CREWE, John I (c.1598-1679), of Steane, Northants. and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, St Giles-in-the-Fields, Mdx.

Background and early career

Crewe belonged to a cadet branch of a family that had settled in Cheshire by the end of the twelfth century. His grandfather, despite attaining gentry status, was said to have been a tanner in Nantwich, which is where his forbears had resided and probably engaged in trade since the early fifteenth century.42Ormerod, Cheshire, iii. 305-6, 309-10, 313-14, 420; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Ranulphe Crewe’; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Randolph Crewe’. Crewe’s father, Sir Thomas Crewe, had married a kinswoman of Gilbert Talbot†, 7th earl of Shrewsbury, and as a result of this connection had acquired property at Steane – two miles north west of Brackley, Northamptonshire – which became his main residence.43HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Thomas Crewe’. Both Crewe’s uncle Sir Ranulphe Crewe† (the father of John Crewe II* of Utkinton) and his father had become eminent lawyers and had served as Speaker of the Commons – his uncle in 1614 and his father in 1624 and 1625.44HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Ranulphe Crewe’; ‘Thomas Crewe’. A man of strong godly convictions, Sir Thomas was one of the feoffees for impropriations and a noted patron of puritan ministers in Northamptonshire and beyond, including the celebrated preacher at Gray’s Inn Richard Sibbes, who preached his funeral sermon.45J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry, 36-7, 40-1, 46, 108-9, 120; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Thomas Crewe’; J. Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts: the Diocese of Peterborough 1603-42’ (Birmingham Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1989), 19, 50.

John Crewe attended ‘the most important centre of puritanism in the university of Oxford’, Magdalen College, where he was a contemporary of his future brother-in-law Sir John Curzon* and of Arthur Goodwin*.46J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry, 85-6; Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts’, 32. Through his father he was connected with an influential network of godly gentlemen and opponents of Caroline policies that included William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, Nathaniel Fiennes I*, John Hampden* and John Pym*.47Northants. RO, Knightley mss, K.III.37-8, 40, 42, 45; K.IV.54; K.IX.107; K.XXXIX.421(a); K.XLIV.495; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Calcot Chambre’; CSP Dom. 1675-6, p. 101; C. Russell, ‘The parliamentary career of John Pym’ in The English Commonwealth 1547-1640 ed. P. Clark, A.G.R. Smith, N. Tyacke, 248, 249; Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts’, 16-17, 20, 49. Crewe likewise became a great patron of godly ministers in Northamptonshire – one of whom praised him in 1634 for his ‘care and endeavour to advance the glory of God and to further the welfare and edification of His church and for the love to godly and painful ministers and the godliness professed, preached and practised by them’.48R. Cleaver, A Declaration of the Christian Sabbath (1625), epistle dedicatory; R. Bolton, A Three-fold Treatise ed. C. Chauncy (1634), epistle dedicatory; Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry, 37; Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts’, 19-20, 127, 128.

Crewe was returned for Amersham, Buckinghamshire, in 1624 and 1625 on the interest of Edward Russell, 3rd earl of Bedford, to whom his uncle Sir Ranulphe Crewe was then acting as legal adviser.49‘Mems. of Nathaniel, Lord Crewe’ ed. Clark, 2; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Amersham’. His maiden speech in the House, in June 1625, was in defence of ministers who had been removed from their livings for nonconformity. Returned for Brackley in 1626, he defended Sir John Eliot† for demanding the impeachment of the royal favourite the duke of Buckingham. At the 1628 general election, he yielded his seat at Brackley to his brother-in-law Sir John Curzon and was returned instead for Banbury, a few miles to the west of Steane, on his father’s interest.50HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘John Crewe’.

From the late 1620s, Crewe was repeatedly identified by the Laudian cleric Robert Sibthorpe as a leading figure in godly initiatives to challenge his authority as minister of Brackley and to enforce sabbatarian observance in the area. One of Crewe’s main confederates in this struggle was the Middle Temple barrister Edward Bagshawe*, a fellow puritan who provided legal expertise in the cause.51CSP Dom. 1639, pp. 441-2; Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts’, 19, 126-7, 131, 157. Like Bagshawe and Sir John Driden*, Crewe was involved in resisting the collection of Ship Money in the county during the later 1630s.52Infra, ‘Sir John Driden’; CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 391; Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts’, 250. His removal from the Northamptonshire bench in August 1639 – almost certainly for his perceived opposition to Caroline policies – was conceived to have been at the instigation either of Sibthorpe or of another prominent Laudian cleric, Samuel Clarke.53C231/5, p. 352; LJ iv. 137b. Nevertheless, Crewe and at least one of his clerical associates, the future Presbyterian divine Francis Cheynell, fell out with Saye and other more ‘precise’ puritans in the 1630s for being, at least in the view of the latter, too ‘orthodox’ and conformable to ecclesiastical authority. Certainly the Peterborough diocesan authorities did not categorise Crewe’s clerical protégés among the more intractable puritans in Northamptonshire.54Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts’, 19-20, 128, 138, 157-8, 217. Crewe’s unwillingness to lend his weight to the Providence Island Company – whose leading members regularly gathered at the residence of his friends and neighbours, the Knightleys of Fawsley, Northamptonshire – is perhaps revealing in this context. Crewe may have shied away from the company not simply on financial grounds but also because he perceived it, rightly, as a front for organised opposition to the Caroline government.55K.A. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630-41, 4. His apparent refusal to join Saye, Pym and other Providence Island grandees in plotting the downfall of the personal rule would help to account for Charles I’s later comment – supposing the king did indeed say something along these lines – that ‘Crewe, though he be against me, is an honest man’.56‘Mems. of Nathaniel, Lord Crewe’ ed. Clark, 2.

Parliamentary career, 1640-1

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Crewe seems to have partnered his fellow Northamptonshire puritan Sir Gilbert Pykeringe* in challenging for the two shire places. On election day, 19 March, the supporters of a rival candidate, Thomas Elmes, conceded the senior place to Crewe but took the contest for the junior place to a two-day poll in which Pykeringe eventually prevailed. Crewe was returned largely, it seems, on the strength of his interest as an opponent of Ship Money and as probably the wealthiest patron of Northamptonshire’s large and influential godly community.57Supra, ‘Northamptonshire’; Diary of Robt. Woodford ed. J. Fielding (Cam. Soc. ser. 5, xlii), 345-6. He was almost certainly one of the moving spirits behind a petition from the freeholders of Northamptonshire to the Commons early in April, requesting redress of their grievances as a result of ‘innovation in religion, exactions in spiritual courts, molestations of our most godly and learned ministers, Ship Money, monopolies, undue impositions...and enlarging the forest beyond the ancient bounds’.58CSP Dom. 1640, p. 7; Procs. Short Parl. 275.

Despite his relatively low-key performances in the 1620s Parliaments, Crewe quickly emerged as a prominent Member of the Short Parliament, both in committee and on the floor of the House. He was named to six ad hoc committees in this Parliament, and on 16 April he was probably appointed chairman of the committee of the whole House for religion.59CJ ii. 4a, 8a, 8b, 9b, 10a, 12a; Aston’s Diary, 5. Having chaired a meeting of this body on 20 April, he successfully requested the following day that it be given power to send for witnesses.60Aston’s Diary, 23, 148; CJ ii. 8a. In a debate on 22 April concerning the puritan cleric and ‘martyr’ Peter Smart, he drew a controversial distinction between those Members who ‘regard the House’ and ‘those near the [Speaker’s] chair: those will take care for the king’, prompting Hampden to observe, diplomatically, that ‘If we displease the House, we displease the king’.61Aston’s Diary, 27. Crewe was subsequently named to the committee for investigating Smart’s imprisonment by the Laudian church authorities.62CJ ii. 8b. Similarly, he was named to committees on 21 and 22 April to investigate the authority of Convocation.63CJ ii. 8a, 9b. In debate, he conceded that Convocation had power to make new canons – which may imply that he disagreed with the majority of his godly colleagues who argued that ecclesiastical legislation required parliamentary approval – but added that ‘a good commission may be ill executed’.64Aston’s Diary, 52. Although he proposed on 23 April that a committee be set up to consider the matter of supply ‘that may give the king satisfaction’, he was named to committees that day and the next (23, 24 Apr.) to request, and give directions for managing, a conference on a resolution that implicitly put redress of grievances – notably, Ship Money – before the granting of supply.65Aston’s Diary, 43; CJ ii. 10a, 12a. In a debate on the Laudian ‘new ceremonies’ on 29 April he questioned whether the king had ever authorised the practice of bowing to the altar.66Aston’s Diary, 91-2. His last recorded contribution to the House’s proceedings came in a debate on Ship Money on 30 April.67Aston’s Diary, 100, 107. In a letter to Sir Simonds D’Ewes* the next day (1 May), he reported the disagreement between the Houses over redress before supply, and he concluded by remarking that ‘We do not yet know whether the Parliament will hold or no’.68Harl. 165, ff. 4r-v.

Five days after the dissolution of Parliament, on 10 May 1640, Crewe was committed a close prisoner to the Tower for his ‘obstinate refusal’ to obey an order of the king and privy council to hand over ‘all such petitions, papers and complaints’ that he had received as chairman of the committee of religion. To submit to such an order would be, he believed, ‘unfaithful to his trust’ and would ‘bring into question in the [court of] high commission many silenced ministers who had petitioned Parliament for relief, being suspended and deprived for not reading the Book of Sports on the Lord’s day’. On 16 June, however, it was reported that he had ‘at last submitted, acknowledges his offence by petition to his Majesty and offers to deliver all those Parliament petitions that were demanded’, whereupon he was released from the Tower.69PC2/52, f. 235; CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 141-2, 155-6, 308; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1167-8, 1196; ‘Mems. of Nathaniel, Lord Crewe’ ed. Clark, 1.

