CHOLMLEY, Henry (1609-66), of West Newton Grange, Oswaldkirk, and Barlow, Yorks.

Consistent with his strong aversion to anything that smacked of government by ‘clubs and clouted shoes’, Cholmley was one of only a handful of leading Yorkshire parliamentarians who aligned with the Presbyterian interest during the mid-1640s.41Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 346. A younger son, he seems to have been intended for a career in the law from an early age. He was enrolled at Gray’s Inn while still only a boy – although his studies probably did not begin in earnest until his admission to the Inner Temple ten years later. It was perhaps in anticipation of his success as a lawyer that his father decided to bequeath him only a £50 annuity in his will.42Cholmley Mems. 77. Cholmley’s legal career was destined to be short-lived, however, for he was probably the Henry Cholmley who was expelled from the Inner Temple in 1635 as one of the ‘principal actors’ in the Christmas disorders that year.43CITR ii. 221. If it was Cholmley who was expelled and not his Surrey namesake at the Temple, he more than made up for his blunder, at least in financial terms, by his marriage early in 1636 to a wealthy Yorkshire widow and sister of the future Presbyterian grandee Sir Philip Stapilton*.44Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. i. 172. It was through his wife that Cholmley acquired the manor of Barlow (or Barley) in the West Riding of Yorkshire, property in Copgrove in the North Riding and a house in St John Street, Clerkenwell.45C54/3084/7; C142/564/166; Cholmley Mems. 77. By 1639, he was sufficiently wealthy to lay out £3,300 in purchasing from George Manners, 7th earl of Rutland, the manor of West Newton Grange, in the North Riding, which he made his principal residence.46C54/3215/8; W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), Tong/3/226.

Cholmley played no discernible part in the county’s affairs until the early 1640s, and even then he remained very much in the shadow of his elder brother Sir Hugh Cholmeley*. In April 1640, with Sir Hugh otherwise engaged in the Short Parliament, it was left to Cholmley, as his lieutenant-colonel, to march his brother’s regiment to Newcastle in accordance with royal orders for mobilising half of the Yorkshire trained bands for possible deployment against the Scottish Covenanters. Cholmley had marched the regiment as far as Durham when the orders were countermanded, obliging him to return ingloriously, and probably unpaid, to Yorkshire.47Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland ms vol. 1608-1700, N33 Car. I: king to Sir Edward Osborne*, 4 Apr. 1640; Cholmley Mems. 99; D. Scott, ‘”Hannibal at our gates”’, HR lxx. 273-4. A few months later, he joined Sir Hugh, Stapilton and other leaders of Yorkshire’s ‘disaffected’ gentry in their petitions to the king of July, August and September, in which they complained about illegal billeting, pleaded poverty in the face of royal commands to mobilise the militia and, in the case of the last petition, requested that Charles summon a Parliament.48Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1215, 1231; Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland ms vol. 1608-1700, N38 Car. I. On 5 October 1640, Cholmley signed the Yorkshire county indenture returning two of the summer’s leading petitioners, Ferdinando Fairfax, 2nd Baron Fairfax and Henry Belasyse, to the Long Parliament.49C219/43/3/89.

Cholmey neglected or failed to secure a parliamentary seat that autumn but was returned for Malton on 8 January 1641, after the town’s franchise, which had existed only briefly in the thirteenth century, had been restored by the Long Parliament.50Supra, ‘Malton’. The moving spirits behind Malton’s re-enfranchisement were possibly Sir Hugh Cholmeley and another leading figure among the ‘northern men’ in the Commons, his friend and kinsman Sir John Hotham – and if so, their principal motive in restoring the town’s franchise may well have been to secure Cholmley a seat at Westminster. Cholmley probably owed his return, at least in part, to the backing of Sir Hugh and his influential friends. However, with his purchase of West Newton Grange, which lay about eight miles from Malton, Cholmley may also have enjoyed an interest of his own in the area.

Cholmley was much less prominent at Westminster during the early 1640s than his elder brother, receiving only five committee appointments before the outbreak of civil war and making very few recorded contributions to debate.51CJ ii. 122b, 139b, 447a, 463a, 677b. His entrance upon the national political stage occurred on 7 April 1641, when he appeared as a witness for the prosecution in the trial of the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†). Giving evidence on the 27th article – that Strafford had levied an illegal tax upon Yorkshire the previous autumn for maintenance of the trained bands – he supported the testimony of Sir Hugh Cholmeley, Stapilton and other prominent ‘disaffected’ gentry that Strafford had threatened those who had refused to serve the king against the Scots with distraint of goods and punishment in the court of star chamber.52Procs. LP iii. 431, 439, 441, 447, 448, 452; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 603, 611, 629. Later that month (26 Apr.), Cholmley was appointed to assist (Sir) Edward Hyde in managing a conference concerning Strafford and the bill for the abolition of the council of the north.53CJ ii. 128a; Procs. LP iv. 95, 98. Just over a week later, on 3 May, he took the Protestation.54CJ ii. 133a.

