ELLYS, William (1607-80), of Grantham and Nocton, Lincs., and Gray’s Inn, Mdx.

Background and early career

Ellys’s family had settled at Wyham, some eight miles south of Grimsby, by the early Elizabethan period.60Lincs. Peds. 324. His father, Sir Thomas Ellis – a successful Gray’s Inn barrister – represented Great Grimsby in the 1597 Parliament, but seems to have found living in the most remote part of the county inconvenient, and by 1607 he had established an alternative family residence at Grantham, on the Great North Road.61HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Thomas Ellis’. To judge by Sir Thomas’s will he was a man of pious, possibly puritan, sensibilities. He describes himself as ‘the unworthiest and sinfullest creature of all other[s]’, and he requested a sermon at his funeral but no ceremony, emblazoning of arms or gift giving. His will also suggests that he was a man of considerable substance, with bequests totalling over £3,000.62PROB11/152, ff. 374-374v.

Ellys followed in his father’s footsteps at Gray’s Inn, rising steadily through the Society’s ranks to become its treasurer in 1658.63PBG Inn, i. 323, 377, 407, 446, 500. According to one authority, he was appointed deputy-recorder of Boston in 1638; but although he certainly ‘advised and travelled for the corporation in divers causes’ during the late 1630s, there is no firm evidence that he did so in an official capacity.64P. Thompson, Hist. Boston, 458; Boston Corporation Minutes ed. Bailey, iii. 34. If he was indeed deputy-recorder of Boston it was by patent from the town’s ‘high recorder’, Lord Keeper Coventry (Sir Thomas Coventry†), which would suggest that Ellys was considered a talented lawyer in senior government circles. Less than a month after Coventry’s death early in 1640, Ellys was appointed recorder in his place, and in March he was returned for Boston to the Short Parliament, taking the junior place to Sir Anthony Irby.65Supra, ‘Boston’; Boston Corporation Minutes ed. Bailey, iii. 39. He was named to only one committee in this Parliament – the committee of privileges – and made no recorded contribution to debate.66CJ ii. 4b.

Parliamentary career, 1640-2

Ellys was returned for Boston again in the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640.67Supra, ‘Boston’. He was among the less vocal Members – at least on the floor of the Commons – but was willing to put his legal expertise and experience as a man of affairs at the House’s disposal. Between November 1640 and September 1642, he was named to almost 30 committees and reported from, and may well have chaired, four of them.68CJ ii. 44a, 155a, 415b, 667a, 684a, 722b. He certainly chaired the committee set up on 3 December 1640 for examining the various interests and disputes arising from Caroline fen-drainage projects – a body that was soon functioning as a standing ‘committee for the fens’.69CJ ii. 44a, 74b, 82b, 192a, 589b; CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 310; Certaine Papers Concerning the Earle of Lindsey His Fennes (1649), 2, 3-4, 6; Lindley, Fenland Riots, 112-13. In general, however, as his appointments – or lack of them – testify, he was not at the vanguard of the campaign to reform the perceived abuses of the personal rule. His only known speech during the early months of the Long Parliament was on 24 November, when he complained of the popish liturgical arrangements in Peterhouse chapel.70Procs. LP i. 268. During 1641, he made at least two reports from one of the standing committees for religion concerning the removal of godly ministers by the Laudian authorities.71CJ ii. 44b, 192b, 264b; Procs. LP v. 399; vi. 489. And later that year, he was appointed to two committees for prosecuting the bishops accused of promoting the new Canons and other Laudian innovations.72CJ ii. 314b, 364b. His relatively low profile at Westminster notwithstanding, he was sufficiently trusted by late January 1642 to be made chair of a committee of the Whole that perfected the bill for tonnage and poundage, reporting this important piece of legislation the following day.73PJ i. 206, 213; CJ ii. 402b. He took brief leaves of absence in August 1641 and March 1642 – on the first occasion to attend a meeting of Grantham corporation at which he was made a freeman and appointed the town’s recorder.74CJ ii. 246b, 483a; Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, f. 95v. The corporation had fixed upon Ellys after taking soundings from, among others, the town’s deputy-recorder, Henry Pelham*.

During the summer of 1642, Ellys emerged as a firm supporter of Parliament’s efforts to seize the military initiative in the counties, and particularly in his native Lincolnshire. He was named to four committees for advancing the Militia Ordinance or frustrating the king’s military preparations – one of which committees, to examine a royalist petition from Lincolnshire, he chaired.75CJ ii. 646b, 667a, 667b, 737b; The Humble Petition of Captain William Booth of Killingholme (1642, E.154.38). On 21 July, he reported a declaration against this petition and moved that the Commons request the Lords to grant a habeas corpus for two Lincoln townsmen who had been jailed by the king’s command for attempting to implement the Militia Ordinance.76CJ ii. 684a; PJ iii. 245; A Declaration of the House of Commons in Vindication of Divers Members of Their House (1642, E.107.37). The Commons agreed to this motion, and Ellys was sent as a messenger to the Lords accordingly.77CJ ii. 684a; LJ v. 227b.