In the elections to the Long Parliament that autumn, Crewe opted to relinquish his place as senior knight of the shire – which was duly taken by Pykeringe – and was returned instead for Brackley, apparently without opposition.70Supra, ‘Northamptonshire’; ‘Brackley’. Why he decided to quit the more prestigious county seat, which he would almost certainly have re-claimed had he chosen to, is a mystery. In his opening speech of the new Parliament, on 7 November, John Pym touched upon Crewe’s imprisonment by the privy council in May as a prime example of the crown’s breach of parliamentary privileges. After Pym had finished speaking, Crewe, ‘fearing lest some prejudicate [sic] opinion of him might be left in the minds of some of the Members of this House...which he conceived might reflect upon him, took occasion to make recital of the whole action’ and stated that he had handed over the petitions to the Commons that had been in his custody not to the council but only to the clerk of the Parliament. After assurances from Pym that he not intended to slight Crewe in any way, the House resolved that neither man done anything ‘that might deserve the least reproach of unfaithfulness from this House’.71CJ ii. 22b; Procs. LP i. 30, 35, 36; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 37. Although Crewe was probably on close, or at least familiar, terms with Pym, Hampden and other members of the parliamentary leadership – a group known as ‘the junto’ – there is no firm evidence that he was privy to their inmost counsels or was among those Commons-men such as Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Sir Gilbert Gerard who (in the later words of Edward Hyde*) ‘observed and pursued the dictates and directions’ of the junto ‘according to the parts which were assigned to them, upon emergent occasions’.72Clarendon, Hist. i. 250.

During the opening session of the Long Parliament – that is, until the autumn 1641 recess – Crewe was named to 43 committees and 15 conference management teams, was appointed a messenger to the Lords once and served as chairman of several important standing committees and committees of the whole House.73CJ ii. 45a, 74a, 100a, 148b, 153a, 166a, 171b, 187a, 247a, 248a, 250b, 251b, 257a, 258a, 267b, 268a, 269b, 276a; Procs. LP v. 65. Clearly he was deemed a capable and trustworthy figure by his fellow Commons-men. A significant proportion of his committee appointments during the early months of the Long Parliament confirm his support for reforming the ‘abuses’ of the personal rule and punishing their authors. Thus he was named on 10 November to a standing committee for drawing together and presenting all evidence of the ‘deplored state of the kingdom’ (this was also known as the ‘committee of twenty-four’); to ad hoc committees for investigating the courts of high commission and star chamber (3 Dec. 1640); to question the judges involved in Hampden’s 1637 Ship-Money trial (7 Dec.); and to consider the ‘several abuses’ relating to the management and collection of the customs and impositions (24 Feb. 1641) – though this last committee was set up more to coerce the customers into lending Parliament money than to punish them.74CJ ii. 25a, 36a, 44b, 45b, 46b, 82a, 92a; Procs. LP i. 80, 83, 85, 86; ii. 532. It was on Crewe’s motion, on 4 December 1640, that the House set up a committee to examine the ‘great oppressions and injuries’ supposedly authorised by the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) in Yorkshire during the second bishops’ war.75Procs. LP i. 460, 464. However, he received only one appointment in relation to Strafford’s prosecution and trial – on 20 March 1641 – and apparently contributed very little in debate on the matter.76CJ ii. 109a; Procs. LP i. 270. He showed noticeably more interest in prosecuting those judges who were perceived to have subverted the laws of the kingdom – particularly in the matter of Ship Money. Indeed, on 21 December 1640 he sided with Pym – and against several Members closely associated with the court – in arguing that Lord Finch (John Finch†), the lord keeper of the great seal, was guilty of treason on several counts, ‘and so desired we might vote it’.77Procs. LP i. 487; ii. 5-6; Northcote Note Bk. 100. On 22 May 1641 he carried the articles of impeachment against another ship-money judge, Sir John Brampston, up to the Lords.78CJ ii. 154a.

Crewe’s contribution at Westminster to the conjoined causes of godly reform and suppressing popery began relatively slowly with nomination to five ad hoc committees on these issues between mid-December 1640 and late April 1641.79CJ ii. 54b, 73a, 100b, 113b, 129a. In the great root and branch debate on 8 February 1641, he joined those Commons-men – mostly, but not exclusively, future parliamentarians – who urged that the London root and branch petition, which called for the abolition of episcopacy, should be committed for consideration by the House rather than laid aside.80Procs. LP ii. 392. On 9 March he reported from the committee of 24 concerning the ministers’ remonstrance for reforming the church, which on 9 February had been referred to the committee, along with the more radical London root and branch petition.81CJ ii. 100a. The committee’s main conclusions, which were supported with numerous references from Scripture, were that the clergy’s judicial powers and secular employments were ‘against the laws of God and the church’ (‘their office is to preach and teach and not to meddle in secular affairs’); that the power of ordination and jurisdiction in church matters lay with the bishops and their clerical colleagues, not with bishops alone; and that ‘the great revenue’ of deans and chapters was of ‘little use’ but the cause of ‘great inconveniences’.82Procs. LP ii. 677-8, 682-3, 685-6; vii. 192-3. At the conclusion of Crewe’s report, the future royalist William Pleydell complained that the committee ‘had strucken [sic] at the root of episcopacy’.83Procs. LP ii. 684.

Where Crewe saw eye to eye with many future royalists in the House was on the urgent need to raise money to pay off the king’s and the Scottish armies in northern England and for supplying the navy. During the spring and summer of 1641 he was named to seven committees on the bill the bill for tonnage and poundage, securing loans from the City and the customers and for improving the yield from subsidies and the poll tax.84CJ ii. 107a, 113a, 130b, 154b, 165a, 180a, 268b, His personal commitment to addressing the kingdom’s financial problems was such that in March 1641 he, Driden and Sir Christopher Hatton* lent £1,000 towards securing a loan from the City.85Procs. LP ii. 628; CJ ii. 217b; Northants. RO, FH2876. In a debate on naval funding, on 17 March, he made it clear that although he favoured supply for the navy he urged that the House avoid any direct reference to the provision of ships ‘because of the extraordinary taxations lately imposed upon the kingdom for shipping money’.86Procs. LP ii. 787.

Crewe’s reaction to Strafford’s trial and attainder in the spring of 1641 suggests that he was closer to the Bedfordian wing of the junto, led in the Commons by Pym and Hampden, than he was to the more militant junto-men associated with Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick. That Crewe spent much of late March and early April away from London and therefore missed most of Strafford’s trial, is revealing in itself. But being present in the House on 21 April when Strafford’s bill of attainder was put to the question, he ‘declined voting against that lord’ – probably by withdrawing from the House beforehand, as did Hampden, Sir Henry Mildmay and several other ‘moderate reformists’. His refusal to support Strafford’s attainder prompted some observers to brand him a Straffordian; some even called him a papist.87Verney, Notes, 59; ‘Mems. of Nathaniel, Lord Crewe’ ed. Clark, 1; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 254-5.

Crewe’s response to the so-called ‘Tower plot’ of late April and early May 1641 (a royal plot to spring Strafford from the Tower and spirit him away by ship) was initially muted, at least in public. He seems to have contributed little if anything to the debates concerning this plot or the Protestation – which he took on the day it was introduced, 3 May.88CJ ii. 133a. However, on 8 May he was named to a committee, from which he reported on 10 May and may well have chaired, to prepare heads for a conference with the Lords on securing the kingdom against further conspiracies. One of this committee’s recommendations was the appointment of a commander-in-chief with authority to mobilise the trained bands of southern England, ‘either in their counties or out of them’, and power to choose his own officers, subject to the approval of the king and Parliament.89CJ ii. 139b, 141b; Procs. LP iv. 297-8, 301. This policy of placing the trained bands under commanders approved by and effectively answerable to Parliament would emerge as one of the junto’s main objectives.90Infra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’.

Crewe assumed an even more important place in the junto’s plans – even if he was not necessarily complicit in them – with his appointment on 17 May 1641 as chairman of a committee of the whole House to draw up the articles of the projected treaty of union between England and Scotland.91CJ ii. 148b. That this was a sensitive appointment is clear from the ‘great difference’ that it had provoked between those Members who had favoured Sir John Culpeper as chairman for this important drafting committee and those who had preferred Crewe.92Procs. LP iv. 420. Crewe’s earlier nomination as a reporter of a conference with the Lords on 4 December 1640 concerning the cessation of arms between the two kingdoms may well have represented his only significant, or at least direct, involvement in Parliament’s dealings with Scotland before the spring of 1641; and it seems likely that his appointment on 17 May was a reflection not of expertise in the field of Anglo-Scottish affairs but of his godly credentials and of the eagerness of a majority in the House to maintain good relations with the Covenanters.93CJ ii. 45a. After chairing the first two sessions of this committee, devoted primarily to the issue of ‘uniformity in church government’, he reported to the House (17 May), which thereupon approved of the Covenanters’ ‘affection...in their desire of a conformity in church government between the two nations ... and as they [the two Houses] have already taken into consideration the reformation of church government, so they will proceed therein in due time’.94CJ ii. 148b; Verney, Notes, 78. Over the following four days he chaired four more sessions of this committee and delivered several more lengthy reports on the treaty articles.95CJ ii. 149a, 150b, 152a, 153b, 154b. His first and only tellership before the autumn of 1645 was in a division on 21 May, when he was a minority teller (the clerk mistakenly identified him as majority teller for the noes) in favour of making his report to the House of that day’s proceedings in the committee.96CJ ii. 153b; Procs. LP iv. 510, 516. On 24 May he was named in first place to a committee for amending the treaty article concerning those deemed incendiaries by the English and Scottish Parliaments.97CJ ii. 155a. Crewe’s chairmanship of the 17 May committee of the whole House probably explains his addition (unnoticed by the clerk of the Commons) to a large bicameral committee, established on 20 May, which was tasked on 26 May with finalising the treaty between the two kingdoms. By early June he had assumed the chair of this committee, from which he reported on five occasions between 3 and 22 June.98CJ ii. 152a, 156b, 157a, 158b, 166a, 170b, 175a, 180b, 182b; LJ iv. 258a; Procs. LP iv. 704-5, 706, 709; v. 30, 41, 126, 130-1, 140, 143, 150, 237, 240, 242-3, 244, 245, 274, 281, 283. On 9 August he chaired another committee of the whole House, this time to consider the bill for ratifying the treaty and was named to a conference management team that day to discuss amendments to this legislation with the Lords.99CJ ii. 247a, 248a; Procs. LP vi. 315, 315, 316, 317.

