WHITELOCKE, Bulstrode (1605-75), of Middle Temple, London, Fawley Court and Phyllis Court, Bucks. and Buckingham House, Chelsea, Mdx.

The son of ‘a distinguished judge’ and MP whose ‘wide learning’ notably encompassed parliamentary history, and the favoured great-nephew of two more leading lawyers, Speaker Sir John Croke† and judge Sir George Croke†, Whitelocke brought to the Commons similar traits of independence, self-confidence, scholarship and piety.90HP Commons 1604-1629. His career continued family tradition. His debut in the House in 1626, when he was still under age, was unremarkable, but following his entry to the Long Parliament 14 years later he was soon chairing a variety of key committees, speaking authoritatively on important issues and deploying his legal expertise and his experience of local administration. With the advent of armed conflict in 1642 he became at one and the same time a lynchpin of the parliamentarian war effort in Oxfordshire and Berkshire and a leading advocate of, and commissioner for, making peace with the royalists. Perceived over-enthusiasm for the latter came close to having him excluded from the Commons in 1645. Once the first civil war had ended Whitelocke tried to keep aloof from the divisions which opened up among the victors, but having become a commissioner of Parliament’s great seal in March 1648 he then accepted a succession of further offices – legal, fiscal and diplomatic – under the commonwealth and protectorate. Although he took no part in the regicide, he continued in the Rump, to the fore of the phalanx of conservative lawyers, was a longstanding member of the council of state, and sat in two protectorate Parliaments before being called to the Other House in December 1657. Returning with the Rump in May 1659 he was again prominent, briefly serving as Speaker, and he sat through the ‘interruption’ as a member of the army-nominated committee of safety. This last in a series of decisions to compromise with the powers-that-be proved fatal to his parliamentary career as the political tide turned over the winter of 1659-60.

According to his reams of autobiographical writings and commentaries on public life – some surfacing in the Memorials published in several editions from 1682; others appearing in The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke (1990); still others remaining in manuscript – Whitelocke occupied a central role in mid-seventeenth century politics, in both senses. On his own account he was courted by peers and MPs from various factions both because of his personal attributes – wide connections, long experience, extensive learning, and abilities in negotiation and draftsmanship – and because of the influential offices he held, which made him virtually indispensable at crucial moments. In the interests of order, legality, liberty and toleration, he positioned himself between extremes and attempted reconciliation. Unsurprisingly, his self-declared importance has been contested.91E.g. W. Palmer, The Political Career of Oliver St John (Newark, Del. 1993), 11. His essential moderation remains broadly accepted, although his absence of partisan commitment is questionable for an important period in the 1640s.

Meanwhile, the supposition that his narratives of his times, which have since the later seventeenth century stood among the handful of vital sources for civil war and interregnum politics, were constructed contemporaneously has been challenged. While Whitelocke himself disclosed that in January 1660 his wife (from motives of love and prudence) ‘burnt many of my papers relating to the public affairs, which makes the present relations the less perfect’, it has also become evident that his memoirs were largely composed in the 1660s.92Whitelocke, Mems. 692; Diary, 559; B. Worden, ‘The “Diary” of Bulstrode Whitelocke’, EHR cviii. 122-34. None the less, their value is still immense. Whitelocke was not only a personal witness to the events he recounts to a significantly greater extent than were the two other major chroniclers of the period, his erstwhile intimate friend Edward Hyde*, later 1st earl of Clarendon, and his (almost) alter ego on the parliamentarian side, the radical regicide Edmund Ludlowe II*, but he had more opportunities at the time to view the documentary evidence. Additionally, his recollections reveal, in a degree of detail not currently available elsewhere, the hopes and fears of a temperamental moderate and the motivation of a seeming trimmer. Furthermore, in intention, if inevitably not always in practice, Whitelocke attempted ‘an impartial relation’ of his times, ‘as it ought to be the temper of all faithful historians’.93Whitelocke, Mems. 102. The account which follows attempts to reconcile the differing and overlapping evidence provided in the voluminous papers of a ‘compulsive scribbler’; these include apparently contemporaneous notes of speeches and committees, as well as correspondence from his eclectic circle of friends.94Worden. ‘The “Diary”’, 123-4.

Apprenticeship in public life 1628-40

Having failed to gain re-election for Stafford to the Parliament of 1628, Whitelocke applied himself energetically to his profession as a barrister. Advancement in his career owed much to the connections of his father Sir James, who was prominent on the bench until his death in June 1632, and to the patronage of his great-uncle Sir George Croke, in whose house he had been born.95Add. 53726, ff. 3, 66v, 83v, 107v and passim; Add. 37343, f. 1. But it also rested on his own efforts and on factors which were to be of significance to his later service in Parliament. He cultivated close associates among fellow lawyers: at the Middle Temple his particular friends included Edward Hyde, Geoffrey Palmer*, John Maynard*, John Lisle* and Bartholomew Hall; friends at other inns included Harbottle Grimston* and Matthew Hale*; he received frequent ‘good counsel and encouragement in [his] studies’ from the celebrated jurist, and sufferer from royal wrath at opposition in the 1628 Parliament, John Selden*.96Add. 53726, ff. 10-11, 86v, 89v-97v, 101v-107v. He assiduously attended assize circuits to gain experience and business, working with, among others, William Lenthall*, the future Speaker.97Add. 53726, f. 82v and passim.

Well before his thirtieth birthday Whitelocke acquired office near his home at Fawsley Court in the Thames valley, becoming recorder of Abingdon (Berks.) and a retained counsellor in Henley (Oxon.), and obtained clients further afield, becoming a freeman of two boroughs on the Isle of Wight.98Add. 53726, f. 71; 5669, f. 97v; CSP Dom. 1634-5, p. 217; I.o.W. RO, NBC 45, f. 197v. In 1634 he was added to the commissions of the peace for Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire.99Add. 53726, f. 71; Coventry Docquets, 68. He proved not only a dedicated attender but also a diligent deliverer of charges to juries. Placed in the chair at Oxford assizes, he expatiated on the longstanding superiority of the jurisdiction of temporal over ecclesiastical courts, although he was ‘wary in [his] expressions’.100Add. 37343, f. 131 and passim; 53726, ff. 75-77v, 80v-81v, 84-85v. A combination of industry, thorough briefing and a calculated degree of independence characterised activity such as that as counsel for the justices in eyre in Wychwood, west Oxfordshire. In order to gain the respect of the local gentry he ‘took a great deal of pains ... in studying the points of forest learning, and searching and taking out of records’ and was ‘not unwilling to appear against the designs of the earl of Danby [Henry Danvers, 1st earl], who sought to promote his own interest under the king’s, as lieutenant of that forest’.101Whitelocke, Mems. 24.

During the 1630s Whitelocke also expanded his horizons in other ways. The grandson of a London merchant, he married first into a City family, building on connections made when a student at St John’s College, Oxford, to extend his mercantile links.102Add. 53726, f. 53v. On their wedding day in June 1630 his bride, Rebecca Bennet, was already manifesting symptoms of the mental illness which contributed to her death in May 1634, but (giving due allowance for the exaggeration of autobiography) Whitelocke exhibited a patience and sensitivity useful in political life. He found solace in music-making, which along with an appreciation of architecture, rich clothing and dramatic celebration revealed he was no dour puritan.103Add. 53726, ff. 53-55v, 60, 64, 80, 89v-97v; R. Spalding, The Improbable Puritan (1975). Meanwhile, he collected papers related to river navigation and his entrepreneurial genes surfaced as he indulged in ‘a little adventure at sea’ with his friend Hall and investors from Poole, Dorset. Although he recounted he ‘was a loser by my adventure, and so gave over the trade’, having learned that ‘gentlemen do not thrive so well with the merchants, as merchants themselves do’, commerce was to be one of his major concerns (and indeed there were to be other bad investments at the end of the 1630s in Yorkshire fen drainage and Avon navigation).104Add. 53726, f. 86; Whitelocke, Diary, 72, 118-19; Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. vi. ff. 18, 34-46, 63. Advice from his wife’s doctor that, if there were to be any hope of a cure, relatives should isolate her under medical supervision, led to Whitelocke’s embarking on travel on the continent. A brief stay in France in 1634 improved his French, consolidated his interest in languages and laid a foundation for subsequent engagement with foreign affairs.105Add. 53726, ff. 97v-107; Diary, 76-82; Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. vi. 88-101.

Whitelocke’s second marriage, a runaway love-match contracted on 9 November 1634 with Frances, sister of Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham, demonstrated an ability to take on and to win over his social superiors. While he alienated his father’s relatively low-born friend William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, by ‘marrying above his rank’, he overcame the initial reservations of Frances’s brother and of her uncle, George Manners, 7th earl of Rutland, soon becoming a visitor at their houses and a manager of their legal business; eventually he received some of his wife’s portion. Other aristocratic kin by marriage, including the countess of Sunderland and Robert Bertie, 1st earl of Lindsey, became part of his social and professional firmament, while he recorded constructive co-operation with Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland, who was steward of Abingdon, and favour from Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, chamberlain of the royal household.106Whitelocke, Diary, 89-114.

On his own telling, making a living proved hard-going, and despite the support of friends he failed in 1638 to gain the potentially lucrative office of attorney of the duchy of Lancaster.107Whitelocke, Diary, 113-16. However, he managed to consolidate his estates by purchasing Phyllis Court and Henley park, which lay between Fawley Court and Henley borough.108Whitelocke, Diary, 117-18; Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. vii. 252, 258, 308-11. He established his credentials as an independent and effective counsellor on the team which defended his kinsman John Hampden* when the latter challenged the legality of levying Ship Money on inland counties; this tax was, for Whitelocke, an ‘illegal pill’, however equitably introduced by the privy council.109Whitelocke, Diary, 110-11; Mems. 24-5. He had already aligned himself with those who defied the establishment of Charles I’s personal rule when he helped defend one of his father’s old friends, John Williams, bishop of Lincoln, called to account for his writings against the ceremonial innovations of another, Archbishop Laud.110Whitelocke, Diary, 109; Whitelocke Pprs., vii. ff. 107-10, 118, 198-9, 201v. In 1639 he ‘received many courteous letters from the Lord Falkland [Lucius Cary*] for his care and pains in the business of Wychwood forest, with many thanks in the name of the country’.111Whitelocke, Diary, 118.

In this context it may have been with a certain sense of entitlement to sit that early in 1640 Whitelocke approached elections to Parliament. His (retrospective) claim that he had ‘no great inclination’ and was ‘not very ambitious ... foreseeing the danger of the times’ may express a characteristic caution, but otherwise appears distinctly disingenuous. He recounted that he ‘was invited and persuaded by divers friends’, ‘chiefly by those of the contrary faction to the court’ and ‘particularly by those at Abingdon ... to stand for the place of their burgess in Parliament’. Swayed by ‘the argument of doing the public good’, he succumbed, but having invested much effort and some money, his nose was clearly out of joint when the vote went against him. The successful candidate, Sir George Stonhouse*, was alleged to have ‘prevailed by his beef, bacon and bag pudding’, bribing a ‘multitude’ ungrateful for all Whitelocke’s good work as recorder.112Add. 37343, ff. 197v-198v; Whitelocke, Diary, 119-20. Too late by this time to do as Edward Hyde had suggested and seek an alternative seat in conjunction with the earl of Danby’s brother Sir John Danvers*, to ‘gratify’ his friends Whitelocke allowed himself to be persuaded further to petition against the result.113Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. vii. f. 353. Taking advantage of the endorsement of his credentials provided by the hospitality of his brother-in-law Lord Willoughby, Whitelocke was poised to act, but was foiled by the premature dissolution of the Parliament.114Add. 37343, ff. 199-202; Whitelocke, Diary, 120-1.

Despite his vantage point in Covent Garden, Whitelocke apparently left no day-to-day account of the Short Parliament parallel to that he supplied for later periods even when he was not actually present in the chamber. However, he did register general comment. On the one hand, he evidently shared the disquiet of MPs at perceived excesses in clerical power, noting the alleged responsibility of Laud for the Parliament’s dissolution and his unequivocal responsibility for the continuation of Convocation and for the grant of a benevolence which ‘added more fuel to the flames already burning’. He also cited approvingly the attack on the temporal powers of the church made by Edward Bagshawe* in his Lent readings at the Middle Temple. On the other hand, he was at pains to distance himself from Parliament-men who had embarked on a more dangerous and radical course of opposition. Unlike several friends and patrons – among them the earl of Holland, the Oxfordshire lord lieutenant William Fiennes, Viscount Saye and Sele, and John Hampden – Whitelocke resisted enticements to fraternise with the Scots commissioners then in London, ‘fearing danger to his native country by such courses’ and disdaining ‘to be any means of encouraging a foreign nation, proud and subtle, against our natural prince’. He disapproved of the incendiary behaviour in the House of Sir Henry Vane I*.115Whitelocke, Diary, 120-1; Mems. 30, 32-5.

Entry to the Long Parliament 1640

When a second general election was called, Whitelocke initially and unwisely lifted his sights higher than in the spring. Buoyed by support from kinsman Sir Thomas Coghill, a recent sheriff of Oxfordshire, brother-in-law Edward Dixon and voters around Henley, he sought a county seat in partnership with Sir William Waller*. Perhaps he expected to appeal to those for whom opponents Thomas Wenman*, 2nd Viscount Wenman, and James Fiennes*, Saye’s heir, looked too radical; probably he hoped to assert the claim of the south east of the county to due representation. The ‘distaste’ of Saye that a mere lawyer should challenge his son simply provoked Whitelocke to a robust rejoinder (or so he said), but the advice of Hyde not to stand against Wenman and the ‘earnest’ appeal of Judge Croke ‘to decline the contest’ then led him to withdraw, albeit with transparent regret. Notwithstanding this, on election day his ‘name was so cried up, that if he appeared, he had carried it, as his friends testified’, whereas Waller, he noted with patent satisfaction, ‘had only a few votes’.116Whitelocke, Diary, 121-2; Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. viii. f. 25.

Until only a few days before the parliamentary session opened, Whitelocke appeared to have gained nothing but ‘more strangeness than formerly’ from Saye and a lapse in those invitations to talk to the Scots which he professed to despise.117Whitelocke, Diary, 122. But he then received the unexpected news that at Great Marlow, where he had not canvassed, he had received more votes than John Borlase*, one of the candidates returned by the sheriff. The Buckinghamshire borough, ten miles down-river from Henley, was already the subject of a double return. With backing from his friends Palmer, Hyde and above all Maynard, who chaired the privileges committee and ensured his petition was considered promptly, Whitelocke obtained a fresh election. On 23 November he and Peregrine Hoby* narrowly defeated Borlase and Gabriel Hippisley. The victory caused bad feeling from Borlase and Hippisley, and also from other ‘great neighbours’, but it was confirmed in committee on 3 December ‘without controversy’ and conclusively settled on 5 January 1641.118Add. 37343, ff. 206v-207v; Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. viii. ff. 33-5; Whitelocke, Diary, 122-3; Mems. 37; D’Ewes (N), 102; CJ ii. 63a.

Notwithstanding his less than straightforward entry to the Commons, Whitelocke was to the fore in its business even before his election was confirmed. Concerted effort by friends who like Hyde prized his presence in the House, together with his specific expertise, doubtless accounts for the fact that he received several early appointments.119Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. viii. f. 24. He was placed on committees addressing various grievances of the personal rule (27 Nov. 1640) and the particular complaints of merchants (2 Dec.), and was added with Selden, Palmer and other associates to the committee for recusants (1 Dec.), while with them he was among MPs deputed to join with the Lords at the preliminary examinations of witnesses against Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford and lord deputy of Ireland.120CJ ii. 38a, 42b, 43a. Over the next few months he played an important, and possibly to a degree pre-determined role, in all these matters.

Chairman and draftsman 1640-1642

Compared with his Middle Temple colleague, Robert Reynolds*, Whitelocke could not be described as a ‘committee-man’. He did not appear to collect relentlessly diverse nominations; he did not, like the exceptionally robust Sir Robert Pye I* or William Wheler*, live permanently on the doorstep of Parliament and attend daily; his legal career, local responsibilities, sociability and periodic illness took him away from the house, and his visible work-load fluctuated from month to month. Instead his very substantial presence in the Journal in the early years of the Long Parliament is accounted for partly by his relatively sustained place at the centre of politics, and partly by his roles as chairman of certain key committees, participant in conferences with the Lords, negotiator, legal counsel, draftsman, and later broker for Thames valley affairs.

Whitelocke’s previous dabbling in commercial ventures may have been largely unsuccessful, but this, and probably also the standing of his home-town of Henley in the river trade to London, underlay his prolonged engagement with export, import and economic development. Initially this had a close relation to complaints arising from monopolies granted by the crown and from other money-raising expedients of the personal rule. Nominated to review patents for ‘pretended conservancy of waters’ (16 Dec.) and to regulate Thames watermen (21 May 1641), he reported a bill to restrain bargemen from working on Sundays (14 July).121CJ ii. 51b, 152b, 165b, 211a. Alongside sundry appointments related to matters such as the price of wines and coining from plate, he sat on committees addressing the abuses of tax farmers and customs officers (21 Dec. 1640) and the importation and manufacture of gunpowder (21 July 1641).122CJ ii. 55a, 75a, 157a, 170b, 219b, 295b. He argued that the making of saltpetre was ‘no prerogative of the king’s by prescription or common law’ (10 May) and spoke on behalf of a merchant whose goods had been ‘unlawfully seized’ for refusal to pay tonnage and poundage levied without parliamentary consent (13 Aug.).123Procs. LP iv. 302; vi. 400. When on 9 November 1641 a declaration on the state of the kingdom was read, Whitelocke’s name was attached to the section relating to the abuses of purveyors and saltpetremen.124CJ ii. 309a. He was named last to the committee considering an act against the export of unprocessed wool (3 Feb.), but having been placed with Selden among a much smaller group of MPs who reviewed patents granted to the Merchant Adventurers for transportation and manufacture of cloth (14 July), he came to dominate it.125CJ ii. 77b, 210b. ‘The committee for Merchant Adventurers whereof Mr Whitelocke hath the chair’ was revived in February and March 1642 to receive additional petitions and business, while a complementary body dealing with complaints against customers, of which he was also chair, was resuscitated in April.126CJ ii. 415a, 480a, 491a, 510a. His notes corroborate in large measure his assertion that in the former capacity, ‘he had many solicitations, heard many excellent debates, and gained much knowledge in the business of trade in general, and of this in particular, and took great pains in it’.127Whitelocke, Diary, 131; Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. vi. ff. 46v, 64v, 80, 81v, 89v-109v, 188-200v, 233. He was still consulting with the Adventurers over the advancement of trade as war threatened (12 July), and the fact that by this time he had also worked on other commercial committees including that addressing the grievances of the common council of London (8 Apr.) meant that he was well placed to represent Parliament to the City and to negotiate loans.128CJ ii. 517a, 589b, 648a, 666b, 702a; PJ ii. 238.

Meanwhile, Whitelocke pursued his opposition to clerical pretention and ceremonial innovation. Nominated on 16 December 1640 to the committee investigating the Canons produced by Convocation and the intentions of the archbishop of Canterbury, he was subsequently among those delegated to prepare charges against Laud (12 Feb., 5 June 1641) and to draw the detailed brief (26 Mar. 1642).129CJ ii. 52a, 84a, 168b, 499b. Despite his previous defence of Bishop Williams, however, as became more starkly apparent later, Whitelocke’s attitude to his former college head was less hostile than that of many colleagues. While conceding that Laud was ‘more busy in temporal affairs and matters of state than his predecessors of later times had been’, Whitelocke accepted his father’s opinion that the fiery, over-zealous and dangerously inexperienced archbishop was none the less ‘a just and good man’.130Whitelocke, Mems. 34. He displayed a similarly nuanced attitude to the episcopate in general. Although party to committees dealing with complaints against the bishops of Bath and Wells, Ely and Durham (23 Dec. 1640; 12 May; 4, 7 June 1641) and closely involved in the impeachment of those bishops primarily responsible for the Canons (30 July, 11 Aug., 1 Dec. 1641), he had no objection to episcopacy per se.131CJ ii. 56b, 143b, 166b, 169a, 230b, 252b, 329a. On the contrary, he noted with approval the fact that, in the face of encouragement from Theodore Beza to ‘plant’ new Genevan-style Presbyterian government, Elizabeth I and Parliament had ‘stood firm and could not be wrought to any unsettlement of the ancient discipline by episcopacy’.132Whitelocke, Mems. 29. A large, separate caste of clergy such as pertained in the Roman church (and in some respects at Geneva too) was inimical, but ‘primitive’ bishops, exercising powers subordinate to imperial law, were a different matter.133Add. 37343, ff. 52-3, 57v, 65v. Accounts of his remarks during debates on 10 March 1641 are somewhat opaque, but it seems that he not only regarded the practice of bishops sitting in Parliament as pre-dating the Norman Conquest, but also considered the practice acceptable provided it was accompanied by some stake and experience in temporal affairs; at the least it is clear that, unlike many, he spoke on the subject without rancour.134Procs. LP ii. 696, 700, 702. While alive to the abuses of the court of high commission and other prerogative courts, he heeded to some degree the request of his uncle Judge Croke to ‘use [his] best manner amongst the Lords and Commons that [the bishops and judges] might have as easy a censure as might be’.135Whitelocke, Mems. 36, 49; CJ ii. 189b.

Whitelocke displayed a similar lack of animus against Catholics. The ‘popish plot’ is all but absent from his accounts of events in England and while he was prominent in certain moves to secure and disarm recusants, this seems to have been a direct response to the conspiracies revealed from the summer of 1641 and to the rebellion in Ireland that winter.136CJ ii. 216b, 221a, 316b, 327a, 349b, 387a; Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. vi. 171. Due administration to Catholics of the oaths of supremacy and allegiance apparently represented for him a key to the securing of political loyalty; the preaching and practice of sedition was a secular crime, punishable by law, and the actions of seminary priests and Jesuits constituted unacceptable foreign interference.137CJ ii. 305a; D’Ewes (C), 80; Add. 37343, ff. 66v, 92-96v. On the other hand, Whitelocke was firmly committed to the private and public nurture of Protestant faith. Although ‘no priest, yet as the father of a family I held it my duty to labour in the Word and doctrine for the good of my own soul, and the souls of those of my household’; ‘every believer is as much of the church as any prelate’.138Add. 37343, f. 164; 53728, f. 133. He doubtless approached his nominations to the committees for the new parish church close to Parliament in Covent Garden (28 June 1641), and to consult on better maintenance for the clergy (25 Mar. 1642), the liturgy and ministry of the national church (4 Apr.) and to consider setting up an assembly of divines (25 Apr.) with the same dedication given to his own private chapel.139CJ ii. 191b, 496b, 510b, 541b; Whitelocke, Diary, 61, 64-5.

As a lawyer Whitelocke was unsurprisingly involved in a succession of private petitions and settlements such as were common, politically neutral business in any Parliament. The first of his relatively rare appearances as a teller was with Maynard (and against Hyde) in an unsuccessful attempt to block committal of an inheritance dispute between Sir James Thynne* and his half-brother, Sir Henry Frederick Thynne (20 July 1641).140CJ ii. 149a, 151b, 164a, 164b, 169a, 217a, 219b, 235b, 239b, 240b, 475a, 505b, 517a, 613b. Occasionally he was given leave to act as counsel in the Lords, including for his brother-in-law Willoughby, although this was itself not without political implications, involving as it did the cementing of alliances.141CJ ii. 65a, 95a, 309a; Procs. LP iv. 579, 588.

More important, however, was the deployment of Whitelocke’s expertise on addressing weightier legal and constitutional grievances. He was on committees drafting the act which abolished the much-resented prerogative courts that were the councils of the Marches and in the north (23 Dec. 1640; 3 July, 13 Aug. 1641).142CJ ii. 57a, 198b, 253b. His earliest recorded motions (8 Dec. 1640) related to Ship Money and the Hampden case. He proposed first the sequestration of the former lord keeper (Thomas Coventry†, 1st Baron Coventry) for his role in the prosecution and secondly the addition of those sent to question the presiding judges to the committee investigating Ship Money.143Procs. LP i. 513, 514; Northcote Diary, 44. At the official request of Solicitor-general Oliver St John*, who had also been among Hampden’s counsel, Whitelocke assisted him, Hyde and Falkland to assemble and order all the papers of complaint related to Ship Money, activity for which they received the warm thanks of the House (13, 14 Jan. 1641).144CJ ii. 67b, 68a. Whitelocke was later added to the committee which prepared the bill abolishing the tax (1 July).145CJ ii. 195a. In the meantime, as suggested earlier, he had a personal interest in proceeding gently with respect to complaints of the judiciary’s conduct over the previous decade: Judge Croke himself had found for Hampden only at the last minute and the colleagues who ruled against him had been visibly under pressure.146Whitelocke, Mems. 49. Similarly, when debates turned to the imprisonment and financial penalties imposed on his friend Selden and other MPs following their opposition to royal policies in the 1620s, Whitelocke combined advocacy of compensation to those whose appeal to habeas corpus had been denied with vindication of the conduct of his own father in the matter.147Whitelocke, Diary, 123; Mems. 38-9; Procs. LP v. 424. With Hampden’s endorsement he gained Sir James’s exoneration and escaped liability for that compensation.148Whitelocke, Diary, 124. Later he sat on the committee which considered the general question of fines imposed in king’s bench (1 June 1641) and drafted a bill to provide for the liberty of the subject (1 July).149CJ ii. 164a, 195b.

In one of his charges to juries Whitelocke invited his hearers to consider ‘how the wisdom of the common law from the beginning, and the wisdom of our Parliaments from time to time, have provided a salve for every sore, and a remedy for every mischief’.150Add. 37343, f. 130. The franchise, with its attendant access to that salve, should thus be wide, as he hinted in an early speech (11 Dec. 1640).151Procs. LP i. 570. When the Commons first considered how to ensure that this Parliament should not end as suddenly as its predecessor, without redress of grievances, Whitelocke was appointed with Hampden, Selden and other friends to a committee to discuss an act for annual Parliaments (30 Dec.).152CJ ii. 60a. With Palmer, Maynard and others he was an active manager of a conference with the Lords about the more practicable alternative plan for triennial Parliaments (12 Feb. 1641), entailing much work and contact with peers.153CJ ii. 83b; Whitelocke, Mems. 40; Diary, 124. Ordered with Selden and two other lawyers to devise a clause to be inserted into the subsidy bill asserting that its passing should not determine the parliamentary session (1 May), Whitelocke alone, ‘whose pen began to please the House’, was then appointed (5 May) to draw a bill to declare that the present Parliament could not be adjourned, prorogued or dissolved without the consent of both Houses.154CJ ii. 131b, 136a; Whitelocke, Diary, 127. Responding to ‘hot’ support for the bill, Whitelocke brought it in as instructed the following morning, whereupon it not only passed the same day (6 May) but unexpectedly received prompt royal assent.155Whitelocke, Mems. 45; CJ ii. 137a. In retrospect he was not wholly pleased with this success: ‘Whitelocke and others held [it] to be too hasting [sic] a proceeding in the making of a law, especially of so vast consequence as this was’.156Whitelocke, Diary, 128. It evidently returned to haunt him in 1648 and 1649.

A member of the committee to investigate the leaking of St John’s speech in the chamber on Ship Money (6 Feb. 1641), Whitelocke also became a recognised authority on and defender of parliamentary privileges and rights.157CJ ii. 80a; Procs. LP vi. 245, 362. He and Palmer drafted rules on committee procedure (27, 28 Oct.).158CJ ii. 296a, 297b. He was also among those specifically desired to attend Robert Reynolds’s committee on parliamentary protections (27 Oct.; 7 Dec.).159CJ ii. 296a, 334b.

Probably Whitelocke’s most significant contribution to the pre-war Parliament was his chairmanship of the Commons committee responsible for proceedings against the earl of Strafford. Following his appointment to consider initial charges on 30 November 1640, he appears to have concluded before Christmas that Strafford was guilty of high treason.160CJ ii. 39b; Procs. LP ii. 5; cf. Northcote Diary, 96. Among the lawyers deputed on 6 January 1641 to look into further evidence from various Irish peers, he was added with Selden, Maynard and Palmer to committees drawing up detailed charges (23 Jan.; 26 Feb.) and also among those ordered to assert the right of the Commons to participate in the trial of a peer (18 Feb.).161CJ ii. 64a, 72a, 88b, 93b. By the end of the month he had emerged as the chair of the committee which, sworn to secrecy, directed the lower chamber’s contribution to the case. For the first, but by no means the last time, he claimed that this honour was pressed upon him against his will, although such was its importance on this occasion that it must have been calculatedly bestowed on a willing subject.162CJ ii. 94a; Whitelocke, Diary, 124; Mems. 39, 41. It suddenly enhanced his profile in Parliament: in the three weeks before the trial opened on 22 March, he reported frequently from committee and from conferences with the Lords.163CJ ii. 98a, 99a, 101b, 103a, 103b, 104a, 105a, 105b, 109b; Procs. LP ii. 727, 729, 741, 799. His increased workload necessitated his removing his family to a temporary lodging in Dean’s Yard, Westminster.164Whitelocke, Diary, 124.

