BOOTHE, George (1622-84), of Dunham Massey, Bowdon, Cheshire.

Background and early career

Boothe belonged to a junior branch of a Lancashire family that had settled at Dunham Massey, in northern Cheshire, in the mid-fifteenth century.40Ormerod, Cheshire, i. pt. 2, p. 523. His great-grandfather, William Booth†, had represented Cheshire in Parliament in 1572; and his father, also William Booth† – who had died while he was still in his teens, leaving debts amounting to £11,000 – had sat for the county in 1624.41HP Commons 1558-1603; HP Commons 1604-1629; Cheshire IPM ed. Stewart-Brown, 46. Boothe’s wardship was purchased for the massive sum of £4,000, plus an annual rent of £250, by his paternal grandfather Sir George Booth, 1st bt., who was one of Cheshire’s most influential figures during the early Stuart period.42WARD9/163, f. 77v; JRL, EGR3/3/3/2, no. 4; R.N. Dore, ‘The Cheshire rising of 1659’, Trans. Lancs. and Cheshire Antiquarian Soc. lxix. 45; Morrill, Cheshire, 9, 30, 47.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in 1640, Sir George Booth and his fellow Cheshire baronet Sir Richard Wilbraham put forward two candidates, referred to as ‘the esquires’, for the county seats.43WARD9/163, f. 77v; Morrill, Cheshire, 33. The identity of these two men is not known, but it has been plausibly suggested that one was either Sir George’s younger son John or his grandson, the future MP George Boothe. On the one hand, Sir George did not get on well with John and would attempt to have George returned for the Lancashire borough of Newton in 1642.44JRL, Legh of Lyme corresp., Lttrs. to Francis Legh, folder 11: G. Boothe to Legh, 11 Feb. 1642. On the other, Boothe had quarreled with Sir George during the winter of 1639-40 – possibly over the marriage that his grandfather had arranged for him with a daughter of the godly grandee Theophilus Clinton, 4th earl of Lincoln – and on 22 January 1640, he wrote from Calais to a friend, declaring that he was ‘grieved to be chased from my own home and to have my dear affection rebound to me again with unkindness’, yet insisting that ‘I always have been and ever will be a most dutiful, though rejected, grandchild’.45JRL, TW/260. The seriousness of this quarrel makes Boothe an unlikely candidate for Sir George’s electoral patronage in 1640.

Sir George was apparently not among the Cheshire gentlemen who signed the indenture returning the winning candidates, Sir William Brereton and Sir Thomas Aston, to the Short Parliament.46C219/42/1/50. Nevertheless, he probably did not object to the return of Brereton, his political protégé and former son-in-law, and may have shared at least some of his aspirations for reform of the Church of England.47R.N. Dore, ‘1642: the coming of civil war to Cheshire’, Trans. Lancs. and Cheshire Antiquarian Soc. lxxxvii. 47. Sir George, like Brereton, did not sign the petition that Sir Thomas Aston organised in Cheshire over the winter of 1640-1, and which he presented to the Lords in February 1641, in favour of episcopacy and denouncing puritan schemes for further reformation.48Supra, ‘Sir Thomas Aston’. However, he did sign the much more moderately-worded petition that Aston presented to the Lords in December 1641, requesting that there be ‘no innovation of doctrine and liturgy ... unless by the advice and consent of some national synod’ and stressing the congruity between the doctrine and liturgy of the Church of England and those of the ‘Reformed churches’ on the continent.49PA, Main Pprs. 20 Dec. 1641. On the issue of church reform, the Booths probably cared much less about the fate of the bishops than Aston, but without going to the root-and-branch extremes of Brereton.50Morrill, Cheshire, 270-1.

By the spring of 1642, the loyalties of Sir George and Boothe were moving in a parliamentarian direction. In May 1642, both men signed a petition from a group of Cheshire gentry to the king, calling for him to return to Westminster rather than go to Ireland (as he had planned) and thereby abandon England to the ‘popish faction’.51Add. 36913, f. 60; To the Kings Most Excellent Majestie the Humble Petition of the Gentry, Ministers and Free-holders of the County Palatine of Chester (1642, 669 f.5.17). This petition was presented to the king at York by ‘young Booth’ – almost certainly the future MP.52Add. 36913, f. 61v. The majority of its leading signatories were future parliamentarians, and although the king chose to construe it as less ‘ill-grounded’ than most other such petitions, its main import – that he must accommodate himself to Parliament’s ‘proposals and conclusions’ – is clear.53His Majesties Answer to the Humble Petition of the Gentlemen, Free-holders, and Ministers of the Countie Palatine of Chester (1642, 669 f.5.18); R. Cust, P. Lake, Gentry Culture, and the Politics of Religion: Cheshire on the Eve of the Civil War (Manchester, 2020), 327-8. Early in July, the Booths were joined at Dunham Massey by Cheshire’s foremost parliamentarian activist, Sir William Brereton, whereupon the three men sent a letter to the Commons, expressing their willingness to execute the Militia Ordinance in Cheshire.54PJ iii. 171; CJ ii. 653b. A month later the king wrote to Sir George, complaining of his complicity with the county’s nascent parliamentarian interest and ‘that your grandchild [Boothe] should so far forget himself as to vent express words importing both a disaffection to us and a scandal to our government, whereby you have both exposed yourselves to our mere mercy in case we may live to see the laws take force’.55Add. 36913, f. 94. The king offered both men a ‘free and general pardon for all by past’ if Sir George agreed to act on the Cheshire commission of array, to which he had been named in June.56Northants RO, FH133. Sir George Booth rejected this offer, but was among the organisers of the ‘neutralist’ Remonstrance that circulated in the county during the late summer, urging joint action by king and Parliament to prevent the ‘dissolution of the fabric of this blessed government’.57Harl. 2107, f. 6; Morrill, Cheshire, 58-9; Cust, Lake, Gentry Culture, 338-41; Dore, ‘1642: the coming of civil war to Cheshire’, 51. His grandson, the future MP, pursued a rather more belligerent course, accepting a commission late in July 1642 as a captain of horse in the parliamentary army under Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex; and by December, he was active on the Cheshire ‘council of war’ for raising money on the propositions for maintaining Essex’s forces.58SP28/261, f. 2; Civil War in Cheshire, 240-2.

