).162CJ iv. 115b, 123b, 130a. His previous interest in military administration was confirmed in work on ordinances to recruit soldiers for service in the siege of Oxford (2 June) and on the size of the garrison at Windsor (5 July).163CJ iv. 155b, 160b, 198a. After the king’s cabinet was captured at the battle of Naseby, Whitaker was a natural inclusion in the body that considered what should be done with it (23 June).164CJ iv. 183b. This committee’s brief included interrogating a number of individuals, including the Portuguese ambassador, suggesting procedures similar to those used by the Committee for Examinations. That this particular case, with its sensational discoveries that occupied most of the Commons time on 23 June in the reading, was not handed over routinely to that committee suggests an awareness by Members of the extraordinary implications of the material now in their hands, and indicates that there were limits to the authority and standing of Whitaker’s committee.165J. Peacey, ‘The Exploitation of Captured Royal Correspondence and Anglo-Scottish Relations in the British Civil Wars, 1645-6’, SHR lxxix. 215.

Even so, the Committee for Examinations was never remote from Whitaker’s concerns. He was asked on 31 March to manage a conference with the Lords on the case of Thomas Savile†, Baron Savile, who had defected to a Westminster Parliament suspicious of his motives. He was to collaborate in this with Miles Corbett, suggesting that the Committee for Examinations had had a hand in scrutinizing Savile’s credentials.166CJ iv. 95a. It was certainly that committee from which Whitaker reported (15 Aug.) on the case of John Lilburne, examined before the committee on 24 July, when both Corbett and Whitaker had been present, jointly directing proceedings. Lilburne had been arrested for verbally repeating allegations fomented by Savile that Speaker William Lenthall and his brother, Sir John Lenthall, keeper of the Marshalsea prison, had connived with the royal court at Oxford in return for a huge bribe. When Lilburne published an account of his first appearance before Whitaker and Corbett, adding a robust critique of the modus operandi of the Committee for Examinations into the mix, Whitaker reported Lilburne’s case to the House and he was sent to Newgate.167CJ iv. 236b, 274a; J. Lilburne, The Copy of a Letter (1645), 1-3 (E.296.5). By this time, Whitaker had forfeited the sympathy of D’Ewes, who dismissed the former’s report of 15 September as ‘long and frivolous’.168Harl. 166, f. 264v.

Committees and politics, 1645-7

That summer saw Whitaker’s reappearance in the chair of the Committee for Examinations, after a period when Corbett seemed the dominant figure.169CJ iv. 236b, 242b, 250b, 274a, 294b, 311b, 315a, 327a, 348a. Lilburne’s clash with the committee provided him with enough material for a number of publications in which the Committee for Examinations figured, never in a complimentary way.170J. Lilburne, The Grand Plea of Lieut. Col. John Lilburne (1647), 3 (E.411.21); idem, Rash Oaths Unwarrantable (1647), 25 (E.393.39); idem, England’s Weeping Spectacle (1648), 5 (E.450.7). Lilburne singled out Whitaker as a particular enemy of his, reviving, or keeping fresh, the latter’s reputation as ‘that old patentee monopolizer’.171J. Lilburne, ‘The Legall Fundamentall Liberties’ (1649), in The Leveller Tracts ed. W. Haller, G. Davies (Gloucester, Mass. 1964), 409, 431; idem, Regall Tyrannie Discovered (1647), 102 (E.370.12). This was a characterisation that Whitaker never seems to have escaped, and the royalist press at Oxford bracketed him and Sir Robert Pye I as ‘old courtiers’, whose votes could be bought.172Anon, The Sence of the House (Oxford, 1644, 669.f.6.117); [G. Bate], The Regall Apology (1648), 57 (E.436.5). In his less pejorative allusions to his adversary, Lilburne consistently described him as ‘Justice Whitaker’. He was not alone in doing so, and the title implies strongly that Whitaker’s place in the Middlesex and Westminster commissions of the peace was still an important asset in his operations at the committee, allowing him to issue warrants for searches on his own authority, as he seems to have done in the case of John Musgrave, whose study was searched ‘for suspected papers against the state’.173Lilburne, Rash Oaths Unwarrantable, 25; Regall Tyrannie Discovered, 102; J. Musgrave, Another Word to the Wise (1646), [12] (E.323.6).