Although ready to concede that Strafford spoke with elegance, grace, ingenuity and reason and that some of the prosecution case was defective, Whitelocke pursued his part in the trial with determination, albeit also with underlying misgivings. He noted with evident pride the earl’s observation to a friend that, ‘[John] Glynne* and Maynard used him like advocates, but Palmer and Whitelocke used him like gentlemen, yet left out nothing material to be urged against him’.165Whitelocke, Mems. 39, 42-3. Entrusted with arguing the final set of articles in the charge, Whitelocke did not speak in the early stages of the trial, but on 29 March he reported to the House from the committee the unexpected, and at that point irregular, tendering by Strafford of testimony from James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh.166Procs. LP iii. 212-14; CJ ii. 113b. When he appeared on 3 April it was to argue the 19th article, that instead of tendering the oaths of supremacy and allegiance to Scottish troops who arrived to serve in Ireland, the lord deputy had devised a new, illegal oath without parliamentary sanction, going ‘beyond the king’s command’ and assuming ‘to himself a power above regal power’. To Strafford’s answer that this was a ‘new treason’ of which he had never heard and was guiltless, his action being authorised by a royal letter, Whitelocke could apparently only reiterate his original point at greater length.167Procs. LP iii. 335-40, 343-5, 354. Two days later he resumed the attack, addressing the 20th to 23rd articles. Strafford had acted ‘to subvert the government of both kingdoms of England and Scotland’; ignoring the contrary opinions of other councillors and the inclination of the king, he had advised an ‘intentional’ ‘offensive war’ against the Scots, he had counselled the dissolution of the Short Parliament and he ‘had a design to bring an army into this kingdom, and so to bring in an arbitrary government’ – ‘an Irish papist army’ at that.168Procs. LP iii. 367-402. Supported as they were by testimonies from, among others, Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland and commander of the English army in the north, these accusations carried more weight, but they were not watertight.169Whitelocke, Mems. 42. Awareness that he was on shaky ground may have underpinned Whitelocke’s agreement to the 24th article, relating to the deployment of the Irish army, being left to Sir Walter Erle*, who had seen military service. Wanting sufficient witnesses, this charge collapsed and Erle was humiliated. Whitelocke’s frustration and scorn at the mishandling of a crucial charge may be deduced from his relation of Queen Henrietta Maria’s reaction to proceedings: while Erle ‘did bark but not bite’, ‘she never heard any man speak so clearly as [Whitelocke] did, and with so little gaping’.170Whitelocke, Diary, 125-6.

Whitelocke was soon embarrassed on his own account. The disappearance from among the case papers in his sole custody of notes by Sir Henry Vane I* relating to the articles so effectively countered by Strafford led to ‘jealousy’ that he had leaked them to the defence. He was exonerated some years later when the capture of ‘the king’s cabinet’ after the battle of Naseby revealed the document to have been in the possession of trial committee member George Digby, Lord Digby*, but in the meantime divisions in the committee increased and its business was compromised.171Whitelocke, Diary, 126-7; Mems. 43-4. None the less, Whitelocke, like others, overcame suspicion and his own ‘remorse and pity’ for the earl, and pursued the prosecution to the bitter end.172Whitelocke, Mems. 44. He was a party to and reporter of discussions with the Lords in the last days of the trial (15 Apr.).173CJ ii. 120b, 121b; Procs. LP iii. 488, 565, 574. His surprise that the king agreed readily to the act of attainder passed on 21 April may have been genuine; his request the next day for leave from the House may have been a reaction to considerable stress.174Whitelocke, Mems. 45-6; CJ ii. 125b.

Back at Westminster by 1 May to promote the prolongation of the Parliament, two days later Whitelocke subscribed the Protestation in company with his friend Palmer.175CJ ii. 131b, 133a. As he reported (12 May) from the committee charged with preparing the oath for tendering across the nation – which he apparently chaired without having been formally appointed a member – it was to be interpreted as meaning that subscribers assented to the doctrine of the Church of England insofar as its tenets ran contrary to the beliefs of papists and to popish innovations; it did not imply that subscribers endorsed every form of worship, discipline or government practised in the national church.176Procs. LP iv. 340, 345, 348. He was still engaged by the committee’s business two weeks later (25 May).177Procs. LP iv. 579.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his reservations about dealing with the Scots, early in 1641 Whitelocke had been a manager of three conferences with the Lords over the Anglo-Scottish treaty (2, 25 Jan.; 6 Feb.).178CJ ii. 62a, 72b, 80b. Doubtless the experience proved useful in assessing evidence for the Strafford trial. In August he was in charge of the bill which secured arrears of the ‘brotherly assistance’ promised by the English Parliament under the treaty.179CJ ii. 232b, 239a, 240a, 242a, 248a, 249b; Procs. LP vi. 362. This could be a sign that Whitelocke had moved closer to John Pym and the activists driving the alliance as a guarantor of Parliament’s continuance. Equally, it could manifest the recognition of Whitelocke’s talents as a negotiator, talents that were to be a cornerstone of his parliamentary service. That this would extend to foreign affairs generally was heralded when on 7 July he was called to chair a grand committee on the king’s intention to give assistance to his sister Elizabeth, queen of Bohemia, and her son Charles Louis, the elector palatine.180CJ ii. 201b. What is clear from all this is that Whitelocke was established as a major player in the House, a place confirmed by his prominent role in discussions surrounding the arrangements to cover the king’s proposed absence in Scotland (28, 29 July; 9 Aug).181CJ ii. 227a, 230a, 247a, 247b. That he labelled the second round of revelations regarding the ‘army plot’ perpetrated by Henry Percy* and others as treason much worse than Strafford’s (12 Aug.), could be another indication of his adherence to Pym’s group.182Procs. LP vi. 380, 384. However, somewhat inexplicably at this juncture, several weeks before Parliament adjourned and put its business in the hands of a recess committee, he obtained leave of absence (13 Aug.) and retired to Buckinghamshire to enjoy a summer with friends, constituents and local responsibilities.183CJ ii. 252a, 256a; Whitelocke, Diary, 128.

The slide to civil war, Oct. 1641-July 1642

The impression persists that Whitelocke, still at this point secure in the circle of his lawyer friends, preferred to retain some distance from Pym’s manoeuvrings. This course became more difficult to steer when Parliament reassembled in the autumn. On his return Whitelocke was immediately in the limelight. Having been plunged into work on committee procedure (27 Oct.) and drafting a petition to the king regarding his employment of unacceptable counsellors and officers (28 Oct.), on 1 November he chaired a grand committee to discuss reaction to the rebellion in Ireland and managed a related conference with the Lords.184CJ ii. 296a, 297b, 300a-301b; D’Ewes (C), 65-7; Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. viii. f. 135. Unlike some MPs, he was not prepared to concede that the Irish ‘must needs [have] a rancour in their spirits’ against those who had conquered them, just as the English had against the Normans, arguing implausibly but conveniently and (he said) to the liking of the Commons that ‘the English were never conquered by the duke of Normandy, but received him by compact as their king’.185Whitelocke, Diary, 129. Although he claimed to have been nominated to the committee of Ireland but prevented from attending owing to illness, over the next few months Whitelocke was highly visible in successive measures to raise money and troops for the succour of the Protestants and the prevention of conflict spreading to England.186CJ ii. 302a, 319b, 350a, 352a, 369a, 391a, 394b, 400a, 401a, 412a, 412b, 435b, 437a, 480b, 495b, 497b-498b, 505a, 519a, 559a, 569b; D’Ewes (C), 170, 210. Perhaps unprecedentedly, he co-operated closely in this with his Middle Temple colleague Robert Reynolds, a committee stalwart.

That the unstable state of Ireland was a matter of consequence to Whitelocke, and perhaps a motivating element in his sometimes ambivalent pursuit of Strafford, is revealed by a speech made on 16 February 1642, when he delivered propositions for the ‘speedy reduction’ of Ireland to the Lords. All the same, this crisis was uniquely grave. Whereas ‘their former rebellions have been only conflicts with sovereignty, to withstand the subjection to the crown of England, the present revolt goes to the extirpation of our nation and religion amongst them’.187The Speech of Bulstrode Whitelocke esq. (1642), 3-4 (E.200.30). It was not now a question

whether English or Irish shall govern, but whether the Protestant or the popish religion shall be established, and which of them shall be ruined. The very life and soul of our religion lies now at stake.188The Speech of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 4.

Furthermore, ‘the loss of that large and fertile land’ would severely diminish the king’s revenues. Although levies for an expedition to recover it would fall on an English people who had already suffered under illegal extra-parliamentary taxation and from the decay of trade, short-term pain would in the long term both reduce the likelihood of extraordinary impositions and be a charitable ‘plaster’ to relieve the ‘wounds’ of their ‘poor distressed brethren’ the Irish Protestants. Following the Roman example, a swift, thorough and decisive campaign was best. ‘Nothing in war can be more advantageous to a state’, he observed, ‘than to bring it to a speedy conclusion’.189The Speech of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 4-7. These sentiments may do much to explain Whitelocke’s subsequent trajectory.

In the meantime tensions at Westminster had begun to divide Whitelocke from some of his oldest friends. He worked with Hyde, Palmer and other lawyers when attention turned again to examinations taken in the wake of the army plot (17 Nov.), revealing once again his new appreciation of the Scottish alliance when he proposed adding the offence of seeking to ‘make the Scots neuters’ to the charges, and his commitment to prosecuting the offenders when he was added to committee preparing the impeachment of Daniel O’Neill (17 Dec.).190CJ ii. 318a, 347a; D’Ewes (C), 158. In the midst of several other tasks on which they were officially engaged together, he planned with Hyde, Palmer and Maynard to raise in the Commons complaints about the allegedly illegal proceedings of the court marshal and of the earl marshal, Thomas Howard, 21st earl of Arundel, and noted that Hyde ‘spake to it smartly [i.e. astutely, vigorously] and ingeniously’.191Whitelocke, Mems. 50; CJ ii. 302b, 309a. Debates surrounding the Grand Remonstrance were opening up fissures, however. Whitelocke had reservations about the document – it was ‘somewhat roughly penned, both for the matter and expressions in it’ – but he was apparently in sympathy with the sentiment behind it, especially as regards religion.192Whitelocke, Mems. 51. Hyde and Palmer, on the other hand, voiced outright opposition to what they regarded as a novel and inadmissible instrument of complaint.193s.v. ‘Edward Hyde’, ‘Geoffrey Palmer’. When the ‘strange’ Remonstrance was passed, Whitelocke shared his friends’ disquiet at the decision to publish it (24 Nov.); when Palmer was then committed to the Tower for further defiance Whitelocke presented to the House his petition for release (8 Dec.).194D’Ewes (C), 196, 249. But he could not endorse Hyde’s and Palmer’s support for Sir Edward Dering* in his publication of a speech condemning the Remonstrance and Parliament’s action on religion. As he later argued (2 Feb. 1642), Dering’s book was ‘against the honour and privileges of the House’; to air publicly proceedings critical of the king would be fatal to all.195PJ i. 262. The differences in outlook were thus evidently small, but other matters on which Whitelocke was working with less conservative lawyers like St John, John Wylde*, John Lisle* and Edmund Prideaux I* probably served to widen the gap. In the course of exchanges in the Commons and with the Lords on the question of whether the king could press soldiers (10 Dec.), Whitelocke seemed to argue that there were circumstances in which he could not.196CJ ii. 316b, 338a, 338b; D’Ewes (C), 262.

He regarded with consternation Charles’s abortive attempt on 4 January to arrest the five MPs whom he saw as his chief opponents. The king’s ‘sudden and intemperate act, so justly liable to exception’ was not only ‘a notorious breach of the privilege of the House of Commons’ but also something which should have been avoided, its inevitable consequences being all too apparent. It was hardly explicable, as was the king’s subsequent departure from London.197Whitelocke, Mems. 53-4. It was Whitelocke’s ‘fortune to be absent’ from the chamber at the critical moment, but in the month that followed he had an unprecedentedly high profile in the Journal.198Whitelocke, Diary, 129. Among more than a dozen politically sensitive nominations were those to consider an immediate response (4 Jan.); to prepare legislation enabling adjournment of proceedings to a safer location (11 Jan.); to draft for publication a letter advising a posture of defence and outlining recent plots (12 Jan.); to draw the impeachment of the attorney-general (15 Jan.); and to prepare a petition to the king asserting parliamentary privileges (17, 26 Jan.); he was also a member of the committee of safety appointed on 17 January.199CJ ii. 368b, 370a, 372a, 379b, 382b, 384a, 385a, 398a Meanwhile, he also drafted other related documents, liaised with the House of Lords, and on 14, 15 and 17 January chaired grand committees as the Commons debated the state of the kingdom.200CJ ii. 374a, 374b, 376b, 377b, 378b, 379a, 379b, 382b, 383a, 383b, 384a, 386a

Yet these circumstances still did not turn Whitelocke into an unequivocal supporter of Charles’s fiercer critics. It seems very plausible that, as he claimed, he ‘had much respect from the great lords at court’, especially his previous connections the earls of Pembroke and Holland, who ‘would often have him to their houses and lodgings at Whitehall’.201Whitelocke, Diary, 129 Contact with these peers, who were among the more moderate critics of crown policy in the Lords, doubtless reinforced rather than compromised what seems to have been Whitelocke’s carefully studied political stance. He recalled that at this juncture he ‘had also good respect from Hampden, Pym and the rest of that company’, yet that ‘he carried himself with civility and clearness to all parties, not engaging himself as of any faction, but reserving his own freedom’.202Whitelocke, Diary, 130.

A crucial factor seems to have been that cumulatively he was somewhat more alarmed by the repercussions of the situation in Ireland and the actions of those advising the king than he was by the implications of decisions being taken in Parliament. His disquiet was probably both reflected in and heightened by membership of committees investigating the comments of James Stuart, 1st duke of Richmond (28 Jan.), Lord Falkland (8 Feb.) and Lord Digby (15 Feb.; 19 Apr.).203CJ ii. 402a, 421a, 433a, 535a. Richmond’s counsel had been ‘of as dangerous consequence as may be and if [it] had been followed had utterly ruined Parliament’, so to impeach him for it was ‘a duty we owe to our king and country’ (27 Jan.).204PJ i. 196. Among MPs deputed to consider Charles’s answer to the House’s petition to put the kingdom into a posture of defence (31 Jan.), Whitelocke, who claimed to have apprehended his intention to seize the magazine at Hull, acted with Sir Henry Vane II* and Sir John Hotham* to endorse its counter-seizure for Parliament (1, 2 Feb.).205CJ ii. 406a, 407b, 410b; Whitelocke, Mems. 57. On the other hand, he was almost certainly as nervous about the ‘extraordinary convention of people’ round Westminster, which he discussed with Maynard, Hampden and others on 5 February.206CJ 415a.

On 17 February Whitelocke obtained leave to go into the country.207CJ ii. 439a. The death two days earlier of Judge Croke, for whom he was a trustee, was probably the immediate cause of about three weeks’ absence, although he also recorded at this point resentment at the loss of legal business (and income) arising from attendance at Parliament.208Whitelocke, Diary, 128, 130-1. However, an element of strategic withdrawal when ‘the times began to appear very dreadful’ cannot be excluded.209Whitelocke, Diary, 131. By the time he reappeared in the Journal on 10 March (a committee appointment which did not demand his imminent presence) Parliament had passed the Militia Ordinance, giving it control of the trained bands, and the last-ditch attempt by Holland and Pembroke at Newmarket to persuade the king to accept it (and avert a breach) had just failed.210CJ ii. 475a. Nominated with four other lawyers to review statutes relating to pressing soldiers (12 Mar.), Whitelocke was then named to committees preparing a justification of the Ordinance (14 Mar.), and discussing communications from the king (17, 29 Mar.), the militia (18 Mar.), and royal instructions to sheriffs to publish material against Parliament (29 Mar.; 5 Apr.).211CJ ii. 477a, 478a, 484a, 485b, 503b, 504b, 512a. He noted that, in voting that the Ordinance was ‘no whit prejudicial to the oath of allegiance’, MPs received ‘great encouragement and confirmation’ not only from such as Pym and Hampden, but also from lawyers like St John and Lisle, and even ‘the confident opinion of Lord Keeper [Sir Edward] Littleton†’, but surely placed himself among those ‘who went along with them, [although] not yet clear of this opinion’.212Whitelocke, Mems. 57. In a speech delivered around this time, he argued that the power of the militia ‘cannot be too warily lodged, not too seriously considered’. It was ‘neither in the king only, nor only in the Parliament; for if the law hath placed it anywhere it is in both king and Parliament, when they join together’. Since ‘the power of money is solely in this House ... without the power of money to pay the soldiers, the power of the militia will be of little force’. Therefore, ‘they must both agree, or else keep the sword in the scabbard, which is the best place for it’.213Whitelocke, Mems. 55.

To this end, ‘Whitelocke used his best endeavours with many others, but to no effect’.214Whitelocke, Diary, 131. Over the next few months he had a fairly high profile in the House. Alongside religious, commercial, financial and Irish business, he was a manager of some important trials; carried to the Lords a request for Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, to be appointed commander of the fleet (28 Mar.), and conferred with peers on numerous occasions; chaired a revived privileges committee (6 Apr.) and (reluctantly) grand committees on the militia (20, 21 Apr.); considered and reported on communication with the king; and worked on justifications of parliamentary action.215CJ ii. 479a, 495a, 497b, 502a, 504a, 505b, 506b, 512a, 513a, 519a, 535a, 535b, 536a, 538b, 539a, 546a, 548b, 550b, 551a, 551b, 556b, 572b, 578a, 609a, 609b, 610b, 611a, 658b; PJ ii. 192. By early June he was in effect making a considerable contribution to what would be the foundation of Parliament’s war effort. Presented with commissions from Saye and Sele to be a deputy lieutenant for Oxfordshire (28 May) and from Lord Wharton (lord lieutenant on parliamentary authority alone) for Buckinghamshire (5 June), Whitelocke accepted; he also reported to the Lords votes for other lords lieutenant (9 June) and promised two horses for Parliament’s defence (10 June).216PJ iii. 470; CJ ii. 614b, 615b, 623a; Whitelocke, Mems. 58. The legal arguments of Littleton and

the solemn protestations of the most powerful and active Members, “That they had not the least purpose or intention of any war with the king, but to arm themselves for their necessary defence”, prevailed with me to keep my station.217Whitelocke, Mems. 59; Diary, 131-2.

That friends including Maynard, Selden and Grimston came to the same conclusion was clearly reassuring.218Whitelocke, Diary, 132.

Yet it was not probably just with hindsight that he described the king’s ‘gracious answer’ to the petition presented to him at York in April and his own troubled reaction to subsequent events.219Whitelocke, Mems. 57. At the grand committees on Charles’s answer to the Nineteen Propositions which he chaired on 23 and 24 June, he appears to have been a moderating voice, while he probably performed the same function when he reported the next day, with the more militant Pym, Holles and Nathaniel Fiennes, from a conference with the Lords.220CJ ii. 637a, 638b, 639b. The defection of Littleton to the king in July was probably unsettling. Whitelocke sat with Grimston on the committee for ordering the militia (9 July), but voiced his profound reservations.221CJ ii. 663b. While he may have tinkered with the text after the event, the substance was probably unaltered. The order ‘seems to me to set us at the pits-brink, ready to plunge ourselves into an ocean of troubles and miseries’. It was ‘strange to note, how we have insensibly slid into this beginning of a civil war, by one expected accident after another, as waves of the sea’. The eventual ‘issue’ could not be known, but in the meantime, all would suffer. ‘Laws, liberties, properties and lives’ would be perforce surrendered ‘into the hands of insolent mercenaries, whose rage and violence will command us, and all we have’. For all that, the solution was not surrender. ‘Yet ... I am not for a tame resignation of our religion, lives and liberties into the hands of our adversaries, who seek to devour us’; it was not ‘inconsistent with your great wisdom, to prepare for a just and necessary defence of them’. But was it ‘not yet too soon to come to it’? Peace propositions should be amended and renewed and, ‘as far as may stand with the security of us and our cause’, Parliament should endeavour ‘to prevent the miseries which look black upon us, and to settle a good accommodation’, in order that ‘there may be no strife between us and those of the other party, for we are brethren’.222Whitelocke, Mems. 60-1; Diary, 132.

Enabling war and seeking peace, July 1642-Mar. 1643

In the months that followed Whitelocke evidently clung on to this vision. On the one hand he played his part in organising what he must have hoped would be the swift and decisive offensive to which he had alluded earlier; on the other hand he pursued opportunities for reconciliation when they arose.223Whitelocke, Mems. 64, 66. He also experienced personally the anticipated suffering and contributed to the preservation of vestiges of normal life.

With Prideaux, Whitelocke prepared the ordinance directing Sir Gilbert Gerard* as treasurer at war (30 July), while he drafted other civil and military correspondence and commissions, including that for making Pembroke governor of the Isle of Wight (6 Aug.; and later commander in the south west, 19 Oct.).224CJ ii. 664b, 697b, 702a, 703b, 706b, 814a, 815b. Already armed with orders to raise horse in Buckinghamshire (5 July), by 12 August he was at Fawley Court gathering arms, ammunition and horse.225CJ ii. 654b, 718a, 719a. There egotism temporarily got the better of his horror of war, and he succumbed to jealousy and scorn of others’ abilities. ‘Somewhat dissatisfied because his command was to be only of an independent troop of volunteers’, he accompanied Hampden in a successful attempt to head off the commissioners of array in south Oxfordshire and then in mid-September entered Oxford with Lord Saye. The awkward relations between Whitelocke and the viscount were not improved when the latter not only ignored Whitelocke’s advice and calls to make him governor of the city (understandable given his lack of experience) but also ‘declined the motion of making Oxford a garrison, whereof the following story will show the great error’.226Whitelocke, Diary, 132, 134-7; Mems. 62-3. Freed from a task he perversely but characteristically described as unwelcome, Whitelocke seems to have divided the rest of the September and October between deputy lieutenant duties in the country and Westminster, where he was added to the committee of accounts (5 Oct.) and promoted the local and national war effort.227CJ ii. 748b, 749a, 763b, 795a, 797a, 819b, 825a. When, following the battle of Edgehill, the king established his headquarters at Oxford and royalist forces dominated the surrounding region, Whitelocke retreated to London, no less committed to prosecuting a short, sharp campaign.228Whitelocke, Diary, 138-40. When on 13 November the royalist army approached Turnham Green, he took to the field for the day, spurning offers from Sir Philip Stapilton* and Hampden to join their cavalry troops and instead taking up a pike in the ranks of the latter’s regiment.229Whitelocke, Diary, 140. Among much else, he participated regularly in conferences of parliamentary leaders, voted for Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, as commander of parliamentary forces (2 Nov.), conferred with the Lords about the earl of Warwick’s command (22 Nov.), drafted declarations in defence of Parliament and was added to the Committee of Navy and Customs (24 Dec.).230CJ ii. 832a, 836a, 841a, 848b, 849a, 851a, 856b, 859a, 862b, 865b, 869a, 872b, 873a, 876b, 878a, 881b, 882a, 890b, 901b, 923a, 943a; Add. 18777, f. 50v. Numerous money-raising appointments complemented continuing liaison with the Merchant Adventurers over loans.231CJ ii. 860a, 862a, 897a, 900a, 903b, 912b, 922a, 983a, 994b; iii. 55a ; Whitelocke, Mems. 73; Add. 18777, ff. 69, 98, 114; Harl. 164, f. 274v.

At the same time Whitelocke was engaged in advancing existing business and maintaining as far as possible fundamentals of law and government. He was on committees to reply to a declaration from the general assembly of the Church of Scotland, to expel foreign religious and punish recusants (though within limits), and to suppress ‘superstitious’ material; he was in joint charge of the bill for calling an assembly of divines (4, 7 Oct.) and of refining a confession for use on fast days (11 Feb. 1643).232CJ ii. 748a, 763b, 793a, 798b, 835b, 913a, 962a; Harl. 164, f. 308. Periodically he appeared in the Journal and in debate in connection with the war in Ireland.233CJ ii. 835b, 883b, 948b, 973b; iii. 53b; Add. 18777, f. 170v. He wrestled with the legitimacy of newly-created officers, with keeping order and with the holding of assizes and other courts in a divided country (esp. 5 Jan; 13–25 Feb. 1643).234CJ ii. 885b, 915b, 932b, 964a, 966a, 969a, 979b; Add. 18777, f. 77.

Some of his worst fears about the conflict were soon realised. On 4 November 1642 he informed the House that his house at Fawley Court had been plundered by troops under Prince Rupert; on 23 November he related the confiscation by royalist soldiers of 1,000 cattle grazing around Aylesbury.235Add. 18777, ff. 50, 68; Add. 31116, p. 12; Harl. 164, f. 111v; Whitelocke, Diary, 138-9; Mems. 64-5. Subsequently he presented an ordinance for reparations to those who had suffered in this way (including himself) and drew orders that parliamentary troops should not take retaliatory action.236CJ ii. 870a, 870b, 879b, 881b, 883b, 907b.

He was doubtless all too well aware of outrages on both sides and how they undermined initiatives for peace. From late October he lodged in the London house in Ivy Lane of Sir Thomas Fanshawe, the king’s remembrancer of the exchequer. Lodging with him were his friends Matthew Hale, broadly a royalist sympathiser, and Geoffrey Palmer, whose excuses Whitelocke had presented to Parliament when he had earlier joined Charles in York.237Whitelocke, Diary, 138; Mems. 58. On 5 October Whitelocke sought permission for William Paul, an Oxfordshire rector with City connections, to leave the capital to serve his turn as chaplain to the king in Oxford, and obtained it in the face of some opposition.238Harl. 163, f. 417v; ‘William Paul’, Oxford DNB. When on 31 October Sir William Waller proposed a grand committee to consider peace, Whitelocke joined Sir Benjamin Rudyerd* (another habitual peacemaker who was, significantly, close to Pembroke) in seconding the motion.239Add. 18777, f. 47a. If he had once been thought by fellow lawyer Simonds D’Ewes* to be ‘very opposite against an accommodation’ – perhaps a reference to, and misinterpretation of, Whitelocke’s involvement with Pym, Vane and Henry Marten* in discussions over allowing the lord general to deliver a petition to the king in early October – he ‘did now earnestly speak for it’ (21 Nov.).240Harl. 164, f. 99; CJ ii. 795b, 798b, 799a. At a grand committee on 22 November Whitelocke revealed that his favoured compromise would be based on the king conceding all bills that had already passed both Houses, passing all bills repaying Parliament’s debts incurred for reparations and agreeing to a bill against delinquents and papists.241Add. 18777, f. 66; CJ ii. 920b, 940b. The act for confirming habeas corpus on which he was engaged (7 Jan. 1643.) was probably another non-negotiable element.242CJ ii. 918b. While in reality probably unattainable, these goals were much more modest than those held by hard-liners – as his contribution to debates reveals – and were potentially not unpalatable to some royalists.243Add. 18777, ff. 146, 148, 156, 160v; Add. 31116, p. 226; Harl. 164, ff. 292v.

Whitelocke was treading a delicate path. He sat on committees to prepare a conciliatory declaration taking into favour persons who had served against Parliament (14 Dec. 1642; 17 Jan. 1643) and a threatening declaration that, unless redress were made, Parliament would treat royalist prisoners in the same severe manner experienced by parliamentarian prisoners in Oxford castle (16 Dec.).244CJ ii. 888a, 891a, 930b. He joined Holles in telling for the majority who agreed to the release of Sir Thomas Jermyn* after he had been accused of sending money to the king (26 Dec.).245CJ ii. 902b. As he participated in discussion of successive propositions and messages from the king in January and February 1643, there is every reason to accept his assertion that he took every opportunity to promote peace.246CJ ii. 904b, 911a, 921b, 935a, 944b, 945a, 963a, 975a, 983b, 985a; Whitelocke, Mems. 66-7; Diary, 141. Whitelocke attributed his selection on 28 February as a commissioner for negotiations in Oxford to the fact that he had both ‘kept fair’ with Pym and Hampden (with whom he had clearly built up a store of credit) and kept aloof from any party, but this does not preclude his having been promoted by some – perhaps fellow commissioners Pembroke and Holland – specifically as a ‘peace’ candidate .247Whitelocke, Diary, 141.

On the commissioners’ arrival in Oxford on 21 March Whitelocke, whose ‘pen’ was again found ‘useful’, was entrusted with drafting all their submissions to the king, which were then transcribed by secretaries.248Whitelocke, Mems. 68. The notebook kept by Whitelocke’s trusted servant Daniel Earle, detailing the visit and including relevant correspondence and propositions, reveals that, bound by very strict instructions, the commissioners had little room for manoeuvre. Exchanges between the earl of Northumberland, chief representative of Parliament, and the king or Falkland acting on his behalf were punctuated by consultation between the actors on both sides and with Westminster, and by hours of waiting for access to the royal presence. The impression is that the commissioners were wrong-footed, more or less throughout: ‘the treaty’, they reported to Pym on 6 April, ‘is very full of difficulty and of much disadvantage to us’.249Add. 64867, esp. ff. 49v-50. Whitelocke’s own perspectives were complex, however. They had a hostile reception from some in the streets of Oxford, who called them ‘rebels and traitors’, but friends, kin and others around the court treated them well. The king ‘used the commissioners with great favour and civility’; in negotiation he revealed ‘great abilities in his apprehension, reason and judgement’. But he was apt to change his position overnight, being susceptible to persuasion from those in the bedchamber and elsewhere who sought to sabotage the treaty. It was thus towards the last moment that discussions broke down and ‘the treaty ... was dissolved, and all the labour and hazard in it, whereof Whitelocke had a great share, became fruitless’.250Whitelocke, Diary, 141-6; Mems. 67-9. Perhaps it was above all the conviction of Charles’s persuadability that ensured that this did not also terminate Whitelocke’s peace-making efforts.