What exactly moved Boothe to side with Parliament against the king is not clear – although his allegiance is consistent with, and was perhaps influenced by, his links by marriage to the godly circle of his first father-in-law, Theophilus Clinton, 4th earl of Lincoln.59Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 473; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 78. A year after his first wife’s death in 1643, Boothe strengthened his connections with the parliamentarian leadership by his marriage to a daughter of Henry Grey, 1st earl of Stamford, sister of the future regicide Lord Grey of Groby*.

From soldier to Commons-man, 1643-6

Boothe was one of Cheshire’s youngest and bravest parliamentarian officers.60Cheshires Successe (1644), 12 (E.94.6); Magnalia Dei 8; The Kings Letter, 3; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 543. By early 1643, he had joined Robert Duckenfeild* and William Edwardes* in raising a troop of horse for Parliament; and within a year, he had been appointed governor of Nantwich, Brereton’s wartime headquarters (at least one contemporary pamphlet identifies Boothe as governor, rather than his grandfather as one recent authority has suggested).61HMC Portland, i. 94; The Kings Letter, 3; Dore, ‘The Cheshire rising of 1659’, 45; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 64. Brereton’s evident faith in young Boothe – he was only 20 or 21 when he was appointed governor – was amply repaid at the battle of Nantwich in January 1644, when it was Boothe’s sally from the town that helped swing the battle Parliament’s way.62The Kings Letter, 3, 4; M. Wanklyn, F. Jones, Military Hist. of the English Civil War (Harlow, 2005), 134. It was perhaps Boothe’s heroics at the battle of Nantwich that prompted Brereton to appoint him a colonel of foot at some point early in 1644.63CJ iii. 440a.

Boothe’s relationship with Brereton had deteriorated considerably by early in 1645, when he and some of his fellow officers went down to London to register a complaint against their commander, apparently for financial irregularities in the supply of his forces.64Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 13-14, 54, 55-6. Political differences evidently played a major part in this quarrel, with Boothe informing the earl of Essex – the head of the Presbyterian interest at Westminster – that Brereton ‘had turned off many brave and able commanders only that he might put in Independents’.65Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 56. These remarks would have resonated strongly with Essex, who himself faced removal from command as a result of policies initiated by his Independent opponents at Westminster. During April, Boothe attempted to raise support in the Commons against Brereton, while Brereton’s ally William Ashhurst* helped draw up a charge against Boothe in case it should be needed.66Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 293, 305-6. Boothe resigned his commission that same month – probably in protest against Brereton and perhaps also in solidarity with Essex and other Presbyterian officers who had been laid aside as a result of new modelling.67Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 325, 371. Thus freed from the irksome requirement to defer to his military superiors, Boothe joined his grandfather and other leading Cheshire parliamentarians in several petitions and remonstrances to Parliament in 1645 and 1646 that were implicitly critical of Brereton’s influence over the county’s military and political affairs.68Bodl. Tanner 60, ff. 220-1; Nalson IV, f. 202; Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 14, 351, 361; ii. 89; iii. 148-9; HMC Portland, i. 279; Morrill, Cheshire, 83, 152-3, 157-8. Yet despite having resigned his commission, Boothe remained closely involved in managing the war effort in Cheshire – and to that extent, at least, he worked reasonably cordially with Brereton.69HMC Portland, i. 239, 288; Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 14, 489; ii. 14, 16, 118, 125, 141, 184, 303-4, 306, 339-40, 343, 377-8, 484, 500, 519; Morrill, Cheshire, 85. Nevertheless, the Booths have been aptly described as ‘the driving force of the anti-Brereton group’ in Cheshire.70Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 353; ii. 14.