Whitaker chaired the committee of the whole House on religion 28 times between early October 1645 and early April 1646.174CJ iv. 296b-503a. On some occasions, such as 8 April 1646, the committee took up the whole day’s business, ‘from morn until night without intermission’, on another petition from the Assembly, which ended with no vote or resolution taken.175Add. 31116, p. 527. The ministers were now complaining of the powers of suspension from the Lord’s Supper given in the recently engrossed ordinance to lay elders, arguing for divine right authority. The Commons seriously considered whether this line of argument was a breach of parliamentary privilege, but backed away from a confrontation.176Add. 31116, p. 524. Small wonder that later in the year (16 Sept.), Whitaker had to admit that after yet another marathon session, ‘he could endure no longer’.177Harington’s Diary, 36. The ordinance was amended, and a rider published on 5 June, but the committee of the whole House was evidently no longer the vehicle for reaching conclusions on religious policy, being too divided and unwieldy for the purpose.178CJ iv. 562b; A. and O. i. 852. His release for the time being from the duties of chairing the whole House was probably critical in allowing Whitaker to resume a leading role in the Committee for Examinations. It was during this period, however, that the committee overreached itself, when it bailed a poacher brought before it for maiming a gamekeeper and killing a deer in the park belonging to Sir Martin Lumley*. Whitaker neutrally recorded in his diary how the bailing had been ultra vires, and a matter of parliamentary privilege. There was clearly in the House a climate of disapproval of the committee’s actions, mixed with a perception that with the end of military campaigning after Naseby it was no longer required, and it was dissolved (8 July).179CJ iv. 607b; Add. 31116, p. 553. A recent attempt to link the demise of the committee specifically with the establishment of martial law in London does not convince.180W. Epstein, ‘The Committee for Examinations and Parliamentary Justice, 1642-7’, Jnl. of Legal Hist. vii. 15.

Whitaker’s even-handedness in his diary-keeping makes his own precise position on political and religious matters hard to fathom. He was a puritan certainly, and must have been sympathetic to the new proposed state church in order to be a credible and durable chairman of the committee of the whole House. He must also have inclined to the Erastian position espoused by the House in these endless debates, and to have been sceptical of the divine right pretensions of the Assembly ministers. But is it striking that he himself was never named an elder in the London province of the fledgling new model state church: neither in Drury Lane or in any other parish, and religious affairs did not figure strongly among his interests in ad hoc committees. He was given responsibility for inviting a minister to preach before the Commons on only one occasion (21 Oct. 1647), and that was to approach Stephen Marshall, one of the most pragmatic and accommodating members of the Assembly.181CJ v. 339a; ‘Stephen Marshall’, Oxford DNB. His relationship with Miles Corbett, his co-chairman of the Examinations Committee and a known Independent, is nowhere described as hostile, and the two men seem to have co-operated amicably, even in the estimation of those who had every reason to look for division between them.182Lilburne, Rash Oaths Unwarrantable, 25. It seems therefore doubtful whether the order suppressing the Committee for Examinations should be read as evidence of factional rivalry between Presbyterians and Independents. In any case, the work of the committee in scrutinizing printed books continued. A whole day (7 Aug.) was devoted to Whitaker’s report on works by the controversialist writers George Withers and Andrewes Burrell, and Whitaker examined some 8 titles during 1647, culminating in an order to him, to Corbett and 8 others, clearly the Committee for Examinations in all but name, to smash the presses where the hostile newspaper titles, Mercurius Elencticus and Mercurius Pragmaticus were printed (27 Nov. 1647).183CJ iv. 639b; v. 47a, 109a, 153a, 167b, 254a, 371a; Add. 31116, p. 559.

