AYSCOGHE, Sir Edward (1596-c.1653), of South Kelsey, Lincs.

The Ayscoughs had moved from the North Riding of Yorkshire to Lincolnshire after acquiring Stallingborough, near Great Grimsby, in the mid-fifteenth century.42Lincs. Peds. 58-60; Lincs. Wills 1600-17 ed. A.R. Maddison (Lincoln, 1891), pp. xxxiv-xxxv. The family had provided a Member for the town in the Parliament of 1529, but its interest then lapsed until the return of Ayscoghe’s son for the borough in 1659.43HP Commons 1509-58, ‘Sir William Askew (Ayscough)’. In the mid-sixteenth century, Ayscoghe’s great-grandfather had acquired the manor of South Kelsey (about 15 miles north of Lincoln) by marriage, and this had become the family’s principal residence.44Lincs. Peds. 63. Ayscoghe’s father and grandfather having died while he was still a minor, his wardship was purchased by their friend and kinsman, the godly Lincolnshire knight Sir Thomas Grantham†, father of the future parliamentarian Thomas Grantham*. The trustees of Ayscoghe’s estate included two more of the county’s godly grandees – Sir John Hatcher (who had married Ayscoghe’s widowed mother) and Sir William Wray†, who were the fathers of the future parliamentarians Thomas Hatcher* and Sir Christopher Wray* respectively.45WARD9/162, f. 107v; WARD9/214, ff. 13v-14, 152v-153; Gibbons, Notes on Vis. of Lincs. 91; Lincs. Wills 1600-17 ed. Maddison, 84-5.

Sir William Wray was probably instrumental in arranging Ayscoghe’s marriage in 1612 to his step-daughter, whose family had been connected by blood and service to the Elizabethan ‘fighting lord’ Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex.46Infra, ‘Sir Christopher Wray’; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Sir Nicholas Clifford’. The Ayscoughs had been zealously Protestant since the Reformation (the family numbered among its more renowned members the Marian Protestant martyr Anne Askew), and Ayscoghe’s education at Sidney Sussex, one of Cambridge’s most godly colleges, was consistent with that legacy.47Al. Cant.; J. T. Cliffe, Puritan Gentry (1984), 97-8; ‘Anne Askew’, Oxford DNB. In 1621, he was returned for Lincoln on the interest of Sir Thomas Grantham, the city’s foremost gentleman property-owner.48Infra, ‘Thomas Grantham’; HP Commons 1604-29.

Although he cut an insignificant figure at Westminster before the 1640s, Ayscoghe emerged in the vanguard of ‘country’ resistance to royal policies with his refusal to pay the Forced Loan in 1627, for which he was removed from the Lindsey bench for 18 months and suffered imprisonment and then internal exile in Suffolk.49SP16/56, f. 56; SP16/89, f. 2; CSP Dom. 1627-8, p. 81; APC 1627, pp. 241, 253, 396, 475; 1627-8, p. 219; HP Commons 1604-29. His fellow Lincolnshire loan refusers included Grantham, Sir William Armyne*, Sir Anthony Irby*, Sir John Wray* and John Broxolme*. Re-elected for Lincoln in 1628, Ayscoghe became a friend and correspondent of the leading ‘country’ politician Sir John Eliot†, who referred to Ayscoghe, his brother-in-law Thomas Hatcher and Sir William Armyne as the ‘honest sons of Lincolnshire’.50J. Forster, Sir John Eliot (1864), ii. 650, 654, 656, 692, 713. This group of godly Lincolnshire grandees looked for support and patronage in the county to the bishop of Lincoln, John Williams. A Calvinist and vocal critic of the Laudian altar policy, Williams generally took a lenient view of puritan nonconformity.51H. Hajzyk, ‘The Church in Lincs. c.1595-c.1640’ (Cambridge Univ. PhD thesis, 1980), 130; ‘John Williams’, Oxford DNB. Ayscoghe was a patron himself of the Lincolnshire divine John Clarke, who was ‘very famous for learning and piety’ and for the importance he attached to scriptural study in education.52Hajzyk, ‘The Church in Lincs.’, 168. In an epistle dedicatory to Ayscoghe and his ‘religious and noble lady’, written in 1634, Clarke emphasised their good fortune in that God had given them ‘a mind to know Him, a heart to love Him’, and he urged them to ‘go on in that good way you have begun ... take up the cross which lies in the ways of God’.53[J. Clarke], Holy Incense for the Censers of the Saints (1634), sigs. A3, A7, A8v-A9v. Ayscoghe may not have taken this advice entirely to heart, for if the royalist pamphleteer John Taylor can be credited, he ‘got a wench with child in his lodging and was not punished [by the Commons] for it’.54J. Taylor, The Causes of the Diseases and Distempers of this Kingdom (1645), 3 (E.305.20).