Boothe’s surrender of his colonelcy had the (probably not unlooked for) advantage of clearing him under the terms of the Self-Denying Ordinance to serve as a Parliament-man. By May 1645 at the latest, the Booths and their allies were angling for the election of an MP for Cheshire to replace the royalist Peter Venables (disabled from sitting in 1644) and to counter Brereton’s influence at Westminster – and Boothe was almost certainly their preferred candidate.71Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 14. Suspicion in the Booth camp late in 1645 that Brereton was concealing the writ for a new election in order to spring a candidate of his own upon the county was groundless, not least because the Commons did not order the issuing of such a writ until after the surrender of Chester in February 1646.72Supra, ‘Cheshire’; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 214, 233-4; CJ iv. 457b. Further delays were caused by technical hold-ups in Cheshire, and it was probably Brereton who was instrumental in having these resolved.73CJ iv. 528b-529a; Brereton Lttr. Bks. iii. 29, 138. He seems to have toyed with the idea of having the future regicide John Bradshawe* stand against Boothe, but Bradshawe’s ‘not appearing in this cause’ and the strength of Boothe’s electoral interest quickly dissuaded him.74Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 440. Consequently, Boothe was returned for Cheshire late in November 1646 ‘without any gainsaying, none opposing him, so generally was he beloved and desired’.75Perfect Occurrences no. 49 (27 Nov.-4 Dec. 1646), sig. Bbb3v (E.365.1); Clarke Pprs. ii. 136.

Parliamentary career, 1646-8

Boothe’s first recorded act in the Commons was to take the Solemn League and Covenant on 9 December 1646.76CJ v. 7b. In a career in the Long Parliament that lasted almost exactly two years, Boothe was named to 16 committees – few of them particularly revealing of any factional allegiance in the House.77CJ v. 9b, 28b, 47a, 51b, 90a, 119b, 125a, 134a, 148a, 278a, 367a, 593b, 597b, 599b ; vi. 87a, 92b. Similarly, there is no evidence in the newsbooks to suggest that he was a particularly prominent or noteworthy contributor to debate. His first notable Commons appointment probably came by virtue of his status as knight of the shire for Cheshire, for on 16 March 1647, he was a messenger to carry up to the Lords a Commons order relating to the county.78CJ v. 113b; LJ ix. 81b. On 20 April, he was granted leave of absence, and he received no further mention in the Journal until 18 August, when he was named to a committee for revoking the legislation passed during the Presbyterian counter-revolution at Westminster between 26 July and 6 August.79CJ v. 148b, 278a. The task of undoing the work of the ‘forced’ Parliament and proscribing its authors apparently held little appeal for him, however, for only three days later (21 Aug.) he was granted another leave of absence.80CJ v. 281a. Declared absent at the call of the House on 9 October, he had returned to Westminster by 6 November, when he was named to a conference management team for inserting in the revised peace propositions the demand that Charles was ‘bound in justice and by the duty of his office to give his assent to all such laws as by the Lords and Commons, in Parliament, shall be adjudged to be for the good of the kingdom and by them tendered unto him for his assent’.81CJ v. 330a, 352b.

It is only with Boothe’s first tellership, on 11 November 1647, that it becomes possible to gauge his political alignment in the House. In partnership with the Derbyshire Presbyterian MP Sir John Curzon, he was a teller against a proposal that church lands be used as security for the payment of army arrears – defeating the pro-army pairing of Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Arthur Annesley by 93 to 59 votes.82CJ v. 356b. With the New Model soldiery clamouring for arrears of pay, Boothe had made his hostility to their interests, and to their Independent political patrons, abundantly clear. Later that month (23 Nov.), he was added to a committee set up to examine information concerning the role of Edward Stephens* in the July 1647 Presbyterian coup.83CJ v. 367a. But again he showed little stomach for this anti-Presbyterian witch-hunt, for that same day he was granted yet more leave of absence.84CJ v. 367a. If he returned to the House before the summer of 1648 it was merely to obtain further leave of absence, which he did on 17 March 1648.85CJ v. 503a, 543b; HMC Portland, i. 450.

Boothe’s most concentrated spell of appointments in the Long Parliament came in June 1648. The second civil war had forced the Independent grandees into an informal alliance with those Presbyterians – who included Boothe, it seems – who were sincere in their commitment to godly reformation and a negotiated settlement with the king, and at the same time opposed to the royalist threat posed by the Scottish Engagers and their English allies. Boothe was named to three committees in June, including those for settling the kingdom’s militia forces and to investigate the royalist insurrection in Kent.86CJ v. 593b, 597b, 599b. And on 23 June, he was appointed a messenger to carry up to the Lords a Commons resolution for establishing a committee of both Houses to consider what terms to offer to the king ‘for settling of a speedy and well-grounded peace’.87CJ v. 611b. When the Lords failed to act promptly on Boothe’s message, the Commons appointed him a messenger again on 26 June to remind the peers of this resolution and to request a speedy response.88CJ v. 612b; LJ x. 346b.