Crewe’s work on the treaty with Scotland in the spring and summer of 1641 seems to have strengthened his conviction of the need to pay off and disband the royal and Scottish armies in northern England. His principal motive here was probably financial – to relieve the kingdom of its crushing military burden. But he may also have acted through fear of another military engagement between the increasingly royalist English army in the north and the Scots, and even, perhaps, from a desire to lessen Scottish influence in English affairs and thereby reduce the pressure on Parliament for the abolition of episcopacy. His motion on 18 May, that a committee be established ‘to advise in what manner the armies might be disbanded’, prompted his addition to the committee for the king’s army, which was charged with working out and costing the disbandment process.100CJ ii. 149a; Procs. LP iv. 439. On 24 May, he and one of the Goodwins moved that legislation be passed requiring ‘all men generally through England’ to lend money; and Crewe ‘delivered in a petition in the name of both Houses to that purpose to be ratified by the king’, but the Commons rejected it.101Procs. LP iv. 550, 551. On 25 June he successfully moved that the Scots be required to pay the billet money and other debts they owed in northern England out of the £200,000 allotted by Parliament for disbanding their army – a motion that suggests he was not overly concerned about winning the Covenanters’ approval.102CJ ii. 187a; Procs. LP v. 343.

A number of Crewe’s committee appointments and nominations to conference reporting or management teams between late May and late August 1641 addressed the inter-related issues of disbanding the armies, framing the Ten Propositions, the king’s intended journey into Scotland and the anticipated parliamentary recess.103CJ ii. 153a, 172b, 187a, 188b, 189b, 190b, 240b, 247a, 250b, 251b, 258a, 269b. In August he was named to four conference management and reporting teams to consider a request from the Spanish ambassador, which the king had endorsed, to recruit troops from the recently-disbanded royal army in Ireland. Like the junto and other godly Commons-men, Crewe was probably determined to prevent such recruiting either in England or Ireland, lest the troops thus raised be used to reinforce the anti-Protestant forces abroad.104CJ ii. 257a, 269b, 275b, 276a; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 366-7. When the House received news on 23 August that a further £152,000 was required to complete the disbandment of the armies in northern England, Crewe was appointed chairman of a committee of the whole House to devise ‘means and ways to advance monies’. That same day (23 Aug.) he and Lord Falkland were ordered to prepare letters to be sent to county sheriffs, urging them to expedite the collection of the recently imposed poll tax, ‘and how their neglect hath prejudiced the kingdom’.105CJ ii. 268a, 268b; Procs. LP vi. 519-20, 537.

Despite working closely with the members of the junto during the spring and summer of 1641 – notably in devising the terms of the treaty with Scotland – Crewe did not fully endorse their programme when it came to the issue of further reformation in religion. Besides their own commitment to godly reform, Pym and his allies were anxious to assure the Scots of Westminster’s determination to bring the Church of England into closer conformity with the kirk. But on the vital question of church government, Crewe could not follow Nathaniel Fiennes I, Oliver St John and other junto-men in arguing for root and branch reform. In a debate on 11 June concerning a preamble to the bill for abolishing episcopacy, ‘it was most of all wondered’, claimed Sir Simonds D’Ewes*, ‘that Mr John Crewe...a man of a very exact, strict life was against the preamble of the bill and against taking away of bishops and desired rather that we might have a bill for the restraining of their power’. Crewe argued that ‘it is established by law that divines [are] to be consulted’ on any ‘bill of reformation’.106Procs. LP v. 94, 97. Similarly, he seems to have had reservations about proposals for divesting the episcopate of its lands and revenues.107Procs. LP v. 574. And in contrast to members of the junto, he was involved only peripherally in the campaign initiated in the Commons in July to impeach 13 bishops accused of promoting the new Canons and other Laudian innovations.108CJ ii. 251b. With the recess looming and still no substantive legislation for the reform of church worship, the Commons set up a committee on 31 August composed of some of the House’s most prominent members – to which Crewe was named – to frame an order against innovations in religion.109CJ ii. 278b. However, there is no evidence that he joined other godly Members in supporting Pym’s report from this committee on 1 September, which recommended the prohibition of Laudian devotional practices and ornamentation and initiated an attack on the Book of Common Prayer.110Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 368-9. On 6 September, Crewe, ‘upon his own motion’, was granted leave of absence. And three days later, on 9 September, Parliament went into recess.111CJ ii. 281a; Procs. LP vi. 657.

Crewe and the outbreak of civil war

Crewe does not seem to have relished the divisive and partisan spirit that increasingly pervaded the House’s proceedings after the autumn 1641 recess. His first appointments after the House re-assembled on 20 October were not until 2 November, when he was named to a bicameral standing committee on Irish affairs (set up in response to the outbreak of the Irish rebellion) and to a conference reporting team on the custody of the prince of Wales.112CJ ii. 302a, 302b. His next appointments were to committees on 29 and 30 November, and thereafter he receives no mention in the Journals until mid-January 1642.113CJ ii. 326b, 327b. It was reported late in November that he had joined that substantial minority – headed by Culpeper, Falkland and other future royalists – which had voted against the Grand Remonstrance.114HMC Cowper, ii. 295. And his only known contribution to debate during these months was to urge leniency towards the future royalist Geoffrey Palmer, who had angered Pym and his allies by demanding the right to enter a protestation against the remonstrance.115Infra, ‘Geoffrey Palmer’; Verney, Notes, 127-8.

From mid-January 1642, Crewe began, slowly, to regain something of the prominence he had enjoyed in the House during the spring and summer of 1641. Between mid-January and mid-August – when he left London to oversee the execution of the Militia Ordinance in Northamptonshire – he was named to 46 committees, served on three conference management teams, acted three times as a messenger to the Lords and chaired three ad hoc committees and one committee of the whole House.116CJ ii. 510b, 515a, 518a, 545b, 546a, 546b, 587a, 588b, 598b, 705a, 706a, 711a; LJ iv. 706a; v. 67b, 274b. The majority of his appointments in this period concerned three major and inter-related strands of parliamentary business: godly reformation at home, the suppression of the Irish rebellion abroad, and Parliament’s propaganda war against the king. On 17 February, he was named to a committee on a bill for promoting a godly preaching ministry and suppressing innovations in religion.117CJ ii. 437b. And on 15 March, he successfully moved that the committee for the universities – a body primarily concerned with advancing godly religion among college fellows and students – be revived.118PJ ii. 39; CJ ii. 478b.

But Crewe’s most important contribution that spring to the cause of godly reform was as chairman of a standing committee set up on 4 April 1642 to ‘settle the church in doctrine and discipline’ and to lay the foundations for what would become the Westminster Assembly of Divines.119CJ ii. 510b; PJ ii. 126; Fall of British Monarchies, 492. Three days later (7 Apr.) he reported from this committee a declaration stating that Parliament intended

a due and necessary reformation of the government and liturgy of the church and to take away nothing in the one or the other but what shall be evil and justly offensive, or at least unnecessary and burthensome; and, for the better effecting thereof, speedily to have consultation with godly and learned divines. And because this will never of itself attain the end sought therein, they will therefore use their utmost endeavours to establish learned and preaching ministers, with a good and sufficient maintenance, throughout the whole kingdom, wherein many dark corners are miserably destitute of the means of salvation.120CJ ii. 515a.

Appointed a messenger to the Lords on 8 April, he carried up this declaration, along with requests for conferences on Hull’s arsenal, preserving good relations between England and Scotland, and Anglo-Scottish provisions for supplying the Protestant forces in Ireland.121CJ ii. 518a; LJ iv. 706a. In the weeks that followed he made several motions for the committee on religion to sit, and he reported proposals from it late in April for supplying the ministry from ‘deans’ and chapters’ impropriations and other means’.122PJ ii. 152, 188-9, 248. True to his godly sensibilities, he moved on 26 April that London’s municipal authorities be ordered to prohibit the sale of food and drink in inns, taverns and alehouses during the following day’s public fast.123PJ ii. 222. When the Lords desired a conference late in May concerning, among other things, the Westminster Assembly and the Anglo-Scottish treaty, Crewe was among those named by the Commons to its reporting team. The next day (27 May), he relayed the results of this conference to the House.124CJ ii. 587b, 589b..

Crewe’s trenchant Protestantism probably accounts in large part for the interest he took during the first half of 1642 in the supply of the British forces in Ireland and for his nomination to committees concerned with strengthening the Protestant war effort against the rebels.125CJ ii. 400a, 460b, 493b, 569b, 572b, 578a, 582a, 588a; PJ ii. 151, 185, 326-7. In April he pledged £600 on the Irish Adventurers’ Act, and there was a reference in the Commons Journal later that month to the ‘thousand pounds undertaken by Mr Crewe and others to be advanced for the service of Ireland’.126CJ ii. 545b; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 565; Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 179. Added on 16 May to a Commons delegation to negotiate a loan from the Adventurers, he reported their willingness to lend Parliament £10,000 for paying the troops in Dublin and was appointed a messenger that same day (16 May) to carry up to the Lords a draft order of both Houses to this effect.127CJ ii. 572b; LJ v. 67b; PJ ii. 326-7. The committee of the whole House that he chaired late in May for ‘providing of a stock of present monies’ emerged from debates over how to fund the war effort in Ireland and how forces were to be raised in England against the king. Crewe favoured proceeding by the traditional method of ‘gathering £200,000 the next year [1643] by way of subsidy’. But as he reported to the House on 27 May, the committee opted to raise the necessary capital by way of loans secured upon ‘the land of the rebels in Ireland’.128CJ ii. 586a, 587a, 588b; PJ ii. 351.