At the outbreak of civil war, Ellys remained at Westminster and was named to several committees that autumn for punishing the king’s adherents. So determined was he to demarcate friend from foe that he urged the House to reject an offer from some of Lincolnshire Catholics to contribute to Parliament’s war-chest.78CJ ii. 745a, 747b, 749b, 785b, 803a, 842a, 852a, 870a; Harl. 164, f. 9v. Equally revealing was his chairmanship on 6 and 7 October of a committee of the whole House for establishing a ‘synod of divines’ – the future Westminster Assembly. This initiative was pursued with at least one eye on persuading the Covenanters of Parliament’s sincerity in the cause of closer uniformity in religion – a necessary precondition for securing Scottish military support against the king. On 7 October, Ellys and the leading godly MPs Alexander Rigby I, Francis Rous and Oliver St John were ordered to prepare legislation for calling an assembly.79CJ ii. 796b, 798a, 798b. And it was Ellys who reported the draft bill to the House on 10 October.80Add. 18777, f. 25v; CJ ii. 802a.

Yet though Ellys was not backward in the parliamentarian cause, there are signs that he did not entirely share the uncompromising outlook of the ‘fiery spirits’ at Westminster. His appointment as chairman of a committee of the Whole on 21 November 1642 to debate a message from the king expressing a willingness to entertain ‘just propositions of peace’ indicates that, at the very least, he was not openly opposed to a negotiated settlement. Under Ellys’s chairmanship, ‘the major part’ of the committee, after prolonged debate, voted in favour of drawing up peace propositions.81CJ ii. 858a, 858b; LJ v. 451b-452b; Harl. 164, ff. 99, 99v, 101v, 102v; Perfect Diurnall no. 24 (21-8 Nov. 1642), sig. Aav (E.242.27). In addition, on 3 December he was a minority teller against disabling Sir Sidney Montagu for refusing to consent to the propositions for assisting the earl of Essex – Parliament’s commander-in-chief – with life and estate. It was perhaps the majority determined to enforce solidarity with the lord general that was behind an order that same day (3 Dec.) for sending Ellys into Lincolnshire to advance the raising of money and arms upon the propositions.82CJ ii. 874b. This mission kept him away from the House during the heated debates of early 1643 over the Oxford peace propositions, making it hard to credit the claim made in a tract published late in January that he was part of a bicameral group voting for peace.83CJ ii. 893b, 894b; Add. 18777, f. 98; SP28/236, pt. 3, unfol.; HMC Portland, i. 79; An Honest Letter to a Doubtfull Friend (1643), sig. A2v (E.87.4).

Alignment with the war party, 1643-5

Ellys had returned to Westminster by 27 March 1643, when he informed the House that while in Lincolnshire he had seen ‘several warrants under the hands of those whom his Majesty employed to seize the whole estates of such as appeared for the Parliament’.84Harl. 164, f. 344v. The same day (27 Mar.), he was appointed one of the managers of a conference to apprise the Lords of these warrants, as part of a campaign to persuade the more peace-minded peers to pass an ordinance for sequestering the estates of the king’s supporters.85CJ iii. 20b; Harl. 164, ff. 344v-345. This and many of Ellys’s appointments in 1643 and 1644 raise the strong possibility that his sojourn on the front line (which cut across Lincolnshire during the early years of the civil war) had converted him to the war-party cause. Of the 17 or so conferences he helped to manage or reported from between March 1643 and the autumn of 1644, well over half related in some way or other to prosecuting the war effort.86CJ iii. 20b, 89a, 156a, 165a, 300b, 436b, 438a, 475a, 479a, 493b, 494a, 499a, 503a, 532a, 538b, 546a, 574a, 587a, 588a, And he was often joined on these occasions by leading figures in the war party, including Sir Arthur Hesilrige, John Lisle, John Pym, Edmund Prideaux I and Sir Henry Vane II.

As a Lincolnshire MP, whose estates were threatened by the earl of Newcastle’s ‘popish army’, it is not surprising to find Ellys involved in efforts to maintain Parliament’s armies in northern England and in the Eastern Association.87CJ iii. 140a, 156a, 174b, 180b, 257b, 655b. More controversial, however, was his apparent support for a military alliance with the Scottish Covenanters. Although he cannot be considered one of the architects of this alliance, it is significant that he was manager of a conference with Pym and Prideaux on 13 July intended to impress upon the Lords the need to send commissioners to Scotland.88CJ iii. 165a. And he would become an active member of the Committee for Scottish Affairs set up that autumn to supply the Covenanters’ forces – a body that developed into the Committee for Compounding*.89Supra, ‘Committee for Compounding’; CJ iii. 282b, 286a; SP23/1A, pp. 1, 2, 3, 6; SP46/106, f. 130. His subscription to Pym’s vow and covenant on 6 June 1643 and his involvement in preparations for the Westminster Assembly can also be read, in part, as expressions of solidarity with the Covenanters.90CJ iii. 118a, 144a. Another touchstone of support for the vigorous prosecution of the war was a readiness to widen the scope of penal taxation – and here, too, Ellys can be identified with the more hard-line element at Westminster. He was named to the 28 August 1643 committee for sequestering the estates of MPs who neglected the service of the House; he chaired the 30 April 1644 committee for improving the sequestration process; and on 7 August, he was added to the war-party dominated Committee for Sequestrations*, of which he was also an active member.91CJ iii. 220a, 473b, 497b, 581b; vi. 81a; LJ x. 429a; SP20/1, ff. 196v, 520; SP20/2, ff. 28, 48.