If for no other reason than he was Sir Hugh Cholmeley’s brother, Cholmley was trusted by the parliamentary leadership. On 7 May, the powerful ‘committee of seven’ – which included John Pym and Stapilton – appointed Cholmley to deliver letters of reassurance from Parliament to the army (which had been quartered in Yorkshire since the end of the first bishops’ war) while at the same time charging him with investigating the circumstances surrounding the second army plot.55CJ ii. 138; Beinecke Lib. Osborn fb190/1, L10: Philip Lord Wharton to Legge, May 1641; CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 577. Cholmley had evidently completed this delicate mission by 14 June, when he assured the House that the regiments of three of the army plotters were well affected to Parliament.56Procs. LP v. 154.

Cholmley’s only parliamentary appointment between early May 1641 and February 1642 was late in August as a commissioner for disarming recusants in the West Riding.57LJ iv. 385a. Like Sir Hugh Cholmeley and Sir John Hotham, he seems to have favoured a hard line on popery while showing little enthusiasm for the cause of ‘further reformation’ in religion. According to a seventeenth-century antiquary, neither Cholmley nor Sir Hugh were puritans, although ‘both these brothers were kind and friendly to the puritans or professors of religion’.58DWL, Morrice ms J, vol. iii (entry for 1640). The puritan divine Richard Baxter was probably correct in referring to Cholmley as a ‘moderate episcopal conformist’.59R. Baxter, Richard Baxter’s Penitent Confession (1691), 30. Cholmley’s addition to the North Riding bench in August 1641, to the West Riding bench in March 1642, and his knighthood at Whitehall in December 1641 suggests that the king perceived him as a man who was not wholly against his interest and who could, with effort, be won over to his cause.60C231/5, pp. 472, 510; Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 211. If this was indeed the king’s hope, it was to prove misplaced, although it is perhaps significant that Cholmley took no known part in the House’s proceedings during the winter of 1641-2 – a period in which the crown’s powers were further eroded and the king himself forced to flee London.

The distressed condition of the king’s army in the north and its officers appears to have been of particular concern to Cholmley. On 4 December 1641, he had presented a petition to the House on behalf of Daniel O’Neill, one of the army plotters, and on 1 March 1642 he successfully moved for the payment of the officers’ arrears.61D’Ewes (C), 235; PJ i. 491; CJ ii. 463a. His familiarity with military conditions in the north and his ties to Stapilton prompted Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex – Parliament’s lord lieutenant of Yorkshire and Stapilton’s patron – to commission him as one of his deputy lieutenants late in April 1642.62W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), Tong/10/1. A few days later, on 2 May, Cholmley was named to a five-man delegation from both Houses to attend the king at York.63CJ ii. 553a. This committee, which included Sir Hugh Cholmeley and Stapilton, was instructed to deliver Parliament’s declaration to the king vindicating Sir John Hotham’s proceedings at Hull and was given power to raise the county’s trained bands against any force threatening the peace of the county.64CJ ii. 559b-560a; LJ v. 47a. According to Sir Hugh, however, John Pym ‘plainly enjoined’ the committee members to ‘draw the trained bands together and to oppose the king in all things ... for the Parliament’s service’.65Cholmley Mems. 103. The king was clearly suspicious of their mission, and after they had delivered Parliament’s declaration to him on 10 May he ordered them to return to Westminster. When they politely insisted that their instructions were to remain at York, he advised them not to make any party for themselves or to hinder his service in the county on pain of imprisonment. He also warned the Yorkshire freeholders against them, ‘not knowing what doctrine of disobedience they may preach to you under colour of obeying the Parliament’.66LJ v. 61; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 615, 616. The committee remained at York for most of May and June and sent several letters to Parliament relating the king’s proceedings and their own efforts to prevent him seizing the county’s military resources.67Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 620-1; PJ ii. 386; PJ iii. 86; CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 322-3, 330. It was Cholmley and his colleagues who presented Charles with the Nineteen Propositions.68CJ ii. 599a; LJ v. 97b.