Crewe featured regularly on committees that prosecuted, either directly or indirectly, Parliament’s propaganda campaign against the king and the royalist party during 1642, although there is little to suggest that he played a leading role in actually drafting such material.129CJ ii. 372a, 400a, 421a, 433a, 461a, 472a, 478b, 484a, 508b, 512a, 525b, 531a, 548b, 551a, 556b, 583b, 588a, 588b, 637a, 638b, 643a, 645b, 663b. More specifically, his appointments in March and April indicate his support for the Militia Ordinance and for securing Hull – both of which policies added greatly to the violence of the ‘paper skirmishes’ between the king and Parliament.130CJ ii. 461a, 478b, 531a. At some point that spring he was commissioned as a Northamptonshire deputy lieutenant by the county’s lord lieutenant appointed under the Militia Ordinance, Henry, 3rd Baron Spencer.131CJ ii. 614a. On 28 April, Crewe reported from, and probably chaired, a committee set up that day to frame instructions for a parliamentary committee to to secure Lincolnshire for Parliament and to assist Sir John Hotham* at Hull. That same day (28 Apr.), Crewe managed a conference with the Lords concerning these instructions.132CJ ii. 545b, 546a, 546b; PJ ii. 239.

Crewe’s close alignment with the junto by the late spring of 1642 is clear from his nomination with Hampden, Pym and St John to an eight-man committee set up on 31 May to consider the addition of further clauses to what would become the Nineteen Propositions: Parliament’s ultimatum to the king ahead of the outbreak of war. Reported by Pym on 30 May, these additional propositions included stipulations for the parliamentary approval of the kingdom’s military commanders and that the king ‘enter into a more strict alliance with the States of the United Provinces and other neighbouring princes and states of the Protestant religion, for the defence and maintenance thereof against all designs and attempts of the pope and his adherents to subvert and suppress it’.133CJ ii. 596a, 597a. Crewe and Pym were appointed managers of a conference on the propositions on 1 June.134CJ ii. 598b. On 6 June, he was named to another junto-dominated committee, from which emerged a few days later a draft of the propositions for bringing in money, plate and horse for the proposed parliamentary army under Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.135CJ ii. 608b, 612b, 613a, 613b; PJ iii. 49. Crewe himself pledged to bring in £200 in plate on the propositions and would supply Essex’s commissary with four horses, complete with riders, their armour and equipment, worth an estimated £120 – one of the largest such subscriptions made by any Commons-man.136PJ iii. 467; SP28/131, pt. 3, f. 3v.

Having gone down to Northamptonshire in mid-June 1642 as part of a parliamentary committee to execute the Militia Ordinance in the county, he had returned to the House by 23 June, when he was named to a committee to prepare an answer to a royal declaration in response to the Nineteen Propositions.137CJ ii. 614a, 637a; HMC Buccleuch, i. 304. It is unlikely that he wholeheartedly endorsed an initiative by the more irenic Commons-men to have the two Houses pass a royally-approved militia bill that would supersede the Militia Ordinance – even though he was named in first place to a committee set up on 9 July to draft this legislation (Henry Marten, who had vehemently opposed this bill, was also nominated, as were several junto-men). Indeed, that same day (9 July) he was named to a committee for preparing a declaration that Parliament intended to proceed with the Militia Ordinance ‘in case it [the bill] doth not pass’ – a clear indication that Parliament intended to take control of the kingdom’s military resources whether or not the king granted his assent.138Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; CJ ii. 663b; PJ iii. 192, 194. His commitment to mobilising the kingdom against the king is clear from his chairmanship of a committee established on 5 August, and from which he reported the next day, to draft additional instructions to the parliamentary county committees.139CJ ii. 705a, 706a. On 9 August, in response to a letter from a group of Parliament’s leading supporters in Northamptonshire, the Commons appointed Crewe and other Commons-men as a committee for the county, with instructions to continue the work of executing the Militia Ordinance.140CJ ii. 711a. Later that same day (9 Aug.) he was sent to the Lords with a draft of these instructions.141CJ ii. 711a; LJ v. 274b.

Parliamentary career, 1643-4

Crewe spent the first year or so of the civil war in Northamptonshire, where he worked closely with Pykeringe, Edward Harby* and other members of the county committee and donated a further £300 to the parliamentarian war effort.142CJ ii. 725b, 909a, 957a; LJ v. 304a, 583b, 617b-618a; HMC Portland, i. 60, 67, 82, 89; SP28/143, pt. 6, f. 9v; SP28/172, pt. 3, unfol.; SP28/238, ff. 197, 542, 586, 596, 641, 656; Bodl. Tanner 63, f. 157; Tanner 64, f. 1; Northants. RO, IC244-6; FH2871. The claim that he joined the peace party at Westminster after the outbreak of civil war appears to rest on nothing more than his lengthy absence from the Commons in 1642-3.143V. Pearl, ‘The ‘royal Independents’ in the English civil war’, TRHS ser. 5, xviii. 84. However, when he returned to the House – apparently in late July 1643 – he was named with Pym, St John, Marten and several other supporters of a military alliance with the Scots to draft additional instructions to Parliament’s negotiating team in Edinburgh.144CJ iii. 188b. On 1 August he took the vow and covenant that had been introduced on 6 June in response to the Waller plot – a royalist conspiracy to deliver up London to the king.145CJ iii. 190a. The next day (2 Aug.) he was named to a ‘council of war’ that Pym and his allies had set up primarily to further the recruitment of a new cavalry force under the earl of Manchester.146Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’; CJ iii. 191b. When it emerged on 3 August that Essex’s failure to grant a commission to his military rival Sir William Waller* had hindered the recruitment of the latter’s army, the Commons sent Crewe, Pym, St John and William Strode I to the lord general to request that he oblige Waller accordingly. According to Sir Simonds D’Ewes, however, this was merely ‘the public pretence for which these men were sent to the lord general. But the secret end (they being most of them very violent spirits) was to draw off my lord general if they could from his good inclinations to peace...’.147CJ iii. 193a; Harl. 165, ff. 134v-135. The impression that Crewe had returned to Westminster that summer (possibly at the behest of Pym and his friends) in order to help frustrate moves at Westminster for resuming negotiations with the king is strengthened by his appointment on 7 August with Pym, St John and several of their allies to justify a vote that day against giving further consideration to peace propositions sent down from the Lords.148CJ iii. 197b; Harl. 165, f. 148v. With any prospect of a swift negotiated settlement obliterated for the time being, Crewe seems to have considered his work at Westminster temporarily concluded, and he received only two more committee appointments – on 15 and 16 August – before resuming his activities on the Northamptonshire county committee, which would occupy him for the remainder of 1643.149CJ iii. 205a, 206b; SP28/121A, ff. 4-6, 19, 26, 29, 32; SP28/239, unfol.; Warws. RO, CR 2017/C9/29; Mercurius Aulicus no. 46 (12-18 Nov. 1643), 651 (E.77.18). He did not take the Covenant until he had returned to the House early in 1644.150CJ iii. 383b.

The timing of Crewe’s return to the Commons, and the major contribution he made in the first half of 1644 to establishing the Committee of Both Kingdoms* (CBK) and to strengthening the Eastern Association army, strongly suggest that, once again, he had resumed his seat primarily for the purpose of helping the war-party grandees defeat their peace-party rivals – who were now associated unambiguously with the earl of Essex. Between early January 1644 and his departure from Westminster a year later as a parliamentary commissioner at the Uxbridge treaty, he was named to 40 or so committees and to eight teams for managing or reporting from conferences with the Lords.151CJ iii. 396a, 404a, 452b, 475a, 479a, 497b, 597a; iv. 14b; LJ vi. 437b. He also reported from, and may well have chaired, five committees dealing with a range of major policy initiatives, including the establishment of the CBK and the Committee of Accounts*, continuing the earl of Manchester as commander of the Eastern Association army and the provisioning of Parliament’s field forces for the 1644 campaign season.152CJ iii. 382b, 391b, 402a, 404a, 452a, 453a, 472b, 473a, 475a, 477a, 479a; LJ vi. 534a.

On 30 January 1644, the day before the arrival of the Scots commissioners Sir Archibald Jhonston of Wariston and Robert Barclay at Westminster, Crewe presented a draft ordinance to the Commons ‘for constituting joint committees and commissioners of both kingdoms, to reside near the Houses, for the better managing the affairs of both kingdoms in their common cause, according to the ends expressed in the late Covenant and treaty’. In recommending this ordinance to the Commons, Crewe asked that ‘seeing the Scots had shewed so much affection to our cause as to march into [sic] our assistance through the snow...that the House would shew so much love to them that some of their number...might make together a committee of both kingdoms’.153Ludlow, Voyce, 97. This first CBK ordinance was given a first and second reading that same day (30 Jan.) and then referred to a committee – which Crewe seems to have chaired – to consider the composition of this new executive.154CJ iii. 382a. Given the near certainty that in presenting this draft legislation, Crewe was acting with and on behalf of the war-party grandees, it seems likely that he was chosen for the task because Essex’s friends in the House did not regard him as one of their leading opponents as they did, for example, Hesilrige, St John and Sir Henry Vane II. When a second, more ambitiously-worded, CBK ordinance – which had been sent down from the Lords – met with stiff opposition in the Commons early in February, particularly from the Essexians, the House decided to use Crewe’s ordinance as the basis for a new bill and ordered the committee appointed on 30 January (dominated by the war party) to revise it accordingly, in consultation with the Scots commissioners.155Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 390b; Harl. 166, f. 9. On 7 February, Crewe reported the amendments to his ordinance, after which the House voted in favour of a CBK that would contain 21 English members (the four Scots commissioners would bring the number up to 25), with power to manage the war, ‘hold good correspondency’ between the three kingdoms and with foreign states. But instead of retaining the members named in Crewe’s original ordinance, the House – after a division that the war party won – voted that the 14 MPs nominated in the Lords’ ordinance should be inserted into this revised version. The nomination of each of these 14 Members, who included Crewe, was then put to the question; and though the peace party and its allies voted against ‘divers’ of them, they all passed. The result of these votes was a CBK whose membership would be weighted heavily in favour of leading supporters of a Scottish alliance and enemies of Essex.156Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 391b, 392b. After the Lords had watered down the ordinance’s provisions and added a further six peers (mostly Essexians), the Commons set up a committee and a conference management team on 10 February – Crewe being named to both – to explain why it could not agree to these amendments. The Lords capitulated on 16 February and passed the ordinance as it had come up from the Commons nine days earlier.157Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 395b, 396a. Crewe attended the first eight meetings of the CBK between 19 and 27 February and was named to a sub-committee for sharing intelligence with the Scottish army in England.158CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 18-27. In the Commons he defied the Lords again that month as chairman of a committee and as a conference-manager to insist upon the retention of William Prynne* as a member of the newly-established Committee of Accounts.159Supra, ‘Committee of Accounts’; CJ iii. 402a, 404a; LJ vi. 437b. Soon afterwards he returned to Northamptonshire, where he was active in March on the county committee.160Harl. 166, f. 30; SP28/121A, f. 584; Warws. RO, CR 2017/C9/69; Luke Lttr. Bks. 333, 334.

