CLAITON (CLAYTON), John (c.1620-aft. 1679), of Oakenshaw, Crofton, Yorks. and the Inner Temple, London.

Claiton, as he signed himself, belonged to a cadet branch of a venerable Lancashire family that had settled at Oakenshaw, a few miles west of Pontefract in south Yorkshire, by the late sixteenth century.15Notts. RO, DD/SR/221/94/16; E115/94/94; Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. iii. 394; Hodgson, Northumb. pt. 2, iii. 419; H.F. Hepburn, The Clayton Fam. (Wilmington, DE, 1904), 4-5, 11-12. His father – an Inner Temple barrister and, from 1626, recorder of Leeds – was a friend or acquaintance of John Pym* by the early 1640s and seems to have shared his hostility to Laudian prelacy.16CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 462; 1641-3, p. 550; LJ vi. 378b. Claiton followed his father into the legal profession, but with the outbreak of civil war he put his studies at the Inner Temple on hold and took up arms against the king. His decision to side with Parliament well have been linked to his religious convictions. Certainly, he and his father appear to have been firm Presbyterians by the 1650s.

Claiton was part of the force under Sir Thomas Fairfax* and the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*) that captured Leeds early in 1643, and he subsequently fought at the battle of Adwalton Moor that summer and probably at Marston Moor a year later.17Notts. RO, DD/SR/221/94/16; Jones, ‘War in North’, 375, 412. Having been commissioned as a captain of foot by October 1643, he did ‘good service’ that month in a successful attack upon the royalist siegeworks at Hull and was sent to Westminster by Lord Fairfax with news of this victory.18HMC Portland, i. 139; CJ iii. 279b. By the summer of 1646, he was serving alongside Roger Coates* as a captain in the regiment of Colonel John Bright*.19SP28/302, f. 760v. Evidently a trusted officer, Claiton was paid £6 out of the revenues of the Northern Brigade (commanded by John Lambert*) in October 1647 ‘towards his pains and charges in a journey to Sir Thomas Fairfax [the commander of the New Model army]’ in London.20SC6/CHAS1/1190.

The John Clayton who was named to (and active on) the West Riding bench and the committee of the Northern Association in the mid-1640s and appointed to numerous local commissions during the 1640s and 1650s was evidently Claiton’s father.21C93/19/27; C93/20/30; C93/25/2; C181/6, pp. 102, 376; C231/6, pp. 155, 306; Bodl. Nalson IV, ff. 49, 213; Yorks. Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. J.W. Clay (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. xviii), 105; A. and O. His career in the north notwithstanding, Clayton senior was in his chambers in the Inner Temple when he dedicated a legal treatise to the parliamentarian grandees Oliver St John* and Oliver Cromwell* in 1646, referring to their ‘honourable favours to me’.22J. Clayton, Topicks in the Laws of England (1646). He would dedicate a collection of legal verdicts from the Yorkshire assizes that he published in 1651 to Bulstrode Whitelocke* and his fellow commissioners of the great seal.23J. Clayton, Reports and Pleas of Assises at Yorke (1651).

Claiton may have quit the Northern Brigade by November 1648, when he was called to the bar at the Inner Temple.24CITR ii. 284. His activities and whereabouts during the 1650s remain largely obscure, but he probably spent much of his time in London, for by July 1654 he had secured the post of gentleman usher in the household of Elizabeth, wife of Protector Oliver Cromwell* – a position he retained until at least March 1658, when he was a signatory with Nathaniel Waterhouse* and several other courtiers to the marriage settlement of the protector’s daughter Mary.25Add. 21422, f. 361; Add. 21424, f. 83. Claiton’s patron for this office is not known, although John Lambert is perhaps the likeliest candidate.