Despite his godly sympathies, Ayscoghe was among the more diligent of Lincolnshire’s commissioners for collecting contributions in the 1630s towards the re-edification of St Paul’s Cathedral – an endeavour much favoured by the king and Archbishop William Laud but denounced by the puritan physician John Bastwick as ‘making a seat for a priest’s arse’.55LMA, CLC/313/I/B/004/MS25474/002, p. 48; CLC/313/I/B/004/MS25474/003, p. 31; K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992), 322-6. Furthermore, Ayscoghe was a leading participant in a project headed by the future royalist Sir John Monson† – one of Bishop Williams’s leading opponents in Lincolnshire and an ally of Archbishop Laud – to drain Ancholme Level. This scheme, which enjoyed strong backing at court, aroused considerable resentment in north Lincolnshire, particularly among the dispossessed commoners.56HP Commons 1604-29, ‘John Monson’; Lindley, Fenland Riots, 44-5; Hajzyk, ‘Church in Lincs.’, 126-8 Ayscoghe attended the meetings of the Ancholme Level sewers commissioners in 1635 that resulted in the settlement of almost 6,000 acres of fenland upon Monson as undertaker, and he was among the 14 local landowners who invested in the venture, purchasing 400 acres for £100.57Lincs. RO, MON/3/9/132; MON/7/17/1; MON/7/18/1, 6; Lindley, Fenland Riots, 44; Holmes, Lincs. 127.

Ayscoghe’s involvement in the Ancholme Level project may well have damaged his credentials as one of Lincolnshire’s ‘honest sons’, for when he stood as a candidate for the county in the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, he was defeated by the future royalist Sir Edward Hussey. Ayscoghe petitioned the Commons against Hussey’s return, and the House ordered that an election indenture drawn up by Ayscoghe’s supporters be delivered to the committee for privileges.58Supra, ‘Lincolnshire’; CJ ii. 10b. The dispute was not settled before the Short Parliament was dissolved. The king’s disastrous second campaign against the Covenanters in 1640 revitalised the country interest and, with it, Ayscoghe’s political fortunes. In the elections to the Long Parliament that autumn, he was returned with his godly kinsman Sir John Wray as a knight of the shire, taking the junior place.59Supra, ‘Lincolnshire’.

Ayscoghe’s career in the Long Parliament was not entirely commensurate with his status as a county Member or the experience he had gained as a Commons-man during the 1620s. He did not figure prominently in debate, was appointed teller on only three occasions, a messenger to the Lords twice and a reporter of just two conferences.60CJ ii. 95b, 782a, 783b, 862b; iv. 60a, 135b, 148a; v. 627b; LJ v. 374a; vii. 239a. Nevertheless, the fact that he was named to 50 committees before the outbreak of civil war is a likely indication that he was at least moderately active behind the scenes at Westminster. This impression is strengthened by his appointment to several committees during the early 1640s for ordering and expediting the House’s business – beginning on 12 December 1640, when he was made a committeeman for processing petitions to the House.61CJ ii. 49b, 151a, 211a, 825a; Add. 18777, f. 45. A number of his early committee appointments likewise suggest a concern on his part to secure the kingdom’s liberties and to reform the perceived abuses of the personal rule. Thus he was named to committees for receiving petitions against Ship Money, to examine the crown’s breach of parliamentary privilege in imprisoning Eliot and other MPs in 1629, to consider the unlawful levying of military charges, and on a bill for abolishing the council of the Marches.62CJ ii. 45b, 53b, 58a, 178b, 253b. He also contributed to the debate on 8 December 1640 concerning the judges’ verdicts in the Ship Money case, reporting allegations that Justice Sir Richard Hutton had been ‘disquieted by the solicitations of [Lord Keeper] Finch’.63Procs. LP i. 513, 517; CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 628.