The Westminster Assembly, 1643-4

Back at Westminster Whitelocke and two other commissioners, Sir William Armyne* and William Pierrepont*, joined a committee to prepare a declaration on the treaty (24 Apr.), while he alone assembled all the related papers for publication.251CJ iii. 58a, 72a, 73b. For nearly two years, in intervals between new rounds of negotiations his activity at Westminster largely ran along familiar lines. Alongside existing friends who had stayed with Parliament, like Maynard and Selden, he was now often in the company Pierrepont and Reynolds (with whom he sat on the committee for Irish affairs: 11 May 1643).252CJ iii. 109b, 236a. Wearing his professional hat in the Commons, he continued to address the difficulties of sealing writs and administering justice in the absence of the great seal at Oxford, to prosecute perpetrators of 1630s grievances and more recent offenders, to deliver legal opinions and to undertake wards business (including the preparation of the court’s abolition).253CJ iii. 92b, 93a, 113b, 269a, 271b, 373a, 390a, 409a, 422b, 457a, 486a, 511a, 525b, 526a, 526b, 645b, 673b, 694b; iv. 70a.

Still chair of the Merchant Adventurers’ committee until at least the beginning of 1645, he continued to negotiate for loans, as well as undertaking other commercial business. He dealt with petitioners from the City and west country clothiers, regulated the import and export of tobacco, food and ordnance, and was occasionally added for specific purposes to the Committees for the Navy*, the Army* and the Advance of Money*.254CJ iii. 55a, 214b, 258b, 266a, 359b, 391a, 399b, 429a, 486b, 504b, 541a, 546b, 673b, 716a, 722a, 728a, 731a; iv. 104b; Whitelocke, Mems. 73. He reported to the House on a petition of the moniers of the Tower of London (18 Oct. 1644; 27 Jan. 1645) and on measures for the relief of captives of pirates, held in Algiers (10 Dec. 1644; 25 Jan. 1645).255CJ iii. 668b, 719a; iv. 30a, 31b. An assessment commissioner for Buckinghamshire since February 1643, from time to time he was drawn into more general taxation and accounting matters, notably a general review of the state’s income (21 Aug. 1644).256CJ iii. 68a, 181a, 186a, 186b, 244b, 360a, 526a, 531b, 536a, 601a, 616b, 670a. Occasionally he was employed in Anglo-Scottish talks, although he retained his suspicion of the Scots’ intentions: on 2 September 1643 he moved to have Scottish articles read verbatim before they were assented to, without success.257CJ iii. 78a, 227b, 387b, 524b, 526b; iv. 3b; Harl. 165, f. 164v. He was involved in communication with Charles Louis, elector palatine, and with increasingly regularity he was called on to receive ambassadors – from the United Provinces, France and Sweden.258CJ iii. 266a, 266b, 363b, 411b, 415a, 466a, 453b, 535a, 553b, 612b, 618b, 689b, 713b; iv. 8b; Harl. 166, ff. 22, 23, 118v. In the absence of Holles, he supplied the House with translation from French.259Whitelocke, Mems. 118.

Relatively few mentions of Whitelocke in the Journal at this period relate to religion, but they are significant, reflecting a moderate stance which a substantial number of more obscure MPs may have shared. Several times named to assemble the evidence for the trial of Archbishop Laud (3 May 1643; 3 Jan., 14, 19 Sept. 1644), he eventually declined to attend committee, resisting the repeated requests of its chairman, Miles Corbett*.260CJ iii. 68a, 357b, 628a, 633b. His ‘urging’ that he be excused on the grounds

that the archbishop did me the favour to take a special care of my breeding in St John’s College ... and that it would be disingenuous and ungrateful for me to take away his life, who was so instrumental for the bettering of mine

was accepted by the House, supposedly to Corbett’s ‘displeasure’ and ‘regret’.261Whitelocke, Mems. 75. Whitelocke took the Covenant on 6 June 1643 and was placed with Reynolds, Armyne and Corbett on the committee charged with preparing instructions for its imposition ‘in all parts of the kingdom’ (9 June), but he noted that it was ‘long debated’ in the Commons whether Members should be obliged to subscribe.262CJ iii. 118a, 122b; Whitelocke, Mems. 69. He hesitated for several days before taking the Covenant tendered that autumn (30 Sept; 3 Oct.), although later he was happy to promote its extension to English subjects in foreign parts, reasoning pragmatically ‘that it would add much to the reputation of the cause’ if merchants in the Low Countries, who ‘lived and maintained themselves in great port and credit’, ‘might be drawn to take’ it (4 Mar. 1644).263CJ iii. 259b, 262a, 415a; Harl. 166, f. 23.

A member of the committee which prepared the ordinance calling the Westminster Assembly of divines (3 May 1643), Whitelocke was nominated to attend (7 June) – a responsibility he took seriously, convinced, as has been noted, that laymen had as important a role as clergymen in the church.264CJ iii. 68a, 119b; Whitelocke, Mems. 99; Diary, 148. His friend Selden, he recorded, ‘spake admirably’ during its sessions, ‘and confuted divers of them in their own learning’.265Whitelocke, Mems. 71. When in August 1644 debate turned to proposals for the settlement of the English church according to a divinely-ordained Presbyterian system, a majority opinion among the clerical delegates, Whitelocke expressed himself authoritatively, but in characteristically measured terms, in favour of removing the exclusive claim to divine sanction. ‘I am none of those ... who except against the Presbyterian government: I think it hath a good foundation, and hath done much good in the church of Christ.’ However, in circumstances where few were entirely clear ‘whether Presbytery, episcopacy, Independency, or any other form of government be jure divino or not’, delegates should consider whether an insistence on divine-right Presbyterianism might not prove an unhelpful snare. After all, he observed, employing the rationale of toleration, ‘the truth nevertheless will continue the same’, for ‘if this government be not jure divino, no opinion of any council can make it to be what it is not; and if it be jure divino, it continues so still, although you do not declare it to be so’.266Whitelocke, Mems. 99-100.

His hearers in the Assembly were generally unconvinced, but when their Presbyterian proposals were presented to Parliament that November, Whitelocke related that he and fellow lawyer John Glynne* ensured that these could not be ratified by a Commons attended only by ‘those who concurred in judgement with the Assembly, and had notice to be there early’. One after the other, Glynne and Whitelocke spoke against ‘the point of jus divinum’, the latter ‘enlarging [his] discourse to a much longer time than ordinary, and purposely that the House might be full, as it was before I made an end’. Their filibustering stratagem worked and the vote went in their favour. ‘Herein Glynne and I had thanks from divers for preventing the surprisal of the House upon this great question’ – although the gratitude of Independents and others was balanced by animosity from die-hard Presbyterians.267Whitelocke, Mems. 110-11; Diary, 155.

Later Whitelocke was doubtless a moderate voice, against the likes of Zouche Tate* and Sir Robert Harley*, on the committee which considered amendments to the Assembly’s Directory for Public Worship (3 Jan. 1645).268CJ iv. 9b. In other respects he preserved what was precious in the legacy of episcopacy and promoted ecumenical scholarship. In December 1642 he and Glynne had been ordered to secure the contents of the library of the archbishop of Canterbury.269CJ ii. 900b, 966b. He still held keys, and was thus among those who controlled access to manuscripts, in 1644, probably until the library was given to Sion College that October.270CJ iii. 469a; Whitelocke, Mems. 106. With Rudyerd and Pembroke’s right-hand man, Michael Oldisworth*, he sat on the committee chaired by Selden which promoted the project to print a Septuagint bible (3 Jan. 1645), ‘willingly assist[ing] in so good a work’.271CJ iv. 9a; Whitelocke, Diary, 185, 190, 194.

Meanwhile Whitelocke was to be found expressing the high – and sometimes unacceptable – cost of the war in money, lives and destruction of property. He was placed on committees considering the plight of the inhabitants of Reading at its surrender (6, 8 May 1643); following his motion that the garrison of Aylesbury was in ‘great strait’ (5 Feb.) he led a sustained relief effort (25 Mar.; May 1644).272CJ iii. 74b, 437b, 452b, 474b, 478b, 481b; Harl. 166, ff. 11, 39. He took charge of printing – for the purpose of negative propaganda – the proclamation issued by the king from Oxford putting the inhabitants of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire under severe penalties for failure to provide provisions for his royalist troops (Apr.), and brought the attention of the House to the double taxation and the other ‘insufferable insolences’ imposed on Buckinghamshire by parliamentarian soldiers (24, 26 May; 31 Dec.).273CJ iii. 464b, 467a, 467b; Harl. 164, ff. 391, 393v; Add. 31116, p. 364. He emerged as chair of a committee to investigate abuses of violence and extortion in other parts of the country (6, 20 May 1643) and was involved in its successors (20, 22 Jan.; 4 Mar. 1644; 24 Jan. 1645); promoted or drafted individual ordinances for reparations (13, 29 May; 9 June 1643); and, as Parliament’s forces began to assume a more permanent character, he brought in an ordinance regulating billeting and free quarter (Jan. 1645).274CJ iii. 73a, 84b, 93b, 121b, 372b, 374a, 415b; iv. 15a, 16b, 22b, 28b. Although he was nominated to committees involved in sequestrations (24 May; 2 June; 7, 10 Oct. 1643; 25, 30 Apr. 1644) and the exclusion of delinquent Members (11 Mar. 1644), he was also engaged in the relief of prisoners and petitioners from both sides, and the reception of former royalists defecting to Parliament (11 May, 28 July 1643; 7 Feb. 1644).275CJ iii. 80b, 100a, 112a, 113b, 185b, 265b, 390b, 423b, 470a, 473b; Add. 18778, f. 33; Harl. 166, f. 33. Although he profited personally from the re-assignment of the chambers of absentees from the inns of court (13 Feb. 1644), he claimed to have done ‘some service to my profession’ and particular service to his friend Palmer in preventing their being ransacked and ‘men’s evidences’ removed.276CJ iii. 398a; Whitelocke, Mems. 91.

Whitelocke and the peace party, 1643-5

The policies Whitelocke pursued and the company he kept left him open to suspicion of flirtation with the enemy. During this period his character of determined non-alignment wears thin: he was visibly identified with opponents of the party advocating the winning of the war at any cost and at key moments specifically associated with the earl of Essex. The former became apparent in May 1643. When Edmund Waller*, who had been with Whitelocke on the mission to Oxford, built on contacts made there to hatch a plot to raise royalist support in London, he thought it worthwhile to sound out Whitelocke, Selden and Pierrepont. According to the relation he made under examination, having visited them in Selden’s study, he concluded from their horrified reaction to his initial tentative and very general remarks that it ‘was not fit or safe’ to elaborate on his design. They were thus exonerated from being accessories, but it is not clear that they informed on his subversive comments, and the possibility that Waller was not telling the whole truth and that there was no smoke without fire probably hung in the air.277Whitelocke, Mems. 70, 105; Diary, 142, 147. That Whitelocke was named to the committee which eventually implemented the punishment of a £10,000 fine on Waller (23 Sept. 1644) does not absolutely exonerate him.278CJ iii. 637a.

Meanwhile, among Whitelocke’s ‘intimates’ of spring and summer 1643, the earl of Holland deserted Parliament in August and went to the king, Northumberland was implicated in the apparent correspondence of Sir John Evelyn of Surrey* and Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire* with Oxford, while Pierrepont was patently (if temporarily) disaffected and Pembroke was permanently unreliable.279s.v. ‘John Evelyn of Wiltshire’, ‘William Pierrepont’, ‘Philip Herbert, 4th earl of Pembroke’; ‘Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland’, Oxford DNB. Whitelocke does not disclose the subject of the ‘consultations’ they and Lord Wenman had at his house.280Whitelocke, Diary, 147. It would be reasonable to conclude, however, that, faced with the serious military reversals of 1643 and the death on 14 June at Chalgrove field of Hampden, the ‘kind friend and kinsman’ who had probably oiled his relations with Pym and with more militant MPs, Whitelocke gravitated away from them.281Whitelocke, Diary, 147; Mems. 70. Given leave to go into the country on 17 June 1643, he was absent from the Journal until 19 July.282CJ iii. 133b, 174a. It may be significant that he troubled to record that Speaker Lenthall gave him a pass ‘with a blank to insert what place he pleased, such confidence he had in Whitelocke’s friendship and faithfulness’.283Whitelocke, Diary, 147.

It is also suggestive that, when disagreements over responsibility for the summer’s defeats multiplied, Whitelocke disappeared from the Journal for a lengthier, unexplained absence. After a conference with the Lords on 10 October and nomination on the 13th to the committee reviewing the petition of Clement Walker*, committed to the Tower for voicing his criticisms of Lord Saye and his son Nathaniel Fiennes, Whitelocke did not reappear in the record until January 1644.284CJ iii. 271b, 274b, 357b. The timing of his re-emergence may have been at least partly connected with the return of Holland to the parliamentary fold. That month, ‘upon the desire’ of Lord General Essex, the earl of Warwick ‘and other great persons’, Whitelocke worked successfully for Holland’s readmission to the Lords.285Whitelocke, Diary, 149; Mems. 80.

Even if Whitelocke exaggerated the frequency of summons he received to speak with Essex at this juncture, there is no doubt that he and the earl were close.286Whitelocke, Diary, 150-1. Another factor which brought them together was the dismissal of Whitelocke’s brother-in-law and Essex appointee Lord Willoughby from his post as major-general in Lincolnshire following criticism of his competence from Henry Montagu†, 2nd earl of Manchester, commander of the Eastern Association, and his lieutenant, Oliver Cromwell* (20 Jan.).287‘Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham’, Oxford DNB; CJ iii. 271a, 534b. As militants increasingly questioned the command of Essex himself, the earl received renewed overtures from Oxford. ‘The friends of peace , of whom Whitelocke was not the backwardest’, persuaded the House to debate them.288Whitelocke, Diary, 153. To those who ‘seemed averse to any propositions at all for peace’, Whitelocke asked who present had not felt ‘the strokes’ of ‘the calamities of our distractions’? The country was ‘weary of our discords’, while foreigners helped to ‘open the veins wider’.289Whitelocke, Mems. 84. This initiative, which he and others discussed in conferences with the Lords about peace on 5 and 15 March, was no more productive than its predecessors, however.290CJ iii. 416b, 438b.

As Essex struggled to hold on to authority and military resources in the face of the diversion of both to the war in the north, Whitelocke participated in numerous committees and conferences on related matters, with attendant – if in the event unrealisable – possibilities of influence in the earl’s favour.291CJ iii. 383a, 418b, 452b, 466a, 482a, 486a. He spoke with Holles against martial law (18 May), and probably reported an Essex line from the committee on the militia (13, 14 June).292Harl. 166, f. 62v; CJ iii. 527b, 529b. On 22 May, with Holles, Maynard and Reynolds, he voiced objections to the Committee of Both Kingdoms (CBK), where the nucleus of the campaign to oust Essex was located.293Harl. 166, f. 64v. But his chief utility to the earl almost certainly lay in the Thames valley, where, doubtless encouraged by further damage to his property, he supported Essex’s plans to redeem his reputation through an all-out campaign. Whitelocke was a leading member of the recently-constituted Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire association, although he declined a proposal that he should command a company of their forces.294Whitelocke, Diary, 150-1, 153; Mems. 88. He presented to the House intelligence on the success of Essex’s success in taking Henley (13 May), was the official conduit to the earl of resolutions from Parliament and the CBK (17, 18 , 20 May) and chaired deliberations on the support to be offered for the ‘reduction’ of Oxford, Essex’s original goal (6, 7 June).295CJ iii. 388a, 491b, 498a, 499a, 500b, 507b, 520b-521b; Harl. 166, ff. 70, 72, 73.

All this came to nothing, however, when Essex was deflected into following the king into the west. Whitelocke, left with the assembly of resources for taking Oxford (17 June), probably experienced considerable frustration.296CJ iii. 533a. Summoned on 1 July to attend the CBK, Whitelocke apparently obeyed: by the 10th he had relayed some of its orders to Major-general Richard Browne II* at High Wycombe.297CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 296, 334. But he was absent from the Journal between 6 July and 22 August.298CJ iii. 553b, 601a. He may have been simply spending time with his family at their new lodgings in Sir Henry Vane II’s house in Deptford, although his choice to accept Vane’s offer indicates that he kept some radical company.299Whitelocke, Diary, 151. In the aftermath of victory at Marston Moor the CBK turned its attention to Essex, whose foray to the west was going badly wrong. On 9 August Essex partisans Reynolds, Stapilton and John Clotworthy* wrote urgently to both Whitelocke and Holles, calling for their return to Westminster. An address from the French ambassador had rekindled their hopes for peace, prompting an appeal to ‘those who affect the good of this kingdom’ not to ‘loiter in this seasonable time’, but also ‘my Lord General’s condition requires his friends being here ... without delay’; they were ‘much wanted and earnestly expected’.300Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. ix, f. 27. It is notable that Whitelocke seems to have taken some days to concur.

In the event, despite the fact that Essex’s campaign ended in an ignominious retreat, Whitelocke remained loyal to the earl. He was prominent among MPs who on 7 September prepared a letter which ‘wholly excused him for being the cause of the misfortune in the west’, while also relaying further peace proposals Essex had received from Oxford.301CJ iii. 621a, 629a; Harl. 166, f. 113; Whitelocke, Diary, 153. ‘I think I knew as much of his mind as others did, and always observed him to wish for peace’, Whitelocke observed, ‘yet not upon any dishonourable or unjust terms’.302Whitelocke, Mems. 108. Yet there is an impression of a slight distance between them: Whitelocke’s loyalty was neither unconditional nor exclusive. His diary makes no allusion to communication between them that autumn as the earl lay at Reading ill and deprived of overall command, but only ‘constant correspondence’ with Browne.303Whitelocke, Diary, 153. At the same time, his links to Pembroke were closer than ever. In addition to much other business that autumn, he was employed on the affairs of Windsor Castle, of which the earl had made him lieutenant.304Whitelocke, Mems. 109; CJ iii. 388a, 507b, 520b–521b, 533a; Harl. 166, ff. 70, 72-3. None the less, it is possible that the victory at Newbury in October, in which Essex’s troops performed with credit, restored any lost confidence on Whitelocke’s part.

Whitelocke’s quest for peace perhaps received a fillip. A reporter of conferences with the Lords in early November, on the 14th he was appointed to a parliamentary commission to the king.305CJ iii. 686a, 690a, 691a, 697a; Harl. 166, f. 153. His account of the negotiations, again held at Oxford, was patently crafted to counter the accusations of treachery which he was to face seven months later, but does not remove all doubt. According to Whitelocke, the party was again met by rudeness from some officers, but civility from the king and cordiality from some former associates like Hyde. Effectively, Holles and Whitelocke broke a prior agreement not to fraternise too closely with the enemy and not to offer anything without prior discussion when they visited Robert Bertie, 1st earl of Lindsey. On arrival they found not only the earl, ill in bed, but also others including Thomas Savile†, 2nd Baron Savile; soon afterwards Charles and Prince Rupert arrived, ‘whether sent to, after we came, or by accident, we knew not’. Asked to draft for royal consideration ‘what might be fit for the substance of the king’s answer’ to parliamentary proposals, Holles and Whitelocke persuaded themselves ‘it would be no breach of trust in us to observe the King’s desire herein: but that it might be a means to facilitate the work about which we came’. Withdrawing into another room, they produced a document which Whitelocke ‘wrote not in my usual hand’ and did not sign, and which they left on departure. There was no breach of trust, Whitelocke stressed: ‘what we did herein was in compassion to our bleeding distressed country, and for the effecting of that which was universally longed for, the settlement of a just and happy peace’. But despite the agreement, the pair said nothing to fellow commissioners; ‘nor could all the examinations at the House of Commons get it out of us’.306Whitelocke, Mems. 112-14; Diary, 155-9. That they had acted unwisely, if not dangerously, must have become apparent when Charles, ‘in no good humour’, first refused to reveal his answer to the commissioners and then sent them a copy only as they were leaving with a sealed letter to Parliament.307Whitelocke, Mems. 115; Diary, 160.

In the short term there were no negative repercussions. In the letter, read in the Commons when Holles made his report (30 Nov.), the king asked to defer his answer until it should be delivered by the duke of Richmond and the earl of Southampton, while the commissioners received the thanks of the House.308CJ iii. 710a, 710b. Following a vote to continue the negotiations, the commissioners were at the core of the reception committee for the royal envoys (14, 16 Dec.) and Whitelocke was a messenger to the Lords on furthering the treaty (26 Dec.).309CJ iii. 724a, 724b; iv. 2b; Whitelocke, Mems. 118; Diary, 161.

Meanwhile, on 3 December Whitelocke was summoned with Maynard to Essex House to advise the earl and the Scottish commissioners, who had recently transferred their hopes of a favourable settlement away from Lord Saye and the war party, and onto the impeachment of Oliver Cromwell.310Whitelocke, Mems. 116; Diary, 160. This was intended as a counter-attack to plans to deprive the moderate commanders of their military office, first manifested the previous month.311CJ iii. 695b. Whitelocke related that he and Maynard were much more cautious than Essex’s ‘special and most intimate friends’ who were present – including Holles and Stapilton – counselling that Cromwell could not be charged as an ‘incendiary’, wilfully provoking conflict, in the absence of watertight proof. This argument convinced the Scots (Whitelocke said) and the plot came to nothing. Leaked to the intended victim, it also earned Whitelocke and Maynard unwonted respect from Cromwell.312Whitelocke, Mems. 116-17; Diary, 160-1. That Whitelocke was the next day entrusted with an order from the House to Essex that, in response to complaints, he must repress soldiers perpetrating ‘insolencies’ in Reading suggests that he was seen both as an associate of the earl and as someone who might be trusted.313CJ iii. 714a.

None the less, when Zouche Tate moved on 9 December what became known as the Self-Denying Ordinance, ‘set on by that party who contrived the outing of the lord general, and to bring on their own designs’, Whitelocke spoke against it.314Whitelocke, Mems. 118. Confident in his own disinterestedness, being without the military office which would be denied to Members of both Houses, he dismissed claims that the move would replenish the depleted Parliament: this was better accomplished by elections to replace those previously excluded or deceased. For the peace treaty to proceed it was helpful, rather than unhelpful, to have officers among the commissioners; dispensing with them was not necessary to the other current preoccupation of ‘new modelling’ the army. Good and successful men were to be laid aside, without plain cause given: they deserved at least honour and thanks, but this was ‘a side wind’.315Whitelocke, Mems. 119; Diary, 162. When the Commons passed the Ordinance, Whitelocke reported the Lords’ reasons for dissenting (7 Jan. 1645), although he and Selden may have sat on the committee rejecting this response with at least some sense of the breach of parliamentary privilege committed by peers in their persistent opposition (8 Jan.).316CJ iv. 11b, 12b, 13b, 17a; Whitelocke, Mems. 122.

The commissioners named on 14 January to meet the king’s nominees at Uxbridge contained not only Whitelocke, Holles and Wenman, but also the younger Vane and St John, as well as Pierrepont, now closer to the war party.317CJ iv. 19b, 24a. While the variety of opinion represented might hold out a greater chance of securing a settlement acceptable at Westminster, it also complicated the negotiating process, as did the different friendships across the political divide. When proceedings opened on 29 January, Hyde appreciated ‘the old openness’ of his former friend Whitelocke, placing him among those who ‘did in their hearts desire a peace, and upon much honester conditions than they durst own’. In Whitelocke’s case the barrier to achieving this was not, Hyde considered, an ‘inclination to [the] persons and principles’ of his colleagues at Westminster; rather, it arose from the (highly contestable) fact that ‘all his estate was in their quarters’ and a nature that ‘could not bear or submit to be undone’.318Clarendon, Hist. iii. 82. For his part Whitelocke acknowledged that Hyde had visited him and Holles, that he visited Hyde and Palmer, and that there had been ‘private discourses together for the furthering of the treaty’.319Whitelocke, Diary, 162. However, set to argue their sides’ respective cases regarding power over the militia Hyde and Whitelocke divided along the same lines as in 1642. While the former ‘affirmed the power ... to be by law unquestionably in the king only, Whitelocke denied this, as reflecting upon the Parliament’s propositions, and not clear by law where that power was’.320Whitelocke, Diary, 164.

A fruitless confrontation was terminated by intervention from Southampton and Holles, although Whitelocke recalled that he had been thanked by fellow commissioners for ‘encountering of Sir Edward Hyde and vindicating the honour and right of Parliament’.321Whitelocke, Diary, 164; Mems. 129. The issue proved a particular sticking point, and it was Whitelocke who on 17 February was despatched to Parliament for further instructions; although this elicited approval and more time for negotiation, it is not clear what part he played in the rest of the negotiations.322Whitelocke, Diary, 164-5; Mems. 130-2. The commissioners were thanked again when they made their final report on 25 February, but ‘the averseness of the king’s party to peace’ meant that nothing had been achieved.323CJ iv. 62b; Whitelocke, Diary, 165.

The ‘reduction’ of Oxford and the Savile affair

Whitelocke returned to a subtly different political landscape at Westminster. Although the Lords had yet to pass the Self-Denying Ordinance and to approve the officers nominated under the New Model Ordinance, options were limited by the support for the latter in the Commons, the appointment of Sir Thomas Fairfax* as commander-in-chief of the new army and the ‘sheer military necessity’ of organising for war in the absence of a viable peace. Outwardly, Whitelocke accommodated himself to circumstances; he went so far as to acknowledge that the change to the new army ‘came off better than expected’. This position clearly owed much to his desire to see the conflict in the Thames valley concluded as swiftly as possible by the means available.324Whitelocke, Mems. 141. However, if this was the touchstone of his loyalty, it could cut two ways. There are strong indications that, in a situation where the new order had yet to be established, he remained committed to the reinstatement of Essex, and that he even facilitated the counter-attack launched by the earl that summer. Whether or not he was fully apprized of the latter, factional fighting nearly derailed his parliamentary career.

Whitelocke had been supporting the command of Browne in the Abingdon area just before his departure for Uxbridge (14, 15 Jan.) and he resumed his quest for resources on his return (20, 28 Mar.).325CJ iv. 19b, 21a, 21b, 85a, 91a; Whitelocke, Mems. 138; Diary, 167. On 18 March he was appointed governor of the garrison at Phyllis Court: although this was because it ‘was his own house’ and thus in his own interest, there is a palpable element of pride in the care he took for pay and morale, even if this was conducted from afar.326Whitelocke, Diary, 166; Mems. 137. As a teller with Holles he narrowly failed to prevent the disbandment of one regiment at Abingdon on 24 April, but he continued to work hard inside and outside Parliament through the spring and early summer to collect funds and raise soldiers for the siege of Oxford, reporting on 5 June amendments to an ordinance for raising £20,000.327CJ iv. 123a, 147a, 148b, 155b, 156b, 157a, 157b, 160b, 164a, 164b; Harl. 166, f. 213v; Whitelocke, Diary, 167. As long as the campaign continued it may have encouraged cordiality between him and New Model commanders Fairfax and Cromwell, but by the same token, the abandonment of the siege, also on 5 June, is likely to have irked him sorely.

Whitelocke made no surviving comment about this setback, but in view of what subsequently occurred to do so might have been to invite unwelcome probing. In any case, his ire would conceivably have been directed against the Committee of Both Kingdoms rather than commanders on the ground. Unless his expressions were entirely coloured by hindsight, Whitelocke maintained a longstanding regard for the Fairfax family, who acknowledged him as kin.328Whitelocke, Diary, 141; Mems. 66. This would have at least partially reconciled him to participation in the creation of the New Model. He was nominated to the committee charged with procuring the £80,000 needed to set forth the army (6 Mar.) and thereafter to committees to organise the management of revenue, excise and accounts (7, 11, 18 Apr.); he drafted a letter to county committees enjoining them to assist excise officers (31 May).329CJ iv. 71a, 102b, 107a, 116a, 158b. He criticised those in the Commons who ‘made extravagant speeches and discourses touching the House of Lords’ when the latter, dominated by Essex’s party, rejected the revised Self-Denying Ordinance, but (while engaged on its re-committal, 24 Mar.) he was realistic.330Whitelocke, Mems. 138; CJ iv. 88a. Unlike those of Essex’s friends who opposed to the end ‘his laying down of his commission’, Whitelocke was surely among those others who ‘told him that mischiefs and contests might arise if he kept it’ – advice the earl clearly (and according to Whitelocke, graciously) heeded in his resignation on 2 April.331Whitelocke, Mems. 140. Judging by his subsequent employment on committees dealing with deserters and mutineers, Whitelocke remained sensitive to instances of disorder (5, 17 Mar.; 14, 19 Apr.; 8 May), although like Sir Henry Vane II he contributed to the rejection of an ordinance for martial law by arguing that those in the provinces ‘would be brought into an intolerable bondage, having their lives depend on the wills of a few men’.332CJ iv. 70a, 7b, 80b, 110a, 117a, 135b; Harl. 166, f. 202v, 207v. Meanwhile, he became prominent in devising the ordinance managing the offices of the lord admiral (15 Apr.; 2 May) and sat on the committee which was to provide a pension for Essex (20 May); he took to the Lords the order for payment (4 June).333CJ iv. 112a, 128b, 148b, 162b.