Crewe had returned to Westminster by 4 April 1644, when he attended a meeting of the CBK.161CSP Dom. 1644, p. 94. He would attend the committee on a regular basis for the rest of the year, was named to many of its sub-committees and made a minimum of nine reports from Derby House (where the CBK met) to the Commons between April 1644 and the beginning of 1645.162Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 463a, 463b, 559b, 592a, 605a, 641a; iv. 11b, 12a; Harl. 166, ff. 50v, 80v; CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 94-5, 108, 119, 122, 123, 129, 141, 144, 223, 227, 229, 256, 286, 296, 340, 375, 408, 433, 472, 489, 529, 535, 545; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 40, 106, 116, 130, 137, 167, 183, 203, 204, 205, 230, 252. Much of his work in the Commons, certainly during the spring of 1644, was an extension of his commitments as a leading member of the CBK. With Derby House anxious both for political and military reasons to have Essex and Waller in the field by mid-April, Crewe chaired (or at least reported from) a committee and helped manage a conference on 8 April concerning the supply of Parliament’s armies and the ‘speedy sending out of forces’.163Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 452a, 452b, 453a. He was also named to CBK sub-committees, on 11 and 16 April, to provide money and provisions for Essex’s and Waller’s forces.164CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 108, 122. On 17 April – two days before the date set for a general rendezvous of Parliament’s armies at Aylesbury – Crewe reported a vote in the CBK that as many of Essex’s troops as could be mustered were to march towards the rendezvous.165CJ iii. 463a. Reporting from the CBK again, on 20 April, he relayed the lord general’s assurance that if he had but a month’s pay for his forces, his whole army would march to Aylesbury.166Harl. 166, f. 50v.

In late April and early May 1644, Crewe joined his CBK colleagues, the war-party grandees St John and Vane II, in the vanguard of the Commons’ campaign to pressure the Lords into renewing the earl of Manchester’s ordinance as commander of the Eastern Association army and omitting a proviso added by the Essexians asserting his subordination to the lord general. D’Ewes claimed that Crewe’s report on 4 May, as chairman of the committee ‘for maintaining the opinion of this House’ concerning the ordinance, was ‘full of dangerous and unnecessary exceptions against the Lords...and that by saying the...lord general had supreme command over the soldiers...they [the Lords] made him above the two Houses – with some other such frivolous impertinencies’.167CJ iii. 472b, 473a, 475a, 477a, 479a; LJ vi. 534a; Harl. 166, f. 55v; Add. 31116, p. 269; Holmes, Eastern Assoc. 184-5. Following the expiry of the first CBK ordinance on 9 May, the Commons authorised Crewe and other members of the committee to open all correspondence directed to Derby House and present it to the House as they saw fit.168CJ iii. 490b, 492a. Crewe figured prominently in the Commons’ efforts – spearheaded again by the war-party grandees – to have the CBK ordinance renewed. And once the Commons had passed the second CBK ordinance – the more radical version that had been sent down from the Lords early in February – on 23 May, the committee, and Crewe’s membership of it, were re-established on a permanent basis.169Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 495b, 497b; Harl. 166, ff. 62r, 62v.

The CBK thought Crewe a fitting emissary to the lord general early in June 1644 to urge upon him the need to proceed vigorously in besieging Oxford, to obey its instructions and to liaise with Waller. But though Crewe had not earned Essex’s enmity in the way that Hesilrige or Vane II had, the lord general does not seem to have welcomed his presence at headquarters, for on 6 June the CBK recalled him to Whitehall.170CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 198, 199, 202, 204, 213; CJ iii. 519b. Essex’s resolve to defy the CBK early in June and to march his army into the west would certainly have been harder to realise had Crewe been in attendance as the committee’s representative.171Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’. Essex’s march westwards left the Thames valley exposed to royalist counter-attack, and therefore on 12 June, Crewe tried (unsuccessfully) to interest his fellow Commons-men in lending money to enable Serjeant-major Richard Browne II* to assemble a scratch force to defend the home counties until the lord general’s return.172Harl. 166, f. 73. That same day (12 June), he was named with St John and William Pierrepont to a CBK sub-committee for writing a letter to Essex, ordering him to resume the siege of Oxford – which the lord general answered by accusing the committee of tactical naivety and ignorance of the military situation on the ground.173Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 227, 228.

The fall-out from Essex’s march westwards accounted for Crewe’s appointment that summer to committees in the Commons and at Derby House for corresponding with him (and reminding him that the CBK’s orders were vested with the authority of both Houses); for strengthening the armies under Waller and Browne; and for persuading the London militia committee to send forces to the lord general’s assistance.174CJ iii. 542b, 544b, 552b, 577a; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 433; Harl. 166, f. 80v. Crewe’s commitment to the vigorous prosecution of the war in 1644 seems to have outweighed his interest in seeking a negotiated settlement. He was peripherally involved, at best, in formulating the Commons’ response to peace initiatives from the Dutch during 1644.175CJ iii. 454a, 535a, 689b. And though he received several assignments in the Commons and at Derby House in relation to the Scots’ confederalist peace proposals – what would emerge as the Uxbridge propositions – he made no prominent contribution to their progress either in the CBK or through Parliament.176CJ iii. 594a, 597a, 647b; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 122; 1644-5, p. 130.

The earl of Essex’s defeat at Lostwithiel early in September 1644 and its military and political ramifications would take up much of Crewe’s time in the Commons and at Derby House in the months that followed. Worried by the growing political divisions among Parliament’s senior officers, he wrote to the earl of Manchester (the cousin of Crewe’s son-in-law Edward Montagu I*, the future earl of Sandwich) on 9 September, urging him to compose the differences within his army for the sake of the ‘common safety’. ‘This ill news out of the west, which is very sad in many respects, will yet be of some advantage’, Crewe opined, ‘being a strong argument for laying aside for the present all differences among ourselves, how just soever’. He specifically requested that Manchester ‘give all respect’ to his senior cavalry commander Oliver Cromwell* and make sure that the Eastern Association horse ‘have their share in the next money that comes to your army’.177HMC 8th Rep. pt. 2, 61.

However, Crewe was obliged to take a less eirenic line with Parliament’s errant officer corps following his appointment with the earls of Northumberland and Loudoun, Viscount Saye and Sele, Pierrepont and St John to a CBK sub-committee on 23 September 1644 to investigate ‘the business of the late loss in the west’.178CSP Dom. 1644, p. 529. Of the six members of this committee, Northumberland, Saye and St John were firm opponents of Essex, while Crewe and Pierrepont were evidently in sympathy with their desire to bridle the lord general and effect wholesale military reform. On 27 September, Pierrepont, St John and Crewe reported the sub-committee’s findings to the Commons, describing how one of Essex’s officers, Colonel John Boteler, had entered into clandestine negotiations with the king and that the lord general’s right-hand man Sir Philip Stapilton* had received a copy of the resulting propositions and had communicated them to Holles and other Essexian Parliament-men but had failed to inform the House itself.179Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 641a; J. Adamson, ‘The triumph of oligarchy: the management of war and the Committee of Both Kingdoms, 1644-1645’, in Parliament at Work: Parliamentary Committees, Political Power and Public Access in Early Modern England ed. C. Kyle, J. Peacey, 119, 121.

The same six members of the CBK were named on 30 September 1644 to another sub-committee at Derby House, which was charged with drawing up instructions for amalgamating the armies of Essex, Manchester and Waller.180CSP Dom. 1644, p. 545; Adamson, ‘The triumph of oligarchy’, 118. The centrepiece of the sub-committee’s recommendations – as reported to the CBK on 14 October – was the establishment of a council of war, immediately answerable to Derby House, for governing Parliament’s new consolidated army. Crewe was one of two civilian delegates from the CBK to this council and, as such, spent the second half of October and early November attending Parliament’s commanders during the second Newbury campaign.181Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 673a, 678a, 680b; LJ vii. 30b, 31a; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 40, 49, 57, 60, 62, 65, 66, 73, 75, 76, 79, 82, 89, 90. Although the 14 October instructions have plausibly been seen as ‘the first stage in the ‘new modelling’ of the army’, their immediate political context was the necessity to subordinate the lord general even more surely to the CBK’s authority.182Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; Adamson, ‘The triumph of oligarchy’, 116-18.

Crewe continued his collaboration with the war-party grandees (soon to be dubbed the Independents) when he emerged in December 1644 as a leading supporter of self-denying – a thinly disguised initiative for removing Essex and other pro-Scots commanders.183Clarendon, Hist. iii. 508. He was named to several high-powered committees and conference teams late in December 1644 and early in January 1645 to counter objections to the Self-Denying Ordinance from Essex’s party in the Lords.184CJ iii. 718b; iv. 13b, 14b. During this same period he was named to at least one of the CBK’s sub-committees concerning with new modelling Parliament’s armies and was involved in the Commons’ and Derby House’s negotiations with the Scots for bringing their army southwards to provide defensive cover during the process of military reconstruction.185CJ iv. 3a, 11b, 12a; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 183, 205.