Ellys’s chambers at Gray’s Inn constituted his main residence during the civil war – he spent very little time in Lincolnshire between early 1643 and late 1645 – and as both MP and de facto Londoner, he could scarcely avoid becoming embroiled in Parliament’s dealings with the civic authorities. Much of his time during the spring of 1644, for example, was taken up with a measure of particular concern to the London militants – the ordinance for the ‘weekly meal’. In an effort to tap the capital’s military resources, the militants had devised a scheme whereby London households forgo a meal every Monday and contribute the money thus saved towards financing a civic auxiliary force.92K. Lindley, Civil War London, 311-13. Ellys was chairman of a Commons’ committee for the weekly meal and played a leading role in giving parliamentary authority to this initiative and in resolving the disputes that it had occasioned among London’s various governing bodies.93CJ iii. 388b, 409b, 436b, 437a, 438a, 449a. He was also an important figure in the campaign of April 1644 to send London auxillary regiments to Sir William Waller* in his march towards Oxford.94CJ iii. 449a, 450b, 451a, 452a, 457a, 458a, 460a, 469b, 534a; Add. 18779, ff. 89, 91v, 92; Lindley, Civil War London, 320. In July, he was made chairman of a committee for liaising with the City authorities about the advance of money.95CJ iii. 569a. To the extent that the London militants comprised the smaller traders rather than the mercantile elite, his stock with them would have risen further following his tellership on 5 June in support of allowing all merchants, not just the Merchant Adventurers, to export cloth to Germany and the Low Countries.96CJ iii. 518a. There is evidence that Ellys himself was involved in the production and export of wool, which probably explains his own desire to challenge the Adventurers’ monopoly and his regular addition to committees on mercantile-related issues.97C54/3386/2; Harl. 166, f. 31v; CJ iii. 44a, 92a, 283a, 501a, 534a; iv. 671a; v. 532a. His commercial interests did not prevent him backing measures for extracting more money from customs and excise revenues.98CJ iii. 214b, 215a, 489b, 534a; iv. 107a, 671a; v. 352a.

Ellys was a leading participant in several of the factional conflicts that rocked Westminster during 1643-4, and on each occasion he sided with the war party. His committee appointments indicate a firm resolve on his part to defend ‘loyal’ Parliament-men and to penalise deserters – none more so than his addition on 11 March 1644 to the committee on an ordinance for excluding those peers and MPs who had fled to Oxford but had subsequently returned to Westminster.99CJ iii. 68b, 220a, 423b, 565a. This legislation was blocked by the earl of Essex’s party in the Lords, prompting several conferences at which Ellys, Prideaux and other war-party men put the case for the Commons.100CJ iii. 532a, 546a. When legislation was introduced the following month for establishing a court martial to try Captain John Hotham* and other delinquents, it was specially referred to Ellys and Prideaux. Ellys reported a draft ordinance on 15 July for a commission of martial law.101CJ iii. 470a, 562a, 574a, 587a, 588a. Once again, however, this initiative was frustrated in the Lords, prompting Ellys, Prideaux, William Strode I and Sir Henry Mildmay to demand on 10 August that any peer who had not taken the Covenant should be expelled from their House.102Harl. 166, f. 106.

Like many other Members, including those associated with the war party, he was involved in initiatives for the maintenance of Essex’s army.103CJ iii. 89b, 180b, 471b, 499a, 534a. But more revealing is his appointment to a committee set up on 29 April 1644, and to subsequent conference teams, for resisting attempts by Essex’s faction in the Lords to subordinate the Eastern Association army to the lord general’s authority.104CJ iii. 472b, 475a, 479a; LJ vi. 534a; Holmes, Eastern Assoc. 184-5. Ellys was also involved in the contemporaneous dispute over the powers and composition of the war-party’s main powerbase at Westminster, the Committee of Both Kingdoms* (CBK). Named to a committee and several conference teams on the CBK, he evidently backed moves to allow the Scots on the committee to draw up peace propositions and to resist attempts by Essex’s supporters to re-define its membership.105Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 446a, 493b, 494a, 503a; LJ vi. 554a. The two committees established on 17 August for settling the kingdom’s militia and for drawing up the Scots’ peace terms (the future Uxbridge propositions) into parliamentary bills represented another affront to Essex’s party; Ellys chaired the first and was named in first place to the second.106CJ iii. 594a.