Cholmley was among the first Yorkshire gentlemen to take up arms for Parliament. Commissioned on 29 July 1642 as a colonel of foot in the earl of Essex’s field army, he was drawing pay for 1,200 men by mid-August. Some of his troops were recruited from his Yorkshire militia regiment, the ‘bluecoats’, of which he had apparently been made colonel in August 1640 in place of and at the request of Sir Hugh Cholmeley – who re-assumed command of the regiment in the summer of 1642.69SP28/1A, f. 87; SP28/143, pt. 6, f. 9; SP28/252, pt. 2, f. 363; Cholmley Mems. 99, 101, 140; Binns, Yorks. in the Civil Wars, 18. The chaplain to Cholmley’s new regiment was the Calvinist minister Adoniram Byfield, who would later emerge as a sympathiser of ‘orthodox’ Congregationalist practices.70SP28/2A, f. 293; A. Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains (Woodbridge, 1990), 107; ‘Adoniram Byfield’, Oxford DNB. Cholmley’s high-profile support for Parliament earned him the enmity of the Yorkshire royalists, and at some point in August they plundered his house at West Newton.71A Full Relation of All the Late Proceedings of His Majesty’s Army in the County of Yorke (1642), sig. A3v (E.112.40); PJ iii. 305; Binns, Yorks. in the Civil Wars, 34. His bluecoats helped to secure the midlands for Parliament but were prone to looting, and they disgraced themselves at Edgehill in October by fleeing the battlefield.72CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 379, 387; LJ v. 321; CJ ii. 863a; Cholmley Mems. 151; P. Young, Edgehill, 1642 (Kineton, 1976), 116, 253; Binns, Yorks. in the Civil Wars, 196. Like Stapilton and another Yorkshire gentleman Lionel Copley*, Cholmley was a member of Essex’s council of war and one his most trusted officers – in contrast to Sir Hugh Cholmeley, who defected to the king’s party in the spring of 1643, taking Scarborough with him.73Infra, ‘Sir Hugh Cholmeley’; Bodl. Carte 103, f. 161; Tanner 63, f. 153; CJ iii. 28b; LJ v. 321.

Cholmley’s political path mirrored that of Essex during the latter half of 1643, with both men moving into open conflict with their former allies in the war party. He was present in the Commons on 6 June to take the vow and covenant that Pym and his allies introduced in the wake of the Edmund Waller* plot ‘to distinguish the good and well-affected party from the bad and to unite the good party faster together among themselves’.74CJ iii. 117b, 118a. But two months later, on 5 August, he was a teller with Stapilton in favour of postponing consideration of peace propositions sent down from the Lords until there was a fuller attendance in the House and the war-party’s opponents could be sure of attaining a majority. This peace initiative, which had Essex’s backing, was designed to end the war on easy terms before the Covenanters entered the fray. The two men lost the division, however, and on 7 August the House voted to reject the propositions altogether.75Infra, ‘Sir Philip Stapilton’; Harl. 165, f. 142; CJ iii. 196a, 197b. That same day (7 Aug.), Cholmley was first named to a committee, which he then chaired, to investigate reports that Pym and his fellow war-party grandee William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, had transported bullion overseas.76CJ iii. 196b, 245a, 246a, 252a. A month later (7 Sept.), he clashed with the ‘violent spirits’ in the House again after they opposed his motion for granting the disgraced and imprisoned Sir John Hotham some of his personal effects.77Harl. 165, f. 171. In common with most of Essex’s closest supporters, Cholmley probably had reservations about bringing the Scots into the war, but he took the Solemn League and Covenant nonetheless (30 Sept.) – apparently in the company of Stapilton.78CJ iii. 259a.

In what seems to have been a further attempt to discredit Saye, Cholmley presented a petition to the House on 12 October 1643 from Clement Walker*, who had been committed to the Tower by the Lords for having made accusations against Saye and his son, Nathaniel Fiennes I*, concerning the loss of Bristol. Cholmley accused Saye of being ‘a judge in his own case’ and that ‘such a heavy sentence thus laid upon a commoner would give the world cause to say the Parliament had put down the exorbitant power of the council table [privy council] and of the star chamber ... [only] to lay heavier burdens upon the subject than either’.79Add. 31116, p. 165. Cholmley was subsequently named to the committee to consider this petition.80CJ iii. 274b. In several divisions in November he confirmed his alignment with the peace interest in the House, serving as a majority teller for releasing Sir John Evelyn of Surrey on bail and in favour of an ordinance for recruiting and ‘regulating’ Essex’s army – legislation that the war-party grandees initially tried to impede and later used to bring the lord general more firmly under parliamentary control.81Infra, ‘Robert Scawen’; CJ iii. 301a, 340b; Add. 18779, f. 13; Harl. ff. 215v-216; Harl. 166, f. 15.