Ayscoghe seems to have been particularly enthusiastic about the House’s efforts to quash Laudian prelacy and church innovations and to suppress popery. He was named to a series of committees on these issues during the first year of the Long Parliament, including those to receive petitions against the bishop of Bath and Wells, to draw up a charge against Matthew Wren, bishop of Ely – who had recently commenced legal proceedings against Ayscoghe concerning the latter’s lease of church property – and to reform abuses in the ecclesiastical courts.64CJ ii.28b, 50a, 56a, 113b, 128b, 139a; HMC Cowper, ii. 243; Lincs. RO, FL/DEEDS/731; CRAGG/5/1/202. Ayscoghe and Sir John Wray presented a petition from Lincolnshire on 27 May 1641 ‘for the abolishing of the government of archbishops, bishops and their subordinate officers’.65Procs. LP iv. 605, 610, 611, 613; E. Dering*, A Collection of Speeches Made by Sir Edward Dering (1642), 63 (E.197.1). Ayscoghe’s trenchant Protestantism was probably a factor in his nomination from late 1641 to committees for the defence of Ireland and the collection of money for distressed Irish Protestants and in his investment of £150 as an Irish Adventurer in April 1642.66CJ ii. 305b, 344b, 486a; D’Ewes (C), 296-7; PJ i. 119; CSP Ire. 1633-47, p. 784; SP28/2B, f. 683; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 564; Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 175.

Local issues also occupied some of Ayscoghe’s time during the early months of the Long Parliament. He was named to several committees and made at least one motion in the House relating to the payment of billet money for Lincolnshire, where some of the king’s army had been quartered since the summer of 1640.67CJ ii. 69b, 196a, 441b; Procs. LP v. 390. His concern to lighten the burden of quartering upon the county probably explains his willingness to stand bond for £1,000 towards securing a City loan late in 1640 to pay the English and Scottish forces in the north.68CJ ii. 238b; Procs. LP i. 228. He was also active on the bicameral commissions for disbursing the proceeds of the subsidies Parliament voted in 1641 – the bulk of which went towards paying the soldiery.69SP28/1C, ff. 11, 25-6, 35-6, 44-5, 64; SP28/2A, ff. 34v-5. In June, he was added to a committee concerning the Lords’ handling of a fen-drainage dispute between Robert Bertie, 1st earl of Lindsey and the Lincolnshire commoners.70CJ ii. 192a.

Despite Ayscoghe’s involvement in the Ancholme Level venture, there is no evidence that he supported Lindsey, the earl of Bedford, or any of the court-sponsored fen drainers whose projects were investigated by the Long Parliament. Indeed, in the case of the courtier and future parliamentarian grandee Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, he was openly antithetical to his interests. On 3 March 1641, Ayscoghe was a minority teller with the godly Shropshire baronet Sir John Corbet against the return of Robert Hyde and Pembroke’s client Michael Oldisworth for Salisbury.71CJ ii. 95b. The clerk of the Commons almost certainly muddled the record of this division, naming Ayscoghe and Corbet as tellers for the yeas and George Fane (or Vane) and ‘Mr Ashburnham’ – either John Ashburnham or William Ashbournham – as their opponents. But the parliamentary diarists Sir Simonds D’Ewes and John Moore were clear that the reverse was the case and that Ayscoghe and Corbet represented the ‘the religious and sound men of the House’ in opposing Hyde’s and Oldisworth’s return as without ‘colour of justice or law’. Many of those who voted for Hyde and Oldisworth did so, claimed D’Ewes, ‘out of affection’ for Pembroke.72Supra, ‘Salisbury’; Procs. LP ii. 612-13, 618. Yet neither Ayscoghe nor Corbet was closely associated, if at all, with the earl’s interest. The majority tellers, on the other hand, were well connected at court and were also unmoved by the godly convictions that animated the losing side in the Salisbury election and its supporters in the House.73Supra, ‘Salisbury’; infra, ‘George Fane (or Vane)’; ‘William Ashbournham’; ‘John Ashburnham’.