Ellys and the Independents, 1645-8

Ellys played a leading role in bringing in legislation upon the Commons’ vote of 9 December 1644 for self-denying – and in trying to counter objections to this initiative from Essex’s party in the Lords.107CJ iii. 718b, 723b, 726a; iv. 5a, 11b, 13b, 14a, 14b, 17a. After the first Self-Denying Ordinance was rejected by the Lords, he became closely involved in the war party’s additional strategy for ousting Essex and his supporters from military command – the creation of the New Model army under Sir Thomas Fairfax*. Ellys was included on several high-powered committees and conference teams that drew up the legislation for this new, consolidated force and that carried the fight to a hostile House of Lords.108CJ iv. 31a, 42b, 48b, 75a, 91b, 95b. On 11 March 1645, Ellys joined Prideaux, Oliver St John and two other like-minded MPs in drafting an ordinance to bring the soldiers of Waller and of the earls of Manchester and Essex under Fairfax’s command. New-modelling was impossible without adequate finance, and here, too, Ellys played his part, helping to arrange a substantial loan from the City.109CJ iv. 71a, 73b, 74b. On 24 March, he reported a new Self-Denying Ordinance – the Commons having revived the committee for self-denial on 25 February and put Ellys in charge of drafting the necessary legislation.110CJ iv. 62a, 88a; Add. 31116, p. 400. Victory for the new-modellers was all but assured by 31 March, when Ellys was among the MPs appointed to the first Committee for the Army.111LJ vii. 294a. Established to ensure that Fairfax’s troops were properly paid and supplied, this new standing committee was composed almost exclusively of the New Model’s leading supporters in both Houses. Despite his considerable contribution to effecting Parliament’s military revolution of 1644-5, Ellys was apparently one of the Army Committee’s less assiduous members.112Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’.

Ellys’s parliamentary career seems to have slowed down slightly after the early months of 1645. His numerous appointments, many of them to draft pieces of legislation, suggest that he remained one of the busiest MPs at Westminster. Indeed, between April 1645 and July 1646 – when he took his first prolonged spell of leave since 1643 – he was named to over 50 committees, managed or reported from five conferences and was a messenger to the Lords on four occasions.113CJ iii. 402b; iv. 152a, 209b, 211b, 216a, 220b, 296a, 363a, 380b, 491b, 597a. Nevertheless, he seems to have moved back from the factional front-line at Westminster after April 1645 and become more active in regional affairs. Post new-modelling, there is a noticeable increase in the number of his appointments relating to the defence of Lincolnshire, the affairs of the Eastern Association and the regulation of Cambridge University.114CJ iv. 102a, 131b, 139a, 147b, 174a, 196a, 210b, 229a, 229b, 267a, 312a, 353b. It was only in September 1645 that he was appointed a deputy lieutenant for Lincolnshire.115CJ iv. 270b. Municipal affairs continued to occupy some of his time in the House. In December 1645, for example, he was one of a quartet of MPs given particular responsibility for liaising with the Common Council about the Newcastle propositions.116CJ iv. 365a. Nevertheless, most of the legislative initiatives he helped to steer through the House from mid-1645 were regarded favourably by the Independents. The continuation and execution of the various ordinances for martial law remained one of his specialities, and he seems to have shouldered much of the burden in preparing an ordinance for the sale of delinquents’ estates.117CJ iv. 110a, 110b, 146b, 151b, 176a, 201a, 214a, 225a, 225b, 237a, 246a, 394a, 442a.

On those rare occasions after April 1645 when Ellys seems to have re-joined the party-political fray, it was invariably in the Independents’ service. It was probably no coincidence that during the Savile affair (June-July 1645) he was a member both of the committee to prepare interrogatories for James Cranford and other Presbyterians alleged to have slandered leading Independents and of the committee to prepare Cranford’s public acknowledgement of his offence.118CJ iv. 167a, 172a, 172b, 213a. That autumn, he was teamed with John Lisle, John Wylde and other Independents to manage impeachment proceedings against Henry Grey*, 1st earl of Stamford – one of Essex’s allies in the Lords – for his assault on the Independent grandee Sir Arthur Hesilrige.119CJ iv. 150b, 218b, 296a; LJ vii. 614a. Similarly, his continuing support for the New Model is clear from his nomination (in second place) on 1 December 1645 to a committee made up almost exclusively of Independents or their well-wishers for settling an estate of £5,000 a year upon Sir Thomas Fairfax*.120CJ iv. 360a.

Although only peripherally involved in drawing up the Newcastle propositions (which were largely the Independents’ handiwork), Ellys was named to several committees in the spring of 1646 for highlighting the king’s bad faith and thus undermining his and the Presbyterians’ campaign for a personal treaty in London.121CJ iv. 363a, 365a, 428a, 490a, 531b. Ellys also figured prominently in the Independents’ efforts to head off the threat of a royalist-Presbyterian rising in London should Charles turn up in the capital and attempt to raise a party for himself, as it was rumoured he might do.122CJ iv. 394a, 442a, 490a, 490b, 491b, 492b, 531b. Neither of Ellys’s two tellerships during 1645-6 are particularly revealing of his politics, although the second of them – on 26 June 1646 against re-admitting Sir John Fenwick to the House – pitted him against the markedly Presbyterian duo of Denzil Holles and Sir Philip Stapilton.123CJ iv. 144b, 588a.

Ellys was an important member of the Commons’ team that managed Parliament’s dealings with the Scots during 1645-6. As a committeeman, messenger to the Lords and manager and reporter of conferences, he played a leading role in despatching a parliamentary delegation to Scotland in the autumn of 1645 to demand the return of the English garrisons in Scottish hands.124CJ iv. 198a, 211b, 214a, 220b. He also managed a conference on the instructions for the parliamentary commissioners to attend the Scottish army on its march to Hereford in August.125CJ iv. 209b. Furthermore, on 5 December 1645 he himself was appointed a commissioner to reside with the English and Scottish forces besieging Newark, although in the event he remained at Westminster.126CJ iv. 353b, 366b, 380b; LJ viii. 47a; HMC Portland, i. 353. Yet despite his alignment with the Independents, he was named to relatively few of the committees set up from the autumn of 1645 with the specific intention of pressuring the Scots to tone down their demands for religious unity and to deploy and discipline their forces as Parliament demanded. Only one of his appointments might conceivably have been ill-taken by the Scots commissioners, and that was to a committee set up on 29 January 1646 (and to which he was named first) for investigating David Buchanan’s tract Truth’s Manifest – a robust defence of the Scots against their Independent enemies.127CJ iv. 210b, 273a, 422a.