Claiton attempted to use his position at the Cromwellian court to assist his father and the Presbyterian elite at Leeds in their conflict with the area’s clothiers and their champion, the radical army officer Captain Adam Baynes*.26Supra, ‘Adam Baynes’; ‘Leeds’; D. Hirst, ‘The fracturing of the Cromwellian alliance: Leeds and Adam Baynes’, EHR cviii. 876-7, 878, 888. Following Baynes’s return for Leeds in 1654, Clayton senior roused the ‘new kirk gang’ at Leeds against him, while his son lobbied in London to have the election result overturned.27Add. 21422, ff. 190, 362, 373. In the event, Baynes kept his seat and was to secure re-election in 1656, despite the efforts of the Claytons to persuade the voters that ‘the consequences may be great, both for point of religion and liberties, if no care be taken but suffer the active soldier and sectary to have the prevailing part in the House’.28Add. 21424, f. 62. Although Baynes and his allies were more vulnerable to changes in the balance of power in London than to the machinations of their adversaries in the West Riding, it seems that the local authority of ‘Justice Clayton’ occasioned them more bother than whatever influence ‘Captain Clayton’ wielded at court. Indeed, by the late 1650s they had written him off as a ‘pettifogging interloper’.29Supra, ‘Leeds’; Add. 21425, f. 78.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, Claiton was returned for the Cornish borough of Lostwithiel. He was clearly a carpetbagger and owed his return to his fellow Member and Inner Temple lawyer, Walter Moyle, who was the borough’s chief electoral patron.30Supra, ‘Lostwithiel’. Claiton was described in the press coverage of the elections as ‘of the Inner Temple’, raising the possibility that it was in fact Clayton senior who was returned rather than his son.31A Perfect List of the Lords of the Other House (1659). However, it is clear from Claiton’s correspondence during the 1660 Convention and the reference to him in that Parliament as ‘Major Clayton’ that it was the son who was the MP.32HP Commons 1660-90, ‘John Clayton’. He was named to three committees in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament – including those for settling a godly ministry in the northern counties and to consider a petition from of his former fellow officers in Parliament’s northern army – and made no recorded contribution to debate.33CJ vii. 600b, 637b, 638a.

Claiton probably welcomed the Restoration, and he would claim – somewhat implausibly – in 1660 that had Sir George Boothe* and his royalist-Presbyterian insurgents of 1659 stood their ground ‘but a little, there was an intention to have showed what Agbrigg and Morley [Claiton’s area of south Yorkshire] could have done [against the restored Rump]’.34Notts. RO, DD/SR/221/94/16. Returned for Lostwithiel again to the 1660 Convention, he was listed by Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, as a likely supporter of a Presbyterian church settlement.35G.F.T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 332. He was probably the ‘Major Clayton’ who was arrested in 1662 for having allegedly declared that ‘had they [former parliamentarians] known that things would come to this pass, they would have aided Lambert [in his abortive rising in April 1660], and that they are punished for not sacrificing their lives in defence of [Thomas] Harrison* and the rest [of the regicides executed in 1660-1]’.36CSP Dom. 1661-2, pp. 428, 614.

Still a bachelor when Clayton senior died in 1671, Claiton was obliged by the terms of his father’s will to marry within three years a virtuous wife with a portion of at least £800 or lose the inheritance.37Borthwick, Prob. Reg. 52, f. 37v. He chose the widow of a Surrey gentleman – a woman who enjoyed the double distinction of being a daughter of the civil-war parliamentarian Sir Samuel Owfeild* and the mother of the heir to an even more prominent adherent of Parliament in the 1640s and 1650s: John Goodwyn* of the Inner Temple and later of Bletchingley.38Infra, ‘John Goodwyn’; ‘Sir Samuel Owfeild’; London Mar. Lics. ed. Foster, 289; Vis. Surrey, 51. Claiton was involved in mobilising the Goodwin interest at East Grinstead in the elections to the second Exclusion Parliament in 1679, but this is the last known mention of him in the historical record.39Bodl. Carte 103, ff. 221-2; HP Commons 1660-90, ‘William Jephson’.

The John Clayton who possessed chambers at the Inner Temple in 1694 was almost certainly the man of that name – probably a kinsman of Claiton’s – who had been called to the bar there in 1691.40CITR iii. 273, 306, 308. Claiton’s date and place of burial remain a mystery. No will is recorded. He was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.