Crewe had a hand in the preparations for the treaty at Uxbridge and was appointed to Parliament’s negotiating team in mid-January 1645.186CJ iii. 724b, 725b; iv. 19b, 24a, 34b; LJ vii. 143a; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 203; Add. 31116, p. 371. But his demeanour during the treaty revealed how little faith he put in peace talks as a means of ending the war. According to Hyde, who was one of the royalist negotiators,

Pierrepont and Crewe, who were both men of great fortunes and had always been of the greatest moderation in their counsels and most solicitous upon all opportunities for peace, appeared now to have contracted more bitterness and sourness than formerly and were more reserved towards the king’s commissioners than was expected and in all conferences insisted peremptorily that the king must yield to whatsoever was demanded.187Clarendon, Hist. iii. 497-8.

Hyde’s reference to his two opposite numbers at Uxbridge as parliamentarian moderates and champions of the cause of peace is far truer of Pierrepont than it is of Crewe. In fact, Crewe had consistently allied with the war-party grandees and had been far more active in building Parliament’s war-machine since the summer of 1642 than in promoting an accommodation. Hyde was also mistaken in thinking that Crewe ‘had been thought to be of the party of the earl of Essex’ until late 1644.188Clarendon, Hist. iii. 508. Crewe was certainly not seen as a personal enemy of the lord general in the way that Hesilrige and Vane II were, but there is no doubting his considerable contribution during 1644 to curbing Essex’s power and strengthening that of his rivals. The editor of the royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus was surely correct in February 1645 when he listed Crewe among the circle of Cromwell, Hesilrige, Pierrepont, St John, Vane II and other prominent Independents at Westminster.189Mercurius Aulicus no. 106 (23 Feb.-2 Mar. 1645), 1392 (E.273.13).

After the collapse of the Uxbridge treaty late in February 1645, Crewe returned to the House and was named to committees on the Self-Denying Ordinance, the establishment of the New Model army and to pressure the Lords into passing Sir Thomas Fairfax’s* officer list.190CJ iv. 71a, 73b, 77a, 88a. That he was regarded as well-disposed towards the New Model is clear from his appointment late in March to the Committee for the Army.191LJ vii. 294a. Established to ensure that Fairfax’s troops were properly paid and supplied, this new standing committee was composed almost exclusively of the New Model’s leading supporters in both Houses. However, there is no evidence that Crewe attended any of its meetings.192Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’. Late in April, Viscount Saye, Crewe, Hesilrige and other members of the CBK were sent to army headquarters at Windsor to assist Fairfax in readying his forces to take to the field.193Harl. 166, f. 205v.

Parliamentary career, 1645-6

Crewe did relatively little to distinguish himself at Westminster in 1645 – certainly when compared with his exploits in 1644 as an architect of the CBK and new modelling. Between his return from Uxbridge late in February and the end of the year – when he appears to have taken a few weeks unofficial leave of absence – he was named to 33 committees (three of which he may have chaired) and served as a teller in three divisions and as a messenger to the Lords once.194CJ iv. 194b, 195a, 298b, 309a, 340a, 345b, 369a, 384a; LJ viii. 60b. His exemplary attendance record at the CBK during 1645 – he attended more of its meetings than any other member – suggests that he was more active at Derby House that year than he was in the Commons. He made at least six reports from the committee during 1645 and was again named to numerous Derby House sub-committees.195Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iv. 91a, 165a, 385a; Harl. 166, ff. 195v, 198, 214v-215; Add. 18780, f. 28v; Add. 31116, pp. 392, 425; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 340, 345, 392, 396, 400, 406, 412, 428, 579, 588; 1645-7, pp. 33, 55, 130, 234.

Several of Crewe’s assignments at Derby House and in Commons point to his involvement in Parliament’s diplomatic dealings with the United Provinces and Denmark.196CJ iv. 131b; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 392, 412; 1645-7, p. 130. But the great majority of his appointments in the Commons during 1645 related to Parliament’s dealings with the Scots – and in particular to drafting answers to papers from the Scots commissioners and to supplying their armies in England and Ireland.197CJ iv. 84a, 121b, 154a, 173b, 180b, 188b, 194b, 195a, 198a, 203a, 231b, 236a, 242a, 275a, 276a, 279a, 298b, 317a, 340a, 366b, 369a, 385b; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 490; Harl. 166, f. 257v. Why he was repeatedly selected by the House to liaise with the Scots is not entirely clear. Apart from his contribution to establishing the CBK, he had done little to distinguish himself as an ally of the Covenanters, and it is unlikely that he favoured their campaign to erect a clericalist Presbyterian church in England. Perhaps what recommended him to the House for this role was simply his familiarity with Anglo-Scottish affairs (as a member of the CBK) and that he was apparently seen by the Essexians and their Scottish allies as someone they could work with – unlike Cromwell, Hesilrige or Vane II. Thus on 24 May, for example, with the Commons anxious for the Scottish army in northern England to march southwards, Crewe and the Presbyterian grandee Denzil Holles were sent to assure the Scots commissioners of the ‘hearty desire of this House for the continuing and preserving a good correspondence between the two kingdoms...and to assure them that they [Commons] shall be careful of promoting their good and safety, as their own’.198CJ iv. 154a. Early in July, Crewe reported from, and probably chaired, a three-man committee to assure the Scots commissioners that there would be no public disclosure of anything in the king’s letters taken at Naseby that might prove prejudicial to Scottish interests.199CJ iv. 194b, 195a. He and John Glynne* were tasked on 5 August with preparing a letter to the Scots army on military matters; and on 11 August he reported several ordinances for paying the Scottish forces in Ulster.200CJ iv. 231b, 236a. The House selected him on 19 September to convey its congratulations to the Scots commissioners for the Covenanters’ defeat of the marquess of Montrose’s army at Philiphaugh.201CJ iv. 279a. And on 6 October he was named to, and subsequently reported from, a committee to secure a City loan of £30,000 for the Scottish army if it marched to besiege Newark.202CJ iv. 298b, 369a.

Despite working to reconcile the best interests of the House and the Scots during 1645, Crewe retained the trust of the Independent grandees. In June, the Presbyterian polemicist and London minister James Cranford named Crewe among a group of prominent Independents that had allegedly been treating with the royalists for the surrender of parliamentary garrisons. This was true to the extent that Crewe had consulted with Viscount Saye, Pierrepont and St John as members of a CBK sub-committee set up on 12 April for holding secret talks with leading royalists, not to surrender parliamentary garrisons, but to secure the surrender of Oxford (and any other susceptible royal garrison) and to investigate who, at Westminster, was secretly supplying the privy council in Oxford with weekly intelligence of Parliament’s plans. The sub-committee was reconfirmed early in May – this time composed of Saye, St John and Crewe, but without Pierrepont — with a narrower brief to consider plans for suborning royalist forces and ensuring their defection to Parliament. Under questioning by a committee of both Houses to investigate Cranford’s allegations, the London cleric was at pains to distance Crewe from any culpable involvement in the sub-committee’s activities, insisting that though Crewe was one of the sub-committee’s members he had never been called to attend any of its meetings. But this was untrue. On Crewe’s own admission, Saye had consulted him (apparently in the second half of April) on one of the designs that came within the sub-committee’s remit: a plan to induce George Goring*, the king’s lieutenant general of horse, to defect to Parliament. Crewe further recalled an occasion when he and Saye had shared a coach with Philip Lord Wharton (a member of the CBK, but not formally a member of the sub-committee) on the way to Arundel House, Saye’s London residence, when ‘they spoke at that time of these thinges’. Crewe was actively involved in discussions with Saye and St John held early in May, and Crewe and St John both concurred that Saye should attempt to secure the surrender of Oxford by bribing its governor, William Legge. However, Crewe and St John were not convinced that Lord Savile – the courtier at the centre of these clandestine negotiations – ‘could procure a performance of those things which the Lord Saye treated with him about’, and therefore they moved at Derby House that ‘the treaty might be at an end’. When details of this so-called Savile affair emerged and were debated in the House in June and July 1645, Crewe declined to join those among the Independents who struck back at their Presbyterian enemies, Holles in particular.203CJ iv. 213a; PA, Main Pprs. 30 June 1645, ff. 199, 227, 230, 231r-v, 233v, 235v, 236v, 238, 242-3; M. Mahony, ‘The Savile affair and the politics of the Long Parliament’, PH vii (1988), 219.

Crewe aligned with the Independents again on 21 August 1645 in a debate on whether new elections should be held to recruit the House. Joining St John and Samuel Browne he brushed aside the objections of the John Maynard and other MPs aligned with the Presbyterian grandees.204Add. 18780, ff. 104-107v. His position during the debates in October on the Westminster Assembly’s proposals for investing parish presbyteries with ‘a general power to debar whom they would [put] from the sacrament’, was out of kilter with both the the Independents and with their Presbyterian opponents, who favoured the proposals as a means of suppressing heterodoxy. Instead, Crewe took the line that without such a power ‘the minister should be forced to give the sacrament against his conscience and that the same snare lay upon them [the House] now if the elders would receive them [communicants] as fit whom they conceived unfit’.205Harl. 166, f. 267v; Cliffe, Puritans in Conflict, 119. On 15 October, he was a teller with Hesilrige for giving a second reading to a proviso (proposed by William Ashhurst) in the ordinance for excluding scandalous persons from the sacrament that would allow a minister, ‘with the consent of the eldership and approbation of the classis’, to exclude persons guilty of ‘notorious sin’ as long as Parliament was informed about the matter. Intended to secure a compromise acceptable to all sides in the House, Ashhurst’s proviso succeeded in splitting its Erastian majority, for all four tellers were opponents of clericalist Presbyterianism. Although Crewe and Hesilrige won this division, and the proviso was given its second reading, the House then rejected it and stuck to the line that presbyteries could suspend communicants only for offences specified in the ordinance.206Supra, ‘William Ashhurst’; infra, ‘Zouche Tate’; Add. 18780, f. 143v; CJ iv. 308b-309a.