Cholmley was serving by the autumn of 1643 as a conduit of communication between Parliament and the lord general, and he was employed by both as a means of making their respective wishes known.82CJ iii. 276a, 326b, 368a, 376a, 709a; Harl. 165, f. 277. In reward for his loyal service, the Commons bestowed upon him the sequestered estate and profits of the provost of Eton – and when this grant was rescinded following the appointment of Francis Rous* as provost, the Lords, in February 1644, ordered the Committee for Sequestration* to compensate him accordingly, Cholmley having been ‘plundered of his whole estate’.83CJ iii. 326b; LJ vi. 439b. The committee granted him £400 a year out of the estates of several delinquents, a sum which he apparently received in full, thereby forfeiting the £4 weekly allowance for Members which the Commons ordered he should receive in June 1645.84SP20/1, pp. 197-9; Bodl. Nalson XIV, ff. 216v, 228, 242; CJ iv. 162b. In addition, the Committee for Revenue* granted him custody of New Park, near York, and the stewardship of the honor of Knaresborough in Yorkshire, although Cholmley insisted that he received nothing from either ‘more than the pleasuring of my friends with some venison’. After the war, Cholmley claimed that he had been plundered of at least £750 in corn, stock and household goods, had seen his rents fall from about £1,000 to £50 a year and that his house (presumably he was referring to West Newton Grange) had been ruined beyond repair.85Bodl. Nalson XIV, ff. 216v, 228r-v.

In March 1644, Cholmley either resigned his colonelcy under the earl of Essex or his regiment was disbanded as part of the process of remodelling and reducing the lord general’s army that had begun late in 1643.86SP28/252, pt. 2, f. 363; SP28/253A, pt. 1, ‘Liber B’, f. 86. Released from his military duties, Cholmley assumed a more active role in the House’s affairs. Between early 1644 and the summer of 1645 – when he returned to Yorkshire for several months – he was named to 34 committees and served as a messenger to the Lords on six occasions.87CJ iii. 402b, 460a, 676b, 680a, 735a, 190b; LJ vi. 431a, 518b; vii. 34b, 114b, 466b. The majority of his appointments during this period related to the financing of the war effort (particularly in the north), the taking of officers’ accounts and payment of their arrears and the resolution of the various quarrels that had developed between Parliament’s local commanders and committeemen.88CJ iii. 372b, 374a, 391a, 402b, 405a, 408a, 498b, 507b, 515b, 592b, 602b, 618a, 635b, 637b, 659a, 670a, 676a, 679b; iv. 107a, 115b, 116a, 121b, 123b, 153b. On the floor of the House he quarrelled repeatedly with the ‘violent spirits’ during the early months of 1644, particularly when defending the interests of the lord general and his allies.89Harl. 166, ff. 10, 15, 16v, 27, 34, 129v. On 19 February, for example, Cholmley, Stapilton and John Glynne clashed with the war-party grandees after the latter had ‘moved new and impertinent objections’ to the ordinance for regulating Essex’s army.90Harl. 166, f. 15. He may also have been acting for the Essexian interest when, on 24 December, he was a messenger to desire the Lords’ concurrence in a Commons’ vote for delaying the execution of Sir John Hotham.91CJ iii. 735a; LJ vii. 114b. Hotham’s execution was a highly divisive issue, with Essex’s supporters pushing to secure the reprieve of either Sir John or his son Captain John Hotham* (both of whom had been officers under Essex as well as friends of the Cholmleys), and the war party insisting that both should go to the block.92Infra, ‘Sir John Hotham’.

Cholmley’s addition on 18 February 1645 to a committee for recruiting the New Model army was his only appointment at Westminster between late 1644 and mid-April 1645 and represented his only known involvement in the work of reorganising Parliament’s armies.93CJ iv. 52a. Of more pressing concern to him, it seems, was the need to maintain at least a semblance of good relations with the Scots, who had moved into alliance with the Essexian-Presbyterian interest at Westminster over the winter of 1644-5.94CJ iv. 121b, 130a. Nevertheless, his majority tellership with Sir John Hippisley on 8 May 1645 in a division concerning the procedure governing exclusion of scandalous persons from the sacrament, suggests that he was broadly aligned with dominant Erastian element in the House.95CJ iv. 134b; R.S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord (Edinburgh, 1985), 127-8. That he was well regarded by the Scots can be inferred from his appointment on 7 June with another Essexian MP, Anthony Nicoll, to deliver a letter from the Commons to Alexander Leslie, earl of Leven – the commander of the Scottish forces in England – requesting him to march southwards to support the fledgling New Model.96CJ iv. 167a; LJ vii. 419b; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 596.