Ayscoghe seems to have been a peripheral figure at Westminster in the five months or so after the 1641 autumn recess, receiving appointment to only nine (mostly minor) committees and making no recorded contribution to debate.74CJ ii. 305b, 338b, 343b, 344b, 348b, 383b, 441b, 486a, 505b. The focus of his activity in the House, certainly by the spring of 1642, was the Commons’ efforts to gain control of Lincolnshire’s military resources and to disarm the county’s Catholics.75CJ ii. 513a; PJ i. 217, 221, 222, 340; PJ ii. 112-13. His own role in this work was formalised with his appointment as deputy lieutenant – very probably in late March or early April – by Parliament’s lord lieutenant of Lincolnshire under the Militia Ordinance, Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham.76PJ ii. 112-13. Late in April, Willoughby of Parham, Ayscoghe and his kinsmen Sir Christopher Wray and Thomas Hatcher were named to a commission from both Houses to secure Lincolnshire for Parliament and to assist Sir John Hotham* at Hull.77CJ ii. 544b, 545b, 547b-548a; LJ v. 27b. A month later, the Commons sent Ayscoghe, Wray, Hatcher, Sir Anthony Irby and several other Lincolnshire MPs into the county to execute the Militia Ordinance and frustrate any attempt to raise the county for the king.78CJ ii. 585b; LJ v. 87a-88b; PJ ii. 281, 286, 288, 336. It was with these appointments that the Lincolnshire county committee was established.

Ayscoghe spent most of the summer of 1642 in Lincolnshire supporting Willoughby of Parham’s campaign to wrest control of the county’s trained bands from the king’s party – and had his house ransacked by the royalists for his pains.79CJ ii. 615a, 801a, 812b; LJ v. 104, 131b-132a; PJ iii. 12, 13-14, 22, 23, 227; Bodl. Nalson II, f. 51. He also played a leading role in sustaining Hotham’s command at Hull during the first royalist siege of the town.80CJ ii. 604b, 611a; LJ v. 183a; PJ iii. 170; SP28/134, pt. 4, f. 6v; Bodl. Nalson II, f. 39. In mid-September, Ayscoghe was one of six Lincolnshire MPs who were reported to have brought in money and horses upon the propositions for the maintenance of the army of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex – in which Ayscoghe’s eldest son, Edward Ayscoghe*, had been commissioned as a captain of horse.81Supra, ‘Edward Ayscoghe’; CJ ii. 772b. Ayscoghe’s decision to side with Parliament was almost certainly linked to his godly religious convictions. He had returned to Westminster by late September, when he carried up to the Lords further instructions for the committee in Lincolnshire.82CJ ii. 782a, 783b; LJ v. 374a. He was appointed to five committees in the House that autumn, including that set up 28 October – to which he was named in first place – for liaising with MPs on parliamentary business when the Commons was not sitting.83CJ ii. 825a; Add. 18777, f. 45. His alignment with the more pacific element in the House is suggested by his majority tellership with John Trenchard on 24 November in favour of allowing one of the king’s servants to take him ‘stockings and other necessaries’.84CJ ii. 862b. The minority tellers were the ‘fiery spirits’ Henry Marten and Walter Long.