Boothe’s appointment with John Gurdon on 2 October 1648 to discover whether the sponsors of a petition from Leicestershire against the Newport treaty had anything else to offer to the House can be read in various ways. However, given that the Commons had informed the petitioners in no uncertain terms that it intended to continue negotiating with the king, it is unlikely that Boothe’s and Gurdon’s assignment had a particularly solicitous purpose.89CJ vi. 41b-42a; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 109. That Boothe himself approved of the treaty is suggested by his appointment on 24 November as a messenger to carry up to the Lords the resolutions of the Commons that although the king’s answer to the proposition concerning the church was unsatisfactory, the negotiations should continue for another three days.90CJ vi. 86b; LJ x. 602b. The army, determined to stop the treaty taking effect, moved menacingly towards London late in November, prompting the Commons to set up a committee on 1 December – to which Boothe was named – for requesting that Sir Thomas Fairfax* halt the army’s advance.91CJ vi. 92b; Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 36-7 (1-12 Dec. 1648), sig. Ccc2 (E.476.2). When the army ignored this order and marched to Hyde Park, the Commons sat into the night, debating the letter’s contents and eventually divided on the question of whether to include the obviously confrontational phrase ‘derogatory to the freedom of Parliament’.92CJ vi. 92b. The tellers for the yeas were Boothe and the Presbyterian Sir Walter Erle, ‘but such was the cowardice of some and the uncessant [sic] bawling of those brethren that ... side with the army ... that it was voted in the negative’.93Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 36-7, sigs. Ccc2-Ccc2v.

Boothe was perhaps fortunate to escape imprisonment at Pride’s Purge on 6 December. Instead, when he came to take his seat on 7 December he was turned away by the soldiers guarding the Commons’ door, whereupon he joined a group of secluded Members in a letter to the Speaker, ‘telling him what interruptions we had in the way of our duties’.94CJ vi. 94b; Clarke Pprs. ii. 137. There is evidence that Boothe and Brereton were still on speaking terms in the autumn of 1648, despite their political differences, and it is possible that Brereton used his influence to prevent Boothe suffering a fate worse than seclusion.95Harl. 2070, f. 133. Boothe and several other secluded Members tried to gain admittance to the House again on 12 December, but again the soldiers turned them back, ‘bidding them go drink and whore, or warm their nails at home in the chimney corner, there being neither privilege nor room in the House for reprobates at that time’.96Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 38 (12-19 Dec. 1648), sig. Ddd2v (E.476.35). Indignant at his ill-usage, Boothe wrote to the inhabitants of Cheshire on 19 December, informing them of the army’s proceedings and the likelihood of worse to follow, ‘force debarring me from being there where your commands do place me for preventing of such extremities, which to do myself but right, I may say I was in a fair way of effectuating and had made a good progress in it when the aforementioned interruptions happened’.97Clarke Pprs. ii. 136-8. How precisely he had contributed to preventing the army’s ‘extremities’ is not clear.

Boothe withdrew from public life under the Rump, and in 1650 he was removed from the Cheshire bench.98C231/6, p. 196. His grandfather, active in local government to the last (for which he won praise from the council of state), died in October 1652, whereupon Boothe inherited his title of baronet and the entirety of the family estate, consisting of some 11,000 acres and worth about £2,000 a year before the civil war.99JRL, EGR3/6/2/2/1; CSP Dom. 1651, p. 428; Dore, ‘Cheshire rising of 1659’, 44-5; Wanklyn, ‘Landed Society’, 281, 306, 390.

Defying the protectorate, 1653-8

Attempts to encourage Boothe’s return to public service began in October 1653 – when he was restored to the county bench – and probably gathered pace following the establishment of the protectorate in December.100C231/6, p. 271. In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, he stood as a candidate for one of the four Cheshire county seats and was returned in second place after John Bradshawe.101Perfect List of the Members Returned (1654, 669 f.19.8). His appeal to the voters rested partly, no doubt, on his standing as one of Cheshire’s greatest landowners and partly, too, on his distinguished record of service to the county. It is also likely that he was well regarded by the powerful puritan interest within the deanery of Manchester, which covered north-eastern Cheshire where much of Boothe’s estate was situated.102T. Paget, A Demonstration of Family-duties (1643), 3; Richardson, Puritanism, 8-9; P. J. Pinckney, ‘The Cheshire election of 1656’, BJRL xlix. 413; ‘Thomas Paget’, Oxford DNB. However, there is no evidence to identify him at this stage in his career as a major patron of godly religion in the region.

According to Thomas Gewen*, Boothe was among those Presbyterians who withdrew from the 1654-5 Parliament in protest at Cromwell’s intervention and the imposition of a ‘recognition’ on MPs. Although Gewen hoped that Boothe might be prepared to return, it seems unlikely that he did, as he is not mentioned in the Journal.103Archaeologia xxiv. 140. It is also revealing that he seems to have played no part in local government under the protectorate even though he was named to numerous county commissions. The assessment of his political sympathies given by John Griffith III* – in recommending him to Secretary John Thurloe* for inclusion on the March 1655 Cheshire militia commission – hints at the tension in Boothe’s relations with the protectoral government: ‘for although some of those as ... Sir George Booth etc. in some things possibly were unsatisfied, yet against the cavaliers’ interest you may as safely trust them as ever; and it will not be convenient to slight persons of eminency and interest in their country, being assured of their fidelity’.104TSP iii. 217. That autumn, Boothe was also appointed to the Cheshire commission for securing the peace of the commonwealth, but he refused to have anything to do with the rule of the major generals.105Cheshire RO, DLT/B38, p. 10. Indeed, it was later reported that he had described the major-generals as ‘Cromwell’s hangmen’ and that ‘he would satisfy any man that was angry at his words with his sword’.106CCSP iii. 242.