Whitelocke was collecting sufficient other business to have a constant and very visible profile in the House. Two cases of breach of privilege point to a continued specialisation in such matters, but also to varied contacts. He presented a complaint by Lord Wenman, a fellow commissioner at Uxbridge and a colleague in much of the Thames valley business of the spring and summer, of violation of privilege by Robert Carr, 1st earl of Somerset (14 May), and prepared the impeachment of the discredited parliamentarian general Henry Grey*, 1st earl of Stamford, for assaulting the leading Independent Sir Arthur Hesilrige* (23 May).334Add. 31116, p. 418; CJ iv. 136a, 140b, 141b, 152b. He headed the list of MPs who were to receive a weekly allowance, presented on 4 June.335CJ iv. 161a.

But at this point factional strife erupted. On 4 June Essex, acting in concert with the Scottish commissioners, launched what has been plausibly presented as the first salvo in a long-prepared bombardment of Saye and his allies. He supplied the Lords with information ‘which directly linked’ the shameful loss of Leicester to the royalists at the end of May – the event which occasioned Fairfax’s departure from Oxford – ‘with the negligence of the Grey-Hesilrige connection both in Leicestershire and at Westminster’.336M. Mahony, ‘The Savile affair and the politics of the Long Parliament’, PH vii. 212-27, esp. 218. Two days later he struck again, putting before the Committee of Both Kingdoms an intercepted letter from Lord Digby to the governor of Oxford. The message, forwarded by Essex’s associate Colonel Edward Massie*, alluded vaguely to clandestine negotiations.337‘The Savile affair’, 212. It is possible that Whitelocke had no prior knowledge of or contribution to the onslaught, but that is on balance unlikely. Chair since 23 April of a committee charged with conferring with the Scots commissioners ‘upon occasion’, he had recently investigated Grey and Hesilrige, and he and Holles were selected on 6 June to draft a letter on other matters from the Speaker to Massie.338CJ iv. 121b, 165b. Both men sat on the committee set up to look into Digby’s letter (7 June), as did Sir Henry Vane II, still (until the arrangement ended in mid-August) Whitelocke’s landlord.339CJ iv. 167a.

Meanwhile, on 6 June Saye had fired his own round in the form of a report to the Committee of Both Kingdoms from his subcommittee relating to hitherto undisclosed negotiations for the surrender of Oxford with royalist defector Lord Savile and to evidence (supplied by Savile) of spying by Holles. Since the negotiations were unauthorised, Saye was risking a good deal and may have been manoeuvred into revealing his hand. This matter was also confided to the 7 June committee. It has been argued that there was a delay before it met, but the fact that on 11 June Whitelocke complied with an instruction to bring in to the House papers related to the treaty of November 1644 which were in his hands suggests that some progress had been made by then.340‘The Savile affair’, esp. p. 217; CJ iv. 172b. He was made chairman – probably an indication both of the strength of the Essex party and of the fact that thus far no mud had stuck to him – but by the time he reported Savile’s refusal to name his sources and consequently weak case (16, 17 June), further aspects of the pro-Essex campaign had revealed themselves.341CJ iv. 176a, 178a. London Presbyterian minister James Cranford (prompted, as it proved, by Scottish commissioner Robert Baillie) spread publicly stories of treacherous collusion between Saye’s subcommittee and Digby, while Essex associate Stapilton had reported disparaging remarks uttered by Peregrine Pelham against Essex, Manchester and himself.342V. Pearl, ‘London Puritans and Scotch Fifth-Columnists’, in P.E. Jones, Studies in London History (1969), 317-331, esp. 322. Whitelocke was on both the Commons committee investigating the latter (11 June) and the joint committee on Cranford, from which he reported on 14 June.343CJ iv. 172b, 174b. He was thus well positioned to guide enquiries in a direction congenial to himself and his friends.

For a time the Essex strategy seemed to be gaining ground. However, the parliamentarian victory at Naseby on 14 June, so welcome in most respects, went a fair way to vindicate the New Model army and to hand the initiative to Saye. Whitelocke himself was full of praise for Fairfax – as he was for the king, and for many on both sides.344Whitelocke, Mems. 151; ‘The Savile affair’, 220-1. The capture on the field of a cache of royal correspondence had its positive aspect – a document of Digby’s established that he and not Whitelocke had been the mole in the Strafford trial – but it also had the potential to expose Whitelocke’s and Holles’s conduct in Oxford, even though their paper had been returned. Both were nominated to the investigating committee (23 June), but given the delay in its assembly and the chairmanship of war party man Tate, it was conceivable that the material had been picked over before reaching the committee room.345CJ iv. 183b; Whitelocke, Diary, 127; ‘The Savile affair’, 220-1.

Present in the Commons on 26 June, when he went to remind the Lords about the ordinance for deserters, Whitelocke was assured that the ordinance for funding the Oxford campaign would be considered, and was deputed to prepare a declaration against clubmen (all related to typical pre-occupations), but he may then have been absent for all the next five days.346CJ iv. 186b, 187a, 187b, 189a. He was not in the House, and perhaps not expected, on 2 July, when Saye’s kinsman John Gurdon* presented a letter from Savile with a new accusation.347CJ iv. 194a; ‘The Savile affair’, 221. This was the circumstantially plausible claim that Holles and Whitelocke had behaved treacherously while commissioners at Oxford and had ‘made an offer to the king to procure the House of Commons to yield to such propositions as the king should make’.348Add. 31116, p. 436. Cornered, as was probably the intention, Holles admitted both their unscheduled meeting with the king and their production of a paper, but denied advising the king how to answer Parliament’s propositions or holding correspondence with royalists. Whitelocke still thought he ‘unadvisedly and suddenly confessed more than he needed to have done’.349Whitelocke, Mems. 154; Diary, 168. The revelation was greeted by demands from some that both men should be committed to the Tower forthwith, but this was defeated when Sir William Lewis* and Stapilton argued that it was unjust to imprison two such faithful Members on the word of a man of fluid allegiances. An alternative proposal from Lisle that he should give Whitelocke notice to attend the next day was accepted and, summoned from Vane’s house at Deptford, he duly attended. He was forewarned of the business at issue by a visit from Winwood; Lisle had sent only ‘a grave general letter’ and ‘Whitelocke suspected Lisle to be of the combination of his accusers’, a suspicion grounded in the latter’s proximity to Saye and lent plausibility as a ploy to surprise another confession.350Whitelocke, Diary, 169; Mems. 154.

On 3 July, after a morning in the Commons during which ‘nothing was said to him in public’, ‘Whitelocke himself moved, that in regard it was full of sadness to him to be under a cloud and suspicion in this House’ for as yet unspecified business, it might be heard the next day. Supported by others, the motion was accepted.351Whitelocke, Diary, 170; Mems. 155; CJ iv. 194b. Submission made a good impression; the defined delay gave sufficient opportunity to take counsel but hope of prompt resolution. On the 4th Whitelocke, according to his recollection, having established his credentials as a sufferer in the service of Parliament (unlike Savile), admitted to the visit to Lindsey, to whom he had ‘a particular relation and alliance’, and to the unexpected encounter with Southampton and Savile. He told MPs that he and Holles had reassured the royalists that the Scots genuinely sought peace and that they ‘did not speak of any violent Independent party’. They had insisted that Parliament’s demands on religion and the militia were indispensable to the conclusion of peace, and that the Westminster Parliament was a real Parliament.352Whitelocke, Mems. 155; Diary, 170; Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. ix. f. 52.

In the debate that followed, Savile’s refusal to name his informant on Holles and previous failure to accuse Whitelocke despite the latter’s chairmanship of the enquiry was underlined.353Add. 18778, f. 61v; Add. 31116, p. 437; Harl. 166, f. 237; Whitelocke, Mems. 156. Examination of Savile in this particular matter of privilege had to be left to his peers, but the fact that Whitelocke had ‘voluntarily, and upon his own accord, made a narrative in general of his knowledge in this business’ was noted when a Commons committee was nominated to consider the allegations against him and Holles.354CJ iv. 195b. Among some of his friends named – including Lewis, Maynard, Stapilton and Clotworthy – there was relief; among other friends – notably Reynolds – there was chilly distance; other members – notably Lisle and Vane – seemed hostile. For Whitelocke this was a clear case of factionalism. ‘The enemies of the earl of Essex put their interest upon it to ruin Holles, whom they found a pillar of his party’; those ‘very hearty friends’ who rallied to Whitelocke were also to a greater or lesser extent of that party. Significantly, however, he regarded the attack on himself as somewhat incidental: ‘they had not the same envy against me’, but they ‘could not well sever us’.355Whitelocke, Mems. 155; Diary, 170-1.

Alignments were demonstrated when a well-attended session of the pre-existing Savile committee met on 7 July under the hostile chairmanship of Samuel Browne. St John, Vane, Gurdon and others used the occasion to attack Holles and Whitelocke, but when Savile was called and failed to provide proofs, it was a case of his word (and Saye’s) against theirs. The next day Hesilrige tried again and prompted Savile to reveal more of his role in the Oxford negotiations and the meeting with Holles and Whitelocke, but the initiative began to slip away from their side when Gurdon disclosed that he had received the letter produced on 2 July from Saye’s daughter, Lady Temple, and that Saye and Vane, among others, had effectively briefed him. On the 10th Browne’s attempt to make Hollis and Whitelocke answer interrogatories was overruled and they had the opportunity to deny categorically ‘some of the Lord Savile’s informations which were not true’ .356Whitelocke, Diary, 171-2; Mems. 156-8. If Whitelocke can be trusted on this point, it was a sign of his opponents’ weakness that on 11 July, when the committee did not sit, and not before, that ‘many private messages were sent to’ him ‘and conferences with him, to assure him that if he would desert Holles, and join against him, he should not only be spared, but highly rewarded and preferred’. The threatened alternative was ‘loss of his life and destruction’.357Whitelocke, Diary, 173; Mems. 158. He resisted, whether through principle, affinity or confidence. The upswing continued on the 12th, when the earl of Denbigh and Wenman appeared at the defendants’ request to corroborate their version of events at Oxford (more or less: they were vague in some particulars).358Whitelocke, Diary, 173; Mems. 158-9.

A crucial breakthrough on the 14th underlined the importance of the Essex-Scots commissioners axis.359‘The Savile affair’, 222. The latter presented to the committee intercepted letters between Savile and Oxford since he had defected to London. Questioned about these, Savile revealed that these communications had been authorised by the subcommittee of the Committee of Both Kingdoms and ‘from time to time’ encouraged by Saye; thereby ‘Hollis and Whitelocke found the bottom of this design against them’.360Whitelocke, Diary, 174. This did not end the matter: ‘long debates’ between two clearly opposing sides ensued in the Commons on the 14th and 15th.361Harl. 166, f. 240; Whitelocke, Mems. 161; CJ iv. 208a. Also on the 14th Whitelocke reported on the Cranford enquiry, of which, in a testament to Essex-party strength, he was still chairman; he requested permission for the committee to confer with Commissioner Baillie.362Add. 31116, p. 430; Add. 18778, f. 37v. The two matters, inextricably inter-related, dominated Commons business on the 17th and 18th , when Holles and Whitelocke were individually cross-examined; Whitelocke spoke at length on both topics to the same effect as previously.363Add. 31116, p. 441; Add. 18780, ff. 77-8, 79a; Harl. 166, ff. 241, 244; CJ iv. 211a. A resolution that the case was ‘ripe for judgement’ proved premature.364CJ iv. 212b. It took two further days of deliberations (19, 21 July), a vote against an adjournment (led by Wenman and Sir Thomas Dacres*) and marshalling of support in the chamber before the Commons finally concluded that ‘forasmuch as it doth not appear to the House that Holles and Whitelocke had any ill intention in their proceedings at Oxford’, the accusation was ‘totally and finally laid aside’. Victory seemed complete: Holles and Whitelocke were given leave to prosecute Savile for reparation.365CJ iv. 213a, 213b, 214b; Add. 31116, p. 443; Add. 18780, f. 81v; Harl. 166, ff. 243v, 245v; Whitelocke, Diary, 176; Mems. 161. The Cranford business was still outstanding two days later when the clerk was ordered to deliver papers to Whitelocke.366CJ ii. 216a.

Realignment and victory, Aug. 1645-Oct. 1646

With a rapidity that seems to demonstrate the strength of the Essex party case, or the desperation of Saye’s manoeuvring, the shadow of punishment for treason lifted and Whitelocke’s business in the House returned to normal. Pierrepont, protesting his motives ‘as a true friend’, warned Whitelocke at the beginning of August that ‘further prosecutions’ were being contemplated against Holles, at least. Holles scornfully ‘slighted it’, although his earnest profession of friendship and fraternity to Whitelocke may have been intended to keep him on side.367Whitelocke, Diary, 177. The effort was worth making. Over the next few months, even if allowances are made for exaggeration, Whitelocke’s diary reveals that he was courted from many quarters: ‘I set down these things to show how men will be caressed if they are thought capable to do any favours’.368Whitelocke, Mems. 174.

On the one hand there is plenty of evidence that he had close contact with the Essex camp until at least the end of 1645. ‘Holles and his party’ continued to ‘treat Whitelocke very kindly’, although the latter advised the former against pursuing their grievance against Savile; Holles, Lewis and Stapilton took him out to dinner twice; Stapilton successfully moved for him to be granted the books and manuscripts of Lord Keeper Littleton, while Whitelocke acted as counsel for Stapilton’s mother.369Whitelocke, Diary, 179-83; Mems. 179-80; CJ iv. 274a, 452b, 467b, 468a. He dined at Essex House, and consulted there on 21 December with the earl, Holles, Stapilton, Lewis , Walter Long* and Lord Willoughby (another frequent associate) on the eve of the departure of the last as a commissioner to the Scots; Whitelocke also ‘reconciled’ differences between Willoughby and fellow commissioner Rutland.370Whitelocke, Diary, 183-4; Mems. 183.

On the other hand, Whitelocke was apparently on good terms with a wide range of other individuals and groups. Alongside Willoughby and Rutland, his professional clients in the Lords included the earls of Middlesex, Lincoln and Winchelsea, and Lords Grey and Maynard; among former royalist commoners he acted for his old friend Palmer and for Sir Robert Jenkinson, recently the king’s sheriff of Oxfordshire; he was retained by newly-elected recruiter MP Sir John Danvers. He remained close to Selden and the countess of Kent, and to Rudyerd and Pembroke; when the earl proposed him as steward of Westminster College (Nov. 1645), the dissenters on the College committee were ‘his usual adversaries’, Roger Hill II* and William Wheler*, whose antipathy was most likely to have been personal or religious.371Whitelocke, Diary, 177-84, esp. 183. More notably, Speaker Lenthall ‘was very kind to him’ (Oct.), having himself escaped charges of correspondency with Oxford; Whitelocke had sat with Selden on the committee for the punishment of the accusers (15 Sept.).372CJ iv. 274a; Whitelocke, Diary, 182. The earl of Northumberland, who latterly, since his conversion to the war party, had been unfriendly, called on Whitelocke to provide assistance relating to the earl’s custody of the royal children.373Whitelocke, Diary, 178-9, 182. Samuel Browne thawed towards him, ‘being conscious’, Whitelocke supposed, ‘that he had pressed too hard upon him in the business of the Lord Savile’ (Aug.).374Whitelocke, Diary, 177; Add. 37344, f. 1. Not only did he co-operate professionally with Browne and Solicitor-general St John, but he ‘lived with Sir Henry Vane, Mr Solicitor, Browne and other grandees of that [anti-Essex] party, and was kindly treated by them as [he] used to be by the other’.375Whitelocke, Mems. 176-8, 182. Whitelocke recalled moving out of Vane’s house at Deptford on 27 July, and noted that Lady Vane wanted the house back, but even in the midst of the Savile crisis he had been engaged on preparing an ordinance confirming to Vane the office of treasurer of the navy (15 July), and in August, once the crisis had passed, Whitelocke and his wife again stayed at Deptford.376Whitelocke, Diary, 177-8; CJ iv. 207b.

It seems to be a sign of normality that, in an autumn when he was periodically ill, he chose to record that in September ‘the House made use of Whitelocke as at many other times, in the nature of a secretary’.377Whitelocke, Diary, 179. At the height of the crisis he had been engaged on the business of Windsor garrison, the raising of money for the siege of Oxford and the supply of Major-general Browne.378CJ iv. 198a, 201b, 202a, 204b. This continued through to spring 1646. Apparently overcoming a considerable ‘difference of opinion’ between members, Whitelocke was evidently a frequent chair of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire subcommittees.379CJ iv. 217a, 217b, 227b, 249b, 256b, 337a, 339b, 351a, 461a, 468a, 468b; Add. 37344, ff. 1-4v, 13v-14; Whitelocke, Mems. 171, 179, 185; Diary, 184. The mutiny of the Phyllis Court garrison against their governor, Charles D’Oyly, was a matter of concern, but the House chose Colonel Temple rather than Whitelocke because the latter ‘could not be spared’ from the Commons.380Add. 37344, f. 6v; Whitelocke, Mems. 166, 169; Diary, 178. The raising of men in the City for the Oxford campaign provides a context for his membership of the London militia committee (4 Dec.), while the ‘very unruly’ behaviour of soldiers in Thames valley garrisons impelled him to ‘give way’ and abandon his previous opposition to martial law: he was ordered to bring in an ordinance to cover Henley, Reading and Abingdon (1, 9 Jan. 1646).381CJ iv. 365a, 394a, 410a; Whitelocke, Diary, 184. He ‘attended the committee of garrisons, where everyone strived to lessen the charge of his neighbourhood, and consequently of his own estate’; that he chaired it with Thames valley radical Henry Marten must have added to the challenge.382Add. 37344, f. 5v; CJ iv. 505a. As before, he was occasionally drawn in to business concerning the war in other areas, including Ireland, and on 15 October 1645 he and St John drafted letters to Cromwell from the Speaker approving his actions in north Hampshire.383CJ iv. 260a, 264b, 309b, 319b, 351b, 368b, 505a, 521a, 523a, 527b.

All this, together with other business such as the punishment of royalist delinquents, gave Whitelocke experience of co-operation with the Independents and brought him closer to the centre ground of Westminster politics.384CJ iv. 225a, 275b, 313a, 452a, 480b. As previously evident, at least until December 1645 his involvement in peace negotiations with the Scots – which he ‘furthered ... all he could’ in a conference of 6 August – was conducted in concert with the Essex party.385CJ iv. 203a, 233a, 273a, 275a, 276a, 366b; Whitelocke, Diary, 177; Mems. 183. Thereafter, however, the ties loosened; gaps in his hitherto constant presence in the Journal (9-31 Dec.; 2-18 Jan.; 1-16 Feb.), partly explicable by illness or attention to legal business, perhaps also signal re-positioning. Lord Saye and two of his sons had thawed sufficiently towards Whitelocke to endorse his appointment as steward of Henley on 17 January 1646.386Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. ix. f. 77. At the end of the month Whitelocke chaired the committee of old and new friends preparing a new round of proposals to send to the king.387CJ iv. 423a, 424b, 425b. He was nominated to important committees to regulate proceedings at committee for assessment at Haberdashers’ Hall (17 Feb.) and to reconsider the question of Members who held civil or military office from Parliament (16 Mar.) before he was again engaged on peace proposals from the Scots (18 Mar.).388CJ iv. 455b, 477a, 478b.

In the spring of 1646 a succession of parliamentarian victories against royalist forces in different parts of the country was changing the political landscape decisively. The association of Whitelocke, Maynard and Grimston with the likes of Cromwell and Army Committee chairman Robert Scawen* in the ordinance for draining the Great Level, was in Whitelocke’s case probably in part an expression of longstanding commercial interests, but it was probably also a sign of rapprochement with those he had sometimes distrusted (28 Apr.).389CJ iv. 525b. Two days later Whitelocke was deputed to prepare a letter to Fairfax concerning the anticipated final onslaught on Oxford.390CJ iv. 527b. A question arises, given what ensued, as to whether this choice is explicable merely in terms of Whitelocke’s place on the regional committee at Westminster. Following the king’s escape from Oxford on 27 April, Whitelocke was nominated to the committees preparing a declaration against any individual harbouring his person (4 May) and a justification of the Commons’ insistence that, when apprehended, he should be imprisoned in Warwick Castle (9 May). Both bodies were dominated by Whitelocke’s former opponents.391CJ iv. 531b, 541b. On Whitelocke’s telling, on 12 May Fairfax wrote to Speaker Lenthall requesting that Whitelocke be given leave to attend him as a locally knowledgeable advisor and potential commissioner for negotiating Oxford’s surrender. After consultation with the Speaker and others, it was thought unwise to disclose this to the House, on the ground that ‘it would not be liked that Whitelocke should be a commissioner for the general to treat with the commissioners of the governor of Oxford, when he had been a commissioner of both kingdoms to treat with the king himself’. 392Whitelocke, Diary, 185-6; Mems. 204. If the problem was lingering suspicion of Whitelocke among his accusers of the previous summer, then it is surprising that Fairfax should ask for him, that someone involved did not make negative capital out of it, and that Whitelocke recorded such a positive impression of his visit. Since no-one could contest his local knowledge or zeal for the issue, and since it does not seem entirely credible that anyone other than Whitelocke himself would be concerned at a derogation of reputation by treating with Sir Thomas Glemham instead of the king, it is conceivable that the problem lay in suspicion by former friends about what Whitelocke might do with his new friends in the army.

Whatever the truth, there was clearly an element of subterfuge. Whitelocke was nominated to five more committees (16, 18, 20, 23, 26 May) before on 3 June, ‘thirst[ing] after the end of the war’, he was officially granted leave to go into the country to organize the slighting of the Henley and Phyllis Court garrison. The first was chaired by Nathaniel Fiennes (also nominated to those of 23 and 26 May), who would surely have noticed and colluded in Whitelocke’s absence; none relied on Whitelocke’s urgent presence.393CJ iv. 548a, 548b, 550a, 551b, 553b, 555b, 562a. According to his recollection, he went home to Fawley Court in time to travel from there to Oxford (to cover his tracks) and to attend ‘excellent sermons’ within the camp of the besieging army on 17 May and possibly also 24 May.394Whitelocke, Diary, 186. He was certainly in the Commons chamber on 3 June, if it was indeed he who moved for the slighting of the Henley garrison, and on 8 June, when he was ordered to prepare a letter of thanks to Fairfax for the capture of Boarstall House and went to the Lords with various ordinances, but during these weeks he went several times to Oxford (a journey he elsewhere asserts to have taken him less than a day).395CJ iv. 562a, 568b, 569a, 569b. Admitted into Fairfax’s councils of war, he was ‘used ... with extraordinary respect and courtesy’, and exploiting this, claimed credit for restraining a destructive onslaught on university buildings.396Whitelocke, Diary, 186; Mems. 204. His cordial reception probably influenced him towards a harder line than heretofore when, between 9 and 17 June, he led the Commons’ urging of the Lords to hasten despatch of propositions to the Scots and chaired discussions on the militia.397CJ iv. 570b, 572b, 573a, 576a, 576b, 578b, 579a, 579b. In his next flurry of activity in the House between 22 and 25 June he combined sitting on propositions to the Scots and to the king with preparing Parliament’s letter of thanks to Fairfax following the surrender of Oxford and Faringdon and with forwarding an ordinance for payments to Henley garrison.398CJ iv. 583b, 584b, 585a, 585b, 587a, 587b. Back in Oxford he was ‘very solicitous for the due observation’ of the Oxford Articles, attended more sermons (and prayers led by laymen) in the general’s quarters (28 June, 5 July) and conferred with Fairfax, Cromwell, Ireton and the other principal army officers over negotiations for the surrender of Wallingford (29 June); once again he gave his services as secretary.399Whitelocke, Diary, 187; Mems. 213. Such was his involvement in the mopping-up operation in Oxfordshire and Berkshire, the dismantling of fortifications around his home and the diversion of troops to Ireland, that from July to mid-October his appearances in the Journal were relatively few and, where unrelated to local needs, either low-profile or non-urgent.400CJ iv. 595b, 601a, 616a, 620a, 625b, 633a, 641b, 660a, 662a, 666b; Whitelocke, Diary, 187-90; Mems. 214, 217-18, 220, 223 It ostensibly required a great deal of effort to secure demilitarisation, but the process apparently nurtured, and was nurtured by, a close association with Fairfax. Whitelocke was at Henley when the earl of Essex died in London on 13 September.401Whitelocke, Diary, 189. He did business for the earl’s executors and with Stapilton sought unsuccessfully to block the exclusion of royalist kin from Essex’s funeral, but in a graphic demonstration of how far Whitelocke had moved from former allies, on days between trips to the Lords to expedite ordinances for the army, it was in Fairfax’s coach – in company with the general he now held in high regard – that he himself attended the occasion.402CJ iv. 697a, 701b, 702a; Whitelocke, Diary, 189, 190.

Universities, religion and the law, 1645-7

As indicated, Whitelocke had remained keen to ensure that war did not destroy scholarship. He had already been named to two committees for the regulation of Cambridge University (14 June, 22 Nov. 1645; also 12 Oct. 1647), when on 1 July 1646 he was nominated to consider parallel regulations for Oxford.403CJ iv. 174a, 350b, 595b; v. 331b. He conveyed to the Lords an ordinance for the preservation of libraries, globes, mathematical instruments and other ‘necessaries’ from scholars’ chambers (8 Dec. 1646) and, subsequently named to the London committee of appeals against the parliamentary visitation of the university, he led with Selden, Fiennes and Vane II resistance to ejections of fellows and limitation of the curriculum.404CJ v. 4b, 5a, 83a, 143a, 174a; Reg. Visitors Univ. Oxford, pp. lxxi, 545-7; CCSP i. 414. He used his influence to nominate as a visitor Bartholomew Hall, the longstanding friend with whom he was sharing chambers, and who was becoming a notable figure locally.405Add. 37344, ff. 6, 86; LJ vi. 695b-696a; A. and O.; Whitelocke, Diary, 199. It is not clear whether he extended the same care to artefacts when on committees valuing and selling brass statuary and the Garter collar at Windsor (19 Sept. 1645; 9 Mar., 7 Apr. 1646).406CJ iv. 279a, 468a, 502b.

He also continued to attend the periodic sittings of the parliamentary privileges committee.407e.g. Whitelocke, Mems. 235. His chairmanship was noted when it was revived in July 1646 for the purposes of reporting on cases between commoners and peers and of investigating ‘scandalous pamphlets’ alleged to emanate from Colonel Robert Lilburne*.408CJ iv. 601a, 616a. It occasionally drew him into other business in connection with matters such as elections and Members’ debts.409CJ iv. 666b, 709a; v. 134a. One diarist recorded his concerns over the filling of seats vacated by death or by delinquency and over election disputes – ‘if we choose in new Members and things miscarry’ – and noted that ‘that which sticks with him is that we are untied’ or lacking precedent, especially now the extraordinary wartime conditions were passed (a debatable point on 21 Aug. 1645).410Add. 18780, f. 105v; Whitelocke, Mems. 183. Meanwhile, in contrast, Whitelocke’s interest in commercial enterprise was very rarely in evidence in the chamber, although he was named to the committee for the relief and employment of the poor and punishment of vagrants (23 Nov. 1647).411CJ v. 366b. However, to a certain extent before the fall of Oxford, and to a great extent thereafter, religion and the law were his more important preoccupations in the House.

Whitelocke’s association with Selden was apparent in several of his appointments regarding religion. He sat with his old friend on committees regulating Westminster Abbey (7 July 1645) and discussing the putting of Selden’s home parish of White Friars, and other previously exempt places, under a Presbyterian system of classes and elderships (21 Jan. 1646).412CJ iv. 198b, 413b. Whitelocke may have been relatively at ease with his role in promoting the formal liturgy contained in its effective replacement, the Directory for Public Worship (25 July 1645) and confident in his opposition to peers’ attempts to exempt their private chapels (29 July), but he spoke against ‘putting down’ the Book of Common Prayer and ‘for liberty of conscience’ (Oct. 1646); he was far from advocating ‘a compulsion under a penalty’ to resort to unprofitable services. According to his undated writings, while ‘laziness and debauchery’ were inquirable as reasons for absence from worship, additional meetings ‘in upper chambers, and at the mine pit’ should go unremarked.413Add. 37343, ff. 62, 65, 76; CJ iv. 218b, 224a; Whitelocke, Diary, 190. Rising to endorse Selden in speaking against clerical powers of excommunication (3 Sept. 1645), he drew on careful preparatory reading to argue that it was ‘improper’ for pastors to keep their sheep from food: the invitation to communion was issued to all and all (including himself) were ignorant sinners; the recipient’s worthiness was not for the pastor to judge; the definition of ‘elders’, who might be accorded a supervisory role, was open to debate. Even though he ‘omitted some things ... which I thought might give most offence ... yet’, he noted, ‘I did not pass uncensured by the rigid Presbyterians, against whose design I was held to be one, and they were pleased to term me a disciple of Selden and an Erastian’.414Add. 37344, ff. 6, 12; Whitelocke, Mems. 169-70. As discussions continued, he doubtless demonstrated the truth of both epithets.415e.g. 14 Oct. 1645, Add. 18780, f. 143v. Like others who argued over the ordinance for exclusion from the sacrament (23 May 1646) and who were later named commissioners under it (3 June), his view of the permissible criteria probably differed sharply from that of those Presbyterians.416CJ iv. 553b, 562b. Consistently determined to confront the issue of iure divino Presbyterianism, he was involved in drafting Parliament’s answer to the petition for a thoroughgoing Presbyterian settlement (Nov. 1645) and ‘took much pains ... to assert the power of Parliaments in matters of ecclesiastical government’.417e.g. 18 Aug. 1645, Add. 18780, f. 92v; Whitelocke, Diary, 182, 185; CJ iv. 511a. Concerned to use this power to promote a broad Protestantism, he was among the lawyers in charge of an act to extirpate Catholicism from Ireland (20 Jan. 1646) and sat with Selden on committees providing for preaching ministers in the north of England (3 Apr. 1645) and over the whole of England and Wales (7 Apr. 1646).418CJ iv. 97b, 411b, 502a. He depicted himself as Selden’s right-hand man in the project for printing the Septuagint translation of the bible, solicited for the task by Patrick Young, former royal librarian, and glad ‘to give my best assistance to so good a work’ (16 Oct. 1646; June 1647).419CJ iv. 695a; Add. 37344, f. 96; Whitelocke, Mems. 257. He was nominated to committees reviewing the use of the revenues of [St] Paul’s church in the City (7 May 1646) and improving arrangements for the sale of episcopal lands (27 Feb. 1647), and was added to the Committee for Plundered Ministers (5 Oct.), but it seems that at this juncture he was not especially active in the financial and disciplinary aspects of ecclesiastical reform.420CJ iv. 538b; v. 100a, 326b.