Ellys’s failure to take a tougher stance against the Scots may have owed something to his religious views. That he shared the Scots’ desire for greater uniformity in discipline and worship between the two kingdoms is suggested by his chairmanship of a committee of the Whole in May 1644 to consider propositions from the Westminster Assembly on a common form of ordination for ministers.128CJ iii. 504. There is also evidence that he shared the Scots’ concern at the proliferation of the sects and spread of religious heterodoxy. His addition to the Committee for Plundered Ministers* on 9 August 1644 was in response to the Westminster Assembly’s complaints against sectaries – and he and those added with him were charged with finding ways to suppress Antinomian and Anabaptist views.129Supra, ‘Committee for Plundered Ministers’; CJ iii. 585a; Add. 31116, p. 308. Several of his appointments during the mid-1640s related to the sale of bishops’ lands and the establishment of a ‘godly and religious ministry’.130CJ iv. 275b, 312a, 381b, 720a; v. 400a. Moreover, on 8 October 1645, he was appointed with Prideaux and William Prynne*, as a trier and judge of the eldership of the Serjeants’ Inn classis in London.131CJ iv. 300b; LJ vii. 637b. Ellys was evidently a religious Presbyterian of some hue – an impression strengthened by his nomination to the 21 January 1646 committee for putting Whitefriars and other civic liberties under the government of the London provincial classis.132CJ iv. 413b. Where he probably parted company with the Scots and the more ‘rigid’ English Presbyterians, however, was on the question of whether Scottish church discipline was jure divino – that is, divinely warranted. This would certainly explain his appointment to a committee set up on 16 April 1646 and headed by the leading Erastians Sir Henry Vane II and John Selden, to assert Parliament’s supremacy in matters of church government.133CJ iv. 511a; R.S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord, 506-11.

Ellys was granted leave on 2 July 1646, and on his return to Westminster (which was apparently early in September) was named to just fourteen committees before taking another leave of absence in March 1647.134CJ iv. 597a, 660a, 662a, 671a, 673b, 682b, 687b, 701a, 708b; v. 8b, 17b, 60a, 74a, 85a, 107b. The fact that he was named to just one conference team after 1645 – on the sale of bishops’ lands (12 Nov. 1646) – is further testament to the decrease in his parliamentary workload from the busy years of 1643-5.135CJ iv. 720a. None of the committees he was named to between September 1646 and March 1647 say much about his political loyalties. His appointment to three committees in May and June on the indemnity ordinance, however, and to the 23 July committee for preparing a declaration against the London Presbyterian Engagement, does suggest a continuing loyalty to the army and the political Independents – as does his nomination to a new Army Committee on 23 September 1647.136CJ v. 166a, 198b, 199a, 255b. Nevertheless, he was apparently not among those Members who fled to the army following the Presbyterian ‘riots’ of 26 July. Indeed, his name disappears entirely from the Journal between 23 July and 9 October, when he was declared absent without leave.137CJ v. 330a, 332b.

It is impossible, certainly from the scattering of appointments Ellys received after September 1647, to locate him precisely on the political spectrum at Westminster in the months before Pride’s Purge. A more reliable indication of who his friends were at this time is the secret mission to Paris that he undertook in February-March 1648 (he was granted leave to ‘go into the country’ on 18 February) to persuade Cardinal Mazarin to prevent Prince Charles leaving for Holland to assume command of royalist operations in the second civil war.138Hamilton Pprs. Addenda ed. Gardiner (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, liii), 19. Ellys’s sponsors for this – as it proved – futile mission were almost certainly the Independent grandees. His nomination to committees for redressing the army’s grievances, trying Judge Jenkins and other royalist incendiaries and for sustaining the parliamentarian cause during the second civil war – while at the same time preserving good relations with the City’s Presbyterian governors – was certainly consistent with support for the grandees’ broader objectives.139CJ v. 396a, 417a, 437b, 465b, 565a, 589a, 608a, 624a, 628b, 631b. On the other hand, there is nothing to link him with the radical Independents. Indeed, his last three appointments before Pride’s Purge – on 23 September, 27 October and 13 November – were to committees for furthering the treaty with the king at Newport.140CJ vi. 29b, 62b, 75b. His likely reward for his many services to the Independent cause was his appointment at some point during the mid-1640s as steward of Stepney – an office reputedly worth £200 a year. Ellys had sold the stewardship to a fellow lawyer by the autumn of 1648.141A List of the Names of the Members of the House of Commons (1648, 669 f.12.103).