The Commons sent Ayscoghe and Thomas Grantham into Lincolnshire early in December 1642 to raise money and arms for the parliamentarian cause. On 17 December, the two men wrote to the House, asking for officers, arms and ammunition and that Parliament send down Willoughby of Parham and their fellow Lincolnshire MPs Irby, Hatcher and Sir Christopher Wray with their troops.85CJ ii. 872b, 873b, 893b, 894b; iii. 210b; HMC Portland, i. 79-80; Add. 18777, f. 98. The activities of this group of Parliament-men in the county prompted the king to issue a proclamation in mid-January 1643, declaring them ‘traitors and stirrers of sedition’ and warning that any who obeyed their warrants ‘concerning any musters, levies, or contributions for levies whatsoever ... shall be esteemed by us as an enemy to the public peace, a person disaffected to us and to the religion and laws of the kingdom and shall accordingly receive condign punishment’.86A Proclamation of His Majesties Grace, Favour, and Pardon to the Inhabitants of His County of Lincolne (1643). Their situation was apparently desperate by 24 March, when Ayscoghe and his colleagues begged the House either to send them money and arms or to recall them to Westminster ‘and not make your commands a punishment to us, who by God’s mercy, have hitherto helped to preserve this county from evident ruin and shall still continue our endeavours, if we may receive encouragement from you in this particular’.87HMC Portland, i. 106. According to the royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus, this letter occasioned ‘great offence’ in the Commons ‘as tending to the discouragement of men’s affections ... at a time when they stood most in need of a good opinion among the people’.88Mercurius Aulicus no. 17 (23-29 Apr. 1643), 215 (E.101.10).

With the royalist army of William Cavendish, 1st earl of Newcastle, threatening his estates, and the soldiery of both sides becoming increasingly plunder-prone, Ayscoghe may have come to share the view of the peace party at Westminster that a swift accommodation with the king was the only safeguard against a complete breakdown in the social order. Captain John Hotham* certainly thought so, informing Newcastle in April 1643 that he had been treating with Ayscoghe and Sir Christopher Wray – ‘men as considerable as any in the north’ – and had been ‘so earnest with them’ that he was confident they would declare for the king and bring most of the county with them.89HMC Portland, i. 702-3. Early in May, Ayscoghe and Wray wrote to Parliament, praising Hotham’s ‘great industry and care’ in strengthening Lincoln’s defences and complaining of the tardiness of Oliver Cromwell* and his troops, ‘which long since were promised to our assistance’.90HMC Portland, i. 706. In another letter a few days later, Ayscoghe, Wray and Hotham defended themselves against allegations of negligence in Parliament’s service and again accused Cromwell of failing in his duty to assist them. They asked the Commons to send down ‘some soldiers of knowledge’ to take charge of the county’s military affairs.91HMC Portland, i.707-8; Bodl. Nalson III, f. 22. Cromwell’s arrival soon afterwards precipitated Hotham’s abortive defection to the king – to which Ayscoghe’s only known response was to re-affirm his loyalty to Parliament by assisting Cromwell and Willoughby of Parham in their desperate efforts to defend Lincolnshire against Newcastle’s army.92Infra, ‘John Hotham II’; CJ iii. 180a, 232b, 271a; SP28/264, f. 113; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 240-4. When Hotham’s letter of April 1643, alleging that Ayscoghe and Wray were willing to defect, was read in the Commons in October 1645, ‘the House, not being in any whit moved therewith, did pass a vote that nothing appeared in any of those letters whereby the House had any cause to suspect the fidelity of ... either of those gentlemen’.93CJ iv. 295b; Add. 31116, p. 469.

Having returned to the Commons by 30 August 1643, Ayscoghe was among the MPs who took the Solemn League and Covenant in St Margaret’s church, Westminster, late in September.94CJ iii. 222b; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 481. Apart from three relatively brief periods of absence on leave and six months serving as a parliamentary commissioner at Newark during 1645-6, he seems to have attended the House more or less regularly between the autumn of 1643 and early 1647.95CJ iii. 577a; iv. 61a, 298a. During that period, he was named to 25 committees, the majority of which – certainly before mid-1645 – were concerned with the maintenance or management of the war effort. The House enlisted his services on committees for sequestering the estates of malignant MPs (21 Sept. 1643), raising money in the City to mobilise more troops (11 Apr. 1644), investigating the military incompetence of Henry Grey*, 1st earl of Stamford (18 May), levying the excise (5 July) and for maintaining the British regiments in Ireland (29 July).96CJ iii. 250a, 457a, 498b, 551b, 574a. He was also involved in Parliament’s efforts to supply Willoughby of Parham, the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*) and Colonel Edward Rosseter*, and he was an active member of the standing committee for the Eastern Association*.97CJ iii. 232b, 257b, 271a, 279b, 333a; iv. 225a; LJ vii. 453a; E113/9, sub ‘Robert Marshall junior’; SP28/251, unfol.; CCAM 25.