On the other hand, Whitelocke’s status as one of the leading lawyers of the House and his personal interest in the Articles of Oxford ensured a somewhat greater involvement in dealing with lay delinquents. He headed the list of five lawyers ordered to prepare the form of pardon to be tendered to those coming from the king’s quarters to compound (11 Oct. 1645) and was several times named to committees dealing with particular cases or principles.421CJ iv. 304b, 703a, 708a; v. 10b, 61b, 74a. He was named with Glynne, Vane II and the commissioners of the great seal to bring in an ordinance permanently disabling Sir Robert Heath†, who had acted in the king’s judiciary at Oxford, from being a judge (1 Nov. 1645), and also to the committee investigating Serjeant John Glanville* (3 Sept. 1646).422CJ iv. 330b, 662a.

A considerably greater portion of his attention was devoted to the regulation and remoulding of the legal system itself, in which he emerged as an important player. Recent participation in several wardship cases adjudicated by the Commons informed his contribution to the debate in February 1646 which resulted in a vote to abolish the court and its jurisdiction.423CJ iv. 201a, 313b; Whitelocke, Diary, 185. Nominated in May to the committee bringing in the ordinance to recoup arrears already due, he subsequently played a significant part in winding up its proceedings; the arrangements for compensation to be paid to its officers (chief among whom was Saye) were noted as being in his hand (15 Apr. 1647).424CJ iv. 538b, 551b, 710a, 727a; v. 31b, 142b. He was a commissioner to investigate abuses in heraldry (19 Mar. 1646), sat on the committee ensuring the continuation of probates of wills following the abolition of episcopacy (17 Oct.), claimed a responsibility for securing an annual salary of £1,000 for the judges in the exchequer (Mar.; 21 Oct.), and was joint chairman of a committee enquiring into writs of habeas corpus issued in relation to prisoners of the court of king’s bench (2 Dec.).425A. and O.; CJ iv. 696b, 701b, 735b, 736a; Whitelocke, Diary, 185 Attending the committee drawing instructions for assize judges, he secured the appointment of his uncle Edward Bulstrode to the Welsh circuit, ‘for which he was a fit and learned person’ (21 Jan. 1647).426CJ iv. 583b; v. 60a; Whitelocke, Mems. 235. Most importantly, he brought in two ordinances authorising the Speakers of the Lords and Commons to hear and determine causes and to seal writs in the court of chancery, and had a prominent role in continuing the function of commissioners of the great seal in the Speakers rather than in non-Members (19–29 Oct.; 8 Dec. 1646; 9 Feb. 1647).427CJ iv. 699b, 701a, 702a, 703b, 708b; v. 4b, 81b; Add. 31116, p. 574; Whitelocke, Diary, 190. It was to be some months before he received the reward he both coveted and feared – that of himself being a commissioner.

Navigating political crises 1647-8

Whitelocke received about half as many mentions in the Journal in 1647 as in 1646, and a fraction of that in 1648. In this period, as his diary reveals, when present in the House he was ‘more silent than ordinary’; frequently ‘troubled’ he was also more often absent. Particularly at tense moments, he took refuge in application to professional business and in private conversations.428Whitelocke, Diary, 191-225. Installing his family again at Phyllis Court, he ‘was as much with them as my occasions would permit’.429Add. 37344, f. 89v. While his instincts were evidently, as ever, inclined to peace and permanent resolution of the conflict, he appears increasingly to have spurned initiatives to bring it about. Instead he reacted to events, seemingly content to make the best of the situation and principally exerting himself to effect rescue of, or obtain reward for, those to whom he was tied by affection or professional brief. Among peers, he was consistently on cordial terms with Pembroke – himself perplexingly fluid in his alignments – but, on the evidence of his diary, not a frequent companion; much closer to Willoughby and Holland, he did not follow their political path. Among MPs, he consistently fraternised with lawyers like Selden and Reynolds who prized legitimacy and had a semi-detached association with those like Evelyn of Wiltshire and Pierrepont who shared their Erastianism and support for toleration, but whose journey towards settlement with the king eventually left them behind.

As the Presbyterians’ star waxed at Westminster in late 1646, it is notable that Whitelocke did not return to an exclusive association or embrace their plans for a settlement. An apparently busy summer and autumn in the House culminated on 30 October in an appointment to the committee charged with the strategically important task of nominating sheriffs and vetting local magistrates.430CJ iv. 709b. He then disappeared from the Journal until 24 November (when his sole appointment of the month related to wards business), although his diary recorded that on the 8th he ‘did service for the duke of Buck[ingham] upon his petition to Parliament’, while on the 30th he ‘spake freely ... against all persecution for matters of religion, in which he offended the Presbyterians’.431CJ iv. 727a; Whitelocke, Diary, 191. A pattern emerges of frequent gaps and occasional prominence in the Journal, alongside regular committee work (mostly related to the law) and periodic speeches asserting freedom of conscience. Among a handful of mentions in the Journal in the first half of December, Whitelocke acted with Oxfordshire MP Wenman to quash a proviso to the ordinance for maintaining the army which would have reduced levies on certain other southern and western counties (3 Dec.) and sat with Holles and Lewis on the one hand, and Hesilrige, Vane and Marten on the other, to respond to the latest Scots overtures (14 Dec.).432CJ iv. 735b-736b; v. 4b, 5a, 10b, 12a. A fortnight later he reassembled with many of the same colleagues to refine aspects of the Newcastle Propositions the king (28 Dec.), a reappearance which coincided with his being voted £2,000 towards his losses sustained in the wars (partly thanks to Sir John Holland*, an Erastian who strongly favoured peace and pressed for Whitelocke’s servant Daniel Earle to be secretary to the commissioners) and his presenting on Vane’s behalf an ordinance for the latter’s surrender of his office as navy treasurer.433CJ v. 31b, 32a, 34b, 40a; Whitelocke, Diary, 191.

After another handful of mentions in the Journal in late January and early February 1647, on 23 February Whitelocke obtained leave to go into the country.434CJ v. 60a, 61b, 74a, 81b, 83a, 95b. He stayed until at least 5 March to obtain a grant of arrears for his brother-in-law Lord Willoughby, but then departed for the Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire assizes, reappearing in the Journal for a couple of appointments in April and a slightly larger round of Commons business in mid-May.435CJ v. 105a, 106b, 134a, 142b, 143a, 166b, 168b, 170b, 174b, 181a; Whitelocke, Diary, 192. Amidst this, at some point between February and May, Whitelocke, courted by both sides, concluded that he must break off all relations with the Presbyterians. He noted for 2 February the ‘inconstancy of the giddy multitude’ in complaining against oppression by soldiers who ‘were so lately in their highest esteem and respect, as freers of their country from servitude and oppression’, and, as early as this – or at least later that month when Presbyterian leaders formally proposed the disbandment of the army – he may have said as much in the Commons.436Whitelocke, Mems. 236; Diary, 192. In February or May – his accounts differ – as part of the scheme to divert forces towards the settlement of Ireland, Whitelocke was approached about being one of its two lord justices, but ‘he did not like it and waived it’.437Whitelocke, Diary, 192; Add. 37344, f. 89v. It was, however, to 25 May, when the Commons finally voted for disbandment, that he ascribed the moment when, ‘upon some private consultations with Mr Holles, Sir Philip Stapilton, Mr Recorder Glynne, and others of that party’, he ‘declared [his] opinion against it, as that which might prove dangerous to them, and to all the Parliament party if it should succeed’.438Whitelocke, Mems. 248. Whether he feared most being at the mercy of the Scots (invited into England as part of the settlement), or of an army which would not submit to dissolution, is impossible to determine. But although disclaiming – with some plausibility at this juncture – ‘any design or policy in me to come off to a new party, who might be though[t] more growing into power than the other’, in practice he moved closer to the army grandees. ‘Cromwell and his party’ had been ‘against my going away [to Ireland], and more than formerly desired my company and began to use my advice in many things’.439Add. 37344, f. 89v; Whitelocke, Mems. 249.

This did not assuage Whitelocke’s alarm at the agitation among the common soldiers and their ‘very rude address’ to Parliament.440Add. 37344, f. 91v. In June, often in company with Evelyn of Wiltshire, he was at the core of efforts to reassure the kingdom of intentions to make peace and to placate the army’s demands for pay, drafting and reporting letters and declarations.441CJ v. 198b, 207b, 209b, 210a, 212b, 215a, 216b. His patent relief at not being accused with the Eleven Members against whom the army laid charges of impeachment on 16 June, and disclosure that ‘some of the officers ... told me afterwards that I was named but not agreed to be one, because I had lately in the business of the army declared myself not to be their enemy’, suggests some deliberate playing on his fears.442Add. 37344, f. 93; Whitelocke, Mems. 253. With Maynard and Samuel Browne he was deputed to draft a letter from the Commons to Fairfax demanding further proof of the Members’ alleged misdemeanours before taking action (23 June).443CJ v. 221a. However, for the next three weeks, unsettled – notwithstanding his assertion that he ‘took no notice’ – by information that the charges against Holles would resurrect the Savile affair and hence implicate him, he kept clear of the House.444Add. 37344, ff. 96-99v; Whitelocke, Mems. 257-9. He was still troubled by unwelcome and potentially compromising visits from Holles, but he was sustained by the encouragement and advice from Browne, Evelyn, Maynard, Pierrepont, Reynolds, Selden, St John and Wenman among MPs, as well as others like Bartholomew Hall: whether this represented simply the friendly sympathy of others who shared his views on events or also the rallying of a coherent – if short-lived – group to the support of its intimidated spokesman is difficult to determine.445cf. V. Pearl, ‘The Royal Independents’, TRHS 5th ser. xviii. 69-96.

On his own telling Whitelocke returned to the Commons on 13 and 14 July, rumours that the king was about to visit him at Phyllis Court having sent him post-haste to London to avoid embroilment in clandestine negotiations.446Add. 37344, f. 98v He kept a low profile until 23 July, after action against the Eleven Members had been postponed and they had been given leave to go abroad.447Add. 37344, f. 99v. That day he was added, with Selden and others, to a committee tasked with wresting control of the London militia from Presbyterian hands.448CJ v. 255b. But following the invasion of the House by demonstrators three days later, he again absented himself from Parliament. In retrospect he did not shrink from blaming the Eleven Members for stirring up the rabble and precipitating a coup, but it did not propel him towards the army. Instead he spent the next five or six weeks in the country, visiting his home, attending the judges on circuit and pursuing his legal practice.449Whitelocke, Mems. 261; Add. 37344, ff. 100-109v.

Whitelocke attributed a brief re-appearance in the Commons on 9 September to a desire to demonstrate ‘that I had not deserted them’, but more specific motives may have pertained.450Add. 37344, f. 110. By this time it had become clear that the Independents were firmly re-established and in the majority, and that the Newcastle Propositions were revived. Whitelocke played some part in attempts to mitigate punishment meted out to Glynne, who had remained behind to face the consequences of his part in the coup, and accepted an invitation to dine with ‘St John and his party’, expressly to sound them out on their attitude to his brother-in-law Willoughby, who had acted as Speaker of the Lords during the coup. That he found them ‘very much incensed’ against Willoughby ‘as the chief actor’ and that Browne, in particular, was determined to pursue him, did not encourage Whitelocke to associate with them or to engage in public life. He declined to succeed Glynne as recorder of London and having received intelligence of ‘many secret passages’ from Speaker Lenthall, another man seemingly caught in a hard place, withdrew to Henley.451Whitelocke, Mems. 268-9; Add. 37344, f. 110.

Resuming more sustained residence in London at the beginning of October, Whitelocke returned to the Commons. Brave enough to visit Willoughby, in the custody of Black Rod, he was otherwise very apprehensive about the continuing differences between the army and Parliament, and ‘was more silent than ordinary’ in the chamber.452Add. 37344, f. 113v; Whitelocke, Mems. 272, 276; Diary, 200-1. Addition to the committee preparing the impeachments of Willoughby and fellow peers (15 Oct.) gave him an opportunity to wield influence in favour of man he was convinced had acted only ‘according to his conscience’; concern to retain this influence may conceivably have moderated his behaviour towards Independents.453Whitelocke, Mems. 272; Diary, 200-2. He also received several other significant committee appointments – to that for Plundered Ministers; to draft propositions to the Scots (2 Oct.) and to the king (1 Dec); to consider the choice and remuneration of government officials (18 Oct; 20 Nov.); to prepare an ordinance for securing soldiers’ arrears (21, 22 Dec.) – but his visibility in the Journal was modest compared with a few years earlier.454CJ v. 325a, 326b, 331b, 334a, 334b, 336a, 364b, 366b, 373b, 395b, 397b. He did business for various peers, including Pembroke, Holland and Northumberland, and had the satisfaction of winning convincingly with Evelyn of Wiltshire a division over who should command a navy ship (8 Oct.), but his very success in gaining friends and patrons – and possibly in being seen to negotiate an even-handed course – brought its own hazards.455Whitelocke, Diary, 200-4; CJ v. 328a. When he arrived at the Commons on 4 December to hear that the Speaker was ill and that he was in line to supply the chair, he beat a hasty retreat, knowing ‘the trouble and danger of thereof ... especially in those times’.456Add. 37344, f. 123v; Whitelocke, Diary, 202; Mems. 282.

It is notable, in this context, that Whitelocke was not – whether through lack of trust, personal disinclination or some other cause – chosen that month as a peace commissioner to the king. Following the receipt by the Commons on 18 December of ‘a high and insolent paper from the Scots commissioners’, at dinner with Pierrepont and Wenman on 28 December he recorded pessimistically that ‘they had much discourse about the Scots’ proceedings in the treaty of the Isle of Wight, and feared a new war’.457Add. 37344, f. 125, 126v; Whitelocke, Diary, 203. He was in the country when the vote of no addresses was passed on 3 January: his palpable distrust of the Scots, whose secret dealings with the king sabotaged the treaty, doubtless conflicted with sympathy for those in the Lords who opposed the vote and conceivably led to paralysing indecision on the matter.458Add. 37344, ff. 127-8. Beyond labelling Charles’s answer to Parliament’s commissioners as ‘not ... satisfactory’, Whitelocke registered no opinion on the vote and, despite returning to the House on the 5th, had no appointments relating to its aftermath.459Whitelocke, Mems. 286; Diary, 203; Add. 37344, ff. 128. Indeed, he had only three committee nominations until July – one to receive petitions for redress following war damage (10 Jan. 1648) and two to deal with legal matters (14 Jan.; 16 Feb.).460CJ v. 425a, 432a, 465b. Yet although once he had steered Willoughby’s affairs through Parliament he was strongly suspected to have counselled his brother-in-law to ‘withdraw’ and take the path to exile, he did not himself desert Parliament.461Whitelocke, Diary, 205. He firmly declined another attempt to make him recorder of London, but consented to the Speaker’s request to present a petition to the House on behalf of his brother, was on good terms with clerk Henry Elsing, attended the Oxford University appeals and the Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire committees, lobbied for compensation and arrears for his clients, and socialised with fellow MPs of similar views like Sir Benjamin Rudyerd and Robert Reynolds.462Whitelocke, Mems. 290; Diary, 203-6; Add. 37344, ff. 128 seq. Looking back from 1654, Reynolds was to refer to ‘an old plain constant friendship … to your person, without reference to place or fortune’.463Longleat, Whitelocke pprs. xv, f. 48.

Whitelocke was absent at the assizes when on 2 March he was chosen with Henry Grey*, 10th earl of Kent (formerly Lord Ruthin), and Sir Thomas Widdrington* as a commissioner of the great seal.464CJ v. 477a, 477b; Whitelocke, Diary, 206-7. He attributed his appointment primarily to ‘Cromwell and his party’ and secondarily to the wider interest of Fairfax in the Commons, but presumably it rested on a combination of his palatability to the Independents, reinforced by his periodic speeches for religious toleration, and of genuine support from friends between the extremes of politics: not only was his law practice ‘greater than any’, but he was ‘well understood in the House by his long attendance and service’.465Whitelocke, Diary, 206; Mems. 300. This ‘recognition’ dignified his ambition and evidently allayed some of his anxiety. However, it is noteworthy that before he returned to London to be sworn with Widdrington on 12 April, he had ‘much serious discourse’ at Phyllis Court with Pierrepont, St John, Evelyn of Wiltshire and his brother Arthur Evelyn. The meeting, on 31 March, was for Whitelocke’s guests a precursor to a decision to re-open negotiations with the king, but, while Whitelocke surely shared their perceived desire to ‘disengage him [Charles] from the Scottish interest’, at this point he probably doubted that this could be achieved. That the meeting unsettled him rather than imbued him with a purpose to use his new office to the advantage of potential allies is suggested by the fact that on his first day back in London he sought out Speaker Lenthall. Although Whitelocke probably exaggerated his desire to escape office, there seems no reason to doubt either his expression of misgivings or the role of Lenthall and Reynolds in persuading him to accept it.466Whitelocke, Diary, 210-12; Hamilton Pprs. 174; Mercurius Elencticus no. 22 (19-26 Apr. 1648), 167 (E.437.10).

Once in office he was courted by many, and was gratified to give legal advice to Fairfax, among others, although according to his diary his most frequent associates had no links with the army; he continued to talk with Pierrepont and Evelyn.467Whitelocke, Diary, 211-18. During a period of Presbyterian resurgence and of renewed rebellion and riot, he applied himself to his chancery business and attended the House only intermittently, but when he did – for example to report judges for the summer circuit (13 June) – he experienced ‘great respect’.468CJ v. 598a On the day that the earl of Holland appeared at Kingston with a force of royalists, he was first named to the committee deputed to organise security for a renewed treaty with the king (5 July).469CJ v. 624a. Given his recent association with the earl (whose attempt to reveal his plans he had rebuffed) he was potentially vulnerable, but he rode out the storm which culminated in Holland’s defeat and capture by heeding advice to attend Parliament ‘as often as he could’ to allay any suspicions.470Whitelocke, Diary, 217-19; Mems. 317-18. However, a few days of assiduity were apparently sufficient, and he soon lapsed into a pattern of country visits. Although in early August he detected in debates on another self-denying ordinance for depriving MPs of office an attempt to undermine him, among others, he claimed to view this with equanimity: he was ‘not troubled’ at the thought of losing his commission and returning to his more profitable private practice.471Whitelocke, Diary, 220; Mems. 326.

In the meantime, office had its advantages. At the beginning of September it debarred him from being named with Wenman and Pierrepont as a commissioner to negotiate the treaty of Newport. Whitelocke claimed relief: he no longer had the stomach for it, ‘all the former treaties wherein I was a commissioner having proved ineffectual’.472Whitelocke, Diary, 220-1; Mems. 326, 334. He was nominated on 23 September to consider a letter from the treaty commissioners, but believing the Derby House Committee’s intelligence of a royalist plot to massacre 80 MPs and considering it ‘dangerous for any Member of the House, or of the army to walk without company without being assassinated’, he spent as much time as he could in his study and garden.473CJ vi. 29b; Whitelocke, Mems. 339-40; Diary, 222. He was apparently pleased to receive from Pembroke some time that autumn the lieutenancy of Windsor Castle and its park and forest.474Whitelocke, Mems. 323. On the other hand, he tried to escape appointment as attorney of the duchy of Lancaster and being made a serjeant-at-law, which necessitated taking an oath whose foundation seemed to him questionable and inappropriate for a commissioner of the seal (12, 13 Oct.). That he was then permitted the seniority of a serjeant without taking the oath demonstrated a critical level of support and seems to have somewhat bolstered his confidence. In mid-November he and Widdrington presided over legal ceremonial at the installation of serjeants and judges at Westminster and he took the opportunity to justify Parliament’s novel action in this regard.475Whitelocke, Mems. 350. Three days later he used his speech to the new serjeants in chancery to assert Parliament’s ‘constant resolutions to continue and maintain the old settled form of government and laws of the kingdom’, perhaps challenging army leaders not to threaten it.476Whitelocke, Mems. 352. Learning in late November that they ‘intended to put [him] out of the House’, he none the less discovered contentment ‘with his present employment, because it sheltered him, and excused his absence from the House in their high debates concerning the army’. ‘A message from the general full of civility and kindness’ on 30 November no doubt helped.477CJ vi. 50a, 51b, 59b, 75a; Whitelocke, Diary, 223-5.

Pride’s Purge and the regicide, 1648-9

The oscillations of Whitelocke’s mood (provided this was not distorted by retrospective adjustment) and the uncertainties of his allegiance may mask a latent security and a pragmatic consistency. He patently owed his commission not just to well-wishers but also to those who found him an acceptable and useful ally. It is testament to the army grandees’ desire to maintain legitimacy that the perceived indispensability of legal officers like himself shielded them from the purge on 6 December. It is conceivable that in Whitelocke’s case they deliberately played on his anxieties while simultaneously issuing reassurance; that they relied on his caution, moderation and desire to safeguard the law and his own position within it to bring him on side.478cf. Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 146, 205. If so, it was an effective policy and it was continued well into 1649.

On Whitelocke’s telling, he and Widdrington were treated with polite indifference by the soldiers in Westminster Palace yard when they arrived on 6 December to conduct chancery business. He was keen to stress that several attempts over the next few days to continue that business were made only after consultation with friends and ‘to prevent any failure of justice’, although he conceded that some ‘marvelled’ at his going so far as to attend the sermons of the House on the 8th.479Whitelocke, Diary, 225-6; Mems. 360-1; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 156. Weighing, like others, qualms as to attending a Parliament under military force against the duty to prevent a dissolution and an absolute hand-over of power to the army, he and Widdrington disregarded the ‘dissatisfaction’ expressed to them by Pierrepont and played for time. After two meetings on the 18th and 21st with Speaker Lenthall and Cromwell, who on the face of it seemed to be pursuing a compromise which would avert the bringing of the king to trial, Whitelocke and Widdrington were invited to draft some proposals and ‘to endeavour to bring the army into better temper’. Having ‘no great mind to sit in the House of Commons as it was then constituted’ they spent the 22nd devising a formula for restitution of excluded Members and a declaration for submission to both Parliament and the army outlining the former’s intentions for the settlement of the kingdom. It is difficult to deny Whitelocke’s contention that ‘this was a work of no small difficulty, and danger’ or to dismiss his assertion that it was ‘at this time not to be declined by us’. Ostensibly, at least, it had been entrusted to them by both sides: no gentleman brought up on the rhetoric of public service – still less a self-important lawyer with extensive drafting experience – could readily resist the argument that ‘the kingdom might receive good by this our employment’.480Whitelocke, Mems. 361-3; Diary, 226-7.

The naming on the 23rd of a committee to draw charges against Charles was probably the signal that their proposals had no hope of success. Included, along with others identified by royalist commentators as moderates, he and Widdrington did not attend, although in the chamber and at the Speaker’s house they participated in ‘sharp debate’ about whether Parliament had a need or a right to try the king.481CJ vi. 102b, 103a; CCSP i. 465; Whitelocke, Mems. 363-4. Ignoring personal summonses to the House on the 25th and 26th, they decamped together to the country.482Whitelocke, Diary, 227; Mems. 365. That their flight was the product of ‘unheroic reasoning’ is indisputable, and it was probably both cowardly and unnecessary, but is not clear that they could have accomplished much more by staying.483Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 161. Honourable resignation of office tended to founder on the ultimate willingness to others to supply the place; force was not available; temporary withdrawal bought time to think and potentially even concessions. Returning to London only on 3 January 1649, Whitelocke escaped being named as a commissioner for the king’s trial.484Whitelocke, Diary, 227-8. Although he attributed his exclusion to his vocalised opposition and claimed that he had ‘resolved to hazard ... all, how beneficial soever, or advantageous to me, rather than do any thing contrary to my judgement and conscience’, it does not seem that this had registered.485Whitelocke, Mems. 366. On the 6th he and Widdrington were nominated to a committee to settle the proceedings of the courts of justice.486CJ vi. 112b. By the time they finally appeared in the Commons on the 9th the trial had begun; that circumstance and the vote that day for a new seal represented two battles already lost, but Whitelocke scored the minor victory of securing a writ of habeas corpus for his secluded and still imprisoned colleague William Prynne*.487Whitelocke, Mems. 367-8; Diary, 228; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 196. From the fact that he and Widdrington were the next day ‘particularly enjoined’ to attend the committee for the courts of justice, it seems evident they had stayed away.488CJ vi. 115b. The summons sent them briefly into the Westminster shadows – though they kept in touch with Lenthall – until on the 17th, sitting in Queen’s court to hear cases, they were confronted with an act from the Commons for adjourning the legal term which required them to issue writs. The refusal of the two commissioners from the Lords to sign the requisite warrant precipitated at least one decision. Returning to the chamber, Whitelocke and an increasingly wavering Widdrington finally obtained an act enabling them to sign warrants alone (20 Jan.).489CJ vi. 122a; Whitelocke, Mems. 369-70; Diary, 228-9. They implemented it, and were in the House again on the 23rd, when Whitelocke was ordered to draft an order to alter the style of the writs, but judges and other friends offered largely discouraging advice, and until the end of the month the commissioners contented themselves with conferring and doing their business in private houses, including the Speaker’s lodgings.490CJ vi. 123a; Whitelocke, Mems. 371-4; Diary, 229. Whitelocke collected three committee nominations in that time – to repeal acts relating to treason, praemunire and the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the crown (30 Jan.); to bring in an act for trying delinquents in prison (31 Jan.); to consider the problem of debtors (31 Jan.) – but stayed away from the chamber itself.491CJ vi. 126a, 126b, 127a; Whitelocke, Diary, 229; Mems. 376.

As the king was executed Whitelocke prayed at home for a king who died ‘with true magnanimity and Christian patience’ and that ‘this day’s work might not so displease God, as to bring prejudice to this poor afflicted nation’.492Whitelocke, Mems. 376; Diary, 229. The revolution was, for him, ‘an affront to nature’.493Worden, Rump Parliament, 64. Once it had occurred, however, he took a day to recover and then rallied to the powers-that-be. On 1 February he was ‘in the House from morning till night’ and he, Widdrington and others declared their dissent from the vote of 5 December which had tried to prolong negotiation with the king. Having cleared this hurdle, for the next few weeks he was highly visible in the Commons Journal.494PA, Ms CJ xxxiii, p. 625; Whitelocke, Mems. 376; Diary, 229; [W. Prynne], A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members Case (1660, E.1013.22). . This entailed a succession of further compromises, but not necessarily craven capitulation.

His immediate task was to further the act for the adjournment of the Hilary term (2 Feb.), but he was soon drawn into the highly controversial issue of the abolition of the House of Lords.495CJ vi. 129a. This may have been a manifestation of his going ‘blandly on’ in naive compromise with the regime, but given his links with various peers, his retrospective claims of voicing public opposition to the move should be considered seriously.496Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 203. When in a ‘long and smart’ debate on 5 February he drew on his knowledge of constitutional records and histories to the extent that some colleagues ‘desired notes of my speech’, he may have been unwisely showing off and thus courting trouble. However, it does appear to amount to a rearguard action. There is a plausibility in his insistence that the chairmanship of the committee to draft the act of abolition was ‘put upon’ him the following day, without regard to his contrary opinion and the fact that he was not in the House when the vote was passed.497CJ vi. 132b; Whitelocke, Mems. 377; Diary, 230. His involvement in devising a new form of oath to be given to judges (7, 8 Feb.) and to sheriffs and justices of the peace (8, 14 Feb.) might be justified as the product of the impulse to keep order.498CJ vi. 133b, 134a, 134b, 140a. This impulse emerges strongly from his otherwise limp and ambiguous account of his speech when he and Widdrington were offered a new commission for the great seal when they surrendered the old one (8 Feb.).499‘Tepid ambiguity’: Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 204; CJ vi. 134b. Insofar as Widdrington’s scruples of conscience (though not of ill-health) ultimately excused him, where Whitelocke’s various ‘motives for refusal’ – trouble, danger, difficulty and ‘want of ability’ – did not, it would seem that the latter simply declined with insufficient conviction. Yet amid the implausible combination of self-justification and self-deprecation, Whitelocke advanced a compelling reason for acceptance. Anticipating – he admitted to having been forewarned – the objection ‘that if I decline this service at this time, it will be a kind of disowning your authority as unwarrantable and illegal’, he declared that ‘this ... is far from me’; he ‘supposed’ he had already ‘given [his] testimony otherwise’ in owning Parliament’s authority thus far. In fact, he suggested, ‘a strict formal pursuance of the ordinary rules of law ... hath been hardly to be discerned in any of the late proceedings on either side’; ‘unavoidable necessity hath put us upon those courses, which otherwise perhaps we should not have taken’. In that context, he was

sure my sitting and acting here is according to the known laws of England, and that my protection at this time is only from you; therefore my obedience is only due to you, and there is no other visible authority in being but yourselves.500Whitelocke, Mems. 378-9; Diary, 230.