Career in the Rump, 1648-53

Listed by William Prynne* among the MPs secluded at Pride’s Purge in December 1648, Ellys may have been one of those ‘others from the Inns of Court’ who ‘had liberty granted to go to their chambers on their parole’ on 12 December.142[W. Prynne], A Vindication of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1649), 29 (E.539.5); Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 1361; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 372; Holmes, Lincs. 204. Why Ellys had been targetted by the army for seclusion is not clear – unless, as seems likely, he had voted on 5 December in favour of accepting the king’s answers to the Newport treaty as the basis for settlement. He clearly disapproved of the purge, for on 10 January 1649 he joined two fellow lawyers who certainly had been secluded – John Maynard and Thomas Waller – in suing for a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of William Prynne, who was still in military custody.143Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 194. Needless to say, Ellys had no hand in the trial and execution of the king. Moreover, he seems to have thought long and hard thereafter about whether to resume his seat; it was not until 4 June 1649 that he registered his dissent to the 5 December 1648 vote and was formally re-admitted to the House.144CJ vi. 223b.

Ellys’s only tellership in the Rump – with Sir William Brereton on 14 October 1651 in favour of clemency towards the earl of Derby – is perhaps further evidence that he was associated with those in the House, such as Brereton, who wished to preserve as much of the established order as possible.145CJ vii. 27b. The opposing tellers were the hard-line Rumpers Denis Bond and Thomas Harrison I. His tally of a dozen committee appointments in the Rump – mostly during 1651 and 1652 – was also far from impressive.146CJ vi. 427b, 481a, 528a, 558a, 567a, 593b; vii. 55b, 76b, 190b, 239a, 253b. Legislation for setting the poor on work was specially referred to his care on two occasions.147CJ vi. 481a; vii. 190b. But the business that seems to have taken up most of his time was that of perfecting the bill for a new representative. During October and November of 1651, he chaired seven session of a committee of the Whole on this bill and reported from it three times.148CJ vii. 27b, 29a, 29b, 30a, 31a, 34a. His last appointment in the Rump was on 2 February 1653, when he and three other lawyers were entrusted with the task of redrafting a bill for setting up county registers.149CJ vii. 253b. Like his three colleagues on this occasion, Ellys has been identified with efforts to resist the campaign for law reform.150Worden, Rump Parl. 320; N.L. Matthews, William Sheppard, Cromwell’s Law Reformer, 187, 194.

A Cromwellian grandee, 1654-9

There seems little doubt that Ellys welcomed the establishment of the protectorate late in 1653, securing appointment in May 1654 as the new regime’s solicitor general.151Abbott, Writings and Speeches, iii. 317. His annual salary was a modest £70, although according to one commentator his office was actually worth nearer £3,000 a year – presumably in fees and perquisites.152Add. 32471, f. 12; A Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 10 (E.935.5). Ellys’s initiation to his duties was in June 1654, when he took part in the prosecution of John Gerhard and others accused of plotting to assassinate the protector.153CSP Dom. 1654, p. 235. In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Ellys was again returned for Boston, but despite his exalted position within the Cromwellian establishment he was named to just six committees.154Supra, ‘Boston’; CJ vii. 368b, 370a, 370b, 371b, 374a, 380a. In the spring of 1655, he was selected to oversee the trial of the northern insurgents in Penruddock’s rising, but the procedural objections raised by Francis Thorpe* and the other presiding judges caused him to halt his journey northwards, and it is not clear whether he ever made it to York.155Infra, ‘Francis Thorpe’; CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 106, 113, 117; TSP iii. 359, 373.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Ellys was returned for Grantham – Sir Anthony Irby having taken the seat at Boston.156Supra, ‘Boston’. Remarkably, Ellys received no committee appointments in this Parliament, although he did contribute to debate.157Burton’s Diary, i. 28, 83, 226, 248; ii. 20, 317, 318, 331, 332, 333, 418. Most of his interjections were of little consequence or concerned legal matters, but occasionally he made a revealing comment. For example, he thought the Quaker evangelist and alleged blasphemer James Naylor was guilty of ‘as high an offence as can be committed’, and he was apparently eager to throw the book at him.158Burton’s Diary, i. 28. Nevertheless, when Cromwell wrote to the Commons late in December 1656, asking to know its grounds for giving sentence in this matter without his consent, Ellys accordingly moved to question the House’s judgement against Naylor – much to the dislike of the attorney-general, his old colleague Edmund Prideaux.159Burton’s Diary, i. 248-9. If any of Ellys’s fellow Presbyterians were disposed to think badly of him, he would perhaps have redeemed himself in their eyes on 21 January 1658, when he moved for ‘a general bill for maintenance of ministers in all corporations’ and to impose a tax for that purpose.160Burton’s Diary, ii. 331.

Ellys claimed that he had been absent from Westminster during the framing of the Humble Petition and Advice, and he was certainly not listed among the ‘kinglings’ in the House – those who supported the offer of the crown to Cromwell.161Burton’s Diary, iii. 566; iv. 53; Narrative of the Late Parliament, 22. In fact, Ellys’s appointment on 18 January 1658 as a commissioner for tendering to MPs the oath enjoined in the Humble Petition represents the first positive evidence of his support for the shift towards a more monarchical form of government.162CJ vii. 578a. However, he expressed his approval of the new constitution in no uncertain terms on 2 February, when he correctly perceived attempts by republican MPs to open a debate on how the Commons should ‘correspond’ (transact business with) with the Cromwellian Other House as an attack upon the entire protectoral settlement:

You have surely settled them [the Other House] as a Parliament, with a legislative power. You have called yourselves, four times, Commons, in one paragraph. They must stand for something. I cannot agree them to be a House of Commons. Then what can they be but a House of Lords? ... If they be a legislature, how can you pass laws without a correspondence? We can do nothing. We may as well go home again, and then we leave our own constitution at a greater loose [sic].163Burton’s Diary, ii. 418.