From 16 September 1646, Whitaker was once again in the chair of the committee for the whole House, on religion, where an ordinance to combat the spread of heresy and blasphemy was in debate. Predictably by this time, progress on the measure was slow and painful. Whitaker recorded how sometimes whole days were spent on it, noting ‘good progress’ occasionally, more often nothing resolved, not even ‘until dark night’ fell on the day’s proceedings.184Add. 31116, pp. 566, 567, 580, 581, 594, 600, 602. Nothing had emerged from the deliberations by 1 January 1647, when another ordinance, on preventing preaching by non-ordained preachers, bumped the heresy ordinance down the order of business of the committee of the whole House. Despite many sessions chaired by Whitaker on this in January and February 1647, it was not until over a year later (19 Feb. 1648) that Whitaker was able to report the ordinance for blasphemy, which incorporated elements of both measures.185CJ v. 35b, 45b, 53a, 55a, 60b, 68b, 75b, 85a, 468b. To add to the interventions of the Westminster Assembly, by this time diminishing in impact, came the struggles between Independents and Presbyterians in the House, which made concord on a topic such as the authority for preaching almost impossible to achieve.

With Harbottle Grimston and Miles Corbett, Whitaker was an active manager of the examinations and interrogations of Judge David Jenkins, and was named to the committee that searched for the printers of the stream of publications he managed to produce from the Tower.186CJ v. 153a, 167b. By 29 June, Whitaker was reporting to the House on the case.187CJ v. 220b, 228a. One of Jenkins’s tactics was to have appealed through his published writings to the parliamentarian army, hoping to divide soldiers from their paymasters. That army was on a collision course with Parliament, as Jenkins knew. In July, Whitaker was with Corbett and Pye named to a small committee on the composition of the army (9 July) and was with Corbett asked to investigate a paper emanating from London on the crisis.188CJ v. 238a, 254a. When in reaction to what looked like a rapprochement between Parliament and the New Model, a Presbyterian-inspired crowd invaded both chambers of Parliament (26 July), Whitaker was one of those who fled to the army, although the sources are not unanimous on this point.189LJ ix. 385b; HMC Egmont, i. 440. His association with Corbett may well have brought him into the fold of the Independents in this crisis, as may his position as in effect a kind of deputy Speaker, so practised was his chairmanship of the whole House.

Backbencher, 1647-53

After Whitaker returned to the Commons (he was back by 19 Aug.), his participation in parliamentary business took on a different shape to that of the previous years. He only chaired one more session of the whole House on religion, on the blasphemy ordinance (1 May 1648), and that a full nine months after his return.190CJ v. 548b. Between August 1647 and Pride’s Purge on 6 December 1648, he was named to 32 committees. A number of these (30 Sept., 6, 21, 30 Oct.) were on propositions to the king for a political settlement, and another (15 Nov.) was on Charles’s security while on the Isle of Wight, after his escape from Hampton Court.191CJ v. 321b, 327b, 339a, 346b, 359a. He was named to the committee on management of the Tower Hamlets militia (19 Nov.) and to Miles Corbett’s committee on poor relief (23 Nov.). With Corbett he was also named to a committee on curbing the press (27 Nov.), and another to investigate intelligence handed them by the Speaker (13 Dec.).192CJ v. 363b, 366b, 371a, 380a. These last two committees were typical territory of the officially defunct Committee for Examinations, and a recovery of that committee’s powers is evident in orders to Whitaker and John Venn to interrogate a sailor (27 Jan.) and to Whitaker and Sir Robert Pye I to examine three other men on 3 February. In this last case, Whitaker and Pye were acting as justices of the peace, the qualification so prized in the early days of the committee. Unsurprisingly, therefore, by 8 March the name as well as the substance of the Committee for Examinations was back in currency.193CJ v. 445b, 453a, 480b, 485b. This revival came immediately after the Vote of No Addresses (3 Jan.), and heightening anxiety in Parliament over the prospects for any kind of settlement with the king.