He thus submitted to Parliament’s will, but in default of better, for the time being, and without enthusiasm. His conscience-salving reward was the concession to be sworn serjeant-at-law privately at his own convenience.501CJ vi. 135a, 135b.

On 9 February, when the legal term belatedly opened, Whitelocke, now the senior commissioner, took credit for mediating between the judges and Parliament to satisfy the former’s misgivings and secure a vote for repeal of the oaths of supremacy and allegiance so that they could satisfy themselves of their legitimacy and proceed to sit.502Whitelocke, Diary, 231-2; Mems. 380. Whether or not he was the only actor in this – his colleague Lisle, a regicide, was, he claimed, ‘very opinionative’ – it was a critical development.503Whitelocke, Diary, 232. But the culmination of Whitelocke’s identification with the new order came on 14 February with his election to the council of state.504CJ vi. 141a. Even if his claim that it was unanimous was the product of wishful thinking, he was to be consistently re-elected until the end of the commonwealth, rising through the poll to be second after Cromwell in November 1651 and November 1652.505CJ vi. 362a, 532a; vii. 42a, 220a; Whitelocke, Diary, 232. At first among the more infrequent attenders, his profile there later increased and he was its president between 29 December 1651 and 29 January 1652.506CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. xlviii-lxxv; 1650, pp. xv-xli; 1651, p. xxxv; 1651-2, pp. xlvii, 81; 1652-3, pp. xxviii-xxxiii. His activity there and as commissioner of the great seal both affected and impeded his activity in the Commons.

Rump Parliament 1649-53

For the next four years Whitelocke was prominent among the formidable phalanx of conservative lawyers who not only markedly diluted the Rump’s radical potential but also, through their opposition to reforming legislation, have been credited with sabotaging this Parliament.507Worden, Rump Parliament, 30, 109-10. The question of whether this was in fact the case, and if so, whether it was deliberate or the product of unintended consequences, remains to be answered. Equally, the extent to which Whitelocke, like others, used his seat in Parliament either to promote personal projects or to develop policies of more general interest, needs to be addressed.

From the beginning instances may be found of Whitelocke attempting, with varied success, to minimise the radical standing of the Parliament and its attendant institutions, although his interventions and abstentions were rather selective. He was among a majority on the council of state who objected to parts of the Engagement members were to take, especially that which approved the proceedings of the court which had tried the king (19, 20 Feb.).508Whitelocke, Mems. 383; Diary, 232; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 9. At first joint, and then leading, chairman of the committee charged with preparing a declaration justifying Parliament’s actions (16 Feb.; 14, 16, 17 Mar.), he tried to limit and to refine it, but was thwarted: his motion for re-committal resulted instead in the document being made ‘much sharper than I had drawn it’, with the addition of ‘divers clauses, which I thought matters fit to be omitted’.509CJ vi. 143b-144a, 148b, 163b, 165b, 166b; Whitelocke, Mems. 389; Diary, 234-5. He was not in the Commons on and around 8 March, when he was named to the committee for an act abolishing monarchy, and seems to have avoided involvement in it, but the corollary was that he also missed the division on the reprieve of the peers condemned for their rising the previous summer, from which Holland failed to benefit, thanks to the casting vote of the Speaker. Whitelocke deplored that action and Holland’s consequent execution, although it is conceivable that his presence could have prevented it.510Whitelocke, Diary, 234; Mems. 386-7; CJ vi. 158a. Perhaps he was nervous of making himself conspicuous in this particular case.

As time went on and he was again close to his brother-in-law Willoughby, and other peers with a compromised past, Whitelocke was probably a moderating presence on committees dealing with delinquents, compositions, sequestrations and land sales, where he was periodically joint chairman with more radical colleagues.511CJ vi. 160b, 167b, 177a, 178b, 182b, 330b, 393b, 530a, 616b; vii. 236b, 245a; peers, e.g. Whitelocke, Mems. 402, 405-6. It is notable, in this context, that he explained his acceptance of the keepership of the library at St James’s Palace (plausibly) as the product of Selden’s encouragement and a desire to preserve its contents from depredation.512Whitelocke, Mems. 415-6; Diary, 243; CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 151, 497. Even so, however, he can be found with the usually uncompromising Hesilrige – with whom he showed himself capable of co-operating in other matters – in marshalling support for advantageous terms for former New Model officers awarded arrears on dean and chapter lands (probably a council of officers initiative, 16 Feb 1650) and in including a papist in a bill for land forfeit (13 July 1652).513CJ vi. 366b; vii. 153a; Whitelocke, Diary, 246; Mems. 442. On the other hand, he was twice a teller against the even more radical Henry Marten on sequestration issues (17 July 1650; 27 June 1651).514CJ vi. 442a, 593a. It is unfortunate that he made little comment on his inclusion on committees devising an act of pardon and oblivion (5 July 1649, 22 Jan. 1652) and the Engagement to the commonwealth (12, 24 Oct; 27 Nov 1649), but it is telling that by January 1650 he had persuaded himself that the sending by the commissioners of writs to sheriffs ordering them to proclaim the latter was a course ‘very ancient and constantly used (especially in elder time), as appears by the records, but of late disused’.515CJ vi. 250b, 307b, 313a, 326b, 363b; vii. 76b; Whitelocke, Mems. 439; Diary, 241-8. He may have dodged some difficult issues because of urgent business elsewhere, but others ultimately required constructive accommodation. Here he was responding to a direct personal instruction from the council of state.516CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 481.

Whitelocke described his combined workload in chancery, on the council and in the Commons as ‘very hard duty’ and ‘labour enough for one man’.517Whitelocke, Diary, 234; Mems. 418. None the less, he took time to attend the sick-bed of his second wife, and following her death on 16 May 1649 retreated to the country to recover from grief which afflicted him even while sitting in court; he was absent from the Journal from 9 April to 19 June.518Whitelocke, Diary, 236-41; CJ vi. 181a, 182b, 237a. These different pressures led him to resign his place as attorney of the duchy of Lancaster on 6 July, although he had the satisfaction of seeing his nominee, Bartholomew Hall, voted into his place by an overwhelming majority.519CJ vi. 252b, 253a, 262a. It was ostensibly as a gesture of convenience, to enable Whitelocke and fellow commissioner Lisle to work together more easily, that on 20 July the Commons awarded them the use of the duke of Buckingham’s former house at Chelsea, but Whitelocke ‘was nothing pleased’. Lisle had moved for possession during his absence; the property was in bad repair; and Whitelocke, allied to the duke and with no desire to offend him, preferred ‘the freedom of Syon House’, lent him by the earl of Northumberland.520CJ vi. 266a; Whitelocke, Diary, 242 and n; Mems. 414. He evidently did not find Lisle as congenial a colleague as Widdrington had been; Northumberland, on the other hand, thought ‘the consideration you are pleased to have of me and of that house of mine is a very great favour, which shall be thankfully acknowledged’.521Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. x. f. 24. All the same, by the winter he needed accommodation at Whitehall.522CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 374.

As a member of the committee sifting petitions to Parliament (27 Aug. 1652), Whitelocke was acutely conscious of the burden of extra business created by those who directed their requests there instead of to the courts; he was also in a position of power if he had leisure to wield it.523CJ vii. 171b; Worden, Rump Parliament, 309, 312. His office as commissioner of the great seal entailed a certain amount of unavoidable parliamentary activity.524e.g. Whitelocke, Mems. 401. He regularly reported arrangements for judges on circuit, as well as being the obvious anchorman of committees addressing urgent shortcomings in justice or administration arising from abolitions or regime change (palatine and northern jurisdictions, 22 Feb., 6 July 1649; prevention of error in form, 19 Mar.; a new oath for the lord mayor of London, 4 Apr.) and dealing with business related to pardons, examinations and acts regulating government servants (2 Aug. 1649; 11 July 1650).525CJ vi. 148b, 165b, 169a, 179a, 246a, 251b, 440a, 464a, 483b, 500b, 505b; Whitelocke, Mems. 392, 394. He lent authority to, and sometimes chaired, committees making financial settlements on leading members of the council and Parliament (June-Aug. 1649; 30 May 1650; 31 Dec. 1650).526CJ vi. 237a, 241b, 248a, 269a, 285b, 417b, 516b, 565b. Additionally, from time to time he reported on the conservation of their records in the Tower of London (8 Jan., 31 July, 6 Aug. 1651; 2 Jan. 1652).527CJ vi. 520b, 614b, 617b; vii. 53a.

The heavy demands of routine legal business, as well as all his other responsibilities, provide a necessary context in which to view Whitelocke’s reputation for ‘stonewalling’ law reform.528Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 277; A.J. Busch, ‘Bulstrode Whitelocke and early Interregnum Chancery Reform’, N. American Conference on British Studs. xi. 317-30. Given the ‘staggering arrears’ of cases to deal with in the courts following wartime disruption, he deserves some credit for drafting with Lenthall and (perhaps) Richard Keble the new set of orders for chancery issued in 1649; these made some attempt to weed out false pleas and prioritise cases and were arrived at largely, if Whitelocke’s account is accurate, during an adjournment of the House on 18 August.529Busch, ‘Whitelocke and Chancery Reform’, 318-19; Whitelocke, Mems. 421. His subsequent activity was less prompt and sometimes looked more grudging, but it was by no means completely hostile. Re-appointed on 17 July to the committee preparing legislation to address the abuses in debt law decried by leading radicals like Marten and Cornelius Holland, Whitelocke ‘made some objections against it’. He and others faced charges of obstruction, but he managed to get it referred to a new committee, evidently more to his taste. A watered-down act was passed in September, requiring several further acts to improve upon it; that Whitelocke reported from committee on 22 and 28 November and then was added at its re-committal on 21 December hints at inefficient and shifting management.530CJ vi. 262a, 324b, 327a, 337a; Bodl. Tanner 56, 78; The Prisoners Remonstrance (1649), 4 (E.572.8); Worden, Rump Parliament, 202-4. That autumn there was, he recorded, ‘a great peek against the lawyers’ in Parliament.531Whitelocke, Mems. 430. In a speech apparently delivered at the end of November he defended not only the presence and vital counsel of lawyers in the House (citing many precedents) but also their fundamental usefulness to the commonwealth. It was ‘the greatness of trade’ and not they who prompted a ‘multiplicity’ of suits; civilised countries could not exist without them; those who thought that lawyers should suspend their professional activities while in Parliament should logically also demand that ‘merchants forbear trading, physicians from visiting their patients, and country gentlemen shall forbear to sell their corn and wool’. In passing he also conceded that reform of one relatively minor law which had been adduced as an example of abuses ‘might be just and give right to people’.532Whitelocke, Mems. 431-3.

Months before the establishment on 2 March 1650 of a council of state subcommittee to oversee legal matters (consisting of Whitelocke, Lisle, St John, Henry Rolle† and John Wylde*), Whitelocke was called to engage with bills reforming particular grievances or shortcomings.533CSP Dom. 1650, p. 18. On 18 July 1649 he and Lisle were among MPs added to a committee appointed to consider the probate of wills and administration of marriages and divorce in the absence of ecclesiastical courts, while on 22 March 1650 he was appointed joint chairman of a committee bringing in an act against adultery, incest and fornication.534CJ vi. 263b; 385b; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 1. Responsibility for the delay in presenting such by-products as an act for registration of marriage, births and burials, which the council of state ordered four MPs to deliver to Whitelocke and Cromwell on 13 February 1652, was clearly not Whitelocke’s alone, although it took him another five weeks to report back to Parliament (18 Mar.).535Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. xii. f. 44; CJ vii. 107a. Placed on the committee on law proceedings set up on 25 October 1650, he reported only two weeks later a bill for turning law books and all court proceedings into English.536CJ vi. 488a, 493b. Subsequent debate on the bill prompted some MPs to engage in what Whitelocke saw as ‘derogation and dishonour of the laws of England’, prompting him to a lengthy speech in their vindication and in correction of misconceptions which revealed his pride in his profession and his frustration with ill-informed criticism (22 Nov.). Yet desire to preserve the mystique of his craft did not bind him to the preservation of Norman French, despite the far-reaching implications of its abandonment. To accept that it was unreasonable ‘that the generality of the people of England should by an implicit faith depend upon the knowledge of others in that which concerns them most of all’, to appreciate that such dependency was no different from that of the laity kept by ‘the Romish policy ... in ignorance of matters pertaining to their souls’ health’ and to announce that he could ‘find neither strangeness nor foresee great inconvenience by the passing of this act’, represented no small concession.537Whitelocke, Mems. 478-83.

Even when it came to full-scale review and reform of the law itself, heralded in the committee appointed on 26 December 1651 and subsequently confided to the Hale commission (whose membership he selected with Lisle and Cromwell), Whitelocke was not unconstructive.538CJ vii. 58b; Busch, ‘Whitelocke and Chancery Reform’, 321. He may have complained unfairly about the ill-informed and ‘opinionative’ contribution of the radical minister Hugh Peter, but in a period during which he was also president of the council of state (29 Dec. 1651-29 Jan. 1652) he found time to consult ‘often’ with committee members, while on 25 March 1652 he reported several bills arising from the commission’s proposals.539CJ vii. 62a, 110b; M. Cottrell, ‘Interregnum law reform’, EHR lxxxiii. 689-703, esp. 694, 696; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 280; Busch, ‘Whitelocke and Chancery Reform’, 322. He may subsequently have run out of energy or time, however: when on 2 February 1653 the House was resolved into a grand committee on county registers, he and Solicitor-general St John were explicitly dispensed from attendance at their other public employment in order to participate.540CJ vii. 253b; Worden, Rump Parliament, 319-20.

There were some issues where law met social policy on which Whitelocke’s stance may have accorded more nearly with that of radicals and ‘commonwealthsmen’. His membership of a committee set up to simplify the poor laws and provide work opportunities (1 Mar. 1650), which otherwise could be seen as a formality, was prefaced by participation in conciliar discussion of how to bring down the price of coal and corn.541CJ vi. 374b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 360, 402. Among Whitelocke’s many diversions was the Mineral and Battery Works Company, of which he became a member in May 1649 and governor in December 1650, doubtless at least partly thanks to his connection with the earl of Pembroke – a ‘very good and kind friend’ until his death that year.542BL Loan 16, ii. ff. 99, 102v, 103v, 125v; iii. ff. 4, 12; Whitelocke, Diary, 252. His continuing interest in commercial enterprise was also reflected in parliamentary appointments, many of which in turn stem from his service on the council of state. Trade issues periodically detained him in both arenas and he reported from the council on the coinage (20 Dec. 1649); an appointment to a committee addressing reform of the treasury (27 July 1652) was, on the other hand, a rare example of involvement in financial affairs.543CJ vi. 270a, 335b; 575b, 581a; vii. 67a, 159a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 376; 1651, p. 268; 1651-2, pp. 67, 150, 325; 1652-3, pp. 2, 47. Membership of the council’s admiralty subcommittee (24 Feb. 1649; 1 Mar.; 5 Dec. 1651) led to committee and other activity in the Commons.544CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 17; 1650, p. 149; 1651, p. 66; 1651-2, pp. 46, 501; CJ vi. 275b, 534a, 617a. A council appointment to review ordinances relating to mariners and prize goods (20 Mar. 1649) gave rise to a Commons appointment to look into butlerage and prisage (20 Dec.); he was still reporting to the House on these in December 1652 and March 1653 in the midst of also presenting a series of bills for managing the navy and admiralty.545CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 43; 1652-3, p. 124; CJ vi. 335a; vii. 227b, 228a, 231b, 234a, 235a, 264b.

Whitelocke almost certainly embraced with enthusiasm his role as commissioner of the great seal in authorising presentations to benefices. He was nominated (18 July 1649) to the committee refining the enabling act and investigating institutions made since the abolition of episcopacy, and he reported the form of the commission which resulted (8 Feb. 1650); consistently, it was in English.546CJ vi. 263b, 335b, 359a. Unsurprisingly, he was nominated to consider an Oxfordshire petition on the state of its clergy (6 Apr. 1649) and to forward preaching in St Albans (5 Sept. 1651).547CJ vi. 180b; vii. 12b. Still a pronounced laïcist, he was named first to a committee considering an act to prevent ministers treating matters of state in their prayers and sermons (3 Apr. 1649); he supported the abolition of regular fast days (although not occasional extraordinary fasts, 7 Mar. 1651) on the basis that they represented ‘too much formality’ and when London ministers criticised government policy towards the Scots in February 1650 he denounced them to the council of state.548CJ vi. 179a, 546b; Worden, Rump Parliament, 82-3, 133-5; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 511; Whitelocke, Diary, 279. Anticlericalism apart, ‘with singular consistency’ his religious position was broad and tolerant.549Worden, Rump Parliament, 131. He opposed the burning of a book by Abiezer Coppe, the notable Ranter (2 Feb. 1650), disliking ‘the illegality and breach of liberty in those arbitrary proceedings’, and with Vane II rallied a small majority to defeat claims that John Fry’s satirical work, The Clergy in their Colours, was scandalous (31 Jan. 1651).550Whitelocke, Mems. 440; CJ vi. 529b. He probably favoured the readmission of the Jews and he almost certainly maintained an indulgent attitude towards the proscribed Prayer Book.551CSP Dom. 1651, p. 472. Continued friendship for Archbishops James Ussher and John Williams led to numerous favours, while he seems to have taken over from Pembroke as principal patron of the French congregation in Westminster, which under the nose of Parliament used a formal liturgy, presenting to the House their petition for a permanent place of worship.552Whitelocke, Diary, 241, 246, 251, 283; CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 138; Longleat, Whitelocke pprs. xiii. f. 215; V. Larminie, ‘The Herbert Connection, the French Church and Westminster Politics’, in Huguenot Networks 1560-1780 ed. Larminie (New York, Abingdon, 2017), 47. As in the mid-1640s, a shared taste in sermons and a similar religious outlook was a major factor in oiling the wheels of co-operation with Oliver Cromwell, although, as seen by his reaction to petitioning in August 1652, Whitelocke was resistant to any attempt by the army to dictate to Parliament the pace or nature of religious reform and disappointed by Cromwell’s disinclination to prevent it.553Whitelocke, Diary, 271; Mems. 541; Worden, Rump Parliament, 135.

Membership of a committee to promote the gospel in Ireland (30 Nov. 1649), from which Whitelocke reported on 1 March 1650, was one of a relatively modest number of Commons’ appointments connected to his duties on the council of state’s Irish subcommittee.554CJ vi. 250a, 327b, 336a, 374b; vii. 49a, 49b, 77b, 80b, 118a, 194b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 384; 1650, p. 2; 1651, p. 494; 1651-2, p. 243. Military service there by his son James, undertaken against his advice, gave him a certain interest in the conduct of affairs and a motive to promote in the Commons rewards for James’s commander, Jerome Sankey*.555CSP Dom. 1650, p. 489; 1651-2, p. 318; Whitelocke, Diary, 242-4, 249-51, 268-70, 275. His tellership with Major-general Thomas Harrison I* against radicals Hesilrige and Marten in favour of prolonging the lord lieutenancy of Fleetwood (19 May 1652) is indicative of his cautious approach.556CJ vii. 134a. Cromwell failed to persuade him to accept judicial office in Ireland (June 1652).557Whitelocke, Mems. 536.

In contrast, as regards Scottish affairs Whitelocke became a lynchpin of contact between the council and Parliament. From the first he was associated with more radical MPs in communicating Parliament’s views to the Scottish commissioners (26 Feb. 1649).558CJ vi. 150b. On 8 February 1650 he reported to the House from the council of the arrival of spies promoting the ‘new troubles’ which heralded confrontation with Scottish support for Charles II.559CJ vi. 359a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 507-8. He formally announced the resignation of Fairfax as commander-in-chief following his refusal to fight the Scots and was on the party which went to convey parliamentary appreciation of Fairfax’s ‘faithful services’ and to attempt – perhaps genuinely in Whitelocke’s case – to change his mind (25 June).560CJ vi. 431a, 431b; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 206-7, 210, 213, 215; Whitelocke, Mems. 460-2; Diary, 260. The next day, within locked doors, he revealed that the council had ordered the army to march north.561CJ vi. 431b; Whitelocke, Mems. 462, 470. When the Scottish army invaded England in August 1651, Whitelocke, who was on the conciliar committee of safety – and who had only just contracted (secretly) his third marriage – reported frequently from the council to Parliament (12, 14, 19, 25, 30 Aug.; 3 Sept.) and was at the forefront of Commons’ action.562CJ vi. 618b-622b; vii. 3a, 5b, 6a 7a, 9a, 10b; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 315, 320, 326, 329, 349, 354, 358, 363, 366, 401; Whitelocke, Mems. 505; Diary, 262. He and Lisle were ordered (6 Sept.) to bring in an act for annual commemoration of Cromwell’s victory at Worcester and named to the committee to arrange a reward for the general.563CJ vii. 13a, 13b. He was on the parliamentary delegation sent to greet him (9-12 Sept.), receiving from Cromwell presents of ‘a very handsome and gallant young nag’ and two Scottish prisoners, whom he sent home.564CJ vii. 13b, 15b; Whitelocke, Mems. 509; Diary, 269-70. He was on a committee preparing a justification of the commonwealth’s rights over Scotland (9 Sept.) and reported on commissioners to be sent there (23 Oct.; 10 Dec.).565CJ vii. 14a, 30a, 49a, 56a; Whitelocke, Mems. 512; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 474, 475, 489, 494; 1651-2, pp. 43, 48. Assisted by Vane II and Lisle, he was in charge of the of subsequent measures culminating in the incorporation of Scotland into one commonwealth with England (Mar./Apr., Oct. 1652-Apr. 1653); this clearly entailed an enormous amount of drafting and consultation, and it is not clear whether, as time went on, Whitelocke always obeyed council instructions to report to Parliament.566CJ vii. 108a, 112a, 118b, 189a, 189b, 194a, 195a, 195b, 202b, 219b; CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 185, 243, 439, 442, 456, 459, 508, 510; 1652-3, pp. 2, 38, 49, 51, 97, 103, 127, 144, 156-7, 262.

Whitelocke’s increasingly important role with regard to Scotland went hand-in-hand with his growing reputation as an authority on foreign affairs. The initiative for overall policy direction has been ascribed to Marten, Thomas Chaloner*, Henry Neville*, and Harbert Morley*, who controlled the relevant committees, but Whitelocke, described as also ‘well to the fore’ in this respect, eventually emerged as the leading reporter of council decisions and information to the Commons.567Worden, Rump Parliament, 301. There was no sign of this in 1649. Although he was named first on 13 March to the council’s subcommittee to review alliances with other states, the attention of Whitelocke and others was largely directed elsewhere; he may anyway have tried to avoid identification with the issue in the wake of resisting attempts in April to accord him the dangerous mission of envoy to the Netherlands.568Whitelocke, Mems. 395; Diary, 235-6; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 37, 300. His report to Parliament (2 Feb. 1650) of the commission to be given to Anthony Ascham as agent to the king of Spain was probably mere formality; nomination to the committee to punish those involved in Ascham’s assassination doubtless served to reinforce his disinclination to serve abroad (28 June).569CJ vi. 356b, 434a.

From the beginning of 1651, however, his importance is unmistakeable, supporting his assertion that he ‘attended the council of state as often as he could, being much employed by them in foreign affairs’ – at this point perhaps a welcome relief when he was ‘extreme full of trouble in the business of the seal’, beset by ‘envious’ colleagues.570Whitelocke, Diary, 266-7. He chaired the committee who gave audience to the Portuguese ambassador and reported ensuing business (10, 16, 29 Jan.); he led further negotiations in April.571CJ vi. 523b, 525a, 529a, 556a, 558a, 560a; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 8, 13, 50, 69, 123, 129. He reprised the role late in 1652, reporting to Parliament on 15 December.572CJ vii. 229b; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 436; 1652-3, p. 9. Through 1651 and 1652 he was a prominent member of delegations to receive ambassadors from, and regularly reported transactions with, the United Provinces, Sweden, Tuscany, the north-west German Lutheran duchy of Oldenburg, the Hanse towns, Denmark and France.573CJ vi. 535a, 576b, 577b, 593b; vii. 44a, 64a, 77a, 89a, 100b, 103b-105a, 117b, 130a, 133b, 143a, 192b, 194a, 236b; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 19, 41, 141, 235, 477, 492, 494; 1651-2, pp. 11, 89, 94, 116, 119, 122, 133, 140, 145, 167, 172, 173, 203, 228, 239, 244, 318, 321; 1652-3, p. 62; Whitelocke, Mems. 491-2, 528. With Lisle, he was entrusted with an act to prohibit commonwealth officials from receiving gifts or pensions from foreign states (29 July, 7 Aug. 1651).574CJ vi. 595b, 618b; Recognition of the financial burden of this kind of service was doubtless among the many reasons why in November 1651 he once again declined a commission, this time to go to Spain.575Whitelocke, Diary, 272. The war with the United Provinces, which broke out in May 1652, might have been expected to occasion more frequent reports to the House, as had been the case with Scotland, but here it was not until several weeks into the war that Whitelocke, who had for some time been prominent in conciliar activity, relayed news to Parliament – an indication, perhaps, of a trend towards relying less on the sanction of MPs to implement some areas of policy.576CJ vii. 150a, 150b, 166b, 226a-227a, 236b; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 236, 244, 284, 290, 294, 312, 318, 321, 439; Whitelocke, Mems. 536.

Although he was highly visible in the Commons late in 1652, not least in naval matters which had a clear connection with the conflict, Whitelocke appeared only four times in the Journal between January 1653 and the dissolution on 20 April; his last mention, on 9 March, was as a teller with Hesilrige in division over whether a highwayman should be pardoned.577CJ vii. 265b. By March he did not need the benefit of hindsight to convince him that ‘the drift of Cromwell and his officers’ was ‘to put an end to this Parliament’, although the self-centred nature of his narrative makes it difficult to disentangle a cooling of relations between the general and Whitelocke, and a certain mutual envy, from a bid by Cromwell for greater power over his parliamentary colleagues.578Whitelocke, Diary, 284.

In the early days of the Rump Whitelocke had enjoyed fairly good relations with Cromwell and, as has been argued, there were issues like religion on which they continued to concur, but Whitelocke detected a gradual estrangement.579Whitelocke, Diary, 241, 284. What he described in relation to April 1650 as the ‘very great interest’ acquired by Cromwell as the result of his success in Ireland was seen as less widely based, or less widely shared, that June, when Whitelocke talked of ‘the juncto of the council of state with whom Cromwell consulted’ and himself as an outsider who ‘was often sent for’.580Whitelocke, Mems. 452; Diary, 259. Whitelocke located two potential turning points late in 1651. In November he refused a request to favour a kinswoman of Cromwell’s in a suit – plausibly enough, since the impartiality and incorruptibility of the legal system was a consistent guiding principle. Afterwards he heard that the general had not reacted as reasonably as had first appeared.581Whitelocke, Diary, 272-4. On 10 December Whitelocke was present with other MPs and army officers at a meeting in the Speaker’s house at which Cromwell spoke little, but ‘fished’ for opinions on whether there should be ‘a mixed monarchical government’, as desired by most lawyers, or not. Whitelocke recalled that he had come down firmly for the former, on the basis that ‘the laws of England are so interwoven with the power and practice of monarchy, that to settle a government without something of monarchy in it’ was liable fatally to undermine them. He could envisage a time ‘for the king’s eldest son, or for the duke of York his brother to come into the Parliament ... upon such terms as shall be thought fit and agreeable both to our civil and spiritual liberties’.582Whitelocke, Mems. 516; Diary, 273. On this occasion Whitelocke claimed that his view caused no rift with Cromwell, who in the weeks that followed gave him ‘extraordinary respect’ and ‘many times’ asked his advice’.583Whitelocke, Diary, 274.

By June 1652, however, he thought that Cromwell had an ulterior motive for encouraging him to accept office in Ireland – at least collusion with Lisle to remove him from his great seal office, but possibly also from the seat of power in England altogether, so that there would be no pre-eminent civilian to rival his influence.584Whitelocke, Diary, 276; In this he probably overrated himself, but Cromwell’s attempt to both court and neutralise a colleague, and his own alarm at military pretensions, look genuine enough. When in August the army presented to Parliament its ‘insolent’ wide-ranging petition for reform, Whitelocke – who was on the committee to consider it (13 Aug.) – advised Cromwell to intervene and

stop this way of their petitioning by the officers ... with swords in their hands, lest in time it might come too home to himself; but he seemed to slight, or rather to have some design by it in order to which he put them to prepare a way for him.585Whitelocke, Mems. 541; Diary, 278; CJ vii. 164b.