Boothe’s opposition to the major-generals probably heightened his appeal to the informal caucus of Cheshire gentry that met before the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in August 1656 to choose candidates for the county places.107Morrill, Cheshire, 290. Boothe had not been among the gentry’s original slate of candidates, however, and had only entered their reckoning, or thrown his hat in the ring, after Major-general Tobias Bridge* had objected to one of their first-choice nominees, John Bradshawe. Regardless of the precise arrangements surrounding his selection, Boothe, Thomas Marbury, Legh and Peter Brooke were returned for the county in that order, beating off a challenge from Bradshawe and his electoral ally Brereton.108Supra, ‘Cheshire’; A Perfect List of the … Persons Returned to Serve in this Parliament 1656 (1656), 3 (E.498.5); Pinckney, ‘Cheshire election of 1656’, 397, 413-15.

According to one contemporary report, Marbury, Legh and Brooke were among those excluded from the second protectoral Parliament as opponents of the government – and it is this which is probably the source for the equally erroneous, but often-repeated claim, that Boothe was also excluded.109Harl. 1929, f. 19v; CCSP iii. 189; J. R. Jones, ‘Booth’s rising of 1659’, BJRL xxxix. 432; ‘George Booth’, Oxford DNB. In fact, he was allowed to take his seat, receiving appointment on 18 September 1656 to the committee of privileges and, in second place, to a five-man committee to prepare a declaration for a day of public fasting and humiliation.110CJ vii. 424a. However, that same day (18 Sept.), he presented a letter to the Speaker from the excluded Members, describing how they had been denied entry to the House. And it was apparently in response to the protectoral council’s confirmation of the exclusions that Boothe absented himself from Parliament.111CJ vii. 424b; Abbott, Letters and Speeches, iv. 284; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 94.

That Boothe escaped exclusion in 1656 suggests that he was not at that stage regarded as a Presbyterian troublemaker. Similarly, the fact that the Cheshire Presbyterian minister Henry Newcome did not make his acquaintance until July 1657, when he preached at Dunham Massey, reinforces the impression that Boothe had yet to establish himself as a leading patron of godly ministers.112The Autobiog. of Henry Newcome ed. R. Parkinson (Chetham Soc. o.s. xxvi), 74. Sir Edward Hyde* (the future 1st earl of Clarendon) claimed that by 1659 Boothe had ‘absolute power with the Presbyterians’, but not so much for through his own godly networking as ‘for the memory of his grandfather’, ‘old’ Sir George Booth.113Clarendon, Hist. vi. 112. If Boothe’s relationship with the Cheshire Presbyterian interest is somewhat tenuous before the late 1650s, his links with the royalists are even less substantial. Charles Stuart wrote to Boothe in 1654 asking for his support, but without success; and the ‘Colonel Booth’ identified as a royalist conspirator during the mid-1650s was Boothe’s uncle, Colonel John Booth.114CCSP ii. 392; iii. 242; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 220; Dore, ‘Cheshire rising of 1659’, 49, 51-2, 54, 57; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 118, 149.

Boothe in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, 1659

Boothe was recommended to Protector Richard Cromwell* by General George Monck* in September 1658 as a suitable candidate for the Cromwellian Other House.115TSP vii. 387. In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament in 1659, Boothe and Alexander Rigby II were returned for Lancashire, with Boothe probably taking the senior place. As the owner of a considerable estate in the Warrington area, Boothe enjoyed a strong proprietorial interest in southern Lancashire, and it is likely, too, that he attracted support from the county’s sizeable Presbyterian community.116Supra, ‘Lancashire’.

Despite his misgivings about the protectorate’s constitutional legitimacy, Boothe decided on this occasion to take an active part in the House’s proceedings, although reportedly without taking the necessary oath not to act or plot against the protector.117Henry Cromwell Corresp. 451, 460. Between early March and mid-April 1659, he was appointed to eight committees, two of which – one concerning an assault on Major-general William Packer*; the other for compensating the countess of Worcester – he was named to in first place and may have chaired.118CJ vii. 610a, 622b, 634b, 637a, 638a, 639a, 642a. He also contributed regularly to debate, motivated largely, it seems, by his enduring distrust of the army. When a group of London ‘Anabaptists’ delivered a petition to the Commons on 15 February in support of the army, Boothe accused the petitioners of wishing to ‘plunge my country into blood’ and implied that he would resist them by force if necessary.119Burton’s Diary, iii. 293. And his keenness on having the ‘old peers’ (the parliamentarian lords in the Long Parliament) admitted to the Other House was driven in large part by his desire to keep the military presence there to an absolute minimum.120Burton’s Diary, iii. 417, 527-8. In a lengthy speech on 28 February he praised the old lords while claiming that the Cromwellian swordsmen posed a threat to English liberties.

I have heard that some of them have taken strange things upon them, at other times, as major-generals, to meddle with difference of meum and teum. There hath been such persons in this nation, in military employments, that have told men that law was in their breasts. If any such be in the other House, they will be fit to revive and put in execution that doctrine again ... If you will put the civil sword into the hands of those have the military sword too, I think it cannot be safe for you.121Burton’s Diary, iii. 527-8.