Cholmley took unofficial leave of absence from the House in mid-July 1645 and was apparently on hand a few weeks later to witness Sir Hugh Cholmeley’s surrender of Scarborough Castle to Parliament.97Cholmley Mems. 108; Binns, Yorks. in the Civil Wars, 119. Cholmley signed at least five letters from the Northern Association Committee at York to Parliament during July and August concerning the military situation in the north.98Bodl. Nalson IV, ff. 43, 60, 108; Nalson XIV, f. 142; Tanner 59, f. 428. One of these letters contained evidence passed on from the Cumberland county committee concerning the ‘grievous exorbitancies’ and ‘imperious carriage’ of the Scottish army in the region.99Bodl. Tanner 59, f. 428. This evidence provoked the Scots to accuse Cholmley and his fellow Yorkshire committeemen of colluding with their enemies in spreading ‘calumnies’ against them.100Bodl. Nalson IV, f. 60. In Cholmley’s case this accusation was harsh, although some his fellow committeemen, notably Henry Darley* and John Alured*, would soon emerge as leading opponents of continuing Scottish intervention in English affairs.101Supra, ‘John Alured’; infra, ‘Henry Darley’.

Having returned to Westminster by late September 1645, Cholmley was involved as a committeeman and messenger to the Lords in measures for inducing the Scots to march their army southwards to join the siege at Newark – a proposal that he had endorsed in the Northern Association committee at York that summer.102CJ iv. 284b; 298b, 317a; LJ vii. 598b; Bodl. Nalson XIV, f. 142. Yet although he was less hostile towards the Scots than many of his fellow Yorkshire MPs, he would contribute significantly to the deterioration in Anglo-Scottish relations that occurred during the winter of 1645-6. In or around January 1646, he passed on information to several leading members of the Committee of Both Kingdoms* (corroborating reports of the committee’s agent in Paris) that the French and the Scots ‘were far gone on in a treaty’ and that the French were to pay the Scots the arrears owed them by Parliament.103CJ iv. 421b, 486a. Cholmley’s informant was Thomas Crompton, one of Sir Hugh Cholmeley’s officers and fellow turncoats at Scarborough, who had returned from France in November 1645 and whom Cholmley had then helped to compound for his delinquency. Crompton claimed to have received the information from Sir Hugh, who may have been involved in trying to secure French aid for the king and was thus eager to foil the Scots’ own efforts to win French backing.104Corresp. of the Scots Commrs. ed. H.W. Meikle (Edinburgh, 1917), 164; CCC 1002; D. Scott, ‘The “northern gentlemen”’, HJ xlii. 353. In defending Cholmley against accusations by the Scots that he was an incendiary between the two kingdoms, the Commons claimed that he had passed on the information simply for his own indemnity and had acted according to his duty.105LJ viii. 124b; CJ iv. 466a, 486a. Whether Cholmley had his own motives in seeking to discredit the Scots or was simply doing a favour for his brother (with whom he remained on very close terms) is not clear.106Cholmley Mems. 13, 108, 109-10, 111, 118, 151; CCC 2062; Abstracts of Yorks. Wills ed. J.W. Clay (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. ix), 163-4; Yorks. Royalist Comp. Pprs. ed. Clay (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. xviii), 222; ‘Sir Hugh Cholmley’s narrative of the siege of Scarborough, 1644-5’ ed. C. H. Firth, EHR xxxii. 578. He was certainly concerned by the distressed condition of his native Yorkshire – which the presence of the Scots army had greatly exacerbated – presenting a petition to the House from the Yorkshire clothiers on 16 February 1646.107CJ iv. 439a, 442b.