He professed indifference as to the formal term by which the Commons should correspond with the Other House: ‘for my part, I know not the difference of the name. We must, for our safety and peace, correspond with the Other House. The Petition and Advice binds us all yet’.164Burton’s Diary, ii. 419. Ellys was rewarded for his loyalty to the government with the grant of a baronetcy from the protector; the patent of creation was reportedly issued in March 1658.165Clarke Pprs. iii. 145. However, it was not entered in the crown office docket book until 28 June, and the title was not officially conferred on Ellys until 13 August.166C231/6, p. 401; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, iv. 866.

Ellys retained his place as solicitor general under Richard Cromwell*, and in the elections to the third protectoral Parliament of 1659 he was returned again for Grantham.167Supra, ‘Grantham’. At Boston, which like Grantham had regained its second seat in these elections, the junior place that Ellys had once filled went to his protégé Francis Mussenden.168Infra, ‘Francis Mussenden’; C54/3386/2. Ellys received only one appointment in this Parliament – to the committee of privileges – but was again active in debate, emerging as one of the government’s most effective apologists.169CJ vii. 594b. On several occasions he expressed impatience with the filibustering tactics of the republicans in trying to turn every issue in the House into a debate on the legitimacy of the protectoral settlement.170Burton’s Diary, iii. 29, 192-3, 310, 492; iv. 281, 282. Speaking in February to the bill for recognising Richard Cromwell as protector, he was adamant that ‘his Highness be chief magistrate’, and he took issue with those who sought to vest sovereignty solely in the Commons:171Burton’s Diary, iii. 136-7, 229.

I would be as much for the liberty of the people as any man; but it is not for the honour of the nation to be disputing whether you will have a protector or no. Those that are of opinion that all power is in this House, do not acknowledge the protector to be chief magistrate at all, not so much as de facto. I hope we shall be all sensible of the liberties of the people; but there is a time for all things. The Petition and Advice may be debated afterward, as to the Other House and the like; but never stay debating your chief magistrate.172Burton’s Diary, iii. 229.

When this debate moved, late in February, onto the question of the protector’s powers in the area of foreign policy, Ellys was the first to respond to a long speech from Sir Henry Vane II urging the Commons to assert its control over the kingdom’s armed forces.173Burton’s Diary, iii. 489-92. Any attempt by the Commons to wrest the initiative from the protector on foreign policy, Ellys warned, was to ‘shake off a single person and another House. Before [16]48, it was never challenged to be in this House. In the Parliament it was and in the single person’.174Burton’s Diary, iii. 492. Ellys spoke in similar vein on 1 March in relation to the Other House:

I was not at [the] making [of] the Petition and Advice, but the ground appears to me that the Parliament thought fit to have two Houses...And if this House [the Commons] claim all the power, why may not the other House vote out the power of this House, as well as this House vote out their power? If we lose this foundation, we must go to major-generals and the Instrument of Government, that had no foundation in Parliament. I hope no man means that you must go to confusion and anarchy. It was never meant that we should be upon framing new constitutions every day.175Burton’s Diary, iii. 566-7.

On 7 March, he again raised the spectre of ‘confusion and anarchy’ if the protectoral settlement was undermined – this time on the question of whether to bind the powers of the Other House (as the republicans were demanding):

Are we under government, or under none at all? If under none, we are a miserable, unhappy people ... If you can make a law to bound them [the Other House], exclusive of them, you may also make a law to exclude them. What, then, will be the consequence? If you go on to say no law since [16]48 is binding, I doubt you will go back to [16]42, and what mischief that may be I leave it to you to judge. My advice is, to build upon that foundation, the Petition and Advice, which has many things well provided for your rights.176Burton’s Diary, iv. 52-3.

Ellys’s longest recorded speech in defence of the protectoral settlement was on 18 March 1659, in response to Vane’s objections to the presence of Scottish and Irish Members, whom the republicans regarded as Cromwellian placemen. As usual, Ellys played upon the fearful consequences if the republicans should have their way.

The Petition and Advice knows not how it can be a Parliament of England, Scotland and Ireland, if you have no Scotch and Irish here. If you turn them out, you can make no law to make them sit here. You break the union, and then must you come to a new union ... As to the argument, that the Act of Union is no good law; this argument makes way for Charles Stuart.177Burton’s Diary, iv. 181-4; W.A.H. Schilling, ‘The Parliamentary Diary of Sir John Gell, 5 Feb.-21 Mar. 1659’ (Vanderbilt Univ. MA thesis, 1961), 240-1.

At a time when the Catholic powers of France and Spain were on the verge of settling their differences, he argued, Parliament should be striving to strengthen the union not break it apart.178Burton’s Diary, iv. 183.