On 16 March, Whitaker gave a series of reports on the legal status of Catholics who had surrendered at various garrisons after the first civil war. The committee he chaired on this subject was known as the committee of complaints for breach of articles, more generally as the committee for complaints, and he was apparently its chairman for the rest of his parliamentary career.194CJ v. 501a, 501b, 507b, 511b; vi. 32a; vii. 41b. Most of his committee activities in 1648 were on matters of military preparation and security. The most important bodies were those on the national militia and that of Westminster (12 Apr., 13 June, 10 July), and he himself was added as a militia commissioner for Middlesex on 1 August.195CJ vi. 527b, 597b, 630b, 655b. This was in response to the renewed conflict of the second civil war. Military, rather than religious, subjects called Whitaker once more to the chair of the committee of the whole House, on an ordinance to satisfy the claims of the demobilized ‘reformado’ officers (12, 19 Oct., 16, 23 Nov.).196CJ vi. 50a, 56a, 77b, 84a. This work, begun in October and still proceeding in late November, presumably helped Whitaker’s standing in the eyes of the army, and he was untouched by Pride’s Purge on 6 December. With Miles Corbett and five others, on 13 December he was put in charge of reversing the cancellation of the Vote of No Addresses which had passed the House in the previous August.197CJ vi. 96a. His inclusion in the committee to investigate the publication by the secluded Members of a protest against their treatment (13 Dec.) and another working on an ordinance to try the king (29 Dec.) reveals Whitaker to have been at this stage an active Rumper.198CJ vi. 97b, 106a. This was where he drew the line in the treatment of the king, however. He was not named to the high court of justice which tried Charles, nor did he play any known part in the events that led eventually to the regicide on 30 January 1649.

In the Rump Parliament, the committee of complaints on breaches of military articles seems to have been Whitaker’s only standing committee responsibility, and there was no fresh revival of either the Committee for Examinations or any call for him to chair the committee of the whole House on religion.199CJ vi. 151a; vii. 41b. On 1 February, he took the dissent to the vote on 5 December to continue addresses to the king; and on the 22nd reported from the committee taking the dissents of other Rumpers, showing further commitment to the republican regime.200A Full Declaration (1660), 23 (E.1013.22); CJ vi. 148b. Between the start of February 1649 and late September 1651, Whitaker was named to committees on 27 separate bills, but was given charge of none of them. No particular theme dominated these appointments, although the welfare and remuneration of soldiers, both of high and low status, was a significant element in them, an interest that began with his appointment to the Committee for Indemnity early in January, when it was tasked with improving access to justice by country claimants.201CJ vi. 109a, 113b, 129b, 205b, 209b, 225b, 516b, 524a, 569b. With Cornelius Holland he was asked to examine a report on the export of coin (16 Apr. 1649), but his special responsibilities were now few in number. On 4 September 1649 he was added to the Committee of Navy and Customs specifically on the subject of prisoners taken at sea, and on 14 November his seniority was recognized when, with Corbett, he was one of the 9 Members required to safeguard the parliamentary records.202CJ vi. 187b, 290a, 333a.

Whitaker’s parliamentary career was evidently in decline during the Rump. In 1649 he was named to 26 committees, in 1650, 9, and in 1651, 11.203CJ vi, vii. passim. He was noted by the Journal clerk on only 4 occasions in 1652, the last mention of him at all being on 27 August that year.204CJ vii. 71b, 79b, 127b, 171b. He kept up his attendance and involvement with the Middlesex quarter sessions, however, taking recognizances there not only for the run-of-the-mill offences such as street disorder, but also the more politically sensitive challenges to the government, such as drinking of healths to the ‘confusion of Parliament’ (Mar. 1650) and the expression of anti-Trinitarian views (June 1651).205Mdx. County Records iii, 1625-67, 194, 204, 212; CCAM 640. Whitaker was similarly loyal to the St Giles-in-the-Fields vestry, whose minutes he continued to sign at least until November 1650.206Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre, P/GF/CW/1/1. In that month he amended his will, first drawn up in 1646, which may have betokened an onset of ill health which, rather than political disaffection, might provide a plausible explanation for his slow withdrawal from public life. He died in 1654 and was buried at Giles on 27 April.

Conclusion

Whitaker seems first and foremost to have been rooted in the public life of Middlesex, motivated particularly in the early life of the Long Parliament by an urgent sense that a virulent popery was invading the metropolitan area. The argument that he was moved to support Parliament through disappointment as a crown officeholder seems unconvincing, as he appears not to have availed himself of opportunities for self-enrichment available to him during the Long Parliament and the Rump. His long stints in the chair of the committee of the whole House must surely be taken as a sign that his colleagues were satisfied of his competence and integrity, his chairmanship of religious questions in particular, a token of his relative impartiality and pragmatism on matters of dogma. Despite the wide powers of arrest and search Whitaker had at his disposal at the Committee for Examinations, his special standing there seems to have rested to a significant extent, though not entirely, on his authority as a Middlesex magistrate.