Ayscoghe’s involvement in managing the region’s military affairs earned him the enmity of his son-in-law, the Lincolnshire Presbyterian officer Colonel Edward King. King accused the Lincolnshire county committee – and in particular, it seems, Ayscoghe, Irby and William Ellys* – of putting private interest and the maintenance of military authority before the welfare of the community.98CJ iii. 381b; iv. 233b, 295b, 296a; E. King, A Discovery of the Arbitrary, Tyrannical and Illegal Actions of Some of the Committee of the County of Lincoln (1647), 10 (E.373.3); C. Holmes, ‘Col. King and Lincs. politics, 1642-6’, HJ xvi. 451-84. Ayscoghe and Sir Christopher Wray used King’s attack on the committee to obtain a Commons order obliging him to travel to Westminster to defend his actions, thereby preventing him from standing against Wray’s son, William Wray*, in the recruiter election at Great Grimsby in October 1645.99Infra, ‘Great Grimsby’; Holmes, ‘Col. King’, 473. But the quarrel between King and Ayscoghe may have been more personal than political, stemming either wholly or in part from the determination that Ayscoghe and his friends had shown in defending Willoughby of Parham from accusations of incompetence brought against him by King and Oliver Cromwell over the winter of 1643-4.100LJ vi. 414; Holmes, ‘Col. King’, 458. Ayscoghe was not among the signatories to the county committee’s letters to Parliament in the mid-1640s, denouncing King as a delinquent.

Ayscoghe’s religious sympathies probably conformed closely to the Erastian Presbyterianism of the majority of Commons-men. He and Sir John Wray were tasked in August 1643 with thanking the Lincolnshire Presbyterian ministers Thomas Coleman – the Westminster Assembly’s leading Erastian divine – and Anthony Tuckney for their sermons to the House that day.101CJ iii. 222b; ‘Thomas Coleman’, ‘Anthony Tuckney’, Oxford DNB. And in June 1645, Ayscoghe and Denis Bond were ordered to request Coleman and another Presbyterian, Francis Woodcock, to preach on the next fast day.102CJ iv. 185b. At local level, Ayscoghe supported the ministry of the Lincoln Presbyterian preacher Edward Reyner.103CSP Dom. 1625-49, pp. 712-13; E. Rayner, Orders from the Lord of Hostes (1646), sig. A2 (E.337.1). In political terms, he was probably aligned with the Essexian-Presbyterian interest at Westminster, certainly during 1644-5. His friends Willoughby of Parham, Sir Christopher Wray and Sir Anthony Irby were closely linked with this faction, while Ayscoghe himself was on friendly terms with one of the earl of Essex’s leading adherents, Sir Samuel Luke*.104Infra, ‘Sir Anthony Irby’; ‘Sir Christopher Wray’; Luke Letter Bks. 237, 502. Judging purely by his appointments – or lack of them – in 1644-5, he showed no interest in the Self-Denying Ordinance or measures for new modelling Parliament’s armies, and he may have favoured leniency towards those of Essex’s officers who had been accused of colluding with the royalists before the defeat at Lostwithiel in September 1644.105CJ iv. 135b; LJ vii. 359. His third, and final, tellership, in May 1645, tells a somewhat different story, however, for he partnered the Independent MP Sir Henry Mildmay against the Presbyterian grandees Denzil Holles and Sir John Clotworthy in opposition to a motion for exempting the eminent physician, Sir Theodore Mayerne, from the assessment.106CJ iv. 148a.