With the protectorate and the army on collision course by mid-April 1659, Ellys’s warnings against a return to the ‘mischief’ of the 1640s acquired new relevance. During a debate on 18 April over whether to prohibit the council of officers meeting without the consent of Parliament and the protector, he hinted darkly at what such military gatherings portended:

What can be the end of these meetings? If you suffer this, none knows what may come of it. You know what adjutators [the army adjutators of 1647] came to. They were hard to be suppressed. We know not what may be at the bottom of these councils...Such meetings as those have not been these eleven years. Surely such an extraordinary meeting must have an extraordinary end.179Burton’s Diary, iv. 458-9.

The crisis in relations between the protectorate and its republican enemies came on 21 April, when the Commons began debating the nation’s militia and the power of the civil authorities in matters military. With a fatal lack of tact, Ellys and other Cromwellians argued that the armed forces should be placed under the immediate joint control of the protector and the two Houses – a development dreaded by the republican interest in the army and its parliamentary allies.180Burton’s Diary, iv. 476; Prose Works of John Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 65. That night, the army compelled the protector to dissolve Parliament.

Towards and after the Restoration

Despite Ellys’s enthusiasm for the protectorate and the loss of his office of solicitor general upon its fall, he did not entirely neglect the service of the restored Rump. He was named to committees in the Rump on 10 May and 8 September and continued to receive appointment to local office.181CJ vii. 648a, 657b, 775b. He was among the lawyers who were considered for riding circuit at the summer assizes, but the council of state omitted his name from its final list of nominations.182Bodl. Rawl. C.179, pp. 68, 73. On 30 September, he was fined £20 for being absent from the House without leave, and he does not seem to have returned to Westminster until about 18 January 1660, when the Rump appointed him its solicitor general.183CJ vii. 814b. Two days later (20 Jan.), he was a minority teller with John Lenthall against giving the republican officer Nathaniel Rich* command of a regiment of horse.184CJ vii. 817b. The opposing tellers were the republican duo of Henry Marten and Henry Neville. As the power of the commonwealth interest faded, Ellys assumed a more prominent role in parliamentary affairs – beginning on 14 February, when he and Sir Thomas Widdrington were appointed to bring in a less republican version of the Engagement in an attempt to satisfy General George Monck*.185CJ vii. 843a; Prose Works of John Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 173. Most of Ellys’s appointments in the final weeks of the Long Parliament occurred on or after 21 February (the day on which the secluded Members were re-admitted) and related to the settlement of government and a return to ‘known ways’.186CJ vii. 818a, 843a, 843b, 847a, 847b, 848b, 852b, 853a, 866a, 867a, 868b, 871a, 872b, 875a, 877a. Nevertheless, his apparent support for the restoration of monarchy in some form did not preclude his nomination to the 10 March committee for inserting in the militia commissioners’ oath an acknowledgement that ‘the war undertaken by the Parliament against the forces raised by the late king and his adherents was just and lawful’.187CJ vii. 871a.

In the elections to the 1660 Convention, Ellys was involved in a double return at Grantham, where he and William Bury* had been defeated on a poll by Thomas Skipwith* and another royalist candidate. Although Ellys’s election was declared void on 18 May, his appointment to the committee of privileges suggests that he attended the House at least once before that date.188HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Grantham’, ‘William Ellys’. He was listed by Philip, 4th Baron Wharton – who was a political patron of Ellys’s by the late 1660s at the latest – as one who was likely to support a Presbyterian church settlement.189Bodl. Carte 81, ff. 278, 280; G. F. T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 338. His baronetcy was forfeit at the Restoration, and he was omitted from all local offices except the Kesteven magistracy. In 1662, he relinquished both his recorderships – and the timing of his resignation in the case of Boston suggests a desire on his part to avoid being tendered the oath abjuring the Solemn League and Covenant.190Boston Corporation Minutes ed. Bailey, iii. 382; Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, f. 360v. He evidently conformed to the Church of England, and it was his great-nephew Sir William Ellys, 2nd bt.†, and not Ellys himself, as some authorities assert, who protected ejected Presbyterian ministers.191B. Dale, Yorkshire Puritanism and Early Nonconformity, 21; HP Commons 1660-90, ‘William Ellys’; J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry Besieged 1650-1700, 212. His legal career continued to flourish after the Restoration, culminating in 1672 with appointment as a justice of the court of common pleas. However, in 1676 the earl of Danby had him removed from the bench in order to make way for one of his own supporters. Returned for Boston in the elections to the first Exclusion Parliament in 1679, Ellys was classed as ‘honest’ by the earl of Shaftesbury (Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*). In May 1680, he was re-appointed to the bench, thereby depriving the whigs of an able speaker in the House.192HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘William Ellys’.

According to his monumental inscription, Ellys died on 2 December 1680, not nine days later as most authorities state.193MI, Nocton par. church. He was buried at Nocton on 17 December.194Lincs. Peds. 326. In his will, in which he asked to be interred in a decent manner but without ‘pomp’, he referred to his good friend Richard Hampden† – son of the civil-war parliamentarian grandee John Hampden* – whose daughter had married Ellys’s great-nephew Sir William Ellys.195PROB11/363, f. 232v. Having never married and dying childless, Ellys left the bulk of his estate to his great-nephew, who sat for Grantham in most of the Parliaments between 1679 and 1710.196PROB11/363, f. 233; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Sir William Ellys’.