Crewe’s third and fourth tellerships in the Long Parliament – which would prove his last – were a month later (17 Nov. 1645), when he twice partnered Sir Walter Erle against the introduction of an assessment in England for payment of the Protestant forces in Munster, Ireland. The opposing, minority, tellers were the Essexian grandees and leading members of the Presbyterian-dominated Star Chamber Committe of Irish Affairs*, Holles and Sir John Clotworthy.207Supra, ‘Committees for Ireland’; CJ iv. Late in December 1645, Crewe was a messenger to the Lords and reporter from the CBK concerning draft letters to the king and to the Scots, rejecting Charles’s offers of a personal treaty in London and demanding instead that he give ‘a positive answer...to such propositions as shall be sent to him’.208CJ iv. 384a, 385a; LJ viii. 60b. A majority of the English contingent on the CBK – and in particular Browne, Pierrepont, St John, Sir William Armyne (all Independents) and, it seems, Crewe – were determined to persist with a policy of what amounted to a dictated settlement.209Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’. Crewe was said to have opposed a personal treaty on the grounds that once in London the king would join with the Presbyterians and ‘grow too strong’.210Mercurius Academicus no. 5 (12-17 Jan. 1646), 44 (E.315.10).

He received no appointments at Westminster between 25 December 1645 and 31 January 1646 and may well have taken unofficial leave during that period. During his apparent absence from the House, news broke at Westminster that he and two of his colleagues at Derby House – Pierrepont and St John – had reported to the CBK from its agents in France concerning secret talks between the Scots and the French for restoring the king. The Scots commissioners were careful to avoid criticising the three members of the CBK, but clearly resented the fact that ‘informations of so high a nature and so public concernment had not been kept up [i.e. held privately] for so long a time, but had been freely and in a friendly manner communicated unto us at the first occasion, that we might have cleared ourselves and given satisfaction to the honourable committee’.211Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iv. 421b, 422a; Add. 31116, p. 515.

There would be little alteration in Crewe’s pattern of appointments and range of parliamentary business during 1646. Between late January 1646 and early January 1647 – when he departed Westminster as a commissioner to attend the king at Holdenby House – he was named to 35 committees (one of which he apparently chaired) and one conference management team, made four reports from the CBK and its sub-committee for Irish affairs and served once as a messenger to the Lords.212CJ iv. 431a, 520b, 649a, 663a; v. 1b, 2a, 14b, 27b; LJ viii. 613a; Add. 31116, p. 562. Once again, a high proportion of his appointments and work at Westminster related either directly or indirectly to Parliament’s increasingly fractious dealings with the Scots – an area of business now dominated by the Independents’ agenda.213CJ iv. 540a, 548b, 570b, 617a, 644b, 649a, 663a, 673b, 675a, 721a; v. 1b, 2a, 12b, 14b, 23b, 27b. On 6 May, for example, with the Independents anxious to prevent a conjunction between the king and London’s ‘Covenant-engaged’ faction, Crewe was named to an Independent-dominated committee, chaired by Hesilrige, to draft an order of both Houses declaring that anyone who concealed the king from Parliament would be ‘proceeded against as a traitor to the commonwealth, forfeit his whole estate and die without mercy’.214CJ iv. 531b, 532a. Ten days later (16 May), with Charles now in Scottish hands, Crewe was named to another-Independent-led committee – this time to draft a declaration to the Scots commissioners for asserting and vindicating the rights and privileges of Parliament with respect to custody of the king.215CJ iv. 548b, 573a, 584b, 585a, 590b. And on 9 June he was named to a committee to prosecute Parliament’s complaints over the abuses committed by the Scots’ forces in England.216CJ iv. 570b. A distrust of both Charles and the Scots probably underlay much of his involvement in 1646 in preparing the terms of the Newcastle peace propositions – which were conceived as a means of imposing a settlement on the king that would destroy Scottish ambitions for a ‘Covenanted uniformity’ between the kingdoms.217CJ iv. 424b, 431a, 553b, 576a, 617a; D. Scott, ‘The ‘northern gentlemen’, the parliamentary Independents, and Anglo-Scottish relations in the Long Parliament’, HJ xlii. 365-70. That autumn he assumed a prominent role in negotiating the terms and conditions for the withdrawal of the Scottish army from England and for the future disposal of the king’s person.218CJ iv. 649a, 663a, 673b, 675a, 721a; v. 1b, 2a, 12b, 14b, 23b, 27b, 30a; LJ viii. 613a; Add. 31116, p. 562.

The Scots’ withdrawal lent urgency to the quest for a religious settlement that would satisfy both the Covenant-engaged interest and the Erastian majority in the Commons. Crewe was named to four committees between early November 1646 and early January 1647 concerned with repairing churches, the payment of tithes, the maintenance of the ministry and to examine the radical preacher William Dell for the unauthorized publication of a sermon he had delivered to the Commons on 25 November and who had compounded his offence by criticism of a sermon delivered later that same day by Christopher Love, who had preached strongly in favour of a Presbyterian reformation.219CJ iv. 714b, 719a; v. 10b, 40b. Crewe was named in first place on 4 January 1647 to a six-man committee for drafting an ordinance to settle church government in Ireland ‘as is, or shall be, established in the kingdom of England’. Although only one of his fellow committeemen on this occasion – Zouche Tate – was a thorough-going religious Presbyterian, it was unusual for Crewe to find himself on such a relatively small committee with no leading Independents in its ranks.220CJ v. 40b.

Parliamentary career, 1647-8

Crewe’s appointment on 6 January 1647 to a bicameral commission for receiving the king from the Scots and conveying him to Holdenby House in Northamptonshire would determine his political duties and activities for the next ten months.221CJ v. 43a, 44a, 49b. It was this commission that drew up a list of the king’s bedchamber men and other attendants while he resided at Holdenby, which Crewe reported to the House on 11 January.222CJ v. 49b, 50b. Crewe seems to have worked harmoniously with his fellow commissioners, who were mostly men of political Presbyterian sympathies – namely, Richard Browne II, Sir John Coke, Sir Walter Erle and Sir John Holland.223Bodl. Tanner 59, ff. 659, 687, 691, 694, 710; HMC Portland, i. 429; Mems. of the Great Civil War ed. Cary, i. 188-9, 241-5, 257-8, 268-9, 271-3, 275-6. 284, 297-8, 314. When Cornet Joyce and his troops arrived at Holdenby early in June to take custody of the king, Crewe joined Browne and Coke in asserting that had they sufficient forces of their own they would uphold the trust that Parliament had reposed in them (as the king’s custodians) with their lives.224Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 517. It was Crewe’s servant that the commissioners sent to the Presbyterian grandees Holles and the earl of Manchester at Westminster with information that the army intended to remove Charles from Holdenby.225LJ ix. 232b, 235b. Confronting Joyce at army headquarters a few days later, Crewe and Coke insisted that ‘he deserved to lose his head for what he had done’.226Clarke Pprs. i. 124. Having ‘most constantly attended upon this service’, and with their role as custodians of the king usurped by the army, Crewe, Coke and Browne requested late in June to be discharged from office, but to no avail.227Mems. of the Great Civil War ed. Cary, i. 273. Their attendance upon the king was officially terminated only with Charles’s flight from Hampton Court on 11 November, when they were thanked by the Commons for the ‘faithful discharge of their trust’.228CJ v. 357a. Crewe received three appointments in the Commons during the next fortnight – including his addition to a committee for investigating the Presbyterian ‘counter-revolution’ of 26 July – before being granted leave of absence for six weeks on 25 November.229CJ v. 359a, 366b, 368b. His next appointment was not until 22 February 1648, when the Commons sent him to the duke of York (the future James II) with a thinly veiled warning to desist from plotting to escape parliamentary custody.230CJ v. 470b. That same month, Whitelocke claimed that Crewe was ‘in great repute with Cromwell and his party’ – i.e. the Independent grandees.231Add. 37344, f. 129v.

Crewe was part of that influential constituency at Westminster in 1648 that recognised the necessity of compromising with the City’s Presbyterian fathers and agreeing to a treaty with the king – although not without preconditions – in order to hold London and the kingdom against royalist insurgency and Scottish invasion. This group included his old colleagues among the Independent grandees as well as ‘rigid’ Presbyterians such as his friend, or at least close acquaintance, the earl of Manchester. During the spring and summer of 1648 Crewe was named to 22 committees (one of which he chaired) and served on three conference management teams and twice as a messenger to the Lords.232CJ v. 548a, 563b, 640b, 647a, 647b, 673a; LJ x. 262a, 395. Although he was not among the most assiduous attenders at Derby House during 1648, he made at least two reports from the Derby House Committee* and two from the Derby House Committee of Irish Affairs* between late March and early August.233Supra, ‘Derby House Committee’; CJ v. 519b, 521b, 551b, 646a, 657a; SP21/26, pp. 143, 146, 147, 164. In the Commons, his services were regularly enlisted when it came to preparing parliamentary communications to the Scots and to conferring with the City authorities on security matters, the redress of their various grievances and the payment of London’s assessment arrears.234CJ v. 555a, 555b, 558a, 558b, 563b, 565a, 574a, 624a, 643b, 664a. It was Crewe who, on 18 May, carried up to the Lords a draft ordinance for making Major-general Philip Skippon* commander in chief of the forces in and around London – a measure that would prove vital in securing the City for Parliament during the second civil war.235Supra, ‘Derby House Committee’; CJ v. 563b; LJ x. 262a.

Crewe’s Commons assignments that spring and summer also make clear his continued zeal in the cause of further reformation in religion; on 1 May, for example, he was made chair of a committee for using dean and chapter lands to settle a godly preaching ministry.236CJ v. 519a, 522a, 548a, 552a, 602a. His concern to effect a godly church settlement undoubtedly strengthened his commitment to seeking a treaty with the king – which is again evident from his appointments – but one held away from London and with preconditions designed to prevent a sell-out peace. The ‘three propositions’ to which Charles was to be compelled to agree to before any personal treaty included the settlement of Presbyterianism in England for three years.237CJ v. 593a, 610b, 614a, 637a, 640b, 647b, 649a, 664a, 697b; LJ x. 395; Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 146. On 25 and 26 July, Crewe managed and reported from a conference at which he put the House’s case for retaining the three propositions, but the Lords, ‘notwithstanding the reasons given at the conference, insist to have a personal treaty’ without preconditions.238CJ v. 647b, 649a; LJ x. 395.