At a purportedly chance meeting in St James’s Park in November, when an affable Cromwell took the opportunity to consult about public affairs, Whitelocke said that he told the general that he had ‘power and party sufficient to repress’ the soldiers’ clamours and that the army was not the tool to control corrupt MPs. Responding to a ‘sudden and unexpected’ outburst from Cromwell asking ‘what if a man should take upon him to be king?’, Whitelocke (silently identifying that man) replied that Cromwell had credit and power enough already: assuming the title would merely stir up political and legal difficulties.586Whitelocke, Diary, 281-2; Mems. 548-51.

Whitelocke represented the last few months of the Rump as a constant struggle between Parliament and the army, in which he was a staunch and voluble upholder of the former against the latter, to whom he constantly protested that they would ‘pull down the foundation of their own interest and power’.587Whitelocke, Diary, 283-5; Mems. 552-5. On 19 and 20 April he and Widdrington ‘and but few others’ made last-ditch attempts to avert the forcible dissolution. At that point he chose to overlook the shortcomings that had prompted it, celebrating instead a ‘great Parliament, which had done so great things, of whom many were wise, just, courageous and faithful men’, but which had been ‘wholly routed by those whom they had maintained, and authorised, who could not justify anything that they had done, nor any drop of blood they had shed but by [its] authority’.588Whitelocke, Diary, 286-7; Burton’s Diary, ii. 89.

Swedish embassy, Apr. 1653-Sept. 1654

A letter intercepted five weeks later claimed that ‘Whitelocke declareth that the Parliament is not dissolved and there is a gathering of hands to that purpose’.589TSP i. 249. In those circumstances he was not a candidate for the Nominated Parliament, however eagerly his advice had been courted in the past. Neither was he on the new council of state. At last cut loose, he indulged his scorn. ‘It was much wondered by some’, he registered at the Parliament’s opening on 4 July, that its Members ‘would at this summons and from these hands take upon them the supreme authority of this nation, considering how little authority Cromwell and his officers had to give it, or these gentlemen to take it’.590Whitelocke, Mems. 559. When this ‘little Parliament’ abolished the court of chancery in August, Whitelocke found himself with neither employment nor patronage.591Whitelocke, Mems. 563; Diary, 289. But in early September he was formally offered a commission as ambassador to Sweden in place of Lisle, who had declined. After agonised discussion with friends and family, who were divided on the matter, a ‘troubled’ Whitelocke accepted. 592Whitelocke, Diary, 290-1. Parliament not only agreed his commission (14 Sept.) but also his petition for immediate payment of arrears of salary.593CJ vii. 318b, 333a, 335a; CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 146-7. Having come to the chamber to receive his commission on 29 October, Whitelocke was ‘suddenly to go’, and he set out on 2 November.594CJ vii. 338a, 341b, 342a; Whitelocke, Mems. 567; Diary, 292-3.

It seems clear from his earlier refusals of similar missions that it took a withdrawal of other alternatives to persuade him to take on this one. He found the experience both alarming (in terms of adverse weather and danger of assassination) and exhilarating (in terms of the opportunity for learned conversation with Queen Christina and for apparent political influence). It pandered to his self-importance in allowing him to gather a party of grateful attendants and it adversely affected his financial situation and his health. The pain of separation from his wife and children was considerable.595Whitelocke, Diary, 294-387, 393; Mems. 568-94; Longleat, Whitelocke pprs. xiii. ff. 215, 236; CCSP ii. 261; Add. 37346-7; BL, RP209; TSP ii. passim. On the whole, however, it enhanced his political reputation and earned him respect on his return home.596e.g. TSP i. 635; CCSP ii. 289, 350; S. Carrington, The History of the Life and Death of Oliver, late Lord Protector (1659), 188-9. It also provided him with a Swedish knighthood (probably some time in February 1654), although this honour receives uncharacteristically little mention among his papers and was rather intermittently referenced in England.597Whitelocke, Diary, 335.

Whitelocke arrived home on 1 July 1654 to a warm reception from Protector Oliver Cromwell. His account of his embassy, delivered to the council on the 6th, was accepted favourably and the treaty he had negotiated was endorsed.598Whitelocke, Diary, 387-90; Mems. 593-4. The electors of both Oxford and Bedford had already chosen him to represent them at the forthcoming Parliament, while those of Buckinghamshire informed him of parallel intentions.599Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. xvi. ff. 55, 69, 71. He wrote to the latter on the 17th to decline this, the most prestigious offer, suggesting in his stead Richard Beake, who had accompanied him to Sweden, but this was the seat he ultimately accepted, a decision not formally registered until a month into the parliamentary session (5 Oct.).600Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. xvi. f. 69; CJ vii. 373a. It is not clear whether he had been angling for an Oxfordshire county seat, for which he (also) proposed his son James, or whether he was playing for time in order to form an impression as to how the Parliament would unfold.601Whitelocke, Diary, 391; Mems. 596; Longleat, Whitelock pprs. xvi. f. 76. Before it opened he was again sworn as a commissioner of the great seal (to which he had been nominated in his absence), his treaty was ratified, he was appointed a treasury commissioner and he was summoned to give counsel to Cromwell.602CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 281, 284, 337; Mems. 597. Even if he set too much store by the feasting and entertainment he received on visits to Bristol and Oxford, he evidently looked the part of a great man.603Whitelocke, Mems. 599; Diary, 394.

First protectorate Parliament, 1654-5

As far as Whitelocke was concerned, he was a force to be reckoned with in the Parliament. ‘Diligent’ in his attendance at the House and its committees, and heard often ‘with great favour and respect’ – ‘when he could spare time from the business of the seal’ – he ‘gained so great an interest in the House that Oliver was not pleased with it’.604Whitelocke, Diary, 399; Mems. 606. His prominence, if that is what it was, derived not so much from the number of his committee nominations, which fell off noticeably after a few weeks, as from the importance of the business they addressed and the interventions he made in debate.

Nominated to the privileges committee on the first working day of the Parliament, on the next day Whitelocke made a lengthy relation of his embassy.605CJ vii. 366b. As might be expected, he put a positive gloss on it and gave a largely favourable view of Swedish society, apart from its trade and its rights and liberties, which were both inferior to those enjoyed in England. In an indication of some sympathy for law reform and simplification, he noted that its laws were ‘clear and few, nor are they covetous to multiply them, which they hold an error in government and the cause of contention’, while he commended their ‘good way ... to supply their churches’ in vacancies, which consisted in lay inhabitants choosing candidates to present to the bishop or superintendent for ordination.606Whitelocke, Mems. 601-3. The speech received ‘general applause’ and Lord Broghill, whose interest Whitelocke had promoted in the previous Parliament, returned the compliment by endorsing the treaty and successfully moving for a payment of £2,000 towards the ambassador’s arrears of salary.607Whitelocke, Diary, 250, 395; CJ vii. 49b.

Whitelocke was a key player in the main opening business of the House – the process of settling the government. When Cromwell requested subscription by MPs to a declaration recognising the protectorate, Whitelocke reported from the small group which drafted an initial formulation that promised faithfulness to the protector and commonwealth and which undertook not to alter it, but which limited this to the principle, allowing room for amendment of the detail (14 Sept.).608CJ vii. 367b, 368a; Whitelocke, Mems. 605; Diary, 398-9. He was nominated to several further committees which then addressed particular aspects of the settlement and the MPs’ oath (21, 25 Sept.; 12, 18 Dec.; 2 Jan. 1655).609CJ vii. 369a, 370a, 399a, 403a, 411b. He was presumably among those behind a vote on 27 November that commissioners of the seal should issue writs of summons to Parliament should the protector fail to do so within an agreed time limit.610Whitelocke, Diary, 397.

Otherwise, Whitelocke was on several standing committees: those to investigate the proceedings of the judges at Salters’ Hall (relating to prisoners for debt, 15 Sept.); to exercise censorship, if deemed necessary, on diurnals and newsbooks (22 Sept.); to review the establishment of the army and navy (26 Sept.); and to direct Scottish and Irish affairs (both 29 Sept.).611CJ vii. 368a, 369b, 370b, 371b, Once again chancery reform was on the agenda. Whitelocke was on a committee set up on 5 October to decide if the projected ordinance should be suspended, in whole or in part, as well as another resurrecting the issue of alleged abuses in writs including habeas corpus (3 Nov.).612CJ vii. 374a, 381b. He noted in his diary for 27 November without comment that the chancery ordinance was ‘suspended for a time’, but the opposition which he expressed a few months later towards new moves for reform was probably already in play.613Whitelocke, Diary, 397. Nominated also on 3 November to consider a petition from William Craven, 1st Baron Craven, the once-wealthy financier of Elizabeth, queen of Bohemia, Whitelocke recorded doing the peer ‘service’ in this.614CJ vii. 381b; Whitelocke, Diary, 397. This was his last appearance in the Journal for nearly six weeks. The gap is explained to some extent by preoccupation with the illnesses of his daughter Frances and of Selden, but may indicate that he was keeping aloof from certain businesss.615Whitelocke, Diary, 397-8; Mems. 608. On his return he did, however, re-engage with the question of higher education. His appointment to a committee addressing a petition from the University of Cambridge seeking encouragement of civil law studies (22 Nov.) came in the context of involvement during the previous Parliament in considering a petition from Oxford (11 June 1652) and of his continuing commitment to preserving and enhancing the universities.616CJ vii. 141a, 407b; Whitelocke, Diary, 397.

Whitelocke’s final appearance in the Journal was on 2 January 1655, three weeks before the end of the session.617CJ vii. 411b. During this time he described himself as in regular attendance at Parliament, with many ‘suitors’ there, ‘but not with much hope of doing good’. Doubtless he was discouraged by the House’s determination to pursue those perceived as heretics. It was, however, on the machinations of the protector and his closest councillors that Whitelocke pinned the Parliament’s failure. When the protector, finding MPs ‘not so pliable to his purposes’, ‘began to be weary of Parliament, and have thoughts of dissolving it’, Whitelocke counselled otherwise, or failing that, advised him to wait at least until it had sat for the minimum period prescribed by the Instrument of Government.618Whitelocke, Diary, 399-400; Mems. 610-18. Oliver ignored the former, while adhering to the latter.

At first Whitelocke persuaded himself that it was ‘unseasonable, now that it was done to allege anything against the doing of it’ and instead, ‘gave his best advice what was fit to be done for the contenting of the people’.619Whitelocke, Diary, 400. However, he was not included on the council, and he and Widdrington finally resigned as commissioners of the great seal in early June when their resistance to the implementation of the ordinance regulating chancery could no longer be sustained.620Whitelocke, Mems. 621-3; Diary, 402, 404-9; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 152. The penalty for such uncharacteristic intransigence was not inconsiderable in terms of loss of income, but neither was it dangerous or disadvantageous as anticipated. The protector, ‘being of himself not ill-natured’, compensated both men by making them commissioners of the treasury at a salary of £1,000 a year, and in succeeding months he and his council called on Whitelocke for a variety of high-profile tasks including receiving the Swedish ambassador and serving on the trade and navigation committee.621Whitelocke, Diary, 410; Mems. 626, 629-30; CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 262, 362; 1655-6, pp. 1, 100, 340; J. Hammond, Leah and Rachel, or, the Two Fruitful Sisters, Virginia and Mary-land (1656), 27 (E.865.6). Despite, or perhaps partly because of ‘often press[ing] him to have frequent Parliaments’, the protector not only ‘seldom omitted to’ consult Whitelocke about foreign affairs but also again raised the possibility of his going on embassy to Sweden. Nothing came of this, or of what the reformer and ecumenist John Dury referred to as an intention by ‘the state ... to employ your honour in an universal embassy towards all Protestants in Germany, to unite them for the carrying out of a common cause’, but in the meantime it served to maintain Whitelocke as a figure of potential power.622Add. 32093, f. 341; Whitelocke, Mems. 630; Diary, 410-44; CSP Dom. 1655-6, pp. 191, 227; TSP iv. 596. One marker of this was that his former adversary Lord Saye wrote in June 1656 requesting, ‘upon the account of your lordship’s former favours to me’, assistance in a chancery cause in which Whitelocke was still perceived to wield influence.623Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. xvii. f. 166.

Notwithstanding this, by the time elections were in prospect for the next Parliament in August 1656, Whitelocke had concluded that he was ‘undeservedly undervalued and neglected by the protector’.624Whitelocke, Diary, 445. Hence he seems to have made particularly strenuous efforts to marshal his friends. Dignified by his Swedish title, he was elected as a knight of the shire for Buckinghamshire as a result of what was described to him as a massive demonstration of support: ‘1,000 horse and in the field above 3,000’ who turned out to march to Aylesbury ensured that he was ‘first and unanimously elected’.625Whitelocke, Mems. 650; Diary, 445-6.

Second protectorate Parliament 1656-7

Although Whitelocke may have exaggerated his popular mandate, his standing in the Parliament was substantial, and arguably greater than in its predecessor. In addition to frequent committee appointments, and the chairing of several of the most important, he was evidently a regular contributor to debate, and as a result of a brief tenure as Speaker, he was able to promote a succession of private bills. Both his range of interests and the views he expressed were consistent with his previous record, and as before he alternated between appreciating opportunities to advise the protector and regretting that the course of politics was not the one he would have chosen.

Prominent in the pursuit of unfinished business surrounding law reform, he seems not so much to have been dragging his feet as laboriously ensuring that measures were watertight and lasting. He seemed to agree that ‘to regulate the body of the law would be impractical’, but confident that ‘the law is a just rule’, he was prepared to contemplate regulation of its procedures (24 Apr.).626Burton’s Diary, ii. 35. This conclusion may have been reinforced by his experience in the case of George Rodney (and later his widow, Sarah) versus John Cole, a dispute over debt which first surfaced in a petition to Parliament in November 1656, but which was still detaining MPs in March 1659.627CJ vii. 457b, 479a, 479b, 620a. It exposed flaws in the conduct in chancery of the commissioners of the great seal, and although Whitelocke himself eventually emerged more or less exonerated from the longrunning revelations of confusion and mistakes, there was ‘high language’ and ‘great clashing’ between him and Lisle (who sought to implicate colleagues) during debates; sometimes they appeared to recollect themselves and tone down their exchanges, but cumulatively they tended to undermine confidence in the system.628Burton’s Diary, i. 19, 105, 135-6, 303.

One of the draftsmen of a new bill to mop up remaining issues surrounding the abolition of the court of wards (23 Sept.), Whitelocke was first named when it was re-committed on 29 October and was still engaged in committee and in debate in November.629CJ vii. 427a, 447a; Whitelocke, Diary, 451-2. With two other lawyers he prepared another bill for tightening up registration of births, burials and marriages, with a new remit of preventing abduction of heirs and infants (25 Sept.); he spoke to it on 15 November, but nearly six months later was still trying to ensure that the final act would be permanent, would not invalidate existing marriages, and would be voted through by a convincing number of MPs (29 Apr. 1657).630Whitelocke, Diary, 452; Burton’s Diary, ii. 68. He recorded that in December 1656 he ‘promoted’ the bill for the probate of wills and granting administrations and he seems once more to have been sympathetic to representations from civil lawyers.631Whitelocke, Diary, 452-3; CJ vii. 457a. Otherwise he was involved in matters as varied as reviewing the laws on wrecks (28 Oct.) and reconstructing courts and jurisdictions in the north (20 Nov.; 23 May 1657), while the reform of abuses and the regulation of chancery was still in play towards the end of the Parliament (25 Sept.; 7, 13 Oct. 1656; 30 Apr. 1657).632CJ vii. 428a, 435b, 446b, 456a, 528a, 538a.

Cumulatively Whitelocke invested considerable energy in commercial and social matters, where his own interests were more decisively on the side of reform. His position in the Mineral and Battery and the Mines Royal Companies, together with his office at Windsor, doubtless contributed to his promotion of a bill for the increase and preservation of timber in the Forest of Dean (25, 27 Sept. 1656) and to his involvement in surveying forests for sale (30 Apr. 1657).633CJ vii. 428a, 429b, 528a; Whitelocke, Diary, 453, 459, 469. That he was considered not entirely unsympathetic to the continuing problem of prisoners for debt and small creditors, which he was again nominated to address (29 Oct.; 1 Nov.) is suggested by a range of other nominations and activities.634CJ vii. 447a, 449a. To varying extents he was involved in regulating alehouses (29 Sept.), artificers’ wages (7 Oct.), corn prices (7 Oct.), vagabonds (16 Oct.), enclosures and drainage (29 Nov.; 22, 23 Dec.), highways (2 Jan. 1657; opposing the bill), the ‘multiplicity of buildings’ (9 May; 20 June; apparently asserting freeholders’ rights to engage in reasonable development) and ‘immoderate living’ (17 June; including gambling).635CJ vii. 430a, 435b, 439b, 461b, 472b, 473a, 478a, 531b, 559b, 565a; Burton’s Diary, i. 294; ii. 207, 229.

A freeman of the Merchant Adventurers’ Company since 1654, Whitelocke advanced the bill for its incorporation (Mar. 1657) and defended the interests of native merchants by arguing that the burden of paying arrears on London assessments should be placed on the Hanseatic merchants based at the Steelyard (19 Dec.).636Add. 28079, f. 59; Whitelocke, Diary, 459; Burton’s Diary, i. 180. He attended the protectorate council’s subcommittees for trade and for weights, measures and markets, furthered bills for navigation, for the import of bullion and for regulating vintners, and spoke against the ‘great abuse’ embodied in the importation of ‘prohibited goods’ by aliens (1, 17 June).637Whitelocke, Diary, 451-3, 460, 462, 469; CJ vii. 560a, 568b; Burton’s Diary, ii. 168. He ‘furthered’ the bill for the abolition of purveyance (3 Nov.), sought to protect the inns of court from the novel imposition of assessments (23 Dec.), questioned the ‘inveterate hate of that party against us’ which prompted over-hasty motions for financial penalties (25 Dec.) and opposed the continuation of the decimation tax (7 Jan. 1657) on grounds of it being indirect, unparliamentary and likely to punish the innocent, but as a treasury commissioner he showed himself keen to increase the state’s revenue by trade and other means.638CJ vii. 449b; Whitelocke, Diary, 452; Burton’s Diary, i. 211, 234, 317-19; Mems. of the Verney Family, iii. 288. Nominated to committees to investigate arrears due in excise and in the prize office (17 Oct.), he spoke on the issue on 7 November, while in March 1657 he ‘had an account prepared for the House of the whole year’s disbursements for the land and sea forces and government’, to which he subsequently spoke (24 Apr.).639CJ vii. 440a, 440b; Whitelocke, Diary, 451, 459; Burton’s Diary, ii. 28. In May he was among those responsible for several money-raising bills, including one relating to postage.640CJ vii. 542a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 139, 142.

As he had argued 14 years earlier, perhaps Whitelocke was content that fines on papists’ estates might be employed to ‘improve the revenue’ in the way envisaged by a committee to which he was named (22 Oct. 1656).641Add. 18777, f. 114a; CJ vii. 443b However, his stance was rooted in legality. When named to prepare a bill for discovering and convicting recusants (3 Dec.), he spoke up not only on behalf of the spouses of converts who might find their estates sequestered, but against the principle that the whole issue might be left to the potentially severe discretion of a magistrate: clear guidelines were needed.642CJ vii. 463b; Burton’s Diary, i. 7. The lengthy debates on the case of James Naylor, whom some MPs demanded should be condemned by Parliament for his apparent re-enactment of Jesus Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, raised for Whitelocke particularly complex issues. Placed on committees to consider the offences of Naylor and others at Bristol (31 Oct.) and subsequently to examine also petitions against Quakers (18 Dec.), initially Whitelocke seemed in no doubt as to Naylor’s wickedness: it was actually ‘more than blasphemy’.643CJ vii. 448a, 470a; Burton’s Diary, i. 32, 57-8. For this very reason, however, he was heard to say that it was a new crime, or rather, a new sin, against which there was no readily discernable legislation, and thus he advised first establishing upon what basis proceedings might be initiated; to do otherwise would be to set up alarming precedents; to duck the problem by referring it back to an inferior court was unacceptable (5, 8 Dec.).644Burton’s Diary, i. 32, 57–8. Yet (if Thomas Burton* caught the nuances accurately) his thinking evolved as he reflected, giving rise to the suspicion that he may have been playing for time and hoping that MPs would repent their decision to punish Naylor or even, less flatteringly, that his reactions were muddled. It was a ‘weighty business’ in which it was ‘fit every man [in the House] be heard’ (12 Dec.), yet it was also a diversion that ‘had taken up too much of their time’ and he ‘spake to make an end of the business’ which he considered ‘too fiercely prosecuted by some rigid men’.645Burton’s Diary, ii. 125; Whitelocke, Diary, 452-3. While prepared to agree that, ‘if it be the will of God that this person should die, we ought not to spare him’, he questioned whether it was in fact God’s will (13 Dec.). On closer examination, it proved the Naylor had not actually denied or cursed either God or Jesus. While he might be indictable in the court of upper bench for broaching opinions liable to raise sedition, ultimately there was no law by which Parliament could condemn him to death.646Burton’s Diary, ii. 125-30. Four days later, on the other hand, he expressed the view that lower courts might well release Naylor under habeas corpus, and that to avoid this Parliament might declare him ‘guilty of such and such things’ and ‘adjudge that he shall suffer thus and thus’.647Burton’s Diary, ii. 161-2. Perhaps the key to Whitelocke’s convoluted reasoning lay in his fear of popular disorder and sedition, at odds with his normal instinct for private tolerance.648Burton’s Diary, ii. 4. In debate on petitioning against Quakers (18 Dec.) he suggested that if ‘there be any such people as deny magistracy and ministry ... cutting of throats must necessarily follow’; what he objected to most was ‘the disturbance of the public peace of the nation’. The remedy for that was ‘a particular law’.649Burton’s Diary, ii. 170.

Naylor’s case found out Whitelocke’s vulnerabilities. On other religious issues he was more consistently tolerant and constructive. Notwithstanding his having relinquished the responsibility that went to commissioners of the great seal, he was first named to a committee for securing sequestered parsonages to their current inhabitants (4 Oct.) and inclusion on a committee raising further maintenance for ministers (4 Nov.) was accompanied by long term activity in this cause.650CJ vii. 434a, 450a; Whitelocke, Diary, 460, 468; Burton’s Diary, ii. 61-2. In contrast, as he recorded a few months later, he was a reluctant attender of the committee of triers and ejectors: ‘I liked not the work’.651Whitelocke, Mems. 665. Although he was nominated to the committee preparing a bill for better observance of the sabbath (18 Feb. 1657), he declared himself firmly against ‘any liberty ... to enter men’s houses’ to enforce any regulations or to collect outstanding tithes: that would be ‘more than was granted in the time of popery’ (20 June).652CJ vii. 493b; Burton’s Diary, ii. 263. His own house was ‘often’ the setting for a subcommittee on religion, announced on 16 January and convened first on 6 February, which undertook a review of mistakes in the translation of the bible, in consultation with scholars of varied political and religious stances.653Burton’s Diary, i. 351n; Whitelocke, Diary, 455; Mems. 658. Alongside this he remained a promoter of universities, joining with Nathaniel Fiennes to uphold the liberties of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and receiving further representations against the parliamentary visitors.654CJ vii. 477a; Whitelocke, Diary, 459; Burton’s Diary, i. 268.

As in the previous Parliament, Whitelocke was an early recruit to the standing committees on Scotland and Ireland (23 Sept. 1656).655CJ vii. 427a. He again ‘declared his opinion upon the bill for uniting Scotland to England’ (Nov. 1656; Feb. 1657) in relation to which he apparently argued for a simple formula which preserved as much as possible of the existing social order (4 Dec.), but Ireland seems to have occupied more of his attention.656Whitelocke, Diary, 451-2, 454; Burton’s Diary, i. 14. Also in favour of uniting Ireland and England, he was engaged in several measures to punish rebels and settle confiscated land there, including on protectorate stalwarts Henry Cromwell* and Lord Broghill, with whom he maintained cordial relations; a ‘small sharer’, he furthered the bill for the Adventurers for Ireland.657Whitelocke, Diary, 454, 466-9; CJ vii. 477a, 515a, 529a, 546a; Burton’s Diary, i. 259; ii. 176, 197. His speeches in favour of making land grants legally watertight (29 Apr.; 1 May 1657) and of fixing an appropriate overall level of taxation at the outset (12 June) underline a commitment to minimising the potential for disputes, as well as to the preservation of his own modest stake.658Burton’s Diary, ii. 66, 96, 225. Meanwhile, in contrast to the previous Parliament, although he recollected again giving a full account of his negotiation in Sweden to MPs (Nov. 1656) and was rumoured to be destined for another embassy there (Feb./Mar. 1657), foreign affairs occupied little of his time.659Whitelocke, Diary, 451; CCSP iii. 415. His sole committee nomination and recorded speech in this area related to the potential war with Spain (10, 17 Nov. 1656).660CJ vii. 440a; Whitelocke, Diary, 452.

From the beginning of the session Whitelocke appeared as one of Parliament’s grandees, closely involved in all its dealings with the protector and co-operating closely with other civilians like Broghill, Fiennes and Secretary of state John Thurloe* who saw in Oliver the best hope of maintaining stability and legitimacy. In Whitelocke’s case as in many others, it was a policy born of pragmatism and adopted with reluctance, and there are periodic signs of faltering loyalty or nerve and of concern to define tightly the limits of executive influence over Parliament. He was appointed to the committees which, in the aftermath of a royalist-Presbyterian plot and an assassination attempt on Cromwell, drafted an act to annul Charles Stuart’s title to the throne (19 Sept.), declared a thanksgiving fast (22 Sept.) and discussed plans to secure peace, safety and a permanent settlement for the future (25, 26 Sept.).661CJ vii. 425a, 426a, 428a, 429a. By late November he was chairing a committee dealing with the thorny question of the protector’s assent to parliamentary bills and its relationship to determining the length of its sessions.662CJ vii. 455b, 459b. When in December calls were renewed for the re-admission to the House of MPs who had been excluded by the government, Whitelocke appeared to lend support in proposing adjournment for a fuller attendance, although his precise intent is difficult to determine; whatever else, he advocated a return to closer control by Parliament itself over Members who absented themselves (as some did in sympathy with those excluded).663Burton’s Diary, i. 194-5, 289. As is revealed by his response to Cromwell’s questioning of Parliament’s jurisdiction over Naylor, he thought precedents for its exercising a judicial role should be deployed with caution, but that the protector was not the final arbiter of their efficacy: whatever power it had, the Instrument of Government did not restrain it and Parliament should not thoughtlessly concede it. In this, as in other matters, ‘if there be a defect of law’ he preferred that ‘a law be made’ to repair it, ‘that posterity may not be surprised’ (by implication, by a novel, extra-parliamentary or illegitimate source of power) (26, 30 Dec.).664Burton’s Diary, i. 253, 256, 276.

The failure in January 1657 of a second assassination attempt rallied conservative MPs to the protector’s side, but Whitelocke appeared to want to avoid being panicked into the hasty passing of embryonic legislation. He was named second after Thurloe to a committee preparing the narrative that would justify a public thanksgiving (19 Jan.) and reported from that appointed to congratulate Cromwell personally on his deliverance (21 Jan.).665CJ vii. 481a, 481b. However, he was clear in debate on 19 January that responses should be distinct and nuanced. Whitehall chapel was an appropriate place for a thanksgiving ‘because the deliverance was from thence’, while a separate time and place should be fixed for what ‘cannot be too solemn a congratulation’ from MPs. That was not the occasion to press the protector on political matters; nor was it ‘ever known that the whole House waited upon his highness for his consent to any business’ – that, he seemed to think, would be too abject.666Burton’s Diary, i. 361. It was perhaps in recognition of his pre-eminence in combining ultimate loyalty with (as he repeatedly claimed) sufficient independence and regard for parliamentary sovereignty that when Speaker Widdrington was finally forced from the chair by his health, Whitelocke was selected as his temporary replacement (27 Jan.).667CJ vii. 482b; Burton’s Diary, i. 369. Earlier in the month Whitelocke had proposed adjournment as the solution, and now as usual he protested his reluctance and unworthiness; it was, he declared in retrospect, ‘the most difficult and troublesome employment of any that he had yet undergone’.668Burton’s Diary, i. 338; Whitelocke, Diary, 455. But he had requisite experience and he enjoyed some rewards. Already, as in previous Parliaments, engaged on prioritising parliamentary business, and thus the recipient and promoter of many private petitions, he was now in a position to advance those he favoured (for a fee) as a perquisite of his place; this in turn enhanced his standing.669Burton’s Diary, i. 198, 199, 202; CJ vii. 439b, 445a, 472a, 496b, 501a, 503b, 505a, 505b; Whitelocke, Diary, 456-7; Mems. 655-6, 661. Allowed £5 a day in expenses more than Widdrington, he recorded proudly his ‘friends’’ verdict that more business was despatched during his period of office than in the rest of the parliamentary session thus far. When he relinquished it on 18 February the same friends secured a vote of £2,500 arrears in respect of money outstanding on his Swedish embassy.670CJ vii. 493a; Whitelocke, Diary, 457-8; CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 276; Burton’s Diary, i. 375.