Ayscoghe’s most important parliamentary appointment during the mid-1640s came early in December 1645, when he was named with William Pierrepont*, Armyne and Hatcher as a commissioner from both Houses to reside with the English and Scottish forces besieging Newark. The commissioners’ principal task, which they appear to have performed diligently, 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.107CJ iv. 366b, 374b-375a; LJ viii. 43b-44a; Add. 37978, ff. 46v-7; SP46/106, ff. 281, 300-10. However, the army of Alexander Leslie, earl of Leven, as the commissioners informed Parliament, contained too many horse for the region to sustain, with the result that the Scottish soldiery resorted to extorting money from local communities.108LJ viii. 136. One incident early in 1646, in which the Scots terrorised the Yorkshire village of Tickhill, was particularly resented by the commissioners, who complained bitterly about it to Lieutenant-general David Leslie, the commander of the Scottish horse.109HMC Portland, i. 340-1. They were even more angered by what they perceived as Leslie’s failure to punish the offending soldiers.110LJ viii. 348. At the conclusion of the siege of Newark early in May, the commissioners praised the English forces for their ‘fidelity, courage and good discipline’, but they were pointedly silent about the conduct of the Scottish army.111LJ viii. 310a. On 30 May, the commissioners were thanked by the Commons for their ‘great industry, faithfulness and judgement’.112CJ iv. 559a. Once back at Westminster, Ayscoghe was named to committees for preparing a declaration against the Scottish army (9 June 1646), for investigating the promoters of the City’s Presbyterian Remonstrance (11 July), for recompensing the Independent grandee William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, and other officers of the abolished court of wards (24 Nov.) and for establishing a committee of both Houses for the management of composition revenues (10 Dec.).113CJ iv. 570b, 615b, 727a; v. 8b. If these appointments were at all reflective of his political sympathies, it is difficult to imagine that he was working closely with the Presbyterian grandees at this point in his parliamentary career. Moreover, with the Presbyterians in the ascendant at Westminster by the spring of 1647, he opted to obtain leave of absence from the House and does not seem to have resumed regular attendance until the summer of 1648.114CJ v. 110a, 268a, 330a, 373b, 400b, 543b.

Ayscoghe’s first Commons’ appointment of 1648 was on 8 July, at the height of the second civil war, when he, John Swynfen, Thomas Lane and Sir Thomas Widdrington were appointed reporters of a conference concerning the Lords’ desire for unconditional negotiations with the king, rather than the Commons’ proposal that Charles give his assent to preliminary propositions for establishing Presbyterianism for three years and relinquishing control of the militia for ten.115CJ v. 627b. It would appear, from this appointment, that Ayscoghe concurred with the dominant group in the House – a coalition of ‘rigid’ Presbyterians (such as Swynfen) and moderate Independents (such as Widdrington) – in its attempts to steer a middle course between, on the other hand, capitulation to Charles and the Scottish Engagers and, on the other, the radical Independents’ demand that Parliament abandon all thought of treating with the king. The same day (8 July), Ayscoghe and several other Members were ordered to bring in an ordinance for paying the forces under the Lincolnshire commander Colonel Edward Rosseter.116CJ v. 628b. Ayscoghe was declared absent and excused as ‘sick’ at the call of the House on 26 September, but he had returned to Westminster by 25 November, when he was named to a committee to determine which garrisons should be maintained.117CJ vi. 34a, 87a. This would be his last appointment before he was secluded in Pride’s Purge on 6 December.118A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.52). Precisely how he had offended the army and the radical Independents is not clear – unless, that is, he had voted on 5 December in favour of continuing negotiations with the king.

Ayscoghe was included on the Lincolnshire assessment commissions of 1649, but he was omitted from those thereafter and dropped from the Lindsey bench in 1650. He died at some point between May 1653 and the entry of his will in probate on 1 July 1654.119C6/39/8; PROB11/235, f. 56v. In his will, he asked to be buried at Stallingborough, but there is no record in the parish register to this effect. He bequeathed his heir, Colonel Edward Ayscoghe, his best horses and all of his hawks. He left his son-in-law, Colonel Edward King, £5.120PROB11/235, f. 56v. Colonel Ayscoghe represented Great Grimsby in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659.121Supra, ‘Edward Ayscoghe’