Early in September 1648, Crewe was named with Viscount Saye, William Pierrepont and several more of his closest colleagues at Derby House to the parliamentary commission for negotiating with the king at Newport, and he would spend most of the next three months on the Isle of Wight.239CJ v. 697a; LJ x. 492b; Bodl. Tanner 57, ff. 300, 310, 345, 382; HMC Portland, i. 500, 501, 503, 504, 505. His correspondence that autumn with the earl of Manchester and another influential Presbyterian Parliament-man John Swynfen formed an important link in the chain of communication between the commissioners and Westminster.240CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 296-7, 300, 302-3, 306-7, 309, 319-20. The key consideration for Crewe and Swynfen was how to reconcile Parliament’s commitment to a godly church settlement with the king’s abiding reluctance to abandon episcopacy (if Crewe did indeed discuss episcopacy with Charles, as his son would later claim, then it was very probably at Newport, not civil-war Oxford).241‘Mems. of Nathaniel, Lord Crewe’ ed. Clark, 1. Crewe joined the other commissioners in trying to persuade the king that given what Charles ‘had already done in offering to settle the Presbytery [i.e. Presbyterianism] for three years, that his conscience might be satisfied [as] to what more was desired’.242Desiderata Curiosa ed. F. Peck (1735), ii, lib. x, 11. As the treaty dragged on, however, Crewe urged greater flexibility in this area, warning Swynfen on 6 November that

no man knows what will become of religion and the Parliament if we have not peace. Future troubles will be laid to the charge of Presbytery, and the people will be apt to hinder and oppose that which they conceive to have been an occasion of their miseries, and so instead of abolishing episcopacy we may beget an enmity to Presbytery ... I entreat you to further a satisfactory answer to the king’s propositions; he expects it and therein hath great reason on his side.243CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 319.

In a further letter to Swynfen that same day (6 Nov.), he expressed the opinion that if the king’s latest offer on church government were drawn up in specific terms in an act of Parliament, the bishops would be able to do nothing without the consent of the two Houses.244CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 319. Crewe was evidently willing to accept either Presbyterianism or a moderated episcopacy as the price of a settlement. Having returned to the Commons by 1 December, he and three of his fellow commissioners received the thanks of the House for their ‘great, good and very faithful services’ at Newport.245CJ vi. 92a.

In the great debate of 4-5 December 1648 on whether to accept the king’s answers at Newport as a basis for settlement, Crewe voted with the majority in favour of the motion, and at Pride’s Purge on 6 December he was not only excluded from the House but was also among those 45 or so Members who suffered imprisonment. This group largely comprised leading Presbyterians, but also one of the Independent grandees – Nathaniel Fiennes I.246‘Mems. of Nathaniel, Lord Crewe’ ed. Clark, 2; Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 36&37 (5-12 Dec. 1648), sig. Ccc3v (E.476.2). Crewe and 15 other MPs were released on 20 December, whereupon he quit national politics and would soon lose his place on the Northamptonshire bench and assessment commission.247Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 1369. On 16 January 1649, he joined his brother-in-law Edward Stephens and ten other Presbyterian victims of Pride’s Purge in a letter to James Cranford (Crewe’s accuser in the Savile affair) in his role as licenser, requesting his imprimatur for a pamphlet by William Prynne – published on 23 January – lambasting the army and its proceedings and vindicating the secluded Members.248Add. 70006, f. 62; W. Prynne, A Vindication of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1649, E.539.5).

The Protectorate and Restoration

Crewe withdrew from public life under the Rump. ‘We must take heed what we write and what we say; you will therefore expect no great news’ he wrote to his son-in-law Edward Montagu in 1651.249F. R. Harris, The Life of Edward Montagu, K.G. First Earl of Sandwich, 76. In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Crewe was returned in second place behind Sir Gilbert Pykeringe for one of the six Northamptonshire county places.250Perfect List of the Members Returned (1654, 669 f.19.8). All six men were included on the list of Members approved by the protectoral council early in September.251Severall Procs. of State Affaires no. 258 (31 Aug.-7 Sept. 1654), 4093 (E.233.22). However, Crewe made no recorded impression upon the proceedings of this Parliament, and it seems likely that he failed to take his seat. It cannot be discounted that the ‘John Crewe Anglus [i.e. Englishman]’ who visited Padua, in the Venetian republic, in the summer of 1654 was Crewe – or possibly his kinsman John Crewe II of Utkinton – although ‘popish’ Italy would probably have held little appeal for a man of Crewe I’s strict godly sensibilities.252Inglesi e Scozzesi all’Università di Padova dall’anno 1618 sino al 1765 ed. H. F. Brown (Venice, 1922), 160.

Crewe’s appointment to the protectoral council’s committee for trade in 1655 and to similar government commissions during the mid-1650s suggests that he was well-regarded by the Cromwellian regime.253CSP Dom. 1655-6, pp. 1, 100, 218. And his letters to Edward Montagu under the protectorate reveal that he retained a keen interest in affairs at Westminster. Commenting on proceedings in the Commons in November 1656, he considered that there was ‘great reason for extraordinary duties [i.e. prayer and fasting]. I beseech God to fit us for mercy public and private...’.254Bodl. Carte 73, ff. 16, 51. Like Manchester, Saye, Pierrepont and other former grandees of the Long Parliament, Crewe was summoned to the Cromwellian Other House in 1658 but, like many of them, declined to attend any of its meetings – nor did he give any excuse for his absence.255HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 504, 522; A Second Narrative of the Late Parliament (1659), 34 (E.977.3). Following the second restoration of the Rump, late in December 1659, Crewe, Sir Gilbert Gerard and 20 or so other secluded Members turned up at Westminster and sought to take their seats, only to be turned away by the army.256W. Prynne, A Brief Narrative of the Manner how Divers [Secluded] Members of the House of Commons...were again Forcibly Shut Out (1659), 3 (E.1011.4).

Crewe’s house on Lincoln’s Inn Fields functioned as a kind of ‘party headquarters’ for the secluded Members in their secret deliberations and their negotiations with General George Monck* that led to their re-admission to the Commons on 21 February 1660.257HP Lords 1660-1715, ‘John Crew, 1st Baron Crew’; Pepys Diary, i. 18, 57, 60; CCSP iv. 535; Baker, Chronicle, 686; ‘Mems. of Nathaniel, Lord Crewe’ ed. Clark, 2; G. Davies, The Restoration of Charles II, 288; J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry Besieged 1650-1700, 28-9. Samuel Pepys – Crewe’s kinsman by marriage and a client of Edward Montagu – found Crewe ‘very joyful’ after his first day back in the Commons, on 21 February and convinced ‘that the House doth intend to do nothing more then to issue writs [for holding new elections] and to settle a foundation for a free Parliament’.258Pepys Diary, i. 62. The next day (22 Feb.), Crewe was named to a committee to prepare qualifications for Members to sit in a new Parliament to be held in April – the 1660 Convention.259CJ vii. 848b. In all, he was named to 11 committees between 22 February and the final dissolution of the Long Parliament in mid-March – three of them for settling and confirming godly ministers in parish livings and for introducing a confession of faith.260CJ vii. 848a, 848b, 855b, 856a, 860b, 866a, 868b, 871a, 872b, 877a. On 23 February he received the highest number of votes, after Pierrepont, in the elections to a new council of state, of which he was an active member.261CJ vii. 849; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. xxvi; Add. 4197, ff. 264, 268, 270; Stowe 142, f. 70. Shortly before Parliament was dissolved, Crewe – or so Edmund Ludlowe II* alleged – moved that all parliamentarians ‘should be left to the pleasure of the king’, that royalists should be allowed to vote in the elections to the Convention and that the House should ‘bear their witness against the horrid murder of the late king...expressing himself therein with all gall and venom imaginable’.262Ludlow, Voyce, 97, 99. Yet Crewe’s undoubted support for a restoration of monarchy was apparently tempered by the conviction that ‘the war undertaken by the Parliament against the forces raised by the late king and his adherents was just and lawful’.263CJ vii. 871a. In March it was reported that Crewe, Gerard ‘and that gang’ favoured a restoration in accordance with the 1648 Newport peace propositions.264CCSP iv. 609.

In the elections to the 1660 Convention, Crewe was returned for Northamptonshire and was listed with his son Thomas Crewe (who had been returned for Brackley) by Philip Lord Wharton as likely supporters of a Presbyterian church settlement.265HP Common, 1660-1690, ‘John Crew’; G.F.T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 338. Crewe’s friends were worried that by having ‘too much concerned himself [in the Convention] with the Presbyterian[s] against the House of Lords’ he would alienate the king.266Pepys Diary, i. 118, 125-6. Nevertheless, he was a member of the delegation that met Charles at The Hague, and in April 1661 he was created Baron Crewe of Steane.267CP. He was an active member of the Lords during the first decade of the Cavalier Parliament, although by 1662 he was disillusioned with Charles and his court and bemoaned the exclusion that year of several thousand godly ministers, ‘to whom he [Crewe] says the king is beholden for his coming in and that if any such thing had been foreseen he had never come in’.268HP Lords, 1660-1715, ‘John Crew, 1st Baron Crew’; Pepys Diary, iii. 290-1. One of his principal correspondents and confidants during the Restoration period was Swynfen, who was a prominent spokesman for the puritan interest in the Cavalier Parliament. It is almost certain that Crewe, like Swynfen, was a conforming member of the restored Anglican church.269Infra, ‘John Swynfen’; Cliffe, Puritan Gentry Besieged, 76, 77-8, 94, 106, 143, 176, 181.

Crewe died on 12 December 1679 and was buried at Steane.270‘Mems. of Nathaniel, Lord Crewe’ ed. Clark, 19; Baker, Northants. i. 685, 688. In his exceedingly brief will – having clearly made prior provision for his children and dependents – he declared that he was ‘of the same faith now I am old wherein I was trained up in my youth. I am convinced that I deserve damnation and believe that my sins are pardoned by the infinite mercy of God through the infinite merits of Jesus Christ’.271PROB11/361, f. 253v. He was succeeded by his son Thomas, who was returned for Northamptonshire in 1656 and for Brackley in 1659, 1660, 1661 and March 1679.272Infra, ‘Thomas Crewe’.