Having lost the argument for keeping the military men out of the Other House, or at least of admitting the old peers as a counterweight to them, Boothe was scathing about the possibility of ‘bounding’ – imposing constitutional limitations upon – its proceedings. On 7 March 1659, he expressed indifference as to whether the Other House was bound or not: ‘It signifies naught to me whether you bound them before, or after. It will be but a bauble to play withal. A sword cannot be bounded’.122Burton’s Diary, iv. 65. He then derided the ennobled swordsmen’s lack of land and connections suitable to their exalted role.

Many have no freehold but their salaries, if you will put that among your tenures. Their relations are not useful. They are gallant in their persons, but thin in relations ... Some noble and meriting … but a very few ... I confess the old peers are not so useful as to interest, but they certainly are better as to interest than these.123Burton’s Diary, iv. 65.

Despairing of their attempt to bring in the old peers or exclude the swordsmen, Boothe and other Presbyterian grandees made common cause with the commonwealthsmen (republican MPs) on 8 March in trying to scupper the Other House altogether by defeating the government on a vote as to whether to ‘transact with the persons now sitting in the Other House’.124CJ vii. 611b-612a; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 472. When the debate on the Other House resumed later that month, Boothe returned to the theme of the vanity of trying to impose limitations upon the newly created second chamber.

You do say you will bound them, but you must bring these bounds to them, and they will tell you, we will not agree to these bounds – we will bound you. These are but vain things. Make what additions you will – at the very moment of your transacting [with the Other House] you put your bounding out of doors. If your body politic be misshapen at the making, the widening or straightening of it will not help it.125Burton’s Diary, iv. 280-1.

So grievous to Boothe was the military presence at Westminster that he frankly admitted his determination to vote against the Commons having any dealings with the Other House even if a door was left open to the re-admittance of the old peers. In what was effectively a repeat of the 8 March vote, Boothe and the leading commonwealthsman Sir Arthur Hesilrige were minority tellers on 28 March against two questions – for transacting ‘with the persons now sitting in the Other House’, and a proviso that this would not remove the old peers’ de jure (although in actual fact non-existent) privilege of being summoned to the upper chamber.126CJ vii. 621b; Burton’s Diary, iv. 286, 293. Hesilrige, of course, objected to the Other House not so much from distrust of its military component as a fundamental hostility to the protectoral settlement itself. (This was Boothe’s second tellership in the House – his first, on 19 March, was on a non-partisan division over whether to adjourn a debate)127CJ vii. 616a. Predictably, Boothe joined the chorus of Members on 12 April calling for harsh measures against the Cromwellian officer Major-general William Boteler*, following a report from the committee of grievances that Boteler, in the course of his duties in 1658, had maltreated several persons suspected of delinquency.128Burton’s Diary, iv. 404, 407. That same day (12 Apr.), Boothe was named to a committee for drawing up an impeachment against Boteler.129CJ vii. 637a.

Boothe’s rebellion, 1659

The army’s overthrow of the protectorate in April 1659 probably came as no surprise to Boothe. Nevertheless, as in 1648 and 1656, his pride and sense of indignation would not allow him to quit the field without letting his enemies know that might was not necessarily right. After the army had restored the Rump early in May, Boothe was among a dozen or so secluded Members of the Long Parliament who tried to gain access to the House, but were barred by the army.130[C. Walker*], Hist. of Independency. The Fourth and Last Part (1660), 41 (E.1052.4); Nicholas Pprs. iv. 134. These Members then addressed a letter to Speaker William Lenthall, recounting how they had been ‘forcibly hindered ... from going into the House’ and warning him and the other restored Rumpers ‘that though to yourselves you may seem to sit free, there is the same force ... continued at your doors which excluded, interrupted and forced the major part of the House in 1648’.131[A. Annesley*], England’s Confusion (1659), 14-15 (E.985.1). Clearly, the army’s intervention at Pride’s Purge still rankled with Boothe.

Although Boothe was probably not surprised to find himself on the receiving end of the army’s strong-arm politics, the events of April and May 1659 seem to have represented the final indignity as far as he was concerned. Early in May, the royalist conspirator-in-chief John Mordaunt, 1st Viscount Mordaunt, reported to Hyde that Boothe had received a royal commission as commander-in-chief of the forces to be raised in Cheshire, Lancashire and north Wales in a projected national uprising against the commonwealth that summer.132Clarendon SP iii. 460; CCSP iv. 194, 203, 205, 209; Z. Cawdrey, The Certainty of Salvation (1684), 28; Jones, ‘Booth’s rising of 1659’, 431. Mordaunt conceded that Boothe was a newcomer to the business of royalist plotting, but he assured the king that the Cheshireman was ‘very considerable in his country, a Presbyterian in opinion, yet so moral a man, if ever any of that principle were to be thoroughly depended on, I think your Majesty may safely on him and his promises, which are considerable and hearty’.133Clarendon SP iii. 472.