It was against that day that Whitelocke recorded that he declined to be responsible for delivering to Parliament the first draft of what became the Humble Petition and Advice, ‘not liking several things in it’.671Whitelocke, Mems. 656. Perhaps he was emboldened by his recent success, although he also registered jealousy on the part of ‘the protector and some of Whitelocke’s ill-willers about him’.672Whitelocke, Diary, 458. But through March he was ‘much employed in the great business of the settlement of the nation’; appointed to committees refining successive clauses of the remonstrance, he reputedly voted for kingship to be retained in the first article, and emerged – thanks above all to Broghill – as the chairman of the delegation which was to offer Cromwell the crown.673Whitelocke, Diary, 459-60; CJ vii. 499b, 501a, 502a, 505a, 506a, 507b, 508b, 511b, 514a; Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 22 (E.935.5). The position was a delicate one: although for once Whitelocke did not indicate any initial reluctance, not only was there much at stake but there was also a potential for loss of face as day after day he waited fruitlessly on Cromwell and then solemnly reported the protector’s prevarication and scruples (4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13-15, 17, 20-23 Apr.) to a House which then promptly adjourned.674CJ vii. 520a–523a; Burton’s Diary, i. 417, 421; ii. 1-8. An account of exchanges with Oliver on 11 April reveals him apparently rather ill at ease, more cautious and formal than his fellow members of the delegation, and inclined to take refuge in the fact of being only a mouthpiece of Parliament. Notwithstanding an undertaking to speak with ‘a great deal of clearness’, his remarks were circumlocutory and utterly lacking in the persuasive rhetoric of his colleague Fiennes. Essentially, he commended the advantages of a familiar title of king, ‘known by the law of England for many ages, many hundreds of years together received, and the law fitted to it, and that to the law’, over the novel title of protector.675N. Fiennes et al. Monarchy Asserted (1660), 3, 8-11. On the 16th he was somewhat more fluent – although not free of the ‘tedious’ quality he claimed to fear – as an advocate of a kingship grounded in law and popular acceptance. Repeating his earlier argument for a foundation of common consent, he rested the hope of obtaining it for the latest change in government on the continuity of divine sanction, doubting ‘not but that God will continue his blessings to that good old cause wherein we are engaged’. If all else failed to convince, he then suggested that Cromwell should accept the crown because Parliament had offered it; whether this was a deliberate attempt to signal the subordination of the former to the latter, or simply another argument added to the mélange, is not evident.676Monarchy Asserted, 77-80.

For a while Whitelocke was convinced that ‘the protector was satisfied in his private judgement that it was fit to take upon him the title of king’.677Whitelocke, Mems. 656. In debate on 23 April he echoed Broghill in arguing that the Petition and Advice should not yet be ‘unravelled’.678Burton’s Diary, ii. 18. While on the 24th he made several interventions in favour of referring elements of the settlement to committee, on the 25th he commended the preamble to the Petition as being ‘drawn with a great deal of moderation’.679Burton’s Diary, ii. 34, 37, 42, 48; CJ vii. 524a. He seemed to be struggling to assert a supreme power invested in ‘the single person and a Parliament’ without invalidating the laws passed by ‘the people only’ or denying their ‘ancient and undoubted right in law-making’.680Burton’s Diary, ii. 48. He was certainly concerned that no clumsy additional clauses to the Petition should undermine decisions arrived at in previous Parliaments – for example with regard to land in Ireland (29 Apr.) – or raise the spectre of the act passed against government by an individual: ‘here is a flat contradiction in itself, and one law fights against another’ (30 Apr.).681Burton’s Diary, ii. 66, 89, 92. By now he ‘was tired in this great business’, however. Although present at final meetings with Cromwell, he left the arguments to others.682Burton’s Diary, ii. 101, 116; CJ vii. 531a; Whitelocke, Diary, 463-4.

Whitelocke did not describe the moment when Cromwell announced his definitive decision against kingship: he simply ascribed the ‘change of mind’ to pressure from the army and from radicals.683Whitelocke, Mems. 656. He was a member of the large committees which in May and June sought to alter the Petition and Advice to fit the new circumstances, but inevitably his role was diminished.684CJ vii. 535a, 538b, 540b, 542a, 570b. Apart from involvement in issues mentioned earlier, he spoke several times in debates in favour of order, precedent and due process in parliamentary business and respect for fellow MPs: ‘as there is a care to be had of the circumstances and formalities, as the essence of your proceedings, we are also to credit what a Member says, and be tender of him’.685Burton’s Diary, ii. 122, 128, 147-8. He was prepared formally to hand responsibility for specific issues to the protector, because ‘the granting of such power [by Parliament] is a clear argument that you have the power’.686Burton’s Diary, ii. 160, 162. While the protector evidently had to have sufficient room for manoeuvre, Whitelocke wished to play down the potential role of privy councillors: they were advisors only, ‘accountable for their actions in Parliament’.687Burton’s Diary, ii. 288. Parliament, composed of ‘the greatest judges in England’, should impose an oath on its Members as it had always done; Parliament, and not (as had been suggested) the protector, ‘must have the interpretation of it’.688Burton’s Diary, ii. 295-6. Since Whitelocke and Thurloe were the tellers who on 24 June carried a vote to that effect, it appears that Cromwell did not disagree.689CJ vii. 572a. Named first (25 June) to the committee to organise the protector’s re-investiture the next day, it seems that Whitelocke, in his private consultations at Whitehall over the early summer, had again attained at least a modus vivendi. As his wife again fell ill, he was ‘glad of the Parliament’s adjourning’.690CJ vii. 575a; Whitelocke, Diary, 464-72.

The Other House, Jan. 1658-Apr. 1659

Whitelocke’s status as a man sufficiently influential not to be lightly ignored was affirmed by a writ of summons that December to attend the Other House when Parliament reassembled.691Whitelocke, Diary, 481. ‘The form of the writs’, he recorded with a lawyer’s precision, ‘was the same as those which were sent to summon the peers in Parliament’.692Whitelocke, Mems. 665; Burton’s Diary, ii. 410. As far as he was concerned, this appellate body was essentially identical to its predecessor and its advent signalled a return to business as usual: as he noted for 21 January 1658, the day after its opening

the House of Lords appointed a committee for privileges and a committee for petitions, and sent to the House of Commons for a day of humiliation to be appointed. The messengers were two of the judges, who all sat assistants as formerly in the House of Lords.693Whitelocke, Mems. 672.

He reproduced Nathaniel Fiennes’s keynote speech on 20 January in full and without comment, probably indicating broad agreement with its outlook, and attended proceedings on all but one day of the fortnight’s session (31 Jan.), evidently considering that affairs were being conducted in due form. 694Whitelocke, Mems. 666-72; HMC Lords, n. s. iv. 506-24. He had only two recorded nominations – committees for privileges (21 Jan.) and for the naturalisation of a merchant’s wife (28 Jan.) – but his vanity must have been gratified when, in a debate on foreign policy on 30 January, he gave a ‘full account’ of his embassy to Sweden (not for the first time) and an assessment of Britain’s interest there, with which ‘the House seemed greatly satisfied’.695HMC Lords, n. s. iv. 509, 519; Whitelocke, Mems. 672.

Whitelocke placed the responsibility for paralysing dissension in the Parliament squarely within the Commons, where ‘dissatisfied spirits’ led by Hesilrige and others ‘fomented’ differences and encouraged repeated refusal to answer messages from the other chamber. As was ‘not difficult to foresee’, such actions were self-defeating, leading Cromwell to resolve on curtailing the session. Plausibly, Whitelocke claimed to have tried to dissuade him, pointing out ‘the danger of frequent dissolving of Parliaments, [especially] the straits it would bring him into for money, which he could not raise without the highest discontent; except it were given by them’, and advising, with rather less plausibility, ‘that a little time would cool these heats and bring the Parliament into a better temper’.696Whitelocke, Mems. 672-3. When his counsel was of no avail, and dissolution occurred on 4 February, Whitelocke ‘retired’ to consider his position, ‘not satisfied with public transactions’.697Whitelocke, Mems. 673.

Over the next seven months Whitelocke depicted himself as aloof from ‘the protector’s party’ but still periodically consulted for advice. He claimed to have declined various appointments, among them the governorship of Dunkirk. There was some talk in July 1658 of a patent to create him a viscount, an honour to which part of him might well have aspired, ‘but I did not think it convenient for me’.698Whitelocke, Mems. 673-4. The death of Oliver in September and the succession of his potentially more malleable son Richard may have raised Whitelocke’s hopes of wielding more effective influence – with justification. Protectorate loyalist General George Monck* wrote promptly from Scotland advising Richard to take Whitelocke, among others, into his council.699TSP vii. 388. On 7 October Whitelocke presented to the new protector an address from the gentlemen and freeholders of Buckinghamshire and later that month he was consulted on arrangements for Oliver’s funeral.700Whitelocke, Mems. 675. In mid-January he was again made a commissioner of the great seal – Fiennes, he suggested, being prepared to accept him as a hard-working colleague alongside the ineffectual Lisle – while at the beginning of February royalist intelligence registered rumours that he would be appointed ambassador to the Netherlands.701CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 253; Whitelocke, Mems. 676; CCSP iv. 142.

When Richard called a Parliament, Whitelocke apparently obeyed the summons to ‘the House of Lords’ with some enthusiasm, albeit that he recorded very little about proceedings. He approved the choice of Chaloner Chute* as Speaker of the Commons – ‘an excellent orator, a man of great parts and generosity’ – and may have expected a better outcome this time.702Whitelocke, Mems. 676. Although following the opening of the session on 27 January he was then absent from the chamber for several days, his attendance was fairly assiduous in February and March, falling off slightly towards the end of the latter month but still quite regular until the dissolution on 22 April.703HMC Lords, n. s. iv. 525-65. He was named to committees reviewing the laws against stage plays (which the music-loving Whitelocke conceivably wanted relaxed; 15 Feb.), receiving records sent from Scotland (5 Mar.), preparing an indemnification for those who had acted on government orders (3, 28 Mar.) and considering the limitation of the rights and privileges of the Other House (where Whitelocke probably favoured following precedent; 15 Mar.).704HMC Lords, n. s. iv. 537, 544, 545, 548, 552. The vote of the Commons on 28 March to transact with their counterpart ‘gave hopes to some of an agreement’, but ‘many laboured’ against it.705Whitelocke, Mems. 676. When Hesilrige, Henry Neville ‘and their flock’ refused to let the matter lie and continued the hostile debate, while taking ‘no course to provide money’, Whitelocke claimed that not only the army but ‘all those named of the Other House’ were ‘exasperated’. During April ‘the Parliament grew into heats’, but (unlike fellow commissioner Fiennes) Whitelocke advised Richard against dissolving it. He expressed ‘distaste’ for the ‘designs’ of the army officers who then effected the end of the Parliament and the protectorate government, and was ‘much troubled at these changes and unsettledness’. Yet, having counselled the officers not to recall the Rump, once it was a fait accompli he was soon reassured and involved in the construction of the new regime.706Whitelocke, Mems. 677; Diary, 512-13.

Return of the Rump 1659-60

Whitelocke thus returned to the Commons chamber for what turned out to be his final stint in the House. From the opening of the session on 7 May, he was to the fore. A flattering correspondent assured him in August that, while Whitelocke could exist without a republic, the republic could not exist without him.707Longleat, Whitelocke pprs. xix, f. 70. He was appointed to the relatively small committees which prepared a response to the army (7 May), addressed the administration of justice (7 May), investigated the public revenue (9 May) and considered the appointment of sheriffs and justice of the peace (10 May).708CJ vii. 645a, 646a, 647b, 648a; Whitelocke, Diary, 514. Later he was on the larger committees which drafted a justification of the commonwealth to the nation (20 May), reviewed legislation passed since the Rump had last sat (21 May) and considered a pension for Richard Cromwell (25 May).709CJ vii. 661a, 661b, 665a. With the presentation of a declaration of the army’s expectations (12 May) and the arrival of statements of support from various quarters, Whitelocke allowed himself to hope that ‘this Parliament thus restored might be blessed of God, for settling the peace and liberty of the nation’ – the more so ‘because they were upon the first right and foundation of that Long Parliament which had done so great things’.710Whitelocke, Diary, 514. Furthermore, although the creation of a new seal on the 14th meant that he forfeited his commission, he was – he protested – ‘contented to be omitted’.711CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 263; Whitelocke, Mems. 678; Diary, 518. The same day he was elected to the new council of state (albeit less resoundingly than on previous occasions).712CJ vii. 654a.

Like fellow members of the defunct Other House, ‘Lord Whitelocke’ was still accorded his courtesy title and it is tempting on the basis of his standing, his predilections and his own estimation to see him as pre-eminent among conservative civilians in the House. But it is more difficult than at previous points in his career to pinpoint his allegiances or to determine the political goals of the man known among some, with irony, as ‘honest Whitelocke’.713A. Annesley, Englands Confusion (1659), 10. On the one hand he remained close to Broghill, who swiftly departed for Ireland to lay the groundwork for a restoration of the monarchy; on the other hand, he registered that the notable radicals Henry Neville and Thomas Scot I* ‘became Whitelocke’s enemies’.714Whitelocke, Diary, 513, 515, 517, 520; Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. xix. f. 31. Yet Scot failed to nail accusations that Whitelocke ‘kept correspondence with the king of Scots or some of his ministers’: Whitelocke ‘positively denied any correspondence’, and none has come to light.715Whitelocke, Diary, 515-16; Mems. 679. Although Broghill sent information about the state of Ireland for Whitelocke ‘to make use of them as he should see occasion for the advantage of my lord’, how or if he did so is not apparent, apart from possibly in relation to details of the Irish Adventurers’ bill (20 Aug., 7 Sept.).716CJ vii. 764a, 775a.

That Whitelocke was entrusted by the council of state with forwarding the union with Scotland – on which he reported to the House on 13 June – was not only an occasion for suspicion as to his networks but also a potential indication that he had not lost faith in the ideals of the commonwealth.717Whitelocke, Diary, 515; Mems. 681; CJ vii. 681b. For a while he returned to other business in which he had formerly had an interest. Once again he was involved with measures related to timber, forests and shipping, and addressed abuses in legal officers, and the authorisation of assizes and assessments.718CJ vii. 648b, 673b, 676b, 686a, 689b, 691b, 706b, 762a; Whitelocke, Diary, 520-1. Alongside activity on local and individual petitions, he successfully steered through the case of Solicitor-general Reynolds (a keen proponent of the state ‘without a single person’ at its helm) for succession to the Irish estates of his brother Sir John Reynolds*.719CJ vii. 705b, 726a, 752b, 755a, 770a; Whitelocke, Diary, 517, 519. Above all, while yet again excused going on embassy (to mediate between Sweden and Denmark, June: a reluctance Whitelocke ascribed to his distrust of the ‘overruling temper’ of radical fellow envoy Algernon Sydney*), he was regularly on committees receiving foreign ambassadors and escorting them to the House.720CJ vii. 663b, 687a, 693a, 710b; Whitelocke, Diary, 516, 518-21; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 365; 1659-60, pp. 98, 131, 144, 155. By early July he was so busy that he found his ‘travail betwixt Chelsea and Westminster very troublesome’, a burden perhaps eased by the acquisition of lodging at Scotland Yard in Whitehall.721Whitelocke, Diary, 522, 524; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 11.

During a summer of unrest, Whitelocke was also associated with attempts to quell disorder and rebellion. He was nominated to committees for settling militias (27 June; 9 July) and banishing delinquents from London (5 July), gave related reports from the council of state (16 July), and with St John and Lisle brought in a bill to prevent the circulation of false rumours (19 July).722CJ vii. 694b, 705b, 709a, 720b, 721a, 725a. Subsequently he was among MPs who prepared proclamations against rebels and brought in penalties.723CJ vii. 736b, 751b, 754a, 764b, 769a, 769a. On 10 August the council asked Parliament to grant him a commission as governor of Windsor Castle for its better security.724CJ vii. 755a; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 95.

The fact that Whitelocke had taken a turn from 13 July as president of the council is some modest measure of confidence in his ability to deal with a crisis; unfortunately he made no comment on the process in his diary.725CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 23. In this capacity he addressed the lord mayor and common council of the City at a meeting on 9 August ordered by Parliament ‘to give notice of proceedings on foot in this nation’. In the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that his speech was that of a commonwealth loyalist, yet the extent to which he was prepared to blame the protectorate for the difficulties confronting the current Parliament is noteworthy and, given his part in that, may have been startling to his hearers. MPs had ‘made a good progress, though they found a great alteration in the state of affairs’ since the Rump last sat: there had been ‘a vast expense of treasure, a great decay and loss of trade, and wars begun with foreign nations, and chiefly to support the interest of a single person’.726The Humble Address of the Lord Mayor (1659), 4. Perhaps his script was partly written by others. He was more than usually vivid in his evocation of the ‘design of Charles Stuart and his agents to destroy this nation of their freedom’, ‘to reign in tyranny amongst us’, ‘to ruin and embroil this commonwealth in blood’ and ‘to have fired’ and brought ‘an utter destruction upon this famous city’.727The Humble Address, 5-6. However, in his closing undertaking that Parliament intended to promote trade, and ensure that his hearers’ ‘freedom [would be] advanced, your peace preserved and your rights and liberties continued’, he probably came closer to revealing his fundamental sentiments.728The Humble Address, 7.

Whitelocke maintained a position of influence after handing over the reins of the council to Hesilrige in mid-August, not least, perhaps, because of rifts among the radicals over the place the army should hold in the settlement of government.729CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 157, 159, 164, 171, 208. It was to him that Nathaniel Fiennes and his father applied at the end of the month to obtain mercy for the insurgent Sir George Boothe*; he was also courted from Scotland by General Monck.730Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. xix. ff. 80, 82; Whitelocke, Mems. 683-4. On 1 September he received a somewhat implausible commission as a captain in the Berkshire militia.731CJ vii. 772a. A member of the committee appointed on 6 September to consider an engagement to the commonwealth, he was chosen by the council to present to Parliament the latest proposals for settlement (8 Sept.) and chaired the resulting committee, instructed to sit daily and produce a draft by 10 October.732CJ vii. 774b, 775b; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 180. The diversity of its membership made this a formidable task. Notes made by Whitelocke of its eight meetings between 24 and 5 October reveal painfully slow progress. Twice it had to be adjourned for lack of a quorum (only 4 and 5 of a possible 29 or 30 attenders); significant nominees like Anlaby, Dove, Love, Pembroke, St John, Trenchard and Fleetwood (engaged in rival consultations among the senior officers at Wallingford House) did not make an appearance. Discussion on these days was restricted to religion and in particular the role in it of the ‘supreme delegated power’. It is not clear whether the committee accepted the proposition that the power should give ‘due encouragement and equal protection’ to all in ‘their faith and exercise of religion, whilst they abuse not this liberty to the civil injury of others, or disturbance of others in their way of worship’, although it bears Whitelocke’s hallmark.733Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. xix. ff. 86-8. In any case, however, preoccupation with this represented a reprehensible failure to grasp the urgency of finding a political solution to the relationship between Parliament and the executive, and between Parliament and the army; recognition of this may partly explain the level of absenteeism.

Meanwhile, Whitelocke himself had several committee nominations in the Commons and was a teller in favour of James Ashe* being fined for missing a call of the House.734CJ vii. 780b, 781b, 790a, 791b. Presentation of a petition drawn up by army officers at Derby outlining their demands for a settlement were probably responsible for terminating Whitelocke’s committee’s deliberations on 5 October. That day he was ordered to prepare a letter to Monck conveying Parliament’s acceptance of the general’s professions of faithfulness; unwisely perhaps, as it turned out, Whitelocke rejected Monck’s proposal that he should go as a commissioner to Scotland.735CJ vii. 792a; Whitelocke, Mems. 684; Diary, 533. In the next week he had what were to be the final committee appointments of his parliamentary career. On the 12th, following the revocation of senior officers’ commissions, he sat with Solicitor Reynolds and six others to select new commissioners to run the army; with Reynolds he also discussed an answer to army proposals.736CJ vii. 793b, 795a, 796b. But this too went nowhere.

When on the 13th cashiered officers under John Lambert* cut off access to Parliament, Whitelocke presided over a council of state which devised an ‘accommodation’ ‘to save the effusion of blood’, whereby government was handed to the council of officers until the calling of a new Parliament.737Whitelocke, Mems. 685; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 251. He recorded that he kept in retirement as much as possible and only appeared when sent for, but faced with conflicting advice from family and friends he persuaded himself to accept appointment first to a new council of state as president and then to the army-sponsored executive, the committee of safety.738CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 254, 257; Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. xix, f. 90; Whitelocke, Diary, 536-8; Mems. 685. He emphasised his perplexity, but having ‘revolved in his mind the present state of affairs’, it was characteristic that he should convince himself that ‘there was no visible authority or power for government at this time but that of the army’ and that the alternative, to rely on radicals like Vane II, was to risk all that he valued in the existing order of laws, magistracy and ministry.739Whitelocke, Diary, 538-9; Mems. 685-6. Briefly his judgement must have seemed vindicated. Royalist intelligence at this point remarked that he played his cards so well that he always rose on the right side.740CCSP iv. 417. Included on a committee to devise a form of government (a fact omitted from the published Memorials), and once again made commissioner of the great seal (this time as lone keeper and thus with sole responsibility for signing legitimating writs), he was the spokesman when Fleetwood and fellow officers went to the common council to denounce the intentions of the rival army under Monck.741Whitelocke, Diary, 539-42; Mems. 686; Wariston’s Diary, 150; CCSP iv. 442, 443. He was also made a commissioner to fix the qualifications for Members of the next Parliament (22 Nov.).742Whitelocke, Diary, 546; Mems. 688.

The process by which he became Fleetwood’s primary civilian supporter and one of the ‘only grandees’ soon unravelled, however.743CCSP iv. 459. He claimed that he ‘did much further’ the proclamation for a new Parliament in mid-December, but that he was concerned that ‘some things propounded were expressly contrary to the law’ and dismayed by an animus against lawyers sitting.744Whitelocke, Diary, 550; Mems. 690. His advice to distrust Monck, poised to advance southwards, was ignored first by Lambert and then by Fleetwood, with disastrous consequences (an admission which he did not delete after the Restoration rendered it impolitic).745Whitelocke, Diary, 542, 547. By the third week in December Whitelocke was evidently close to despair: ‘no quiet was enjoyed by any party’ and he ‘wished himself out of these daily hazards, but knew not how to get free of them.746Whitelocke, Diary, 551; Mems. 690. His desperate solution – anticipated by his one-time friend Hyde – was to suggest to Fleetwood that the latter pre-empt Monck in an approach to Charles at Breda, offering ‘such terms as the king should agree upon’, and in the meantime secure the Tower and confront Monck in the field; Fleetwood ultimately listened instead to Vane, and the ruin Whitelocke predicted ensued.747Whitelocke, Diary, 552-3; Mems. 691; CCSP iv. 436. On 23 December he sealed and despatched writs for a new Parliament, but the soldiers’ allegiance transferred to the old one and three days later Speaker Lenthall and the Rump re-occupied the Commons chamber.748Whitelocke, Diary, 553; Mems. 691.

This time it proved that Whitelocke had seriously miscalculated. Appreciating that the Rump ‘would be severe against him’ and hearing of the threats of Scot and Neville ‘to take away his life’ – ‘Scot said he should be hanged with the great seal about his neck’ – Whitelocke pondered ‘how to provide for his own safety’.749Whitelocke, Diary, 554; Mems. 691. Persuaded by Lenthall that he would not be sent to prison, on the 27th he obeyed a summons to appear in the House. A report to MPs of the surrender of Windsor Castle to the authority of Parliament left him, to his relief, unscathed, but the obvious hostility of various Members – among them Reynolds and Hesilrige – encouraged him on the 30th to slip out of London and lie low at his brother-in-law Willoughby’s house in Hertfordshire.750Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. xix. f. 106; CCSP iv. 499; Whitelocke, Diary, 554-8; Mems. 692. He never sat in Parliament again.

Since his chief enemies were themselves increasingly vulnerable in the face of Monck’s inexorable progress and friends like Willoughby in correspondence with the king, Whitelocke survived, but at a cost.751CCSP iv. 519. Having ignored a summons to attend Parliament on 24 January, on 2 February he was ordered to repay to the exchequer £250 which had been paid to him ‘upon pretence of letters patent ... by illegal warrant’ for his salary as lord keeper.752CJ vii. 820b, 832a, 833a. Money troubles dogged him for the rest of his life as he lost office and income, disbursed large sums to avoid property confiscation and achieve indemnity, and struggled to make a living from his profession and provide for his many children. He was mocked in the press as ‘Sir Machiavel Bulstrode Amphibion Whitlock’ and ‘the law’s cunning pick-lock’.753The History of the Second Death of the Rump (1660, 669.f.24.5); Lucifers Life-guard (1660, 669.f.25.34). Undignified grovelling to Monck – to whom he protested that he had not been party to the interruption of Parliament and that his ‘intentions were honest to prevent extravagancies, to preserve the peace and oppose the common enemy’ – to the Speaker of the Convention and, as time went on, to various friends and acquaintances with Charles’s ear, allowed him to negotiate the Restoration and eventually secure his pardon.754Longleat, Whitelocke Pprs. xix. f. 114; CCSP iv. 583, 660, 671; Mems. of the Verney Family, iii. 411; Add. 32093, f. 420; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 445; Whitelocke, Diary, 558-608. However, in January 1661 his new residence in Coleman Street, London, brought him under suspicion of complicity in the Fifth Monarchist rising led by Thomas Venner, and his consistent championing of religious liberty and habit of preaching at conventicles put him under long term surveillance.755Whitelocke, Diary, 622-3; ‘Bulstrode Whitelocke’, Oxford DNB. He never again held public office.

Yet, the recital of illness, pain and troubles in diary entries for the last 15 years of Whitelocke’s life should not obscure the fact that he achieved a certain rehabilitation. His many eminent clients testified to the fact that his legal opinion was still valued; he continued his interests in trade and enjoyed much sociability. He was able to give a good account to Charles II of his stewardship of the royal library and presented an unsolicited treatise on ‘the king’s writ for choosing Members of Parliament’.756Whitelocke, Diary, 602-3, 628; Add. 4749. In January 1660 his wife ‘in pure love to her husband and care to prevent any prejudice to him’ burned ‘many’ of his papers ‘relating to the public affairs’, but he continued to compose, transcribe and collate material on his life and times and on topical issues, especially religion.757Whitelocke, Diary, 559; e.g. Add. 21099, 37341-7, 53728, 59780. He was encouraged, perhaps, by the memory of the council of state committee to which he had been appointed in October 1651 to find a fit person to write a public history.758CSP Dom. 1651, p. 498.

In the final version of his will, drawn up in May 1675, Whitelocke expressed the subtle mixture of piety and disappointment with which he viewed his career, blessing God’s ‘name for my mercies and afflictions, which have been and still are very great and wearisome’. The astrologer William Lilly, whom he had defended in difficult times, and Bartholomew Hall were among the handful of old friends mentioned. His major estates, Fawley Court, Phyllis Court and Chilton Foliat, had already been settled on his eldest sons from his successive marriages, James, William and Samuel, and there was little left to provide for remaining unmarried children.759PROB11/352/304. Whitelocke died at Chilton on 28 July 1675 and was buried at Fawley on 6 August.760Whitelocke, Diary, betw. pp. viii-ix. James did not sit in Parliament after 1660 but William Whitelocke*, who had been a Member for East Looe, Cornwall, in 1659, was elected a total of eight times for Great Marlow or Oxford University after 1688; originally a member of the Green Ribbon club, he then turned tory and eventually became a Jacobite.761HP Commons 1660-1690; HP Commons 1690-1715; HP Commons 1715-1754.

Assessment

Whitelocke never cut a heroic figure in Parliament. His speeches seem dull, his reasoning uninspiring, and his compromises obvious. However, in several respects he was representative, especially of the conservative instincts of a large body of lawyers in the House and (overlapping this) of the aspirations of equally many country gentlemen for a quiet life and the peaceful enjoyment of estates. Although he valued family life and leisure pursuits, he was industrious and had a greater tendency than some busy fellow MPs to specialise in areas where he possessed or could cultivate expertise. He exhibited a sustained interest in trade and in scholarship, and gained a lasting reputation for insight into foreign affairs. Although he might have done more to promote legal reform, he was not as hostile to it as some have suggested, and he clearly had some sympathy for measures to remould society. Consistently a firm advocate of religious toleration, he was able to work constructively with MPs of a far more radical cast.

His attempts at peace-making early in the 1640s were fruitless and laid him open to dangerous suspicion. His readiness to conclude that the only way to avoid disaster was to compromise with the powers-that-be, and in the process to oscillate between support for government by a single person and by a republic, undermined his credibility. But even though his autobiographical accounts may exaggerate it, there is no denying his importance at particular points, particularly in the prosecution of Strafford, the galvanising of support for the parliamentarian war effort in the Thames valley and the wielding of the legitimating power of the great seal. The support of lawyers of stature was indispensable at the turn of 1648 and later; the support of Whitelocke was the more useful because he was still ready to give independent counsel. His recollections may exaggerate this too, but other writings manifest an irrepressible desire to advise and inform and an ability to divulge awkward facts. They may not constitute a balanced or unbiased history of politics between 1640 and 1660, but they remain the most exhaustive. His complaints of others’ slights may sometimes be peevish, but his descriptions of enemies are often humane.