Cholmley’s work-rate in the House seems to have declined after returning to Parliament from Yorkshire in the autumn of 1645. Between October 1645 and the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster on 26 July 1647, he was named to 19 committees and served only once as a messenger to the Lords.108CJ iv. 284b, 298b, 317a, 409b, 472b, 538b, 545b, 549a, 571b, 586b, 658b, 666b, 671b, 708a; iv. 15a, 166a, 170b, 181a, 219b; LJ vii. 598b. Despite being branded an incendiary by the Scots, he seems to have remained aligned with the Presbyterian interest in the House. He was included with Stapilton, Denzil Holles and several other prominent Presbyterians on a committee to consider additional offences for which would-be communicants could be denied the sacrament (18 May 1646), and he was a majority teller with the Presbyterian grandee Sir William Lewis on 4 September in favour of holding a ‘recruiter’ election for the Cornish borough of Callington – a motion opposed by the Independents Sir William Brereton and Sir William Armyne, who feared (with good reason) that the election would result in the return of a Presbyterian sympathiser.109CJ iv. 549a, 662b. In October, Cholmley was a prominent participant in the earl of Essex’s funeral procession.110The True Mannor and Forme of the Proceeding to the Funerall of...the Earle of Essex (1646), 14 (E.360.1). With the Presbyterian interest in the ascendant at Westminster by the spring of 1647, Cholmley decided it was a favourable time to submit his army pay accounts to the Presbyterian-dominated Committee of Accounts*.111SP28/252, pt. 2, f. 363. His certificate confirming his ‘actual service’ was signed by Stapilton and another of Essex’s senior officers Sir John Meyrick*. His accounts were duly passed.112SP28/253A/1, ‘Liber B’, f. 86.

Cholmley was peripherally involved in the Presbyterians’ attempt during the spring and early summer of 1647 to dismember the army and send what remained to Ireland. He was a reporter with three leading members of the Presbyterian interest – Holles, Stapilton and Robert Reynolds – on 1 May of a conference concerning proposals to borrow £200,000 for paying off the soldiery with a paltry six weeks arrears, and he and another Presbyterian MP, Harbottle Grimston, were tasked on 22 June with writing to Colonel-General Sydnham Poynts, the commander of the Northern Association army, ordering him to apprehend any agitators from the New Model who attempted to disturb his forces.113CJ v. 159a, 219b. Cholmley reported this letter to the House that same day (22 June) and may have carried it to Poynts himself, for he was in Yorkshire by 9 July, when he wrote to the Speaker to inform him that Poynts had been seized by his own men and taken to Pontefract Castle.114CJ v. 220a; Mems. of the Great Civil War ed. Cary, 293. His letter suggests that he was hostile to both the New Model and the army agitators, for he complained that Major Henry Lilburne – the brother of the radical army officer Colonel Robert Lilburne* – had ‘so well agitated amongst the soldiery that they ... are just in the same cut with those in the south. And the bait of getting their arrears is so pleasing and acceptable, that I believe many officers connive at the business’. He urged Parliament and the army to settle their differences and then the peace of the kingdom, ‘for otherwise ... clubs and clouted shoes will in the end be too hard for them both’.115Mems. of the Great Civil War ed. Cary, 293.

Cholmley seems to have remained in Yorkshire until early October 1647 and was therefore absent from the Commons during the Presbyterian counter-revolution of late July.116Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 547. During October and November, he received five appointments in the House, of which the most important was his tellership with Arthur Annesley on 26 November in favour of a proposal from the Lords for dispatching the Four Bills to the king and negotiating on the rest of the peace propositions at a later date.117CJ v. 329a, 344b, 347b, 365b, 370. The opposing, minority, tellers were the radical Independents Thomas Lord Grey of Groby and Sir Henry Mildmay.118CJ v. 370. Cholmley’s next appointment was not until 28 April 1648, when he was a majority teller with Charles Cecil, Viscount Cranborne in the third of three important divisions whereby the House voted to re-open talks with the king on the basis of the Hampton Court peace propositions, notwithstanding the vote of no addresses.119CJ v. 547a. Cholmley and Cranborne won this division from the Independents Sir Michael Livesay and Sir William Masham. This volte-face by the Commons incensed the radicals at Westminster and in the army, who took careful note of who had ‘voted with the malignant party against the honest party’.120Clarke Pprs. ii. 17.