Assisted by his younger brother Nathaniel and his uncle Colonel John Booth, Boothe had begun making military preparations against the restored Rump by the end of June 1659; he had also written to Charles Stuart – presumably to express willingness to appear in his cause.134Mordaunt Letter-Bk. 19, 27, 28. Although troubled by the Rump’s easy assumption of control in Ireland (which exposed his western flank to invasion by troops loyal to Westminster), and aware of the huge risk he was taking, he fulfilled Mordaunt’s trust in him by beginning to muster his friends and tenants late in July as part of what was conceived as a series of coordinated royalist risings across the country.135CCSP iv. 259, 260; Clarke Pprs. iv. 32, 288; Jones, ‘Booth’s rising of 1659’, 432, 436. Within a few days of his first rising, Boothe commanded an army of perhaps 4,000 men and most of southern Lancashire and Cheshire, bar the garrison and magazine in Chester Castle.136Clarke Pprs. iv. 33, 38, 39, 42; Mordaunt Letter-Bk. 71; Jones, ‘Booth’s rising of 1659’, 436-7; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 273-4; Morrill, Cheshire, 307-8.

The failure of the other royalist risings to materialise in the summer of 1659 – which Boothe had learnt of even before he took to the field – left him in a perilously exposed position, and this awareness seems to have compounded his indecisiveness as a commander.137Ludlow, Mems. ii. 108; Dore, ‘The Cheshire rising of 1659’, 61-2; Jones, ‘Booth’s rising of 1659’, 436-7, 440; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 260-73; Morrill, Cheshire, 309, 323. ‘Basely ... deserted’, as he put it, by the royalist high command, he put his faith not so much in force of arms as in the impact of a propaganda campaign mounted through print and pulpit to rally Presbyterians and other disaffected parliamentarians under the banner of a ‘free Parliament’ – or, failing that, the re-admission of the Members secluded in 1648.138Autobiog. of Henry Newcome ed. Parkinson, 110. Either course would most probably result in the restoration of Charles Stuart, but it would be on terms similar to those agreed at Newport in 1648. In other words, Boothe and his closest supporters envisaged a negotiated restoration of monarchy that guaranteed a godly religious settlement and the dominance of the Presbyterian interest.139Jones, ‘Booth’s rising of 1659’, 437-9; Morrill, Cheshire, 318-21. He fixed his polemical sights not upon the royalists, therefore, but that far larger constituency which was alarmed by the ‘awe or force of soldiery’ and the perceived threat posed by the Quakers and other ‘fanatics’ to the traditional social order.140A Letter from Sir George Booth to a Friend (1659, 669 f.21.66); An Express from the Knights and Gentlemen Now Engaged with Sir George Booth (1659, 669 f.21.68); The Declaration of the Lords, Gentlemen, Citizens, Freeholders, and Yeomen of this Once Happy Kingdom of England (1659, 669 f.21.88); Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 255, 256-7. Charles Stuart would write to Boothe in December, thanking him for his ‘handsome and considerable engagement’ and informing him that ‘your good friend my Lord Mordaunt hath given me a particular account of all your proceedings, by which I clearly find you intended my restoration’.141JRL, EGR3/4/1/2/2; Cawdrey, The Certainty of Salvation, 29-30; Mordaunt Letter-Bk. 141. Yet in his several declarations during the rising, Boothe never mentioned monarchy directly, and nor did he openly proclaim Charles Stuart for fear of alienating his predominantly Presbyterian base, which was fearful of ‘his Majesty’s restoration by tumult’.142Jones, ‘Booth’s rising of 1659’, 438; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 275, 284; Morrill, Cheshire, 320-1.

No amount of propaganda could make up for Boothe’s military weakness and isolation, however, and his army was routed at Winnington Bridge, Cheshire, on 19 August by a force of New Model veterans under Major-general John Lambert*.143Clarke Pprs. iv. 46; Jones, ‘Booth’s rising of 1659’, 440-2; Morrill, Cheshire, 309. In the aftermath of defeat, Boothe fled southwards, towards the Channel ports, disguised as ‘a gentlewoman, Mrs Dorothy’ – getting as far as Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire before betraying himself by asking his host, an innkeeper, for shaving implements, whereupon he was discovered and promptly arrested.144A True Narrative of the Manner of the Taking of Sir George Booth (1659), 3-6 (E.995.4); Clarke Pprs. iv. 47-8. This ignominious end to ‘Booth’s rising’ was gleefully seized upon by the London hacks

He did leave all, both country, wife and riches,

And turn’d his back and ran out of his breeches.

This is the champion in the wars of Mars

Who fought so long till’s clothes fell off his arse,

And now for them he’s glad to put in place

A tammy [lightweight fabric] petticoat with poor-whores lace.145The Dreadful and Most Prodigious Tempest at Markfield (1659), 7.

Boothe was committed a close prisoner to the Tower on 24 August and had to endure the equally unpleasant ordeal of interrogation by Hesilrige and Sir Henry Vane II*.146CJ vii. 768a; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 115-16.

Boothe was discharged from the Tower by order of the Commons on 22 February 1660 – the day after the Members secluded in 1648 were re-admitted to the House.147CJ vii. 848a; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 245. In the elections to the 1660 Convention that spring, he was returned for Cheshire – probably without opposition, as in 1646.148Newton, House of Lyme, 209; HP Commons 1660-1690. He was listed by Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, as a likely supporter of a Presbyterian church settlement, but he could do little to stem the rising episcopalian tide.149G.F.T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 332; J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry Besieged (1993), 42. On 7 May, he headed the list of twelve MPs appointed to the parliamentary delegation to attend the king at The Hague with the Convention’s reply to the declaration of Breda.150CJ viii. 15a. And in the spirit of that declaration, he used his influence at Westminster in an effort to secure leniency for his former colleagues Bulstrode Whitelocke*, Oliver St John*, Sir Arthur Hesilrige and even for his vanquisher of the previous year, John Lambert.151HP Commons 1660-1690. On 30 July, the Commons voted that £10,000 should be granted to Boothe ‘as a mark of respect unto him for his eminent services and great sufferings for the public’; and the Lords, having received a message from the king of his great esteem for Boothe, gave their assent on 3 August.152CJ viii. 105b; LJ xi. 117a.

According to his grandson George Booth, 2nd earl of Warrington, Boothe used his parliamentary grant of £10,000 from the Convention to pay off debts of £9,000 that he had contracted as a result of profligate spending between 1652 – when he had inherited the estate – and 1660.153JRL, EGR3/6/2/2/1. Boothe’s final mortgage before 1660 had been for £3,000 late in May 1659, which raises the interesting possibility that his defiance of the Rump was as much a financial as a political gamble and that his rising had been paid for on borrowed money. Boothe’s grandson further claimed that he had continued to spend beyond his means to the extent that he had been forced to convey over 300 tenements to trustees to pay off debts totalling almost £30,000 – including a £6,000 portion to his daughter Vere Booth and portions of £16,000 to his younger children (which were never paid).

Raised to the peerage in the 1661 coronation honours as Baron Delamer of Dunham Massey, Boothe sat on the Lords’ benches in the Cavalier Parliament. Attempts were made to implicate him in various plots against the crown during the early 1660s, but reports of his seditious activities were entirely groundless and were not acted upon by the authorities.154CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 465; 1663-4, pp. 512, 529, 659. Nevertheless, he was uncomfortable with central elements of the Restoration religious and political order and refused to pay the part of a ‘servile’ courtier.155JRL, EGR3/6/2/2/2. Although ‘he constantly, when he was in health, attended the public service of God ... according to the law established’, he would evidently have preferred a more comprehensive, Presbyterian-friendly religious settlement.156Cawdrey, The Certainty of Salvation, 27; Cliffe, Puritan Gentry Besieged, 83. It seems to have been his collaboration with the Cheshire and Lancashire Presbyterian ministry during the 1659 rising that established him as a leading patron of the godly in his own right rather than merely as heir to his grandfather’s puritan reputation; and during the early 1660s, he did his best to protect and encourage the region’s godly community.157Autobiog. of Henry Newcome ed. Parkinson, 128-31, 316, 317-21. The sincerity of his attachment to godly religion is attested by his employment of Dissenting clergy as his household chaplains.158The Life of Adam Martindale ed. R. Parkinson (Chetham Soc. o.s. iv), 175, 224, 229, 233; Calamy Revised, 177, 343; ‘George Booth’, Oxford DNB. Moreover, when a bill to suppress conventicles came before the Lords in 1664, Boothe acknowledged his godly affiliations in a letter to the strongly Anglican peer Robert Bruce, 2nd Baron Bruce of Whorlton, begging him to be ‘merciful to us Presbyterians and at least give us leave to play innocently at bowls’.159Wilts. RO, Ailesbury 1300/653. Politically, he grew increasingly uneasy at the lack of restraint on the royal prerogative, such that by the mid-1670s he was firmly aligned with anti-court interest in the Lords.160HP Lords 1660-1715; Browning, Danby, iii. 125, 126, 132, 135, 139, 143, 147, 151. A prominent whig, he voted for the second exclusion bill in November 1680.161HP Commons 1660-1690.

Boothe died on 8 August 1684 and was buried at Bowdon on 9 September.162Ormerod, Cheshire, i. pt. 2, p. 534. In his will, made in 1671, he bequeathed his children a mere £5 each, explaining that he had ‘heretofore well and sufficiently provided for their maintenance and preferment otherwise’.163PROB11/449, f. 35v. However, his grandson, the 2nd earl of Warrington, claimed that when Boothe died ‘he left not one farthing paid towards provisions for his younger sons and daughters, but that whole load came entirely on my father’.164JRL, EGR3/6/2/2/1. That man, Boothe’s heir, was Henry Booth†, the future 1st earl of Warrington, who was returned for Cheshire to the Cavalier Parliament in 1678 and went on to represent the county in all three Exclusion Parliaments.165HP Commons 1660-1690. Surveying his family’s fortunes in 1715, when his debts amounted to a massive £55,547, Boothe’s grandson concluded gloomily ‘our estate has been on the decline for above 70 years last past, by popularity and serving the public and the consequences thereof’.166JRL, EGR3/6/2/2/1-2.