Cholmley’s evident support for a swift negotiated settlement with the king did not deter him from taking up arms against the Scottish Engagers and their royalist allies during the second civil war. Early in June 1648, Cholmley, Francis Lascelles* and John Wastell* were commissioned to raise the North Riding trained bands for Parliament, and by mid-July the Yorkshire militia committee – of which Cholmley was an active member – had appointed him commander-in-chief of its forces.121Add. 36996, ff. 105, 121; Stowe 1058, f. 15v; Bodl. Nalson VII, ff. 22, 188; Packets of Letters from Scotland, 5. Cholmley’s militia units evidently played an important part in containing and mopping up royalist resistance in the north, and in September the Commons voted him £200 for his loyal service.122Bodl. Nalson VII, ff. 188, 199: CJ vi. 38a; HMC Portland, i. 488-9, 492; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 637, 639. As commander of the siege of Pontefract Castle, however, he was out of his depth and was unable to prevent the defenders roaming and plundering the countryside at will.123CSP Dom. 1648, pp. 225, 226; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 1314; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 672; Binns, Yorks. in the Civil Wars, 140-1. His obvious military shortcomings prompted Thomas Fairfax, 3rd Baron Fairfax* to order Colonel Thomas Rainborowe* to take charge at Pontefract. Cholmley, however, with ‘very much violence’, refused to obey this order, informing Parliament that it was an affront to his honour.124HMC Leyborne-Popham, 7; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 1300. Parliament ordered him to submit to Fairfax’s commands, but before the dispute could be resolved, Rainborowe was murdered by a party of Pontefract royalists – an act that a closer siege of the castle may well have prevented. Unrepentant, Cholmley apparently ‘leapt at the news of Colonel Rainborowe’s being killed’, convincing Fairfax’s veterans that he hated the army ‘to the death’.125Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 1305-6; CJ vi. 60b; HMC Leyborne-Popham, 8. Cholmley’s dereliction of duty at Pontefract was still being investigated by Parliament in March 1649.126CJ vi. 174b, 176a.

Given Cholmley’s well-known opposition to the army, it is no surprise that he was on lists of those MPs secluded at Pride’s Purge on 6 December 1648, though he was not in London at the time.127A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669 f.13.64); A Vindication (1649), 25 (irregular pagination) (E.539.5). Indeed, had he been, and not still in Yorkshire, it is likely that he would have been arrested and imprisoned.128Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 211-12. It was reported after the purge that Cholmley and the Lancashire Presbyterian officer Colonel Raphe Assheton II* had declared against the army and assembled a ‘mighty power’ in the north ready to resist the army.129Mercurius Elencticus no. 55 (5-12 Dec. 1648), 532 (E.476.4). But although Assheton’s supernumerary forces were still in arms in January 1649, Cholmley’s had been more or less disbanded by the end of December.130Add. 36996, f. 122; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 1325; Jnl. of the First and Second Sieges of Pontefract Castle, 1644-5 ed. W.H.D. Longstaffe (Surt. Soc. xxxvii), 103; Binns, Yorks. in the Civil Wars, 142. In fact, Cholmley withdrew from national and local politics after Pride’s Purge and probably spent most of the next ten years quietly tending his estate and private affairs. The first page of his commonplace book is taken up with an account of the consecration of his private chapel at Newton Grange in 1654. The ceremony was conducted by Henry Tilson – the Protestant bishop of Elphin, in Ireland – and attended by Cholmley and his wife, their neighbour Grace Belasyse (widow of the prominent Yorkshire royalist Henry Belasyse*) and the Belasyses’ parish minister.131W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), Tong/3/210.

Cholmley seems to have enjoyed good relations during the 1650s with leading Yorkshire gentlemen from across the political spectrum – from the regicide Sir John Bourchier* and the more conservative Rumper Sir William Strickland (both brothers-in-law of Cholmley) to the royalists John Lord Belasyse* and Sir Thomas Ingram*.132N. Yorks. RO, Z838, Strickland pprs., unfol.: settlement, 26 Oct. 1649 (mic. 2243); W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), Tong/3/228; CCC 2062. However, his closest friend among the county’s gentry was the West Riding Presbyterian gentleman Henry Tempest*, whose son married Cholmley’s only surviving daughter. In May 1654, Cholmley and three members of Lord Fairfax’s circle – John Stanhope*, Henry Arthington* and Sir Thomas Widdrington* – were parties to a deed confirming Tempest’s title to his estate at Tong.133W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), Tong/3/248. Two years later, Tempest assigned a portion of his property to the same four men to hold in trust for his children.134W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), Tong/3/253. In his will, written in May 1659, Tempest entrusted the tuition and education of his children to Cholmley, his ‘dear friend and kinsman’.135PROB11/291, f. 281v. Cholmley’s links with Tempest and, through him, with Stanhope, Arthington and Widdrington, suggest that by the mid-1650s he was a political ally of Lord Fairfax. This was apparently the view of one of Secretary John Thurloe’s* informants, who claimed in 1655 that Cholmley had undertaken to engage Fairfax in that year’s royalist uprisings.136TSP i. 749-50. In the event, Lord Fairfax – and Cholmley, too, it seems – remained studiedly neutral.

The fall of the protectorate in April 1659 spurred Cholmley to re-enter the political fray, this time in support of a return to monarchy. In the summer of 1659, he persuaded his nephew (Sir John Bourchier’s son) Barrington Bourchier† to join in Sir George Boothe*’s Presbyterian-royalist rebellion, and encouraged (or so he claimed) by a letter from the king, he was closely involved in Lord Fairfax’s Yorkshire rising early in January 1660 in support of General George Monck*. Cholmley, with 100 horse, attended the final rendezvous of Fairfax’s forces on 1 January 1660, when a declaration of fidelity to the recently re-restored Rump was offered to all present to subscribe.137HMC 5th Rep. 193; [J. Strangways], A Letter From a Captain of the Army To an Honourable Member of Parliament (1660), 4 (E.1013.9); Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, ii. 164; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 293. Colonel Hugh Bethell* and others signed it, but Fairfax, Cholmley and Henry Arthington declined to do so, professing that they ‘owned the same thing’ but would give Parliament their own account of their proceedings.138[Strangways], A Letter From a Captain of the Army, 6. In fact, their refusal to sign this declaration was probably because they favoured the re-admission of the secluded Members rather than the re-establishment of the Rump’s authority. This impression is reinforced by the subsequent refusal of Fairfax and his closest adherents to subscribe to a further declaration adhering to the Rump and ‘against a king or any single person whatsoever’. Nevertheless, after they had succeeded in seizing York, Fairfax, Cholmley and Arthington wrote to the Speaker, giving an account of their proceedings and claiming that ‘what hath been done was only in order to your service’.139Publick Intelligencer no. 210 (2-9 Jan. 1660), 1001, 1003 (E.773.41). In February, Cholmley joined Fairfax and his allies in a declaration to Monck, demanding the re-admission of the secluded Members or a ‘free Parliament’.140SP18/219/49, f. 75; A Letter and Declaration of the Nobility and Gentry of the County of York (1660, 669 f.23.48). Fairfax appointed Cholmley a colonel in the Yorkshire militia on 27 March, and Monck made him a colonel in the regular army in June in place of George Fleetwood*.141Notts. RO, DD/SR/216/1; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 404.

Cholmley was probably the most unambiguously royalist of Fairfax’s immediate circle, and during February and March 1660 he was in contact with the Stuart court about the possibility of a further rising in Yorkshire in support of the king.142CCSP iv. 551, 577, 595, 598; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 370-1. Following the re-admission of the secluded Members on 21 February, he resumed his seat, and on 1 March he was added to the committee on a bill for the repeal of the sequestration acts. On 9 March, he was named to a committee on a bill for calling the 1660 Convention.143CJ vii. 856b, 868b. In the elections to the Convention that spring, he was returned for Appleby, in Westmorland, on the interest of his cousin Lady Anne Clifford, dowager countess of Pembroke, whose northern estate he had helped to put in order during the 1650s.144G. C. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford (Kendal, 1922), 214, 223, 402; ‘Appleby’, HP Commons, 1660-90; M. Mullett, Patronage, Power and Politics in Appleby in the Era of Lady Anne Clifford (Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. tract ser. xxv), 21-2. Included in mid-May on the parliamentary delegation to attend the king on his return to England, he evidently welcomed the Restoration while holding out hopes for a puritan church settlement – the godly peer Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, sent him a copy of the case for modified episcopacy. In debate, he favoured leniency for Bulstrode Whitelocke* and the Yorkshire Rumper Francis Lascelles but took a hard line against Oliver St John* and James Berry*.145HP Commons, 1660-90; G. F. T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 344. Cholmley’s role in the Restoration was acknowledged by a grant of £1,000 out of the forfeited estate of his deceased brother-in-law Sir John Bourchier.146CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 446; CTB i. 196. Appointed a deputy lieutenant for the North Riding in September 1660, he proved diligent in clamping down on the Quakers and other perceived enemies of the crown.147W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), Tong/10/8; CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 463, 674.

In the spring of 1666, Cholmley travelled out to Tangier to deputize for his nephew Sir Hugh Cholmley† as superintendent of the harbour works.148H. Cholmley, Acct. of Tangiers (1787), 252, 255-6. On 30 June 1666, however, only a few months after his arrival, he died and – according to notes in his commonplace book – was buried at Tangier, contradicting claims that that he was carried back for interment in his chapel at West Newton.149W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), Tong/3/210; Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. ii. 254. In his will, he made bequests for the payment of debts amounting to over £1,000 and divided his personal estate between his widow and his nephew Sir Hugh. He made no mention of his landed estate, having presumably already settled it upon his only surviving son Hugh – who was a witness to his will but not included in its provisions.150PROB11/323, ff. 22v-23v. None of Cholmley’s immediate descendants sat in Parliament.